Britain’s Increase in Hate Crimes Is Tied to Changes in How They Are Reported

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/world/europe/britain-hate-crimes.html

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BELFAST, Northern Ireland — On the surface, Britain would seem to be in the throes of an alarming wave of hate crimes.

In 2015, Britain recorded eight times as many hate crimes as the United States, which has five times as many people; that was 31 times the hate crimes reported in France and 88 times the total in Italy.

The rise of the nationalist U.K. Independence Party, resentment of immigration, terror attacks in Europe and perceptions of anti-Semitism on the fringes of the Labour Party have all contributed to an atmosphere of increased fear and hostility in parts of Britain.

Things seemed to worsen after Britain voted in June to leave the European Union, an outcome driven in large part by anti-immigrant sentiment. A Polish family’s house and a Romanian-owned shop were set on fire; Eastern Europeans were spat upon, beaten up and told to go home.

The assaults extended to Muslim women, whose face veils were torn off. Blacks, Asians, gays and people with disabilities also reported abuse. Britain recorded 71,140 hate crimes in the 2015-16 financial year, ending in March. In July, the month after the referendum, the number of hate crimes recorded by the police was 41 percent higher than in July of last year, though they have fallen lately.

All in all, it is a numerical portrait of a society in the grip of hatred and bigotry. Except the statistics are misleading, said Mark Hamilton, the assistant chief constable of the Northern Ireland police, who leads Britain’s hate crime policy for the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

“In most cases, it’s not a rise in hate crimes. It’s a rise in reporting,” he said in an interview in his Belfast office. Since hate crimes are generally underrecorded, he said, “our national strategy is to increase the level of hate crime reporting.”

The number of reported hate crimes in Britain has risen for two reasons: increased public awareness and changes in the law so that almost anything can be recorded as a hate crime so long as the victim experiences a verbal or physical assault as such. Many of the changes stem from the racially charged murder of Stephen Lawrence, an 18-year-old black man who was stabbed while waiting for a bus in 1993.

Many crimes counted in the statistics are registered through True Vision, a government-funded website that allows anyone to anonymously report what they have experienced or witnessed as a hate crime.

Rather than a hotbed of racial hatred, then, Britain is more a country that takes hate crime seriously and encourages citizens to report such acts when they occur. Far from painting Britain as a xenophobic society, Mr. Hamilton said, the numbers point to greater intolerance among Britons directed not at foreigners, but at hateful behavior toward them. The figures also suggest that public trust in the police is improving, he said.

Although the so-called Brexit vote “created a license” for some to lash out, Mr. Hamilton said, “if we look at what we’re reporting, we’re not reporting massive numbers of serious crime.”

Data from the Home Office published last month showed that more than half of all hate crimes were categorized as threatening but nonviolent behavior. Still, a third involved some physical violence.

Excluding online hate crimes, which are difficult for the authorities to monitor, police data show that about 82 percent of hate crimes are racially or religiously motivated, including ones related to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The remainder are crimes against gays, transsexuals and people with disabilities, which the police consider to be badly underreported.

Interest groups have their own counts. Community Security Trust, a British charity, said anti-Semitic incidents rose 11 percent year on year in the first six months of 2016, after totaling 924 in 2015. Tell Mama, which tracks Islamophobia, said it had received 1,128 reports in 2015, more than double those in the previous year. European embassies in Britain have also logged dozens of incidents against their citizens, mostly from Eastern Europe.

But because the official figures do not break down hate crimes by religion, it is difficult to verify such counts.

The rate of prosecution varies across the four countries that make up Britain. In England and Wales, about a quarter of reported hate crimes were prosecuted last year. In Scotland, the rate was about 80 percent, while in Northern Ireland, it was more than half.

Once brought to court, more than four in five hate crime prosecutions result in conviction in Britain.

“The police response has improved in a lot of ways,” said Neil Chakraborti, a criminology professor and the director of the Center for Hate Studies at Leicester University. “Britain has a clear set of laws, a policy that is victim-led, and there is a collective endeavor” to tackle hate crime.

The shift to a perception-based definition of hate crimes emerged from the Lawrence case.

The police were dogged by allegations that Mr. Lawrence had been denied first aid because of his race, and that they had run a smear campaign against his family and supporters who criticized how the authorities conducted proceedings.

A subsequent government inquiry described the London Metropolitan Police as “institutionally racist.” It said there had been a “collective failure” by the authorities “through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

Although the British police still struggle with minority relations, officials say the recognition of racism in the police force drastically changed the mind-set inside the organization.

Most of the recommendations made by the report were put into practice shortly after its publication in 1999.

The police are now subject to greater public scrutiny. The handling of racist incidents is closely monitored, as are stop-and-search procedures. The police routinely measure how satisfied minorities are with their service. Officers are given racial awareness training, and there have been efforts to make the force more racially diverse, even though the number of minorities remains disproportionately low.

Some of the changes also came about because of the 1998 Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. It enshrined, among other things, an individual’s right to life, humane treatment and fair trial. In addition, the Human Rights Act requires minimal use of force and firearms by police officers.

“The threading of human rights through every response of the police service has been a fundamental element in changing how we go about our business and how we view how we do our business,” Mr. Hamilton said. “It’s a superb thing.”

Mr. Hamilton is based in Belfast, once called the hate crime capital of Europe because of Northern Ireland’s long history of sectarian violence between mostly Protestant pro-British unionists and mostly Roman Catholic pro-Irish republicans.

Given the history, the police force in Northern Ireland has led Britain’s hate crime strategy for 20 years out of a bunkerlike compound on the outskirts of Belfast.

Tensions remain, but the reframing of hate crimes and a greater emphasis on human rights in British law also had an impact here.

Sectarian crimes in Northern Ireland are now categorized as hate crimes, which officials say has encouraged more people to come forward. But mistrust of the police still runs deep, and reports of hate crimes in Northern Ireland are generally lower than in England and Wales. (Leaflets recently pasted on street lamps urged citizens not to give information to the police.)

Today, anyone caught painting a fresh mural seen as inciting racial hatred can be prosecuted for a hate crime.

“In recent years, we’ve had a collective courage to name hate crime for what it is,” Mr. Hamilton said, adding that most people develop hatred for other communities because they themselves have suffered.

“What we’re talking about is what motivates people,” he said. “Those are things you can affect. Those are things you can challenge.”