Hate crime (FOI ref: 30A/25)
Request
We aim to analyse the political causes of hate crimes and evaluate the effectiveness of prevention strategies and potential remedies. For this, we are in search of data on hate crimes in European countries. I am well aware of the Home Offices publications regarding hate crimes in England & Wales (such as
and the open data tables available from the Home Offices website (https://gbr01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gov.uk%2Fgovernment%2Fstatistics%2Fpolice-recorded-crime-open-data-tables&data=05%7C02%7Cfoi%40westmidlands.police.uk%7C9419bf40fc4b4c64dfff08dd2e68fe8c%7C2b0f1af29e024cfb982fc61fd716ee98%7C0%7C1%7C638717750916674739%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C60000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=g1JmfdUToyCAFng27Bzs8txCD10HJLaQeZJ0EyDxGHo%3D&reserved=0).
We are however in need of temporally and geographically more fine-grained data for the purposes of our research. For this reason, I successfully made a Freedom of Information request to the Home Office in the end of the last year, the response to which you will find attached to this E-Mail.
In friendly cooperation, the Home Office has provided us with a dataset reflecting the total number of hate crimes per Community Safety Partnership (CSP) per motivating factor ("Disability", "Race", "Sexual Orientation", "Religion", "Transgender Identity") per month.
The monthly Community Safety Partnership (CSP) level data provided by the Home Office is very helpful. Unfortunately, however, data availability varies strongly across police forces and over time - I have been made aware that this data are not available to the Home Office for all police forces for all years, as "some forces send record level data, while others supply data on an aggregated basis that cannot be mapped below Police Force Area level. The forces in each year will differ. "
To close these gaps in the data, I am now contacting the individual police forces. For West Midlands, records are (partially) missing in the financial year(s) 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24. Therefore, under the Freedom of Information Act I request the following information:
A Dataset (.ods, .csv or .xlsx) containing all police recorded hate crime offences recorded by the West Midlands police force in the financial year(s) 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24 disaggregated by i) Community Safety Partnership (CSP) area, ii) motivating factor and iii) month. I.e. every row should show the total number of hate crimes committed by a certain motivating factor in a certain month in a certain CSP area. The motivating factors covered should include "Disability", "Race", "Sexual Orientation", "Religion" and "Transgender Identity".
I am formulating these very detailed specifications as this is the data structure provided to us by the Home Office (containing the columns "Financial Year", "Calendar Month" , "Police Force", "Name", "CSP Name", "Motivating Factor", "Offence Count") and it is vital to our research that the data we are requesting from you corresponds with it.
Alternatively, should this make it easier for you to handle this request, we would also very much appreciate record-level data instead, i.e. Every Row reflecting one incident and the columns reflecting i) crime location (as CSP, municipality name or postal code; more precise details are not necessary), ii) Date (ideally with day, otherwise month and year) and iii) motivating factor.
Response
Please find attached our response.
Please note that this 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 this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be 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 the data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance 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.