Hate crimes and hate incidents

Information on hate crimes and non-crime hate incidents, plus guidance to help members of the public interpret this publication

We have published information in the hate crime and non-hate crime incidents publication (Excel).

This document contains six tabs with statistics on hate crimes and non-crime hate incidents (NCHI). An explanation of this data is provided below.

Hate crimes – see tabs 1 to 5

A hate crime is any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim, or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s:

race
religion
sexual orientation
disability
transgender identity

Avon and Somerset Police also recognises prejudice based on gender, including misogyny.

Within the published document, the first five tabs contain data on hate crimes, including:

crimes with a hate indicator
crimes with a hate crime type classification
racially or religiously aggravated crimes

Tab 1 – Hate Crimes by month, since January 2015

Table 1 – Hate crimes broken down by crime group
Table 2 – Hate crimes broken down by hate type (more than one hate type may be applied)
Table 3 – Hate crimes broken down by outcome
Table 4 – Hate crimes broken down by offence group and hate type (as above, more than one hate type may be applied)

Tab 2 – Victim and Suspect details in hate crimes since January 2015

Table 1 – Suspect Age – by month
Table 2 – Victim Age – by month
Table 3 – Suspect Gender – by month
Table 4 – Victim Gender – by month
Table 5 – Victim General Ethnicity – by year
Table 6 – Suspect General Ethnicity - by year

Tab 3 – Hate Crimes in each year, by Outcome and Hate Type, since 2015

Within tab 3, crimes with a current outcome classification of ‘New – Under Investigation’, will be collated into one row and not broken down by hate type. This is to avoid undermining ongoing investigations.

Tab 4 – Arrests and Voluntary Attendance Interviews (VA), since 2015

Table 1 – Arrests and VAs for hate crimes in each year, broken down by hate type
Table 2 – Arrests and VAs for crimes with a hate indicator, broken down by offence group

Tab 5 – Guilty verdicts in hate crimes heard at Magistrates Court, broken down by hate type, since 2015 (Avon and Somerset Police hold information relating to court verdicts only for cases heard in Magistrates Court).

Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI) – see tab 6

We hold information on NCHIs in two separate systems:

our Command and Control system, STORM, on which all 999 and 101 calls are logged
our crime recording system, Niche

Niche contains information on a proportion of NCHIs recorded, as incidents are automatically pushed through to our crime recording system if they have not been classified as a non-crime within a certain period.

We are able to identify the number of non-crime occurrences held on Niche that have a hate qualifier linked. However, this would not represent complete information, as not all NCHIs are pushed through to Niche in this way, and so a proportion would be excluded from the results.

Complete information on NCHIs would therefore only be available via searches of both Niche and STORM. However, within STORM we do not have a specific data field or category that enables us to search for NCHIs.

For this reason, the retrieval of complete data on NCHIs is complex and would require a manual review of all reports recorded in any potentially relevant, broader category.

Where requests for this type of information have been received under the Freedom of Information Act, we have unfortunately had to refuse the request for these reasons, under Section 12(1) relating to costs.

Non-crime occurrences recorded with hate qualifiers

We have published the following information relating to all non-crime occurrences that have been recorded in Niche under any of the following incident types, with a hate qualifier:

IR002 – Incident Report – Hate Incident
IR005 – Incident Report – Anti-Social Behaviour (Case managed)
CRI0018 UNCONFIRMED – Unconfirmed Crime by Victim or Third Party
CRI0022 OOF AREA – Out of Force Area
IR004 – Incident Report – Safeguarding adult
CRI0019 SCHOOLS – Schools Protocol
IR003 – Incident Report – Safeguarding child
IR006 – Incident Report – Enhanced ASB Victim (Lighthouse)
CRI0022 OOF AREA – TRANSFERRED OR WITH OWNING FORCE
CRI0022 OOF AREA – PENDING TRANSFER
CRI0021 OOFRT – Out of Force Refused Transfer
NR008 – Non-Notifiable Crime – Victim Based – VCOP Required
011/03 – Cruelty to and neglect of children

For the reasons explained above, this does not equate to complete data on NCHIs.

Tab 6 – Non-crime occurrences recorded in Niche with a hate qualifier, with victim and suspect details, by year since 2015

Table 1 – Count of non-recordable occurrences with a hate qualifier, by incident type
Table 2 – Non-crime occurrences broken down by hate type
Table 3 – Non-crime occurrences broken down by outcome
Table 4 – Suspect age
Table 5 – Victim age
Table 6 – Suspect gender
Table 7 – Victim gender
Table 8 – Suspect general Ethnicity
Table 9 – Victim general Ethnicity
Table 10 – Count of arrests and voluntary attendance interviews

As stated above, some information has been published by month, while other aspects have been published by year, to avoid identifying individuals.

Where information is published by month, it will be updated every six months. Where information has been published by year, it will also be updated every six months, with the exception of:

Tables 8 and 9 within tab 6 – showing suspect and victim general ethnicity for NCHIs

This data will be updated every 12 months, to show a full calendar year. This is to avoid identifying individuals or undermining any ongoing investigations, given the low numbers and level of detail shown.

For data published by year and updated every six months, an asterisk indicates the data is for the first six months of that year. For example, 2025* indicates that data is shown up to 30 June 2025.

The data will be carefully assessed to make sure no personal information is identifiable. For example, depending on the number of occurrences identified, it may be that a breakdown by month cannot be provided for some aspects of the information from Data Insight.

This would then be exempt information under Section 40(2) of the FOI Act should a further request come in for a breakdown by month.

The data will be updated every six months.