A HATE CRIME CRISIS? INVESTIGATING THE FUNCTION OF BREXIT, TERRORISM, COVID-19 AND BLACK LIVES MATTER ON LEVELS OF HATE CRIMES IN TODAY’S UNITED KINGDOM

This chapter outlines the policy and legislative responses to hate crime in the United Kingdom. It focuses on England and Wales, as Scotland and Northern Ireland have independent legislative and judicial procedures, however it should be stated that the devolved legislatures have broadly similar natures and some functions such as foreign policy responses are shared. Whilst there was recognition of hate crime, and particularly racist hate crime, in the UK beforehand, the catalyst for current policy and legislation was the murder of Stephen Lawrence in London in April 1993. In response to the Task Force report, the Government established a work programme, initially called Race for Justice, but latterly known as the Cross-Government Hate Crime Programme. After the programme was established in April 2007, it began work to agree a common definition of hate crime which would provide clarity and also allow system changes to provide more accurate data on the extent of hate crime.

Hate crime in the United Kingdom

The current study introduces a method to assess hate crime classification error in a state Incident-Based Reporting System. The study identifies and quantifies the “statistical accuracy” of aggregate hate crime data and provides insight from frontline officers about thought processes involved with classifying bias offenses. Random samples of records from two city and two county agencies provided data for the study. A systematic review of official case narratives determined hate crime classification error using state and federal definitions. A focus group sought to inquire about officers’ handling of hate crimes. Undercounting of hate crimes in official data was evident. When error rates were extrapolated, National Incident-Based Reporting System Group A hate crimes were undercounted by 67%. Officers’ responses validated complications involved with classifying hate crimes, particularly, incidents motivated “in part” by bias. Classification errors in reporting hate crimes have an impact on the statistical accuracy of official hate crime statistics. Officers’ offense descriptions provided greater awareness to issues with accurately interpreting and classifying hate crimes. The results yield useful information for officer training, understanding the true magnitude of these crimes, and a precursor for adjusting crime statistics to better estimate the “true” number of hate crimes in the population.

Blaming the victim: disability hate crime

Love Thy Neighbour? Brexit and Hate Crime

Hate crime research has increased, but there are very few studies examining hate crime offenders. It is, therefore, difficult to determine to what extent those who perpetrate this offence might be different from those who have not committed hate crime. This study is the first to provide an account of the demographics and criminal histories of those serving time in prison for committing a hate crime. It is based on a large complete population of offenders in the UK. Hate crime offenders released from prison were found to have prolific criminal careers, having committed a wide range and large number of different types of offences. When compared with those who committed a general (non-hate) violent offence, violent hate crime offenders were significantly older and were considerably more prolific in their previous offending. Violent hate crime appeared quantitatively, as opposed to qualitatively, different from violent non-hate crime, but this was less clearly true when those who had committed public order hate crime were compared with other public order offenders. Interventions to reduce the later offending of violent hate crime offenders should be based on the effective interventions that exist for violent offenders, but should take into account knowledge about the surprisingly prolific criminal careers of hate crime offenders.

Acts of hostility against people with disabilities remain largely overlooked by academia and the UK government. Despite this, between 2014/15-2016/17 the known incidents of disability hate crime in the UK increased by 249% with hate crime reports on Britain’s railways increasing by 23% between 2015/16-2016/17. Although estimates suggest that 19% of the global population has a disability and whilst public transport is a recognised trigger-environment for hate attacks against disabled people, no dedicated research existed, until now, to understand the victim experience. The key aims of this thesis are to transform academic understanding, methodology and theoretical frameworks.Public transport providers have an equality duty to protect all passengers; if not undertaken, minority groups remain susceptible. This thesis explores victim experiences through in-depth, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 56 participants. Public transport staff members were interviewed and policies explored to understand how diligently authorities, providers and staff meet their legal obligations to protect susceptible passengers as obliged by the Public Sector Equality Duty. To enable engagement with people who possess a range of physical and mental disabilities, specific ethical considerations and adaptions were employed and diverse communications facilitated.Findings reveal everyday abuse, distress and violence affecting disabled passengers and fuelling aversions to using public transport often results in social isolation. Conflicts can be triggered by occupancy of priority spaces with most abuse occurring on buses. Staff members hold little awareness of the problem or confidence to manage it. Most authorities do not discharge their safeguarding obligations, consequently providers are not incentivised to safeguard. The thesis outlines the implications of these findings for scholarship and policy offering recommendations which are designed to raise awareness of the problem and improve access to justice.

The Long-Run Effect of 9/11: Terrorism, Backlash, and the Assimilation of Muslim Immigrants in the West

ObjectiveThe article contributes to the literature on discrete events and behavioral change among the public by studying the link between the United Kingdom's 2016 “Brexit”referendum and racial and religious hate crime.MethodsTime series intervention models on daily and monthly hate crime numbers from the UK Home Office and police forces, controlling for other events such as terror attacks. A range of robustness tests including additional vector auto‐regression.ResultsThe Brexit referendum led to a 19–23 percent increase in hate crimes, but did not lead to a longer‐term increase. The results are robust to a range of alternative specifications, and there is no evidence of a relationship between media coverage of hate crime or immigration salience and hate crimes. The results also show the consistent, large effect of terror attacks on increasing the number of hate crimes.ConclusionThe Brexit referendum caused an increase in hate crimes on par with terror attacks. Discrete political events, like referendums and elections, can play a sizeable role in prejudicial behavioral change.

