Police perceptions of prejudice: how police awareness training influences the capacity of police to assess prejudiced motivated crime

Prejudice motivated crime (PMC) is defined as crimes motivated by bias, prejudice or hatred towards members of particular groups, communities and individuals. To understand how police awareness training facilitates or constrains the capacity of police officers to appropriately classify and respond to PMC, data were collected from a population of Police Recruits (PRs) and Protective Service Officers (PSOs) (N = 1609) to ascertain their perceptions of PMC pre- and post-PMC awareness training. These were used in a logistic regression model to identify factors explaining whether PRs and PSOs would identify a vignette/scenario as a PMC. We found PRs and PSOs were more likely to correctly identify a PMC scenario than a control scenario, but only 61% as likely to identify an incident as PMC post-PMC awareness training after accounting for other variables. We argue that awareness training programmes need to be more aligned to the specific needs of policing in diverse societies.