FOI Ukrainian Hate Crimes (132-2024/25)

Request

Q1. I am requesting data to do research on the effects of the recent wars in Ukraine and Gaza on racial and religious hate crime. I would like to have a list of hate crimes reported to the police with the following information for each incident:

hate crime bias (race, faith, etc.),

crime subclassification (violence against theperson, arson, harassment, etc.),

date (at least month and year, day also is preferred),

indicator if police reported race/religion as Jewish,

indicator if victim reported race/religion as Jewish,

indicator if police reported ethnicity or nationality as Ukrainian,

indicator if victim reported ethnicity or nationality as Ukrainian,

indicator if police reported ethnicity or nationality as Russian,

indicator if victim reported ethnicity or nationality as Russian,

indicator if police reported religion is Islam or race is Arab/Middle Eastern, and

indicator if victim reported religion is Islam or race is Arab/Middle Eastern.

I would like this data for the years 2019-2023.
If a list of hate crimes reported is not possible I would instead ask for a monthly count of racial or religious hate crime against each of the four groups (Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, Muslim or Arab). Finally, I would like a count of total monthly hate crime broken down by racial, faith, disability, sexual orientation, and Transgender for the same period as above.
Q2. As a second project I will look at the relationship between education and hate crime participation. For this I would like a list of arrests for hate crime with the following information: hate crime bias, date of incident (at least year, month and day preferred), birthdate of suspect (at least year, month also preferred), suspect gender, and suspect ethnicity. Of these, the last two are not required and can be omitted if necessary to avoid this request being denied. I would like this data for as many years possible, as early as 2012, with preference for more recent years.

Response

Extent of Searches to Locate Information

Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information. 

Decision

I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is required to retrieve that information.

Whether a person was arrested for a hate crime during an allegation of an offence would require a manual review of all arrest data. This would require manually reviewing thousands of reports, which would exceed the time limit allowed under the Act. 

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.

Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regarding to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). However, we may be able to provide some information in relation to part 1 of your request if you resubmit your request and omit part 2. If you wish to discuss this please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data.  It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.