Douglas Blane tweeted a link to some general stats on the Disability Hate Crime site that I thought I’d post on, as it happened to coincide with some other data that I recently stumbled across. 

The Hate Crime stats page only links to one of its sources, and even then indirectly – to the Crown Prosecution Service’s publications page for equality and diversity policy and guidance.

That’s pretty useful as a source of a number of reports, as it happens. The report on hate crime is here (PDF) (cached copy here).

Coincidentally, a cursory search for filetype:xls site:west-midlands.police.uk this week led me to this “Hate crime appendix” spreadsheet on offences during 2008/09 that were religiously or racially aggravated, or had a sexual orientation, disability or transgender “marker”.

(By the way, the codes used in that spreadsheet refer to Operational Command Units (OCU) – in other words, areas covered by different parts of the police force. When you get codes like this, try copying and pasting them into a search like this. Further research tells us that OCUs have since been replaced by LPUs – local police units)

Knowing what one example of the data looks like can help you find similar data. And so a follow-up search for “hate crime” filetype:xls site:police.uk yields many more results from other police forces. And switching format to PDF gives some more. (Notably, if you don’t specify either you tend to get general pages encouraging the reporting of hate crime)

So there it is: hate crime data. Can you do anything with it?

PS: This is, strictly speaking, about crime rather than welfare – but as we don’t yet have a HMI Crime, here it is.