The number of hate crimes reported in York has risen by 50 per cent over the last four years, the latest statistics reveal.
There has been a steady increase in the number of incidents each year since 2018, with 169 recorded by North Yorkshire Police already in 2021/2022, compared to 112 throughout all of 2018/2019.
Cllr Christian Vassie highlighted the “very worrying” issue during a meeting of City of York Council’s housing and community safety policy and scrutiny committee.
He said: “It worries me considerably, because it seems that we’re having a steady annual increase and we’re struggling to deal with it.
“We know that we’ve got difficult months ahead, with fuel poverty and there are all sorts of factors involved here.”
He asked the council’s head of community safety, Janet Mowat, how the issue was being tackled.
She said hate crimes were analysed on a daily basis, but said that most reports were isolated incidents, making it difficult to find patterns in what was causing the rise.
She added: “We’ve been working very closely with the communities team to put together a hate crime action plan – working with partners and organisations, including the voluntary sector who are supporting a number of the protected groups.
“So we’re really starting to increase the amount of proactive work that we’re doing in the hopes that we increase confidence in reporting again, and get people to give us the detail we need to then to really start to get on top of the issues and address them.”
Taken seriously
Ms Mowat did note that the majority of incidents were linked to the night time economy, particularly around fast food outlets.
She added: “Quite often, they are isolated incidents of name calling – fairly low level. Certainly anything that came to note to my team that was of a serious nature, we would be certainly all over that.
“But in terms of what we’re actually seeing, I would say the majority of them are related to the night time economy, sometimes taxi drivers, but usually alcohol is involved.”
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Cllr Fiona Fitzpatrick wanted assurance that training was offered on an ongoing basis for staff to be able to identify hate crimes.
Ms Mowat said: “Every incident is taken seriously. That’s why it focuses in our daily meeting because that’s where we concentrate on the areas where we know we need to take some action.
“In relation to training we’re doing some work with North Yorkshire County Council through the hate crime working group to develop and deliver a package of training, which we’ll be rolling out.”