Hate Crime (667A/21)
Request
We would like to know about antisemitic crimes and non-criminal antisemitic incidents recorded by West Midlands Police, with numbers of crimes and incidents individually broken down for each month of 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Question 1a
If West Midlands Police flags antisemitic crimes separately, please provide us with:
- The total number of antisemitic crimes recorded in each month of 2018, 2019 and 2020;
- The total number of antisemitic violent crimes recorded, in each month of 2018, 2019 and 2020, which fell into the Home Office categories of “homicide”, “violence with injury” and “racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury”;
- The total number of antisemitic crimes, in each month of 2018,2019 and 2020, that resulted in charges being brought; and
- The total number of antisemitic non-criminal incidents recorded in each month of 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Question 1b
If West Midlands Police does not flag antisemitic crimes separately, please search for crimes and non-criminal incidents in your database using the following whole keywords (i.e. not parts of words, but whole words, so that when you search for “Jew”, entries containing “jewellery” are not returned). Since use of all the keywords might prevent you from answering this FOI request due to excessive cost, please only use the keywords (starting at the top) that can be used without incurring excessive cost.
The keywords are:
- Jew/Jews/Jewish/Judaism
- Semite/Semitic/Semitism
- Antisemite/Antisemitic/Antisemitism
- Yid/Yids/Yiddo/Yiddish
When responding to Q1 or Q1a, please use the following table format, with the following headings:
- Month
- Number of antisemitic crimes recorded
- Number of antisemitic crimes involving allegations of violence*
- Number of antisemitic crimes resulting in charges being brought
- Number of antisemitic incidents reported
*For the purpose of this request, antisemitic crimes involving allegations of violence are those antisemitic crimes which fell into the Home Office categories of “homicide”, “violence with injury” and “racially or religiously aggravated assault without injury”.
Question 2
Please provide us with the name, e-mail address and telephone number of West Midlands Police’s single point of contact (SPOC) for antisemitic crime, or if West Midlands Police does not have a SPOC specifically for antisemitic crime, then please provide the name, e-mail address and telephone number of the SPOC for hate crime generally
Response
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.