National Hate Crime Awareness Week

Title: National Hate Crime Awareness Week

Date: Thursday 15 October

Author: Cllr Gareth Roberts

This week is National Hate Crime Awareness Week and we have been marking this week working in collaboration with our local Police. Hate crimes and their prevalence within our society is a worrying trend that is unfortunately on the rise. While hopefully many of you reading this will have luckily never personally experienced a hate crime first-hand, we all have a role to play in reporting and dealing with hate crimes to protect all of us living in the borough.

In recent years we have seen a rise of hate crimes right across the country and unfortunately this is no different with our own borough. If we take our most recent figures for June to August of this year, in Richmond upon Thames there was a 55% increase of racist and religious hate crimes reported to Police from the previous year while there has been a threefold increase in homophobic hate crimes in our borough. 

Hate crimes can often be misunderstood and cover a wider scope than many people often realise. Hate crimes are defined as crimes that are targeted at a person because of hostility or prejudice towards that person’s perceived:

• Disability
• Race or ethnicity
• Religion or belief
• Sexual orientation
• Gender identity

They can be committed against a person or property. If you are targeted because of who you are, or who they think you are, it is a hate crime. The crime does not have to include physical violence – hate crime can be verbal or online. We all have a role to play in reporting hate crimes in our borough to ensure that all our residents feel safe in our borough and do not suffer in silence.

If you are the victim of or witness a hate crime there are several ways you can report a hate crime or incident:

• Call 999 immediately if it’s an emergency, and a crime is in progress.
• Call 101. This is the non-emergency number. You can report crimes here, whether you’re a victim, witness or making a report for someone else.
• Report a crime online on the Met's website.
• You can anonymously report a crime to police with Crime Stoppers.
• Stop Hate UK. Here you can find advice and support as well as report hate crime to a dedicated hate crime organisation. http://www.stophateuk.org/
• To find out more about Hate Crime and Hate Crime Awareness Week 2020 visit: https://nationalhcaw.uk/ #WeStandTogether #NationalHCAW