Racial and religious hate crimes increased by 34% during the period of the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, provisional figures from the Home Office reveal.
In June, the number of racially or religiously aggravated offences recorded by police across England and Wales was a third higher than in June 2019.
Increases were seen across most forces, with 27 forces seeing an increase of one quarter or more. The level of these offences remained high in July.
The surges across June and July 2020 appeared in a separate Home Office report into trends during the coronavirus pandemic – and are likely to be directly related to the Black Lives Matters protests and far-right groups counter-protests across the country following the death of George Floyd at the hands of US police, the government said.
There were increases in both racially or religiously aggravated and non-aggravated public fear, alarm or distress offences in May, June and July 2020.
Overall there were 105,090 hate crimes recorded compared with 97,446 the year before.
The majority of hate crimes were race-related and this accounting for around three-quarters of offences. These increased by 6% 2018/19 and 2019/20.
Sexual orientation hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales also increased by 19% in the last year.
While increases in hate crime over the last five years have been mainly driven by improvements in crime recording by the police, there has been spikes in hate crime following certain events such as the EU Referendum and the terrorist attacks in 2017.
This comes as charity Victim Support said it received 5,657 referrals between July 5 and August 22 from the police and other agencies, with the majority involving sexual orientation or race and nationality.
This is a 62% rise from the 3,489 referrals during the same period in 2019, with sexual orientation-related referrals more than doubling and race and nationality-related referrals increasing by 64%.