Hate Crimes ? Surely not against Cyclists!

What is hate crime?
A hate crime is when someone commits a crime against you because of your
disability, gender identity, race, sexual orientation, religion, or any
other perceived difference.

It doesn’t always include physical violence. Someone using offensive
language towards you or harassing you because of who you are, or who
they think you are, is also a crime. The same goes for someone posting
abusive or offensive messages about you online.

If it happens to you, you might be tempted to shrug it off. But if you
report the hate crime, we can investigate and stop it from getting worse
– either for you or someone else.

Hate crimes and hate incidents
In most crimes it is something the victim has in their possession or
control that motivates the offender to commit the crime. With hate crime
it is ‘who’ the victim is, or ‘what’ the victim appears to be that
motivates the offender to commit the 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.
Not all hate incidents will amount to criminal offences, but it is
equally important that these are reported and recorded by the police.

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.

Types of hate crime
Hate crime can fall into one of three main types: physical assault,
verbal abuse and incitement to hatred.

Physical assault
Physical assault of any kind is an offence. If you’ve been a victim of
physical assault you should report it. Depending on the level of the
violence used, a perpetrator may be charged with common assault, actual
bodily harm or grievous bodily harm.

Verbal abuse
Verbal abuse, threats or name-calling can be a common and extremely
unpleasant experience for minority groups.

Victims of verbal abuse are often unclear whether an offence has been
committed or believe there is little they can do. However, there are
laws in place to protect you from verbal abuse.

If you’ve been the victim of verbal abuse, talk to the police or one of
our partner organisations about what has happened. You’ll find a list of
them on our How to report hate crime page.

Even if you don’t know who verbally abused you, the information could
still help us to improve how we police the area where the abuse took place.

Incitement to hatred
The offence of incitement to hatred occurs when someone acts in a way
that is threatening and intended to stir up hatred. That could be in
words, pictures, videos, music, and includes information posted on websites.

Hate content may include:

messages calling for violence against a specific person or group
web pages that show pictures, videos or descriptions of violence against
anyone due to their perceived differences
chat forums where people ask other people to commit hate crimes against
a specific person or group