Reports Of Hate Crime Incidents On The Rise In Sussex

Tuesday, 27 October 2020 06:00

By Karen Dunn - Local Democracy Reporter

Some 3,050 incidents of hate crime were reported to Sussex Police in 2019/20 – a rise of 561 on the previous year.

The figures were shared by Chief Constable Jo Shiner during a performance and accountability meeting with Police and Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne, who said they probably reflected ‘the public feeling more confident in coming forward’.

Hate crimes are committed against people because of their disability, race, sexual orientation, gender identity and religion.

Sussex Police is one of the forces which also includes misogyny on that list.

The crime itself can involve: physical abuse or violence, verbal abuse or threats, sexual abuse, offensive calls or texts, written abuse, indirect attacks, harassment, exclusion, isolation, damage to property and online abuse.

Ms Shiner said the latter had been ‘a real challenge’.

Encouraging people to report hate crime to police, she agreed with Mrs Bourne that people were more confident in coming forward, giving officers ‘much more community intelligence’.

While the hate crimes reports have risen by 21.4 per cent, only 11.4 per cent resulted in some one being charged or summonsed.

Ms Shiner said this ‘compared favourably’ with the national average and told Mrs Bourne that not everyone wanted to support a prosecution. They merely wanted to make police aware of what was happening.

She said the pandemic had had an impact on the hate crime figures, adding:

“If somebody has a predisposition towards a particular group of people, sometimes that is magnified or amplified when tensions are risen in other areas.

“We’ve definitely seen more behaviour – not just towards hate crime – but offensive conduct towards other people generally really.

“Hate crime will always remain a focus for us both in terms of crimes and incidents and we will continue with all of the hard work the teams are doing to try to encourage people to report and then to investigate effectively when they do so.”