Humberside Officers Continue To Suffer Racist Abuse

6 May 2026

There were three separate incidents where a Humberside Police officer was racially abused over a single weekend in April, according to the force’s community cohesion team.

PC Alice Leigh, who collects hate crime data as part of her role in monitoring community tensions, said she backed Humberside Police Federation’s campaign, Protect The Protectors: Stop Racism Against Police.

The campaign aims to encourage better reporting of hate crimes and do more to protect police officers and staff. It also wants to get racially motivated abuse or assault recorded as a separate incident, in order to gauge the scale of the problem.

As part of a review into six months of crime data across her region – Hull and the East Riding – PC Leigh found that, out of the top five victims of hate crime, two of those were police officers, meaning that they had been repeatedly targeted in the course of their duties. One of these police officers has experienced abuse a shocking seven times over the past six months.

PC Leigh added that, since that data had been collected, there had recently been a particularly bad weekend. She said: “Over the course of the weekend 17-19 April, we had three separate incidents where officers were racially abused. Two of those incidents happened to the same officer within a 24-hour period. They are unrelated incidents, so these are separate suspects.

“I've reached out directly to the officer concerned. I'm a local Police Federation work-based Rep as well, so I've offered that support in addition to our role as community cohesion officers.”

She continued: “We look at these types of incidents day in and day out, and we know the impact it can have on our victims. We ensure they are correctly flagged on our local system as a repeat victim of hate crime, and we will continue to monitor the investigation as it progresses.

“I'm really passionate about the Protect the Protectors campaign and trying to take an active role in bringing meaningful change and more positive outcomes for our officers.”

PC Leigh said she hoped the campaign succeeded in getting forces to measure racial abuse as its own category, as currently it can be challenging to collect data of racial abuse against officers. She explained: “If there was a specifically recognised offence, like we have for assaulting an emergency worker, for example, it would be really helpful for us to record these incidents.”

Her message to officers who are victims of hate crime is: “This should never happen in your course of duty. Officers do not come to work to be racially abused or racially attacked.”

She continued: “I recognise that this isn't just another incident. It's something that can deeply affect our staff. And that's why it's really important to record and report it, to ensure that we are there to offer sufficient support and take it seriously.” She said the force was doing more to look at police officer victims of hate crime and that “positive change” was taking place: “We're getting the ball rolling to hopefully see some more meaningful change in the future.”

PC Leigh encouraged officers to report hate crime incidents, “so that we can ensure our senior leadership team is aware of the depth and breadth of the problem and how it is affecting our individual officers who are out there on the frontline, day in, day out”.

She also said officers could speak to their Police Federation Rep if they felt incidents were not being taken seriously: “I would really encourage people to reach out to the Police Federation and have that discussion with us, because we can see what we can do to ensure an incident gets accurately recorded and we get the best possible outcome for that officer.”