Agenda item

It was noted that there was only one officer on duty covering hate crime for the county on evening of 15 March 2012 and so the Police were unable to attend this meeting.

It was noted that the Stamp out Hate Crime campaign had progressed well, with the Northampton Youth Forum being awarded a countywide youth award for “Outstanding Contribution to Anti-Bullying”. The young people had been presenting about the campaign to young leader awards nights around the county in response to enthusiasm about the work from young people and leading to further interest in the campaign.

What had begun as young people introducing other young people to the concept of hate crime and that it includes bullying, has begun to move on from that initial awareness-raising as young people continue to drive activities and change in schools. The week of 19 – 26 March would be an anti-bullying week at Weston Favell Academy, organised by the students, including Stamp out Hate Crime and a showing of the exhibition the young people had created which features local people’s stories of experiencing and surviving hate crime and includes information about a number of ways to report hate crime online and otherwise. Moulton College had shown interest with their student association organising an initial pledge sign-up, their multi-disciplinary welfare team staff identifying that they could work with the Stamp out Hate Crime campaign to support students reporting and well-being, and their college Police officer identifying she could use the campaign to help her in encouraging students to report incidents.

The exhibition at the museum had been well received leading to interest from a number of organisations in working together. Copies of the exhibition made by the young people were being made, with one set to be provided to the Northants Police to support their community engagement and work on tackling hate crime.

The elephant for the Safari Northampton small sculptures exhibition was ready and in temporary residence in the Guildhall, having been painted by local artist Lee Burrows.

The young people on youth forum would be meeting soon to look at how to move the campaign on, working with other interested organisations. They had already accepted a number of invites for community events in the summer to help get their message out to people. They felt it was important to raise awareness to help people recognise what hate crime is and what it’s impacts and consequences could be – in case this could help make safer cultures in organisations and prevent incidents happening. They wanted to look more at reporting going forward and recognised feedback from some young people about wanting schools to do more.

Anjona Roy noted that across the county there was a mixed picture of hate crime and hate incident reporting coming through from schools. It was not clear the extent to which schools might be dealing with hate crime and incidents internally and not producing reports to go beyond the school. She noted that Paul Burnett at Northants County Council had some years back given a commitment for annual reports about hate crime to go to school governors.

The issue that the County Council had told this Forum they only wanted to collect hate incidents and not hate crime reports via schools, was noted.

There was some discussion around how as a parent a member of the forum had not felt involved by their child’s school when they had reported hate crime to the school and externally about an incident at the school.

It was noted that Northampton Borough Council had taken into account the work of the forum, Overview and Scrutiny, the youth forum and other evidence, in deciding to make hate crime one of its priority equality objectives under the public sector equality duty. This reflected a commitment to being publically accountable – with annual updating to be provided on progress against the objective each year.