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Characteristics of Police Recorded Hate Crime in Scotland: Study

This report presents the findings of a study into the nature of police recorded hate aggravated crimes in Scotland.    This includes new details on the characteristics of these cases, based on a random sample of police recorded crimes. The report highlighted almost two-thirds of all race-related hate offences had a visible minority ethnic (non-white) victim, a group that makes up around 4% of the population.

The detailed study looking at the characteristics of victims and perpetrators of reported hate crime incidents in 2018-19 also found that:

  • around a third of crimes involved a victim who experienced the incident at work
  • almost two-thirds of hate crime victims and three-quarters of perpetrators were male
  • in the majority (94%) of sexual-orientation aggravated hate crimes the perpetrator showed prejudice towards the gay and lesbian community
  • in around two-fifths of religion aggravated hate crimes the perpetrator showed prejudice towards the Catholic community
  • in a quarter of such crimes prejudice was shown towards the Muslim community and in one in ten cases it was towards the Protestant community
  • there were 1,080 recorded hate crimes in 2018-19 with a police officer victim
  • hate crimes with an aggravation for transgender identity have doubled over the past six years from 48 to 96

The full report can be accessed here.