Chamber and committees

In February 2019, the Scottish Government published a report entitled “Developing information on hate crime recorded by the police in Scotland”. This report includes the number the hate crimes that were aggravated by the five hate strands (race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity).

Table 1 includes additional analysis of the dataset used to produce the report ‘Developing Information on Hate Crime Recorded by the Police in Scotland’ and shows the number of assaults, including Attempted murder, Serious assault and Common assaults, recorded by the police with a race aggravator for the past four years for North Ayrshire, Inverclyde and Scotland. Further information is available at the following link: https://www.gov.scot/publications/developing-information-hate-crime-recorded-police-scotland/ .

The Scottish Government previously published information on Racist Incidents Recorded by the Police, derived from a different source. Table 2 includes further analysis of this dataset and shows the number of assaults, including Attempted murder, Serious assault and Common assaults, recorded by Police Scotland as part of racist incidents for the years 2008-10 to 2013-14 for North Ayrshire, Inverclyde and Scotland. Further information is available at the following link: https://www.gov.scot/publications/racist-incidents-recorded-police-scotland-2013-14/ .

The tables relate to crimes which have been perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated (wholly or partly) by malice and ill-will towards a social group based on race. A person does not need to be a member of a social group to be the victim of a hate crime. The law states that the identity of the victim is irrelevant as to whether something is a hate crime or not; the motivation of the perpetrator is the key factor in defining a hate crime. Furthermore, this will not include any incidents which did not include the committing of a crime or racially aggravated assaults that were not reported to the police.

It is important to note that the tables presented here are not directly comparable as they are derived from different sources. Table 1 is based on information taken from Police Scotland’s Interim Vulnerable Persons Database (IVPD), an incident-based database which was introduced in 2013, and became a national system in 2014, whereas Table 2 is based on information previously extracted annually from individual Police Scotland crime management systems.