Hate crime in Sussex up 354% in a decade

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Over the decades we have seen considerable progress in the UK and across much of the world in working to remove racial discrimination from our society.

Unfortunately, the road to equality is not without its obstacles, and looking at rates of hate crime in our policing area is a cause for deep concern.

To be clear, these stats relate to all hate crime, not purely that based upon race, but racist hate crime remains the overwhelming majority of hate crime recorded by the police.

Recorded hate crime in Sussex during the period from 2012/13 to 2022/23, has grown from 766 incidences to 3,476 incidences, a staggering increase of 354%.

How can we explain this? Well, it’s possible that people have grown more willing to report hate crime over that period of time, although there is no evidence of this and the high (87.5%) conviction rate suggests that all this would mean is that we’d always had a big hate crime problem in the area.

It’s not obviously down to people moving into the area, as despite the growing population the rate per 100,000 people has gone up from 47 incidences to 202 incidences, an even bigger incidence percentage increase of 430%.

So, what does that leave us with? The rather sad observation that there are more people who are willing to commit hate crimes than they were a decade ago. It’s not unique to our area, exactly the same thing has been happening across England and Wales, although our hate crime growth in Sussex has been above average.

Ultimately, when you have bigoted views being given increasing coverage not only on social media platforms, but reflected in the mainstream media, and even the corridors of Westminster, is it really such a huge surprise to see that reflected in wider society?