Please be aware we’re making some improvements and building a new website. You can still report incidents, tell us about general intelligence or talk to us on live chat on this site. Thanks for your patience.

Hate crime - 701/19

Date Responded 24 June 2019

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:

“For the financial years 2017/18 & 2018/19:

1.Can you please tell me how many incidents have been reported to your police force of hate crime via social media

  1. Can you please break the above information in question 1 down via particular social media channel? For example, was the hate crime reported via Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter or Facebook or another social medai channel?
  2. For each of the incidents of hate crime, can you tell me the nature of the hate crime? EG, was it racist, religious, disability, homophobic, transphobic or something else?”

After we sought clarity you confirmed that you meant  committed the offence via social media.

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 with the below noted.

The data has been taken from the central database using the crime tables.

All crimes that had a hate flag and a cyber flag have been included in this FOI, the crimes have then been reviewed to discover the platform that has been used.

The figures for the types of hate crime are greater than the number of hate crimes, this is because 19 of the crimes had hate flags for more than one type of hate crime.

With the above in mind see the below.

1.

Year

Count

2017/18

124

2018/19

115

 

2.

Platform

2017/18

2018/19

Discord app

1

  

Ebay

2

  

Email

12

10

Facebook

54

51

Facebook messenger

14

7

Grindr

1

2

Imessage

1

  

Instagram

7

8

Just eat/Hungry house

1

  

Lovoo/Kik

1

  

Messenger

 

2

Mobile phone

4

8

Musically/Tik tok

 

1

Online game

 

1

Online review

1

  

Sarahah.com

1

1

Snapchat

13

12

Tumblr

 

1

Twitter

7

5

Whatsapp

2

3

Xbox

 

1

Youtube

2

  

Not stated

 

2

 

3.

Year        Racial     Homophobic      Transphobic      Disability Hate         Faith Hate               Gender Hate                  Age Hate

 

2017/18   70          18                    1                      20                          20                           2                                    4

2018/19   59          30                    8                      18                          6                            2           

 

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.

back to top