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Our Takeaways from the Second Police Discrimination & Hate Crime Course

From time to time, we like to take a step back and reflect on what we’ve learned from delivering a Facing Facts Online course. This time, we’re looking at the second round of the Police Discrimination and Hate Crime course, which ran from 29 April – 22 May 2025.

Why This Course?

As we’ve written before, police discrimination is the flip side of hate crime. If communities experience or hear about police brutality, racial profiling, or institutional bias, they are far less likely to report hate crimes. Without trust in the police, victims lose access to justice, safety, and support.

Most hate crime training programmes still don’t adequately address police racism and discrimination. Officers may not see how everyday procedures or decisions reproduce bias, and civil society organisations often want more insight into police powers and accountability. This course was designed as a shared space for police, victim support providers, equality bodies, and civil society to explore these difficult issues together.

What We Aimed to Achieve

As in the first round, we set out to help participants:

• Recognise and articulate the key dimensions of discrimination in policing—individual, institutional, systemic, and historical.
  
• Understand the impact of discriminatory practices such as racial profiling and repeated stops on communities, trust, and reporting.
  
• Explore the role of evidence-based policing and community engagement in building fairer systems.
  
• Apply human rights standards to policing activities, from profiling to border pushbacks.
  

What Did Participants Take Away?

Despite some challenges with completion rates, all respondents to the evaluation survey reported that the course would impact their future work. Some takeaways included:

• “I will stop being indifferent to the negative views of victims of discrimination and start trying to understand where those views have come from.”
  
• “This learning needs the support of senior managers in order to promote organisation-wide training in police profiling and discrimination.”
  
• “Aim to create engagement opportunities for the police with social housing tenants from minority backgrounds in my work as a community project coordinator.”
  

Police participants in particular reflected on the discomfort of discussing sensitive topics, sometimes feeling “under attack” or “in the wrong.” Yet many also acknowledged the value of these exchanges, which challenged them to reflect on personal and institutional bias and highlighted the importance of embedding anti-discrimination training in broader police practice.

The Making of the Course

The second round benefitted from the work done in the first: content, mini-projects – which gave participants the opportunity to apply knowledge about the nature and effects of police discrimination in a practical setting -, and tutorial plans were already in place. The main change we introduced was to ensure tutors were present throughout the small group work in the tutorials, which helped create a more supportive and structured learning environment.

Mini-projects again stood out as an effective way for participants to apply their learning to their own contexts:

• “The mini-projects were open to contribute and discussions were based on experiences.”
  
• “Practical examples from the tutors and the material really supported my learning.”
  

The Tutor Team

We were delighted to continue working with our expert tutor team: Amina El-Gamal, Nick Glynn, and Piotr Godzisz. Their contributions were once again a highlight of the course:

• “The role of the tutors was vitally important, both as instructors and maintaining contact. They provided consistency and made the experience easy to complete.”
  
• “They encouraged interaction between students in an unbiased manner. By the end of the course, participants were much more vocal with their thoughts and opinions.”
  

Recruiting the Right Mix of Participants

Recruiting police officers remains challenging, but we were pleased to welcome a significantly higher proportion of police participants this time, including from dedicated hate crime units. Alongside them, specialist civil society organisations and policy makers enriched the exchange.

In total, 24 participants from 14 organisations across 10 countries took part. While only 14 successfully completed the course (a lower completion rate than the first cohort), we learned important lessons about the barriers some police participants face, including workload pressures and motivation.

Our recruitment and marketing efforts expanded, with stronger engagement on social media and continued collaboration with partners including CEPOL, the European Commission, the Council of Europe, and ODIHR.

What Worked Well? What Could Be Improved?

Course Structure
Participants again valued the clear structure and variety of learning methods—self-paced modules, live tutorials, and mini-projects. Group discussions were cited as particularly valuable, even when initially uncomfortable:

• “The shared spaces to discuss topics were very valuable—this is the best way to learn, hearing lived experiences.”
  
• “Overall, yes—though at times, as law enforcement, it was hard not to feel ‘under attack.’”
  

Social Learning
Peer interaction, discussion forums, and tutor-led tutorials were essential to the learning process. Many participants emphasised that hearing perspectives from different professional and cultural contexts deepened their understanding:

• “Yes, it made me question my own opinions and the manner in which I approach discrimination in the course of my duty.”
  
• “The interaction was thoughtful and thought-provoking and gave a number of different viewpoints from different backgrounds.”
  

Completion & Engagement
The biggest challenge this time was the lower completion rate. While some learners struggled with workload pressures, others—particularly from policing backgrounds—did not complete despite institutional support. Understanding and addressing these barriers will be a priority for future courses.

Looking Ahead

This second round confirmed the importance of multi-stakeholder learning on police discrimination and hate crime. It also showed us where we need to adapt: finding ways to support police learners more effectively, building organisational buy-in, and balancing the challenges of busy professional schedules.

Going forward, we plan to:

• Continue recruiting more police participants, while exploring ways to improve their engagement and completion.
  
• Further strengthen tutor presence to support sensitive discussions.
  
• Refine the balance of self-paced and interactive learning activities.
  
• Explore how to build stronger organisational support for learners, particularly within police services.
  

The conversations were sometimes difficult, but they were also necessary—and they gave us hope. As one participant put it:

“Yes, once the initial feelings of being the ‘face of policing’ in the group were put aside, the interaction really did help.”

This was just the second edition of the Police Discrimination and Hate Crime course. Each round is teaching us more about what works and where we can do better. We look forward to continuing this journey with our next cohort.

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