April 24, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Hate Crime and Equality
Request Number: FOI/14313
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Hate Crime and Equality
Subject: Hate Incidents and Crimes
Request and Answer:
Your request for information has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Act we can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does hold information to which your request relates. The decision has been taken to disclose the following.
Request
We are seeking to understand the frequency of hate incidents and crimes at the smallest level of geography possible (e.g., ward, DEA, or policing district) for the Belfast area.
At the smallest level of geography possible, please provide hate incident and crime data, disaggregated by unique/repeat experiences for 2014-2024.
Answer
For the first part of this request, namely “We are seeking to understand the frequency of hate incidents and crimes at the smallest level of geography possible for the Belfast area” please see link to the NISRA Data Portal under, which provides incident and crime data for race, sexual orientation and sectarian hate for a range of geographies. The smallest of these is ward, and data is available from 2004/05 to 2023/24. This information can be found here:
https://data.nisra.gov.uk/product/HMC
In the second part of the request you have asked for information to be broken down by unique /repeat experiences. This is essentially asking about repeat victimisation. Repeat victimisation is not held in one single field on NICHE, and PSNI does not publish any data in relation to this. Our understanding of repeat victimisation is that to calculate this accurately would require a multi-stage process of manipulating data to accommodate for how it is held on Niche and to account for how crime is recorded according to the Home Office Counting Rules (which have also changed during this time period). To do this would fall under the creation of new information, as it is not something held and extractible from PSNI systems.