Policing racist hate crime: policy, practice, and experience

As an object of academic study, racist hate crime is a comparatively new and under-explored issue in Britain. Despite a long history of what we now label as ‘hate crimes’, it was the murder of Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993 and the subsequent public inquiry in 1999 that served as a catalyst for raising the profile of racist hate crime as a social, political, and policing problem deserving of serious attention in its own right. This chapter will explore a number of issues relating to the policing of racist hate crime, both historical and contemporary, and with particular focus on theoretical and practical influences that inevitably affect the police response to the hate crime ‘problem’.