A “horrible spike” in hate crime after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union was at least partly linked to the referendum, Britain’s most senior police officer has said.
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan police commissioner, told a hearing at London’s City Hall that hate crime was showing signs of decreasing after a sharp rise in June and July, but it had still not returned to pre-referendum levels.
Monitoring presented at the hearing by the London mayor’s evidence and insight team showed a 16% increase in hate crime in the 12 months to August. It also showed that in the 38 days after the referendum there were more than 2,300 recorded race-hate offences in London, compared with 1,400 in the 38 days before the vote.
Hogan-Howe expressed alarm about the figures. “We saw this horrible spike after Brexit,” he said. He revealed there was a connection between the referendum and many of the incidents and pointed out that many of the victims were eastern Europeans.
Hogan-Howe said: “We couldn’t say it was absolutely down to Brexit, although there was obviously a spike after it. Some of them were attributed to it because of what was said at the time. We could attribute that, and eastern Europeans were particularly targeted within the race-hate crime [category]. So there certainly was a spike related to it.
“We have fortunately seen it start to come back down, but I’m not sure we can say yet it is back to previous levels.”
He added: “The absolute numbers are low, but we think it is massively under-reported [crime]. Sadly, people don’t tell us about the harassment and the abuse that we know will go on out there.”
Hogan-Howe pledged that more specialist officers dedicated to tackling hate crime would be deployed.
Sophie Linden, London’s deputy mayor for policing, who was hosting the hearing, said she was still getting daily reports about hate crime in the capital. “It is worrying that it does not appear to have gone back down to pre-referendum levels.”
Figures from the National Police Chiefs’ Council showed a 49% rise in hate crime incidents to 1,863 in the last week in July in England, Wales and Northern Ireland compared with the previous year.
A survey by the Guardian found that European embassies in Britain have logged dozens of incidents of suspected hate crime and abuse against their citizens since the referendum.
The vast majority of incidents involved citizens from eastern European countries, with more attacks against Poles than against all the other nationalities put together.
They include the killing of Arkadiusz Jóźwik in Harlow, in an apparently unprovoked attack that is being treated by police as a possible hate crime. Five 15-year-old boys and one 16-year-old boy, all from Harlow, were arrested on suspicion of murdering Jóźwik and bailed until 7 October pending further inquiries. A second Polish man survived the attack.
