Barnet hate crime up 64% in a quarter, figures show

Police recorded 381 hate crime incidents in Barnet between April and June this year. That is 63.5% more than in the same three months of 2025.

The figure is in the performance dashboard put to the borough’s Safer Communities Partnership Board on 18 September, at Hendon Town Hall. The board is Barnet’s crime and disorder reduction partnership, the body the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 requires every council to run with the police and other agencies.

Over the full year to June 2026 the borough logged 1,127 hate crime incidents, an increase of 36.4% on the previous twelve months. The quarterly jump is far steeper than the annual one, so the rise is accelerating.

Incidents and markers are two different counts

The dashboard counts hate crime twice, and the second number is higher.

• Incidents: 381 in April to June, 1,127 in the year to June.
• Hate crime markers attached to incidents: 426 in April to June, up 59.6% on the same quarter last year, and 1,276 in the year to June, up 41.9%.

A single offence can carry more than one marker, because a victim or a witness can perceive hostility on more than one ground. The dashboard records that over the year to June the most frequent single type was racist crime.

Hate crime has a specific meaning in these figures. The dashboard defines it as any criminal offence perceived by the victim or anyone else to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity, whether or not that perception turns out to be right.

What else moved in the quarter

The report’s own summary to the board says the borough “experienced increases in several high-harm crime categories during Q1 2026/27, including violence, personal robbery, shoplifting and hate crime”.

Offences recorded in April to June 2026, with the change on the same quarter of 2025:

• Violence without injury: 1,091, up 22.9%
• Shoplifting: 859, up 19.3%
• Violence with injury: 492, up 3.8%
• Domestic burglary: 386, up 22.5%
• Domestic abuse: 743, up 5.4%
• Possession of drugs: 181, up 11.0%
• Robbery of personal property: 159, up 19.5%
• Possession of weapons: 68, up 6.3%
• Knife crime with injury: 26, up 23.8%

Some categories fell:

• Other sexual offences: 150, down 31.6%
• Rape: 65, down 20.7%
• Domestic abuse violence with injury: 142, down 12.3%
• Business and community burglary: 111, down 6.7%
• Interfering with a motor vehicle: 107, down 15.6%

There was one homicide in the quarter, the same as a year earlier, and three in the year to June.

Stop and search rose too. Officers carried out 873 stops in the borough in the quarter, 23.7% more than a year earlier, and 3,064 over the year to June, up 34.9%. Thirty per cent of searches in the quarter produced what the dashboard calls a positive outcome.

The council’s own enforcement side

The same pack sets out what the council’s community safety team did in the three months.

• 2,070 incidents were recorded on Barnet’s CCTV, up from 1,891 a year earlier.
• The largest single category was begging, at 34% of incidents, followed by obstruction of a pathway (12%), street drinking (8%), rough sleeping (6%) and fly tipping (5%).
• Burnt Oak accounted for 18% of CCTV incidents, Cricklewood 14%, West Finchley 11% and Woodhouse 11%. The dashboard notes that wards do not all have the same number of cameras.
• The busiest hours for CCTV-recorded incidents were 8pm to 10pm.
• The team opened 346 anti-social behaviour cases and closed 258. It had 2,329 cases under investigation as of 7 September.
• 77 fixed penalty notices were issued. The most common was for fly tipping.

Two residents applied for an anti-social behaviour case review in the quarter. None met the council’s threshold, and one was still under review when the pack was written.

How it looks at street level

The Home Office’s street-level data is a separate count on a different geography, and it lags. Its most recent month for the borough is July 2026, when police.uk mapped 379 crimes within a mile of central Barnet. The most common single category there was anti-social behaviour, with 103 reports.

What it means for you

Reporting a hate crime does not require you to be certain about the motive. The test is perception, yours or a witness’s. You can report it to the Met by calling 101, or 999 in an emergency, and online through GOV.UK’s report hate crime page. True Vision takes third-party reports if you would rather not go to the police directly, including on behalf of someone else.

If you have reported anti-social behaviour repeatedly and nothing has changed, you can ask for an anti-social behaviour case review, still widely known as the community trigger. It forces the council, police and housing providers to sit down together over your case if the local threshold is met. Two people used it in Barnet last quarter, which suggests it is barely known here.

The rise in shoplifting and in violence without injury both matter to anyone working in a shop on a Barnet high street. So does the CCTV pattern: the busiest window is the evening, not the small hours.

About these figures

The dashboard is built from Metropolitan Police crime data published on the London Datastore, plus the council’s own anti-social behaviour, CCTV and Prevent records. It is a slide deck rather than a statistical release, and parts of it have been carried over from earlier quarters. One slide reports a fall of “100.0%” from a figure that is not zero, and the vehicle theft slide is headed January to March 2026 rather than April to June. We have left both out of the figures above. Where the deck ranks Barnet against the 32 London boroughs it does not say whether first means most or least, so we have not used the rankings.

Sources

• Safer Communities Partnership Board, 18 September 2026: agenda and papers
• Safer Communities Partnership quarterly performance update (PDF)
• Appendix A: SCPB dashboard 2026-27 Q1 (PDF)
• police.uk street-level crime data, Open Government Licence

More Barnet information: planning applications, parking, council tax bands.