Hate crime

What’s the role of the CPS in prosecuting hate crime?

The police investigate and obtain evidence to show a crime has been committed.

In hate crime cases this includes gathering evidence that the victim has been targeted because of their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation and/or transgender identity or because of what the offender believes to be their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation and/or transgender identity.

The CPS is responsible for deciding which cases go to court. This includes taking a decision on whether there is enough evidence to prosecute a crime as a hate crime. 

If an offender pleads not guilty the CPS are responsible for preparing and presenting the case against them at court. 

In hate crime cases the CPS is also responsible for asking the courts to increase the sentence that an offender receives – to reflect the fact that the crime they committed was a hate crime.

How are we tackling hate crime and what impact are we having?

At the CPS we recognise how important it is to effectively prosecute hate crimes. Here are some of the things we’re doing to achieve this:

• We train all our prosecutors on hate crime. We designed the training with the support of our community partners to make sure it accurately reflects the cases our lawyers are likely to be dealing with.
• We quality check our cases regularly. CPS lawyers review each other’s work and provide feedback on both open and closed cases – helping us to learn from each other and deliver the best quality service.
• We hold regular feedback groups locally and nationally. These groups give us the opportunity to review cases with members of the community to understand where we’ve done well and discuss how we could improve. These are particularly important for helping us to improve our communication with victims, witnesses and families. Read more about the national Hate Crime External Consultation Group.
• We’ve published public policy statements to explain how we prosecute hate crime. These explain the process that we go through when prosecuting a hate crime and let victims and witnesses know what they can expect from us.
• We work closely with partners across the criminal justice sector and beyond to help the public understand hate crime and what we can do to tackle it.

What impact is this having?

Last year we prosecuted more than 10,000 cases of hate crime.

In 86% of cases the defendants were found guilty of one or more crimes.

In 79% of those cases the judge increased the offender’s sentence because they agreed that the crime was a hate crime.

Hate crime data

Hate Crime data is now published regularly as part of our Quarterly Data Summaries.

Find the quarterly summary you're interested in and select 'Hate Crime' in the index.

For data up until 2018-19, please see our previous hate crime data releases and hate crime annual reports.