Supplementary written evidence submitted by the National Police Chiefs’ Council

Letter from ACC Mark Hamilton National Police Lead for Hate Crime
to the acting Chair of the Committee, 7 October 2016

Dear Mr Loughton,

I have been forwarded your letter dated 28th September, 2016 sent to Chief Constable Sara Thornton, because I lead on hate crime for the National Police Chiefs' Council. I would like to offer you some information about the work we are undertaking to improve our hate crime data recording.

The police started to publish national hate crime data in 2008, after agreeing a shared criminal Justice definition of hate crime. At this time the data was not disaggregated, other than into the five 'monitored strands' of race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender. The one exception to this was the recording of antisemitism which we included as the result of a request from the then Government in response to a report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism.

We take antisemitic crime to be the combination of racist and anti-religious crimes that target Jewish victims.

In 2014, we issued the latest in our series of hate crime guidance documents (http://www.report-it.org.uk/strategy_and_guidance) which included specific guidance in responding to antisemitic hate crime.

We have been actively working with forces to improve data accuracy over recent years, but the capacity to identify such crimes is more developed in some areas than others. It is perhaps expected that the systems tend to be more developed in the areas that have the most significant Jewish population, but the capacity of forces also varies because of the capability and flexibility of existing crime recording systems. Some have dedicated 'flags' to identify antisemitic crime but others have had to identify them though retrospective analysis.

In recent times we have taken action to improve the national data by;

• Working with teams developing new recording systems to ensure that required details are consistently recorded in future systems.
• In May, 2015 I signed Information sharing agreements with groups such as the Community Security Trust (CST). One of their core uses is to highlight discrepancies where CST and police data differ. (http://www.report-it.org.uk/ information_sharing_agreements) In support of these agreements we have commenced joint data analysis meetings at local and national levels.

You will be aware that the disaggregation of religious hate crime is to be included as a voluntary collection in National Crime Statistics for 2016-17 and this will be compulsory from April 2017. In addition to this, and to provide the earliest possible information, I have asked forces to retrospectively provide the same data for 2015-16, which I expect to be able to publish in the next few weeks.

Once the disaggregated data is processed, we will hold our regular meeting with our own analysts from the National community Tension Team and the data experts from the CST, when we will examine where our respective data sets shows any disparity. We and the CST will offer support to any area where the data does not correlate.

I hope this information is helpful to your Inquiry but please get back to me if I can assist further.

Yours sincerely,

Mark Hamilton

Assistant Chief Constable