Combatting the Recent Surge of Hate Crimes

Source: Photo by mwangi gatheca on Unsplash

The COVID-19 health emergency has coincided with a three-fold escalation of online and face-to-face hate crime in the UK, much of which has been directed at black and minority ethnic communities (BAME). Increased levels of face-to-face verbal and physical abuse have been widely reported by the Crown Prosecution Service, police, and faith groups, a pattern that mirrors the surge in pandemic-related hate crimes internationally. Recently, the United Nations Secretary-General said that COVID-19 had unleashed a "tsunami of hate… scapegoating and scaremongering" and urged governments to "act now."

As lockdown lifted in the UK in 2020—and was then imposed again at the end of the year—hate crimes directed at BAME communities continued. It appeared to be fuelled, at least in part, by regional and local lockdowns in areas of the country with significant BAME populations, who were in some cases publicly and widely blamed for new spikes in COVID-19 infections. Fake news and conspiracies are also being used to accuse BAME communities of disobeying social distancing guidelines.

Hate crimes impact individuals and also traumatise those who share the group identity. The National Police Chiefs Council and numerous police and crime commissioners in the UK have stated that hate crimes remain a priority. Yet prosecutions are few.

Research has highlighted enduring barriers to reporting hate crimes—including appropriateness of police response, fear and anxiety, and communication challenges. All of these have been exacerbated by the pandemic, because in-person face-to-face interactions have been truncated due to the risk of spreading the virus. This has had a significant impact on reporting options and opportunities, and made the investigation of crime far more challenging because police have struggled to collect detailed information from victims and witnesses to bring offenders to justice. In normal times, this crucial information would be collected during face-to-face interviews, but for good reasons, such interviews are not happening.

What can be done to support BAME communities to report hate crimes? (Because only then can an investigation ensue.) And how can police collect detailed information from victims and witnesses—who are vulnerable and often traumatised—when they cannot meet in-person?

Recent initiatives have sought to make the reporting of hate crimes easier and to make guidance and support more accessible to all—for example, by offering online remote reporting options with signposting to advice and support services. Apps have also been developed to help record and secure evidence. However, both options do not negate the need for the police to collect detailed information from the victims and witnesses themselves, first-hand.

Police are under enormous pressure and have been spread more thinly than ever over the past year. Recent research has found that the police service often finds itself ill-prepared and ill-equipped to handle increases in racially- and religiously-aggravated offences that followed events such as the EU referendum and the terror attacks in 2017, for example. This is also very likely the case during the COVID-19 health emergency where reduced community police officers and fewer officers in neighbourhoods gathering information and intelligence on community relations may have reduced capacity to pre-empt and mitigate spikes in hate crime and harassment.

Remote interviewing may offer one solution to improving the investigation of hate crime. However, collecting information from vulnerable minority witnesses and victims remotely has not been evaluated and so may not be effective nor accepted by BAME communities. Or, it may be acceptable, effective, and timely—we just do not know.

We do know that urgent work is needed to improve access to justice for BAME victims and witnesses of hate crimes, which necessarily includes developing ways to collect good quality evidence. Hate crime is a serious societal problem.

The independent commission for countering extremism has recently highlighted that hate crimes and extremist activity often go hand in hand. Indeed, extremist activity has increased since the onset of the pandemic, amplifying hate crime and furthering the false "moral" case for hate violence. Remote interviewing to improve access to justice should be prioritised, including working with communities to co-develop acceptable and effective solutions.