PSNI to investigate UK anti-racist policing

Police are to study race hate investigations in West Yorkshire in Britain as part of a new attempt to halt rising attacks on Northern Ireland’s ethnic minorities.

With beatings and intimidation of foreigners in the North up by 40%, senior officers admitted many more have gone unreported.

Loyalist paramilitaries have been blamed for waging a vicious campaign against terrified ethnic groups in the Village district of south Belfast.

At a meeting of the Northern Ireland Policing Board in Omagh, Co Tyrone, today, Duncan McCausland, the assistant chief constable for urban region, revealed an inspector and sergeant will travel to West Yorkshire next week to consult detectives battling racists in the area.

He said: “Local officers are liaising with police in Leeds and Bradford hate crime units to identify best practice in addressing this issue.”

Officers came under pressure to prove they could deal with the thugs amid fears that attacks could spiral out of control.

Several Asian families have already fled their homes due to the campaign of intimidation.

Policing Board representatives were told there have been nearly 300 racially motivated incidents in Northern Ireland since April last year compared with 226 for the 12 months previous.

Many of these happened in South Belfast, where pregnant women have been threatened and their relatives brutally assaulted by gangs intent upon driving them out of their area.

Mr McCausland told how the staunchly working class protestant community living in the Village feel under threat by the new arrivals and that these fears were being exploited by organised crime gangs.

But he pledged that his officers would do everything possible to end the campaign of terror.

With police set to forge closer links with ethnic representatives and undertake new training in religious diversity, he called on others to help.

“We want to make Northern Ireland a safer place for everyone to live in,” Mr McCausland said.

He also insisted that, with only a handful of fresh attacks reported last month, efforts to curb the racists were bearing fruit.

The assistant chief constable claimed: “We are now seeing a decrease in the ferocity and frequency of these attacks. In January, it went down to five.

“We will continue to carefully monitor the situation and take proactive measures to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Mr McCausland had been asked to disclose police plans by Sunil Sharma, one of the 19 members on the board.

Mr Sharma, a leading property developer, insisted that racism has always existed in Northern Ireland, but that it was only with the drop in the sectarian conflict that it has become more prominent.

He said: “There’s certainly a sense of a fairly substantial under-recording of these attacks.

“There’s only a very thin piece of paper you can drive between sectarianism, racism and anti-Semitism in Northern Ireland.”