Reviewing the evidence of hate

Abstract

This article outlines the lessons from one of the projects from the Home Office Crime Reduction Programme, which focused on hate crime and domestic violence. Funded near the end of the initiative, the project differed from many of the interventions. Rather than proposing to test an intervention to see ‘what worked’, it set out to produce the evidence upon which decisions about intervention could be made. Led by a senior academic criminologist (Stanko), housed within the largest police service in the UK - the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) - the project had sponsorship from influential members of the uniformed management team. The project further employed a team of social science researchers - some of whom had worked within the MPS and others who had no experience of working inside the police organization - to work on transforming routine police crime records into evidence to inform policy and strategy. The article argues that the project achieved its aims: police crime records can and do provide evidence sufficiently robust for the driving policy, strategy and police practice.