The Role of Verbal-Textual Hostility in Hate Crime Regulation: Final Report

Over the last ten years, the London Metropolitan Police Service has become a world leader in the policing of hate crimes. This is not only as a direct consequence of the Lawrence Enquiry and the introduction of penalty-enhancement measures. The MPS"”along with other Home Office agencies and the Metropolitan Police Authority"”has developed and modified its data collection, collation and analysis processes, and fundamentally transformed the service provided to victims of hate crime, above and beyond the Lawrence measures. Throughout this time, both the Violent Crime Directorate and the Citizen Focus Directorate have consistently reviewed and evaluated policing practices, with the aim of facilitating an increased reporting of hate crime, and the prosecution of hate crime offenders. Yet, throughout this time, the matter of verbal-textual hostility (VTH) has remained largely uninterrogated, with the exception of matters relating to hate mail and the criminal incitement of hate violence. Uncovering the forensic possibilities available through a closer linguistic analysis of the words used in hate crime is a significant gap in the research undertaken by the MPS. This project aims to fill some of that vacuum. This is the final report documenting the comparative analysis of two complete annual hate crime data sets. These data are drawn from the 2003 and 2007 cases, which consist of 27 164 incident files.1 Five thousand, five hundred and eighty-four of these incident files (or 20.6 per cent of total database, and 26.9 per cent of those cases involving VTH) contained verbatim recording of verbal or textual exchanges.