Brody's Notes... New LGBT Police Liaison Unit In Wales Is First Of Its Kind

By Mark Singer (Washington DC) DEC 13 |  In a stepped up effort to combat rising incidents of hate/bias crimes in Britain, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, specialist police officers are being recruited to combat those crimes in a move to encourage victims to report attacks and abuse.
John Grieve, a former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police force and now adjunct professor of criminology at the London Metropolitan University, who was instrumental in establishing Scotland Yard's Racial Violent Crime Task Force said in an interview with the BBC:

"The UK is amongst world leaders in the way that it responds to hate crime, but there is still much work to do. One of the greatest challenges is to reduce the under-reporting of hate crime. We welcome the government's commitment to increase reporting and we will be examining this data in the forthcoming months and years to better understand the extent of crime and to challenge where performance does not meet the high standards that the public rightly demands of the criminal justice agencies."

Figures released at the end of November by the Her Majesty's government's Hate Crime Advisory Group revealed that total of 52,028 crimes were recorded across the UK last year in which the crime was motivated by bias. 4,805 of which were linked to homophobia – 505 more than the previous year.
In the district surrounding Gwent, in south-eastern Wales, a new police unit comprised of LGBT liaison officers, the first of its kind, will work alongside detectives giving support and advice to victims and witnesses of LGBT hate crime, directing them to Welsh support agencies, and lending advice to police officers dealing with homophobic incidents
The officers in this new liaison unit have been specifically trained to provide much needed help to people who have been victims of hate crime in Gwent because they are LGBT, and it's hoped the liaison officers will encourage more people to report these types of crimes. Fourteen officers and staff members from the Gwent force have been trained under the new initiative, and more will be recruited in six months time.
In an interview with the BBC earlier this month when the unit was first publicized, Assistant Chief Constable Simon Prince said:

"It is estimated that one in 12 people in [the] Gwent [force area] classes him or herself as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender which is a significant number of people.

We hope that the introduction of LGBT liaison officers will encourage members of the community to report hate crimes which are traditionally under reported. If we can encourage greater reporting it will enable us to gain a greater understanding of hate crime and the extent to which people are suffering but also to better enable us to tackle it.”

Mark Williams of the group Safer Wales told journalist Jonny Payne from the British Gay media outlet PinkPaper.com:

"In the field of hate crime one of the main issues is under-reporting. In recent years we've seen several reports highlighting that only one in four cases of homophobic or racist abuse are reported. For people with learning disabilities the numbers are even lower with research suggesting only one in ten cases are reported.”