The Met Police have charged three times as many people for Islamophobic hate crimes as for anti-Semitic hate crimes, and nearly five times as many white Europeans for hate crimes including homophobia as Asians or Arabs over the last three years.
The figures, revealed in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request lodged by Breitbart London, shows that since the beginning of 2013, 678 people recorded as being of European ethnicity were charged with homophobic, Islamophobic or anti-Semitic crimes, which equates to 62 percent of the total charged. In the same period, just 127 people of Asian or Arab descent, were charged for crimes in the same categories, equating to 11 percent of the total charged.
But while the number of Europeans charged with hate crimes in those three categories is roughly in line with the demographics in London (the 2011 census showed that 59.8 percent of Londoners were of European origin, although that number is likely to have reduced slightly since then), it does not align with the Asian / Arab population demographics – the 2011 census shows that those ethnicities make up close to 20 percent of London’s population.
It may be expected that Asians and Arabs wouldn’t take part in Islamophobic hate crimes, thereby bringing the average down, but in fact the percentages hold steady across the three categories: 11 percent of those charged with Islamophobia were Asian or Arab, against 73 percent listed as European.
Similarly 11 percent of people charged with homophobia were Arab or Asian against 57 percent who were European, while 15 percent of those charged with anti-Semitism were Arab or Asian, against the 65 percent who were European.
These figures also hold for the number of arrests for Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and homophobia.
The Met Police record their crime figures from July to July each year, making comparisons between the numbers of crimes reported and the number of people arrested or charged, which have been given for calendar years, imprecise.
However, the figures released in the FOI show that, since 2013, 303 people have been charged with Islamophobic hate crimes, while 105 have been charged with anti-Semitic hate crimes, a ratio of 3:1. Yet in the two years between August 2013 and July 2015, there were 757 anti-Semitic crimes recorded by the force, against 1294 Islamophobic crimes, a ratio of just under 2:1, suggesting that the force are making more effort to follow up Islamophobic crimes than anti-Semitic crimes.
The Community Security Trust, an organisation set up to monitor anti-Semitism in Britain does record incidents by calendar year. They report that there were 583 anti-Semitic incidents in London in 2014; Met Police figures show that just 46 people were charged with anti-Semitism in the same period.
Yet Jewish people are four times more likely than Muslims to be attacked in London, as, although the Met recorded 816 Islamophobic incidents in the last 12 months against the 499 anti-Semitic attacks which occurred in the same period, there are more than a million Muslims living in London, whereas there are fewer than 158,000 Jews.
The arrest and detention figures suggest that the Met Police may be shying away from arresting and charging people of Asian and Arab ethnicity, possibly for fear of being thought of as Islamophobic themselves.
But it may point to evidence of Islamophilia within the force. Yesterday the Met Police issued a press release declaring that Islamophobic hate crimes were up by 70.7 per cent from last year, a statistic which the BBC and Guardian jumped on as evidence of an increasingly Islamophobic Britain. But it completely ignored the fact the number of racist attacks against Jewish people was actually up by 93.4 per cent in the same period.
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