Report school bullies to the police says top cop

Sergeant Peter Allan, told The Argus it was important for all hate incidents to be reported so the force had a clear picture of the scale of the problem.

Currently the majority of hate crimes go unreported although the scale of that silence is impossible to measure.

Sgt Allan said with more knowledge the police could tie together incidents that may have a common perpetrator or cause, or link incidents that might happen in and out of schools.

He said: “If somebody is targeted because of a particular feature, if a school kid is targeted for their glasses or for sticky out ears for example, and if they feel hurt, sad, upset or more vulnerable or scared by that then they should report that to us.

“I am not saying we want take to take it out of the school’s hands or that we want to send everybody before the court, there are community resolution and education solutions too.

“In a school setting, I would still ask parents or schools to report it to us even if the solution is to get both sides to sit down and talk about how it feels to use those words.

“If schools report it to us, then it might be part of a bigger picture of abuse happening outside of schools which they don’t know about.”

But parents and governors have responded to the Sgt Allan’s call with caution.

Patrick Lowe, chair of Brighton and Hove governors Association, described it as “a step too far”.

He said: “I feel there are effective policies within schools in order to deal with bullying issues and in the majority of cases these can be dealt within school.

“Ultimately we are dealing with children here - children can make mistakes or misunderstand things.

“I can’t see bringing the police as the way forward, we don’t want to be in a situation where kids are being carted into police vans.” Horsham-based parenting expert Elizabeth O’Shea said: “Bullying in schools is generally dealt with well and schools are best placed to report bullying.

“But the problem is when schools are not dealing well with bullying or its happening outside of schools, maybe a child is being bullied by kids from different schools and that bullying does need to be reported to the police.

“But in the first approach, parents should empower the child to see if they can deal with the bullying themselves and if not then it is time to take that to a higher authority, whoever that maybe.”

Reported hate crime increased 28% in Sussex between 2012/13 and 2013/14 and early indications are that 2014/15 will see another rise.

The first 27 weeks of the financial year have seen 720 crimes reported which if it continued through the year would represent a 37% increase.

Sgt Allan, who was appointed Sussex Police’s first dedicated hate crime sergeant in November last year, said the increase was down to more people coming forward and reporting them.

He said: “You don’t often hear senior police officers applauding crime figures going up but in this case we do.

“Obviously we want reporting to go up but offending to go down, we don’t want reporting to go up because offending is going up.”

However, Sgt Allan said that encouraging people to report hate crimes was still a real challenge.

He said people don’t report hate crime such as victims not thinking the incident was serious enough, worried about retribution, not being treated sympathetically by police or criminal justice system, or not thinking punishments will go far enough.

He added that it was not uncommon for victims of hate crime to develop a certain resilience to some abuse, which they did not allow to affect them, and did not report to police.

Race hate is the most prominent of the five key categories that are monitored across the country accounting for 72% of reported hate crimes last year and 70% this year.

Sgt Allan believes that this is in part because differences in race can be more instantly recognisable and established rather than disability or religious beliefs.

But Sussex Police are putting particular emphasis on disability abuse even though it represents a much lower proportion of reported crimes at just 8% in 2013/14 and 6% so far this financial year.

Sgt Allan said: “We need to focus on disabled hate crime because we know it is massively underreported from the fact that the numbers are so low and from what disabled groups are telling us.

“The challenge around disability hate crime is how much it is motivated by prejudice and hostility and how much is it just targeting the vulnerable.

“Another problem is that some victims have an issue with language and so in some cases it can be difficult for disabled people to communicate what happened to them.

“There are real challenges around disability hate crime.”

Each force is required by the government to monitor hate crime by race, sexual orientation, disability, transgender and religion although flexibility is given to forces that may want to include a sixth strand should another group face repeated hate crime.

Sgt Allan said that Sussex Police had considered a possible sixth strand with the street community, which is particularly prominent in Brighton.

But he added incidents of members of the public targeting the street community were not that frequent and were outnumbered by the number of street community on street community incidents or even street community aggression towards the public.

It is hoped that the national hate crime awareness week, which runs until Saturday will help to improve residents’ understanding of what constitutes a hate crime while new initiatives launched this week by Sussex Police, including a hate crimes ambassador project, will cause a ripple effect of knowledge through the community.

Global and national incidents have the potential to impact on hate crimes in the county.

Sgt Allan said: “In response to Gaza earlier this year there was an increase in hate crime almost exclusively in Brighton and Hove and I am not aware of anything other than graffiti.

“You have to keep on top of things that happen in the county, elsewhere in the country and elsewhere in the world.”