Hate Crime Awareness Week
What is hate crime?
A hate crime is defined as 'any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person's race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender’.
A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.
Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.
What have Nottinghamshire Police been doing to tackle the issue?
Nottinghamshire Police have joined up with Nottingham Forest Football Club to tackle hate crime and continue ongoing efforts to root it out in our community.
Forest teammates Anthony Elanga, Andrew Omobamidele, and Naomi Bedeau from the Women’s team joined Morgan Gibbs-White in showing their support for the force’s attempts to tackle hate.
Each recorded message promoting the force’s ‘Take Aim At Hate’ campaign – emphasises the importance of people coming forward and reporting hate crime incidents so action can be taken.
Forest, Notts County and Mansfield Town all signed up to an agreement in 2022 to work in partnership with the police to deal with any hate that occurs at football matches.
This joint approach led to 32 hate crime incidents being reported at matches involving the clubs last season, with various action being taken including three people receiving football banning orders.
Chief Inspector Craig Berry, of Nottinghamshire Police, said:
“We’re really grateful to Nottingham Forest and their players for showing their support for our Take Aim At Hate campaign.
“We’re committed to doing everything in our power to try to eradicate hate, so getting this backing from people well-known to our communities and whose words carry so much weight is really impactful.
“It is so important that anyone who is subjected to a hate crime offence, sees it, or overhears it, reports it to someone, preferably the police.
“As pointed out by the players involved in this campaign, there are numerous ways of doing that, whether that’s letting us know over the phone or online, while we’d encourage people to tell a steward should they hear anything at a match too.
“Each of our county’s three professional football teams have worked closely with us to try and eradicate hate from our communities, and we appreciate their ongoing support.”
How to report a hate crime
If it is an emergency, call 999. For example, if there is an immediate danger to life, someone is using violence or threatening to be violent, or if a crime is happening right now and the suspect is still on the scene.
If you need to report a hate crime, we are here to help. Please follow the link below on how to report a hate crime.