Aligning police practice with hate crime theory: The case for using risk assessments to improve police response to victims of hate
| Published date | 01 January 2025 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02697580241279607 |
| Author | Loretta Trickett,Timothy Bryan |
| Date | 01 January 2025 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02697580241279607
International Review of Victimology
2025, Vol. 31(1) 22 –38
© The Author(s) 2024
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DOI: 10.1177/02697580241279607
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Aligning police practice with
hate crime theory: The case
for using risk assessments to
improve police response to
victims of hate
Loretta Trickett
Nottingham Trent University, UK
Timothy Bryan
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
In England and Wales, police forces have been urged to improve their response to victims. Despite
this, many victims continue not to report to police, and those that do often report distrust and
dissatisfaction with police response. Across the hate crime strands, victims have little confidence
in the capacity of police to act empathetically, to respond to hate crime effectively, or to take
hate crime victimisation seriously. In this paper, we argue that risk assessments (RAs) represent a
useful tool to bridge the gap between the reality of hate crime victimisation and current practice.
We suggest that RAs – tools designed to assess a victim’s risk of potential future victimisation
– can not only help the police to implement safeguarding but also provide a fuller understanding
of the impact and harms of hate crime, so that police have a more holistic perspective. The use of
RA may ensure that victim perspectives remain at the centre of police response.
Keywords
Hate crime, victimisation, police practice, risk assessments, reform
Introduction
In operational terms, in countries that legislate against ‘hate crime’, there is a common acceptance
that it involves an ‘aggravated form of offending’. In England and Wales, within law and policy,
‘hate crime’ has come to be defined as criminal behaviour motivated by ‘bias’, ‘discrimination’,
Corresponding author:
Timothy Bryan, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Room 6290, 3359 Mississauga Road MN
Building, Mississauga ON L5L 1C6, Canada.
Email: t.bryan@utoronto.ca
1279607IRV0010.1177/02697580241279607International Review of Victimology X(X)Trickett and Bryan
research-article2024
Article
Trickett and Bryan 23
and/or ‘prejudice’ against minority groups and communities. Hate crime is ‘aggravated’ in terms of
the motivation and culpability of the offender. In justifying the criminalisation of hate crime,
Schweppe (2021) points to the work of Quill (2010: 181–188):
[we seek] to distinguish criminal conduct motivated by prejudices from criminal conduct motivated by
lust, jealousy, greed, politics, and so forth. Unlike theft, burglary, or assault, hate crime emphasizes the
offender’s attitudes, values, and character.
The discriminatory targeting of hate crime means that it has a more detrimental impact on the vic-
tim. Indeed, the central focus of hate crime scholarship has been on the unique experiences of hate
crime victims (Iganski and Lagou, 2015). Many within the field have argued that hate crimes have
uniquely harmful physical and psychological effects on individuals, and particularly harmful
broader consequences for vulnerable communities (Boeckmann and Turpin Petrosino, 2002), soci-
ety at large and even for public confidence in the police (Iganski and Lagou, 2015). Despite having
law and policy in England and Wales that purports to respond effectively to victims of hate, there
continues to exist a gap between policy and practice (Walters et al., 2018), and existing theory on
hate crime victimisation (Chakraborti, 2016). The Macpherson inquiry into the murder of the black
British teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 highlighted the necessity to recognise hate crime when
it happens. Yet, police officers often fail to grasp the seriousness of hate crime (Bryan and Trickett,
2021; Trickett and Hamilton, 2016), meaning that an enhanced service is often not provided in
practice (Bryan and Trickett, 2021). In this paper, we argue that risk assessments (RAs) represent
a useful tool to bridge the gap between the reality of hate crime victimisation as illustrated in the
existing literature, and current practice in England and Wales. Risk assessment tools, designed to
assess a victim’s risk of potential future victimisation, can not only help police to implement safe-
guarding, but also provide a fuller understanding of the impact and harms of hate crime, so that,
responding officers have a more holistic perspective, helping ensure that victim perspectives
remain at the centre of police response and preventing police from substituting their own perspec-
tives. Globally, the development of RAs for hate crime victims is still in its infancy. Given this, the
following discussion makes an original and substantial contribution towards hate crime literature,
by connecting practice with underpinning conceptual theory, and by informing police responses to
hate crime victims both in the United Kingdom and across the world.
In the first section, we outline the context for the recent rise in hate crime in England and Wales
(Gov. UK, 2022). Hate crime is having increasing effects on numerous vulnerable communities in
a broad range of ways and thus, underscores the importance of effective and meaningful police
response. In the second section, we provide an overview of the legal and policing framework of
hate crime in England and Wales, while examining the existing scholarship on hate crime victimi-
sation. Specifically, we explore the unique effects of hate crime on individual victims, victimised
communities, and society at large. In the third section, we outline the gap between existing police
practice and victim experiences of hate crime reporting. In the fourth section, we describe the cur-
rent use of RAs by police forces in England and Wales. We outline the theoretical and practical
design and development of the hate crime RA under discussion. We indicate how police hate crime
RAs currently differ, explaining how their standardised use would improve victim response. We
close by stating that although we believe that RAs can meaningfully improve the reporting process
for victims, the success of this tool is highly dependent on the degree to which officers use it effec-
tively in their daily work.
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