10,000s of UK Hate Crimes Unreported

Local Editor

A British report showed that tens of thousands of hate crimes are going unreported every year, with community leaders warning that victims lack faith in the police to investigate such offenses.

According to the British Independent daily, a government study shows that the proportion of hate crimes being recorded by police in England and Wales has fallen by almost 20 per cent in the past three years.

Less than a fifth of allegations of racially or religiously motivated crime are now investigated, and less than a third of these result in court proceedings, let alone convictions.
Campaigners claimed that the discrepancy showed the police were "no longer looking" for hate crime and were more interested in showing that recorded crime was falling than encouraging victims to come forward.

Based on two years of data it found that there were an estimated 278,000 hate crimes a year - of which 154,000 had an element of racial motivation. But official police figures recorded only 42,236 hate crime offences in the past year and just 30,000 racially aggravated crimes - 15 per cent of the total reported in the Crime Survey.

Although the survey does show higher rates of offending than official figures for almost all crimes, the difference is not usually so stark. On average, across all crimes, police statistics record around 40 per cent of the offences reported to the survey.

The statisticians who compiled the report said that it was possible that some crimes - which the victim believed to be racially motivated - were not being assessed as such by the police.
Race charities said the discrepancy was also due to ethnic minority groups not having confidence in the criminal justice system and not reporting race hate crimes in the first place.

Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris, the national policing lead for hate crime, admitted that under-reporting of hate crime was a real problem.
"There is a significant difference between police-recorded hate crime and the Crime Survey because hate crime is still massively underreported," he said.

Crime prevention minister Norman Baker said all forms of hate crime were deplorable and tried to reassure victims that they would get support if they came forward.
"We can only confront it if victims feel empowered to come forward, confident that their voices will be heard," he said.

Source: The Independent, Edited by website team