Refugee Hate Crime (1186A/20)
Request
Hate Crimes against refugees, migrants and asylum seekers
1.How many hate crimes have taken place against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in your force area this year (2020)?
2.Of the total number of hate crimes against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in your force area are you able to give a breakdown of what each offence was e.g verbal abuse, assault, GBH etc? If this would not meet the time limits, would you be able to at least state how many of these crimes involved serious assaults?
3.Can you provide any details of the victims in relation to their sex, age, and the towns/cities/villages where the attacks happened?
4.Of the total number of hate crimes against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in your force area in 2020, how many of these resulted in prosecutions?
5.How many hate crimes took place against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in your force area last year (2019)?
6.Of the total number of hate crimes for against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in your force area in 2019 are you able to give a breakdown of what each offence was e.g verbal abuse, assault, GBH etc? If this would not meet the time limits, would you be able to at least state how many of these crimes involved serious assaults?
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
Although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached file 1186A/20 attachment). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
We are only able to provide the outcome of a crime. For example where a person was charged or reported to attend court. When that person then goes to court it does not always result in a prosecution and in order to locate all the court prosecutions would exceed the 18 hour time limit for the Freedom of Information Act.
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.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.