Northern Ireland: Race hate incidents at all time high​

PSNI report outlines that there were 1353 racist incidents and 839 racist crimes recorded by the police in the 12 months to end of March 2024

More than eight hate-motivated incidents or crimes reported to the police every day

‘We need a zero tolerance approach to racist and other hate-motivated crime in Northern Ireland.’ – Patrick Corrigan

Amnesty International has expressed concern at the figures recorded for racist hate crimes and incidents in Northern Ireland. The figures were published in a report today by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), which tracked reported crimes and incidents for the twelve months to the end of March 2024.

The report reveals that there were 1353 racist incidents and 839 racist crimes recorded by the police in the 12 months to the end of March 2023 - the highest figure for race hate incidents since police records began in 2004/05. Almost half of recorded incidents were in Belfast.

In addition to this, the last year saw 1091 sectarian incidents and 730 sectarian crimes reported to the police, as well as 452 incidents and 282 crimes with homophobic or transphobic motivation.

The number of reported racially-motivated hate incidents in Northern Ireland has exceeded the number of sectarian incidents since 2016/17.

Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland Director, said:

“The rate of incidents motivated by racism now outstrip those motivated by sectarianism, despite the relatively small numbers of people in Northern Ireland from ethnic minority backgrounds. That means that a member of an ethnic minority community is vastly more likely to be a victim of hate crime​

“We need a zero tolerance approach to racist and other hate-motivated crime in Northern Ireland. Yet that is not what victims of these crimes see, with all too few offenders held to account.”