Statistics reveal that hate crimes in the United States have increased for the past two years in a row. From 2014 to 2016, the number of reported hate crimes has increased from 5,479 in 2014, to 5,850 in 2015, to 6,121 in 2016. These numbers do not include crimes that were not shared with the FBI by local law enforcement, or crimes that were not reported to the police at all. Early indicators reveal that the number of hate crimes in 2017 is expected to further continue this upward trend. The current social and political climate has raised much concern regarding the reported increase in hate crimes, and the safety of persons who may be the targets of bias-motivated crime. One concern that has not received much attention in the scholarly literature or otherwise is the intersection of hate crimes and Stand Your Ground laws. Stand Your Ground laws remove the “duty to retreat” requirement in claims of self-defense, and permit a person to use any force necessary to protect oneself when in a public place that the person has a right to occupy. Empirical research on Stand Your Ground laws indicates that these laws contributed to an increase in homicide rates in states that offer Stand Your Ground as a legal defense, and that these laws have an implicit racial bias that affects the outcome of Stand Your Ground criminal cases. As written, these laws offer much subjectivity to the person employing the Stand Your Ground defense. This study examines the use of Stand Your Ground laws as a legal defense and suggests that, given the current social and political climate, these laws need to be modified to ensure that violence against others because of bias or prejudice cannot be translated into fear for one’s safety, and therefore, a justifiable defense for hate crimes.

The FBI does not provide statistics on hate crimes against immigrants. Media and anecdotal reports indicate that immigrants are frequent victims of hate crime. These crimes range from verbal threats and harassment to lynchings and massacres to beheading and burying aliens (claimed). Hate crime statistics in Great Britain are divided into five categories, in which one or more hate crime strands are deemed to be a motivating factor (race, sexual, religious, disability, transgender). Crimes motivated by the victim being an immigrant or foreigner might be counted in any of the five categories. In recent years, there has been a steady increase in hate crime in England and Wales. The increase cannot be attributed to anti-immigrant sentiments. Media items in the wake of an attack by Muslim extremists document the hateful reactions.

Research suggests there has been a rise in the number of hate crimes since 1985. At the same time, legislatures at the local, state, and national level have enacted policies that both track and regulate hate crime. This article is an effort to determine the factors influencing hate crime policy and implementation efforts. The project is divided into three sections: In the first section, the characteristics and extent of hate crime are discussed. Section two describes hate crime policy as social regulatory policy and uses this theoretical framework to explain state variation in laws con cerning hate crimes. In section three, I present a model of policy imple mentation to predict state implementation efforts of federal hate crime policy Based on the variables suggested by these theoretical frameworks, I present hypotheses and conduct a multiple regression analysis using a fifty-state data set. The results indicate hate crime policies and imple mentation efforts are largely attempts by politicians to satisfy organized interests in competitive political systems. I discuss the implications of these findings and suggest avenues for future research.

We assessed whether the COVID-19 outbreak in the United Kingdom was associated with a rise in sinophobic hate crimes as well as the temporal distribution of victimization rates. A victimization survey (N = 393) showed that following the first known case of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, Chinese/East Asian persons had a higher likelihood of being hate crime or incident victims than members of other ethnic minority groups. Specifically, victimization reported by Chinese/East Asian participants reached its highest level in March 2020 (before lockdown); it then dropped significantly after an initial relaxation of restrictions in May 2020. Overall, we documented a temporary, potentially slightly delayed hate crime trigger effect of the COVID-19 outbreak.

While racism, racialization and antiracism in football have been extensively studied, antisemitism within football has received comparatively less scholarly attention. Among the possible reasons for this academic neglect are the relatively low number of Jewish professional footballers and the debates pertaining to a hierarchy of racisms and whether antisemitic hate crime should be treated as a distinct form of racism. Yet, as this chapter evidences, antisemitic incidents are a common occurrence in English men’s football, with some high-profile examples both on and off pitch in recent years involving officials, club owners, coaches, players and, most frequently, supporters. The chapter provides an overview of expressive’ has positive connotations, so I would change this to ‘forms of antisemitism expressed within men’s football. It first discusses problems of contested definition of the phenomenon and then covers the scale of ‘religious’ hate crime in the United Kingdom (UK). Next, the nature of antisemitism in the UK is outlined before examining its prevalence and presence within English football fan culture. Finally, the chapter focuses on English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur, whose supporters are the target of the majority of antisemitism within English football. This includes a discussion of the different uses and meanings of the controversial term ‘Yid’, which for many people in Britain today is an ethnic epithet and ‘race hate’ term, but which has taken on differing subcultural meanings within the context of English football fan culture. This is because for some 40 years, some Tottenham fans have appropriated and paradoxically used this taboo word as a term of endearment in songs and chants in an attempt to deflect the routinized antisemitic abuse they receive because of their perceived identity as supporters of a ‘Jewish club’.

Apostasy, Human Rights and Hate Crime in England and Wales: A Mixed Methods Study