The 2011 Census found that an increasing number of the city’s residents are from a background other than White British – these residents now make up nearly 20% of the population. There is also a significant Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans population, thought to number in the region of 35-40,000.
The Crime Survey England and Wales (using data from the 2011/12 and 2012/13 surveys) found that victims of hate crime reported that they were more emotionally affected more often by the incident (68%) compared with victims of crime overall (37%) and the impact of hate crime on victims was more severe.
Police recorded racist/religiously motivated incidents and crimes and homophobic hate crimes and incidents began to be recorded by Sussex Police over ten years ago and numbers rose up until 2006/7 and have generally been declining since then, although have seen a slight rise since 2012. This rise has corresponded to work by the police to improve their processes around identifying and recording hate incidents and is not believed to reflect an actual underlying increase in incidents. It remains important, however, to continually encourage reporting – either to the police or to another reporting centre – so support can be provided to the victim and the Partnership can get better intelligence on local hate crime problems. The recording of disability hate and transphobic incidents by the police has been introduced more recently and recorded numbers remain relatively low.