A key argument of the last chapter was that many incidents of ‘hate crime’ are not encounters engineered by offenders, but result from the normal frictions of day-to-day life. Or they take place when offenders seize an opportunity in chance encounters that occur in the course of the victims’ and offenders’ everyday lives. This chapter develops the analysis by demonstrating that the geography of space and place clearly plays a role in generating encounters between offenders and victims. It therefore mediates between the background structural context of ‘hate crime’ and the foreground of offending and victimisation. A number of hypotheses concerning the spatial dynamics of ‘hate crime’ are presented, drawn from the existing literature, and their salience for understanding ‘hate crime’ in the city is explored. Previously unpublished police data from London on ‘race-hate’ incidents are used to examine the geography of ‘hate crime’. London was chosen as a case study as it is the most ethnically and culturally diverse city in the UK, one of the most diverse in Europe, and its rate of increase in diversity has outpaced the rest of the UK. Unfortunately, it is also the UK's capital of ‘hate crime’. For these reasons it provides an instructive case study for analysing the spatial dynamics of ‘hate crime’.

London: capital of diversity

To provide a context for the analysis that follows, the diversity of London's population and the problem of ‘race-hate’ crime in London are briefly outlined. The 2001 Census recorded more than 2 million London residents in Black and Asian minority ethnic communities out of a total population of 7.2 million. Among those who classified themselves as ‘White’ in the Census there were more than 220,000 Irish people, along with over half a million who ticked the ‘Other White’ group.

London is administratively and politically divided into 32 local authorities, or boroughs. According to the 1991 Census, the proportion of the population from Black and Asian minority ethnic groups was less than the proportion for all of England and Wales in only five of the London boroughs. By the 2001 Census only three boroughs, Bexley, Bromley and Havering, had a smaller representation of Black and Asian communities in their population compared with the population for all of England and Wales.