Hate crimes recorded by the police in Scotland, 2023-24

Type of hate crime by hate aggravator (Table 5)

For each of the different aggravators ‘Threatening or abusive behaviour’ was the most common hate crime recorded. For all aggravators except race, ‘Threatening or abusive behaviour’ made up the majority of crimes for each aggravator, ranging from 53% of transgender identity hate crimes up to 75% of sexual orientation hate crimes. For race aggravated hate crimes, 47% were ‘Threatening or abusive behaviour’.

In most other cases, all other crime types only made up a small proportion of recorded hate crimes.

Additionally, as might be expected, a relatively high proportion of crimes recorded with a race aggravator were ‘Racially aggravated conduct’ or ‘Racially aggravated harassment’ (collectively 22%). This is because these are standalone offences relating to racially aggravated behaviour, whereas there are no standalone offences relating to the other strands. There was a correspondingly lower proportion of ‘Threatening or abusive behaviour’ offences recorded for crimes with a racial aggravator. Again, this would be expected as the offence of ‘Racially aggravated conduct’ is similar to the offence of ‘Threatening or abusive behaviour’^[3].