Street Smart
We know that hate against LGBTQ+ people is increasing, but that hate crimes against our community are often not reported to the police or other agencies. In 2024/25, Trade ran the Street Smart project to monitor and report hate against our community. Experienced hate? Tell Trade
More about the project
Through Street Smart project we created a community hate monitoring tool to try and get a better picture of the scale of hate incidents directed against LGBTQ+ people across Leicestershire.
We also held three community safety workshops to listen to community members’ experiences of hate crime and their feelings about reporting those incidents to the police. We also provided participants with top tips for staying safe in public, and trained them in de-escalation techniques to help themselves and others get safely away from threatening situations.
The hate crime monitoring element for this project confirmed our suspicion that trans* and other gender nonconforming people are currently most vulnerable to hate incidents. However, they are also fearful of reporting anything but the most serious incidents to the police, as they worry that they will not be taken seriously and may not be treated with dignity. We will continue to raise these concerns with Leicestershire Police. More positively, we were able to identify a specific ‘hotspot’ for anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in central Leicester and share this intelligences with senior officers in the neighbourhood policing team.
Street Smart was funded by the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland
