People with darker skin over-represented among crime victims, new survey suggests

People of colour were over-represented among people who reported having been victims of insults, abuse, and crime in Dublin city centre in the previous 12 months, in a new survey.

In a sample of 600 people who responded to our City Centre Crime Victim Survey, only 80 respondents said they have darker skin tones. That’s 13 percent.

But this group, who said they had skin tones ranging from 3 to 10 on the scale above, accounted for 23 percent of respondents who said they’d been insulted or verbally abused in the city.

They were 19 percent of those who said they’d been threatened in a public place, 20 percent of those who’d had a motor vehicle stolen, and 30 percent of those who’d had a bike or scooter stolen. 

They were 46 percent of those who’d been deliberately punched or kicked, 47 percent of those who’d been threatened with a weapon, and 100 percent of those who’d been injured with a weapon.

While people with darker skin were over-represented among respondents who were victims of assault and abuse, they were proportionally – or under- – represented among those who’d had their home burglarised or damaged (14 percent), or items stolen from their motor vehicle (6 percent), or bag, pockets or hands (8 percent).

The survey, commissioned by Dublin Inquirer and carried out by Amarách Research between 10 and 17  September of this year, has a margin of error of 3.9 percent. 

Only a small share of the 600 respondents reported having been victims of a crime at all, and an even-smaller pool of those identified having darker skin colours. 

So, the uncertainty is high, and it’s hard to be sure whether the finding represents a broader trend. 

And when asked about perceived motives, not all respondents with darker skin tones said they thought that their skin colour was the reason they’d been a victim.

Around 43 percent of them who were victims of assault identified their skin colour as a trigger for assault and abuse. 

Lucy Michael, a sociologist in Dublin, says there’s a dearth of good crime victimisation surveys that set out to understand people of colour’s full scope of experiences with crime.

“I think we expect a lot of police data in Ireland because we don’t have a really good crime survey,” said Michael.

Some older findings from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) surveys capture victims' non-Irish nationalities, albeit that includes non-Irish White people, and leaves out Irish people of colour.

A 2015 national survey by the CSO found that “the rate of [crime] victimisation for non-Irish nationals was slightly higher than Irish nationals with rates of 6% and 5% respectively”.

Another survey, from 2019, found that non-Irish people generally worried less about crime, but it didn’t report their victimisation rates.

Cian Ó Concubhair –  associate professor of criminal justice at Maynooth University, who helped design the questionnaire for our City Centre Crime Victim Survey– said the CSO crime victimisation surveys are “infrequent” and don’t reveal a lot about victimisation of people with darker skin tones. 

The CSO is currently conducting a new national crime victimisation survey, its first since 2019 – and plans to publish the results next year. A spokesperson for the CSO says this new survey takes respondents' “ethnicity” into account.

Academics say it’s important to be aware of how frequently people of colour are victims of crime, for a myriad of reasons, including for the police to understand whether there’s a gap between victimisation, official reporting, and access to justice. 

Jeremy Levine, associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, who has studied victimisation of Black people and degrees of compensation in the United States, says such data can often expose the scope of estrangement between people of colour and the police – and plant seeds of policy change. 

“Without those relevant data points, then you’re flying blind on policy,” said Levine, on a video call recently. 

More surveys, better surveys 

At the moment, Gardaí’s data on victimisation of people with darker skin tones is limited to hate-motivated crimes, which it has said remain underreported – and so the data underrepresent the breadth of crimes driven by hatred. 

But a recent crime victimisation survey for England and Wales found that people “within ‘Mixed or Multiple ethnic groups’ were more likely to be a victim” of “headline crime” – which ranges from theft to violence – than those who’d selected the White ethnicity. 

A spokesperson for An Garda Síochána said it’s interested in statistics like victimisation rates of people with darker skin tones, and had looked into capturing them, but it turned out that it has no legal basis to collect them itself for now. 

Ó Concubhair, the Maynooth University criminologist, says he doesn’t think that’s true, as the guards collect other kinds of personal data and don’t seem concerned about it. “They don’t have a specific power to gather data about people’s gender identity, but they do,” he said by phone recently.

Michael, the sociologist, says it’s still better to collect victimisation data through comprehensive crime surveys than to rely on the cops to do it, especially because marginalised people’s relationship with the police is often thorny. 

“What we lack in Ireland is a really good crime survey,” she said.

Hard times in the city 

Sanchi Tayal has lived here for the past 10 years.

Her first experience with being a crime victim in the city centre was in 2018, when a masked kid snatched her phone at Heuston Station, says Tayal.

She decided to chase after him, she says. “But at some point, I stopped, and I said, ‘Take the phone, it has a GPS tracker, we will track you.’”

To her surprise, she says, it seemed to spook the young thief. He gave it back and drifted away.

This year, again, a bunch of kids carrying water balloons approached her and two other women – who were visiting from India – in Blanchardstown, said Tayal.

One of them was pregnant. “My cousin’s sister, she was five months pregnant,” Tayal says.

The kids made lewd remarks, and Tayal, worried that they were going to throw the balloons at them, quickly ushered away the two other women, who’d become upset, she said.

Generally, Tayal says, she doesn’t feel safe in the city, and in some other areas of Dublin, like Tallaght and Blanchardstown. “That’s why we got our home in Kildare,” she said.

Among respondents to our City Centre Crime Victim Survey who don’t live in the city centre but visit it, 72 percent of women said they sometimes or often decide not to visit the city centre because they feel it’s too unsafe.

Sumyrah Khan, who was also born in India, says a teenage boy angrily interrogated her in the city centre when she was canvassing for Catherine Connolly’s presidential campaign, a day after the riots outside Citywest Hotel and transit centre last month.

Even though she isn’t eligible to vote, she wanted to support Connolly because of her stances on immigration and Palestine, said Khan.

The boy questioned her about her place of birth, immigration status, and whether she had to pay anything to renew her permission to stay each year. 

When she said she was born in India, the boy’s face seemed flushed, like he was raging, said Khan.

As he ambled away, he muttered, ‘Watch yourself, ’ she says.

Like Tayal, Khan says, she doesn’t feel safe at all, not in the city, and not in Ranalegh, where she shares a rental with a few roommates. “It’s a real fear that I kind of walk around with in my life”.

When the Taoiseach or the Tánaiste speak publicly against immigration, that makes her more afraid, she said.

Among respondents to our City Centre Crime Victim Survey who don’t live in the city centre but visit it, 32 percent of women said they felt “very safe” or “mostly safe” walking alone in the city centre during the day, and 12 percent said they felt that way walking alone there at night.

Confidence in Gardaí 

Both Khan and Tayal say they don’t have much confidence that if they were assaulted, they would get proper support from the Gardaí.

“I think immediate action will not be taken at all,” said Tayal.

Tayal, who also works as an immigration consultant, says, based on her experience with clients, many immigrant victims avoid going to the guards anyway, worried that even being a crime victim can affect their status or a future citizenship application.

That lines up with the findings of a recent study commissioned by the Policing Authority of Ireland and carried out by Michael, the sociologist, which mined the policing experiences of people of Brazilian and African descent and found contours of distrust. 

“Both African and Brazilian participants expressed scepticism about the effectiveness of the complaints process and were wary of making complaints due to fears of future harassment or repercussions, with Brazilians particularly concerned about potential impacts on their immigration status,” it says.

Their overall perception of the Gardaí’s behaviour and attitude is negative, says the report. 

“The lack of comprehensive data on the policing experiences of these communities has been a significant gap in the current understanding and policy-making process,” it says.

In our City Centre Crime Victim Survey, people with darker skin tones reported more satisfaction when reporting assault to the Gardaí. 

But there’s a high level of uncertainty in that finding, because of the small numbers of responses it draws on: only the small group who were victims of a crime, and among those, only those who had darker skin tones and reported the crime to Gardaí.

Michael says she wants to see the Gardaí gather ethnicity data of those they stop on the street to search and detain. 

That would also show if there are any patterns of racial profiling. That can help explain some of the distrust between the cops and people of colour. 

In the past, people of colour have shared vignettes of being subjected to undeserved stop-and-searches. 

In the United Kingdom, where such data is collected, Black people are disproportionately represented in stop-and-search, arrest, and incarceration data.

Still, Levine, the sociology professor in the United States, says broader victimisation data is needed to understand the gulf between how many people of colour are victims of crime, and how many of those people turn to the police for help.

It’s especially important for police forces, he said, to understand whether women of colour are being victimised at a greater rate than they’re hearing about.

“Women of color do not fit cultural schemas of victimhood, and as a result, the police may overlook or ignore their suffering,” says Levine’s study.

Immigrant women whose statuses were tied to an abusive partner and lapsed because the partner wouldn’t help them renew, have said in the past that they didn’t want to report to Gardaí, fearful the guards would investigate their immigration statuses.

Now I see me 

Michael, the Dublin sociologist, has worked on – among other things – knitting together the reports submitted to the Irish Network Against Racism’s (INAR’s) hate-motivated crime reporting platform iReport.ie

Some of the people who shared their experiences for its 2023 report, were doubtful that hate was a factor in what they’d experienced –  like some who’d participated in our crime victimisation survey. “That’s why I went to look at the literature,” she said.

Despite rhetoric that accuses people of colour of “playing the race card”, says Michael,  “research shows that minorities are very slow to assume that their racial or ethnic identity is the cause of their experiences”.

That can especially happen with people of colour who work certain public-facing jobs, like bus drivers, she said. They can chalk up any incident as something that comes with the job and could have happened to anybody.

Says Ó Concubhair, at Maynooth: “They just occupy a higher risk profile because of the work they are doing.”

But it’s also common in people from higher socio-economic backgrounds who speak English well and consider themselves integrated and broadly accepted, said Michael.

They might carry authority and influence in their professional lives as medical consultants or university professors, she said.

To accept that they were targeted because of their skin colour or ethnic background is to reckon with the fact that some still view them as somehow lacking. That’s not easy, and comes with a psychological toll, she said.

“That means that you actually have to acknowledge that you’re seen as less than.”

Khan, the woman in Ranelagh, says she agrees. “There’s a class element there, 100 percent.”

Half the people with darker skin tones who’d responded to our survey identified themselves as belonging to a higher socio-economic class.

Bottom line, says Ó Concubhair, the Maynooth professor, is that we need better crime victimisation surveys to fully understand their experiences.

He’s hopeful that the survey he and his colleagues at Maynooth University have helped to design gets that bit closer to being thoughtful and thorough, he said

“This survey is not perfect, and we’re probably going to see the flaws in how the questions were asked, but this is part of a process of developing good surveys,” he said.

Note: If you’d like to explore the data, you can find an array of tables in this spreadsheet. We also have an SPSS file, get in touch if you’d like that: sam@dublininquirer.com.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.