By ReThink PR and Marketing Agency
THE CHALLENGE
Hateful graffiti is legally classed as a hate incident, and depending on severity, even a hate crime.
Yet, hate graffiti has been under-reported for decades and, until the invention of the StreetSnap app by Dr Lella Nouri, there were no systems in place to capture, report, monitor and analyse incidents of hate graffiti within communities.
Most UK Local Authorities have a mandate to remove hate graffiti within 72 hours, yet the challenge with understanding the impact of hate graffiti goes beyond removing racist, homophobic, sexist and hate signs as quickly as possible. These hateful visuals can tell researchers and community cohesion practitioners about rising tensions within a community and trending or repeated hate symbols, allowing practitioners to design the interventions needed to educate perpetrators and encourage community cohesion.
THE METHOD
To capture hate visual data and share it with Local Authority, Counter-Terrorism, PCSOs, social services and community support teams, Dr Lella Nouri and her research team invented StreetSnap: an app which allows Council teams and their partners to track areas of high hate crime and extremism, report it, remove it, and analyse the data.
Starting with a pilot in Bridgend which began in 2018, StreetSnap was developed alongside Bridgend Community Cohesion Lead and the Partnership Community Safety Manager. Initial training was delivered to elected members of Parliament and frontline staff on when, why and how to report hate graffiti, as well as how to monitor and collate data on the hateful visuals, and how this process would support long-term agendas to improve community cohesion.
Throughout the training sessions and app development process, Dr Nouri and team noticed a knowledge gap around the importance of paying attention to hate visuals and understanding their direct relationship with policy and partnership agendas to reduce community tensions. This demonstrated the need for the StreetSnap app as a means of embedding academic knowledge within community safety practices.
THE IMPACT
The StreetSnap App and training package is available for all UK Local Authorities, and received the backing of Welsh Government’s Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan lead from Welsh Government.
The app has been adopted across several local authorities and its use is supporting social cohesion practitioners to better understand, track, and design interventions to rid hate visuals from UK streets. It speeds up the process of reporting and removing hate graffiti, but it also allows practitioners to label the graffiti by theme so it can be classified and analysed. It is also possible to flag it as extremist terrorist content, sending an alert to Counter-Terrorism Policing.
The app has been widely covered in UK media including The Guardian, showcasing the long-lasting and transformative impact the app is set to have on countering hate visuals and improving community cohesion.
For more information on purchasing the StreetSnap app and training package please contact the team by emailing: streetsnap@legaltech.wales