Hate Crime - 452/20

Date Responded 08 April 2020

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')

As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

You asked:

The Home Office Hate Crime Appendix Tables for 2018/19 show the number of police recorded offences for that year under the ‘Total Religion’ monitored hate crime strand within the Northumbria Force area as 235.

I would be grateful if you could provide the following further information.

Based on an electronic search of MO Notes for these offences which contain either of the character strings 'conver' OR 'aposta', the total number of offences thus identified in which victims or groups were targeted on the basis of being (or being presumed to be) ‘apostates’, or people who have left, converted from, or 'apostatised' from any religious group, for example:

in the case of aggravated offences under Part II of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the hostility demonstrated or motivating the offence was based (wholly or partly) on victims being presumed to be ‘apostates’ from any religious group,

in the case of offences under sections 29A-29G of the Public Order Act 1986, the religious hatred intended to be stirred up was against ‘apostates’ from any religious group.

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police.

I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.

Searches made for faith-based hate crimes containing the phrases/strings "conver" OR "aposta" has resulted in one such instance being recorded that matches the specifics of your request – ie in which the victim was targeted on the basis of converting from a religious group.

As with any free-text search, this only displays exact matches of the phrases/strings searched for. This therefore would not account for any mis-spellings.

It may be therefore that these results are inaccurate.

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.