Examination of Witnesses (Questions 625
- 639)
WEDNESDAY 3 NOVEMBER 2004
ASSISTANT CHIEF
CONSTABLE JUDITH
GILLESPIE, INSPECTOR
ROBIN DEMPSEY,
MR DAVID
WILSON, MR
BRIAN DOUGHERTY,
MR IVOR
PAISLEY AND
MR PHILIP
MOFFETT
Q625 Chairman: Good afternoon. Thank
you all for coming to help us with our last evidence session on
hate crime. If I can start with you two from the PSNI, the trends
in racial and homophobic incidents have been upwards. How confident
are you that you can arrest those upward trends?
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
Perhaps I can start by saying that the upward trend is indicative
of two things that are happening—an increase in the number
of incidents but also an increase in confidence in reporting and
perhaps an increase in our competence at accurately capturing
exactly what is going on out there. It is only within the last
few years that we have started to accurately record hate crime
and indeed in recent months that we have started to record sectarian
crimes and crimes against disabled people. We are coming to grips
with a much more comprehensive picture of what is really going
on out there. Having said that, we not only record crimes but
also incidents so, whilst it would look like our clearance figures
with regard to the overall incident picture are quite low, when
you compare them to crimes committed it gives a truer reflection
of what is going on. That is not to say that those detection figures
could not be improved; of course they could be. We could do much
better and that is one of the reasons why we are hoping in next
year's policing plan that we will have a specific target in relation
to detections for racial and homophobic crimes.
Q626 Chairman: At the moment you
have no targets?
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
At the moment it is simply to set a base line in terms of an accurate
reflection of what is going on.
Q627 Chairman: What I really want
to know is how confident you are that you can stop this upward
trend. You have said it is in the reporting, and I understand
that, but it is also the number of incidents that is going up.
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
Yes, that is true, but we would start to get quite concerned,
in particular in the area of homophobic crime, if the number of
incidents reported started to go down again. That may seem a strange
thing to say but this is very much to do with confidence in reporting
to the police. We know that there is a significant level of under-reporting
in particular of homophobic crime for a whole lot of reasons.
We would be concerned if that dipped considerably. An upward trend
is not necessarily an altogether bad thing but clearly we have
to address the upward trend in the crimes.
Q628 Chairman: Let us just get back
to basics. An upward trend in reporting is one thing. It is the
upward trend in incidents that we are concerned about. That is
not things getting better; that is things getting worse.
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
Of course; I agree with you there. That is why we are looking
at analysing exactly where the incidents are happening. The picture
at the moment with regard to homophobic crime is that it is concentrated
in a small number of areas—in Belfast, in Moyle and in Lisburn
as well. They tend to be the places where members of the lesbian
and gay community congregate for socialising. If we can work with
local police on detection and education initiatives there we can
make a significant impact on this.
Q629 Chairman: Are you doing that?
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
Robin and myself are working at a corporate level in terms of
the education and training of police officers but there are initiatives
going on at local district levels as well, engaging with members
of those communities as to which are the nights, for example,
that are recognised as gay nights within pubs and clubs when you
have a bigger preponderance of gay people associating in those
areas. That is when we need to have higher visibility and policing
patrols. That is just a very practical example of what we can
do.
Q630 Chairman: You have put out some
figures last week and I see that in Belfast alone there were 129
incidents of racial or homophobic abuse reported, which is about
five every week. How much of that is homophobic and how much is
racial?
Inspector Dempsey: In terms of
the whole picture across Northern Ireland I can tell you in relation
to incident reporting that we have had quite an increase, even
in the first two quarters of this year, in the number of incidents
reported to the police. We have seen an increase from 180 to 299
in racially motivated incidents and an increase from 36 homophobic
incidents in the first two quarters of last year to 53 in the
first two quarters of this year. What we have already talked about
is incidents and crimes. We are confident that we are getting
many more incidents, both homophobic and racial, reported to the
Police Service that would not previously have been. Obviously,
there is a concern that there is a rise in incidents and attacks
and crimes and, if I can give some evidence in relation to the
number of initiatives we have presently going, we have 18 corporate
initiatives across the Police Service for racial incidents and
11 corporate initiatives for homophobic incidents. Those are initiatives
that are aimed at protecting people, supporting people, providing
information and linking them in with the other agencies that can
offer support. We have 43 local initiatives across all the districts
throughout Northern Ireland that are being taken forward by the
district commanders and maintained by the minority liaison officers.
