Reporting and recording bias crime in New South Wales

ABSTRACT

This article presents the findings of the first study of official bias crime data held by the New South Wales Police Force. The purpose of this study was to unearth the institutional policies, procedures and practices that frame the response of the New South Wales Police Force to the reporting and recording of bias crime. While several overall patterns and trends are discernable in the bias crime data, their real significance lies in what they tell us about challenges for law enforcement in the dual process of reporting and recording bias crime. The article draws on qualitative interviews with New South Wales Police Force personnel to argue that a sustained program of capacity building and community engagement is needed if bias crime data is to provide meaningful intelligence on the nature of the problem and inform law enforcement responses.

KEYWORDS:

• hate crime
• bias crime
• policing
• crime reporting
• crime recording

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the NSW Police Force for approving and facilitating this research, the BCU for providing the data and the personnel who agreed to be interviewed. This project is supported by the Australian Research Council DP110108888.

Notes

1 NSWPF did collect data on bias crime prior to this (eg, on homophobic and antisemitic crime) but this function was expanded and formalised in COPS in 1999.

2 As noted above, the BCU did not exist until 2015. Previous data was reviewed by the bias crime co-ordinator alone. In the interests of simplicity, we refer to all data recording and review processes as having been conducted by the BCU.

3 For example, monthly files provided for most years of the study contained a small set of core categories such as the type of motive and the bias crime/suspected/incident/not bias crime classification. In 2013, recording practices changed, and the 2013–2017 data became more comprehensive, including demographic factors and case summaries; although these were not always complete and required the study to make its own classifications for some periods. No data at all was initially available for 2015. This data was only provided later for the purposes of this study in a distinct format and with less detail than data for the immediately preceding or following year.

4 For this reason, particularly because of the significant gaps in time where no data is available, the data is not presented across the 10-year period of the study.

5 If all cases are averaged across the months for which bias crime data is available, approximately 33.79 events per month are categorised as either a bias crime, suspected bias crime or bias incident.