‘Our colleagues do not come to work to suffer hate crime’
Cross-party support has been given to the Protect The Protectors: Stop Racism Against Police campaign (Image: Humberside Police Federation)
A campaign aimed at reducing the number of racist attacks against police officers across England and Wales was endorsed by MPs from the Humber area at the heart of Westminster. Cross-party support has been given to the Protect The Protectors: Stop Racism Against Police campaign, with MPs vowing to write to Police Minister Sarah Jones highlighting the number of officers who endure such racist attacks and measures that could be utilised to tackle this.
Melanie Onn, MP for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes; Martin Vickers, MP for Brigg and Immingham and Dame Diana Johnson, MP for Kingston upon Hull North, attended a meeting with Humberside Police Federation where these concerns were highlighted. Mr Vickers said the campaign had his “full support”.
Lee Sims, chair of Humberside Police Federation, said: “Every assault on a police officer is horrendous and it is unacceptable that a police officer is assaulted every 10 minutes in the UK. However, we have also found that officers from an ethnic minority background are being targeted for assaults and abuse simply because of the colour of their skin.
“One of our own officers was assaulted by a person who said they attacked him because he was not white. That is unacceptable.
“One incident like this is one too many. Our colleagues do not come to work to suffer hate crime.
“We are delighted that MPs have indicated their support for the campaign and we will continue to drive this campaign forward.” At least 11,000 hate crimes have been committed against UK police officers in the past three years.
A Freedom of Information (FOI) request to UK police forces found that there were 10,922 reported hate crimes against officers from 27 forces from 2022 to 2025. However, the true figure is likely to be much higher – even close to double – as another 21 forces were unable to provide data.
PC Mourad Karaouani, who works in Bridlington, in East Yorkshire, has had to suffer severe racial abuse as part of being a police officer. He is backing the campaign and also travelled to Westminster. He said: “We met the MPs and we tried to let them know the difficulties we have in everyday policing.”
One of the aims of the campaign is to amend the law – likely to be the Assaults Against Emergency Workers Act – to make racially abusing or racially assaulting a police officer a separate recordable offence. PC Karaouani said: “We tried to send our message and hopefully we get their support to help us get this law changed and hopefully get things to go forward.
“We’re not asking for a different treatment or preferential treatment to officers; we are just hoping that all assaults on any officer are deemed unacceptable, but obviously when it comes to racial abuse it’s even worse and we would like a proper law in place to help us prevent further offences.” PC Sham McGrory is a serving officer with Humberside Police who has bravely spoken out about the severe racial abuse she faces on the front line.
She said visiting Parliament proved that “somebody does have the time to listen to push the campaign, and to be supportive in hope that in the future that it could make a big change”. PC McGrory said: “It was really encouraging today… we now have a very positive mindset going forward, with all the sort of information that we were able to sort of equip them with.
“Today was about sharing that it’s not just statistics on paper but it is officers behind the statistics and sort of share those personal anecdotes, really sort of express what emotions are driving behind the campaign as well.” Brian Booth, deputy national chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said: “It’s really good to see Humberside highlighting this really important issue of our officers being racially assaulted whilst doing their duty.
“There should be no assaults on officers whatsoever but we need to have a look at how the impact of the racist assaults on our constables are being dealt with by the judiciary and by the police service itself. We’ve had some really good MP engagement this week.
“Now we are looking at how we can move this forward, trying to get more MPs involved and trying to get Parliamentary backing into looking at changing the law.”
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