Q631 Chairman: The racial problem
in terms of numbers of incidents is much greater than the homophobic
problem?
Inspector Dempsey: Certainly in
relation to the numbers at this stage we are getting more racial
incidents reported. There are particular difficulties in homophobic
incidents. We would expect the numbers to be lower in respect
of reporting those.
Q632 Chairman: The Metropolitan Police
have a special hate crime unit and other police forces publish
annual reviews on hate crime. As this growth seems to be very
steadily going upwards do you have any plans for developing similar
approaches within PSNI?
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
As Robin has already mentioned, each district has a minority liaison
officer. In South Belfast they have increased the number of minority
liaison officers because of the particular difficulties they have
had there. They have a minority liaison officer now in each sector
area, not just within the district. If you wanted to call that
a hate crime unit you could effectively call it that, but at the
end of the day it is up to each district commander to decide how
they deploy their resources within their area. Each district is
different. As I have already mentioned, Moyle has particular difficulties
with regard to homophobic attacks. Dungannon and South Tyrone
district, for example, have particular difficulties with regard
to migrant workers, the Portuguese community and eastern Europeans
coming in to work in various factories and processing plants there.
Each district therefore is different and each district commander
must meet the policing needs within their district. What I would
say from a corporate point of view is that we have taken a lot
of time and energy to train minority liaison officers within each
district and to deal at a corporate level with the issues that
engage with minority groups, be they lesbian, gay groups, minority
ethnic groups, or indeed disabled groups or older people, for
example, so there is a range of duties that they are engaged in.
Q633 Chairman: Of your minority liaison
officers how many come from minority groups?
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
None at the moment. We have currently within PSNI 17 police officers
who are members of minority ethnic groups and additionally two
members of support staff who would be classed as minority ethnic
members. That represents 0.23% of the Police Service and minority
ethnic groups within the Northern Ireland community generally
are approximately 0.85% of the community, so we are not quite
representative yet. However, we are working very hard to attract
applications from those groups.
Q634 Chairman: Do you have any members
of the PSNI from the Chinese community?
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
Yes, we do.
Q635 Chairman: How many?
Inspector Dempsey: We have one,
I believe, Chairman.
Q636 Chairman: How many applications
have there been from the Chinese community? I am asking this question
for a particular reason.
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
I do not have those figures available.
Q637 Chairman: That is quite understandable.
What the committee would like is if you could let us have the
figures of how many applications you get a year from within that
community.
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
Chairman, you may be interested to know that in our discussions
around next year's policing plan we did have a discussion with
the Board about perhaps including a performance indicator around
attracting applications from minority ethnic groups. That was
part of the discussion. I am not sure at this stage whether it
is going to end up in the policing plan but it certainly was part
of our discussions for next year's policing plan. It is after
all a proxy confidence indicator in terms of the confidence of
those communities in the Police Service.
Q638 Chairman: Has hate crime featured
as a significant area of concern in any of the public meetings
which the Policing Board hold?
Assistant Chief Constable Gillespie:
Yes, there have been a number of presentations to the Policing
Board on the picture of hate crime within Northern Ireland and
I believe they have been the subject of a number of specific questions
afterwards.
Q639 Chairman: What I actually meant
was the public. When you have these public meetings is this one
of the things where the public at large can ask questions?
Mr Dougherty: Unfortunately, Chairman,
at the public meetings of the main Policing Board the public do
not have the opportunity to question the Chief Constable per
se, but at local District Policing Partnership level they
do.
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