Belfast’s worst riots in years expose a racism crisis that data shows has been building for a decade

BELFAST (MNTV) — When masked mobs set fire to homes, cars, and a bus across Belfast in the days following the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie on June 8, the violence may have looked spontaneous. 

The data tells a different story — one of racism in Northern Ireland’s capital steadily intensifying over more than a decade, with its sharpest concentration in the very neighbourhoods that were targeted.

A new data visualisation platform called Rise, developed by the Belfast human rights group Participation and Practice of Rights (PPR) alongside the tech collective Rabble Coop, draws on figures published by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency to map the scale of racially motivated hate across the city. 

The platform distinguishes between racist crimes and racist incidents — the latter being episodes perceived as racially motivated that fall below the legal threshold of a criminal offence.

Numbers behind violence

The findings are stark. In Belfast’s Central ward — where roughly 26 per cent of residents are non-white, making it the city’s most ethnically diverse area — annual reports of racist incidents rose from 82 in 2016-17 to 174 in 2024-25, an increase of 112 per cent. Recorded racist crimes in the same district climbed even faster, up 161 per cent from 43 to 112.

Belfast accounts for a hugely disproportionate share of Northern Ireland’s racist hate. Almost half of all such incidents and crimes recorded across the region since 2007 occurred in the city — a total of 8,847 episodes, equivalent to a rate of 26 per 1,000 residents.

These figures align with a broader upward trajectory documented in official statistics. According to the PSNI’s most recent hate motivation bulletin, officers recorded 2,367 race-motivated incidents in the year to March 31, 2026 — an increase of 561 on the previous year — alongside 1,507 race-motivated crimes, up 320. 

Amnesty International, analysing earlier PSNI data covering the year to June 2025, described it as “a year of hate and fear,” noting that race hate crimes had hit a record high and that the single highest monthly total of race incidents since 2004 was recorded in August 2024, during the previous summer’s far-right riots.

Perhaps most strikingly, separate analysis by The Guardian and Belfast Telegraph found that while Northern Ireland’s overall crime rate fell last year to its lowest level since 1998, racist hate crime simultaneously reached its highest level on record — a divergence that isolates racism as a problem moving in the opposite direction to crime generally.

Pattern of downgrading

The Rise analysis also identified what PPR described as a worrying tendency in certain areas to record racist episodes as incidents rather than crimes, effectively downgrading their severity. 

Across Belfast, roughly a third of the 8,847 episodes logged since 2007 were classified as incidents only. In the Botanic area within the Central ward, that figure rose to 40 per cent.

The concern is that systematic downgrading understates both the true scale of racist violence and the seriousness with which authorities treat it. 

PPR’s Twasul Mohammed said at the platform’s launch that victims who report attacks have often been told to forget about them, and that there appeared to be little coordinated effort by public bodies to understand the patterns of violence, let alone confront them.

Violence residents saw coming

Community organisers and monitoring groups had warned that violence was imminent well before it erupted. 

The Committee on the Administration of Justice’s Daniel Holder observed that as soon as the protests were announced, those who had watched previous episodes unfold knew organised racist violence would follow — and questioned why the violence concentrated in particular areas associated with paramilitary activity rather than others.

The June disorder followed a now-familiar pattern. 

A Facebook page titled “The Great Province-Wide Protest N.I.” circulated a list of protest locations, after which hundreds of masked men and boys blocked roads, torched vehicles and infrastructure, drove migrant families from their homes, and carried out racist attacks. Romanian, Sudanese, and Ukrainian families were among those forced to flee burning homes. 

The anti-racism organisation Hope Not Hate established that the Belfast unrest, and related protests in cities across Britain, had been widely promoted by far-right networks online, with location lists shared by figures including Tommy Robinson and amplified on Elon Musk’s X platform.

This was not the first such episode. During far-right rioting in the summer of 2024 — which spread to Northern Ireland from England following the Southport killings — businesses owned by Black and Asian residents in the Sandy Row area of the Central ward were attacked, with at least two shops destroyed. In June 2025, large-scale anti-immigrant disorder broke out in the town of Ballymena and spread across multiple towns. 

At least 11 minority-owned businesses in the Sandy Row area had also been targeted in 2023.

Policing under strain

The violence has exposed serious questions about the capacity of Northern Ireland’s police to respond. 

The chair of the Northern Ireland Policing Board noted that the PSNI has around 6,300 officers against a recognised need for 7,500, leaving the force stretched — particularly during the summer marching season. 

There were also troubling allegations about the police response itself: Northern Ireland’s First Minister asked the PSNI to investigate claims that officers near the Mater Hospital in north Belfast had advised healthcare staff to show their IDs to rioters as they passed through informal “checkpoints” set up by the mobs.

PPR’s Melissa McMahon, speaking at an anti-racist rally, criticised the police response, saying officers had simply knocked on people’s doors to tell them they were not safe — leaving activists to enter loyalist areas at considerable personal risk to get families to safety themselves.

Political condemnation, structural questions

Officials were unequivocal in their language. Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn called the violence “racist thuggery,” while First Minister Michelle O’Neill and Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly jointly condemned the attacks on homes and public infrastructure. 

The family of Stephen Ogilvie, whose stabbing was used as a pretext for the violence, said they were disgusted that the attack on their son had been exploited to justify race-based attacks, and spoke of the valuable contribution migrants make to Northern Ireland’s healthcare and hospitality sectors.

A 30-year-old Sudanese national, Hadi Alodid, has been charged with attempted murder over the original stabbing — but, as monitoring groups noted, anti-immigrant protests were already being organised online before any formal police action had been taken.

The bigger picture

PPR said it hoped Rise — an acronym for Recording Incidents, Building Solidarity and Empowering Communities — would improve transparency and public scrutiny of racially motivated hate. Akeela Ahmed, chief executive of the British Muslim Trust, described the tool as an important window into the scale of the unrest and called for similar monitoring across the U.K. 

The data, she said, reinforced what was already known: that Muslims and other minority communities face a worrying rise in hostility, intimidation, and violence. 

She stressed that the perpetrators remain a minority, and that most people in the country are decent and tolerant — but warned that acknowledging that goodwill cannot become an excuse to minimize a problem that is real and growing.

What the Belfast data ultimately reveals is that the June riots were not an aberration. 

They were the visible eruption of a hostility that official statistics have been recording, year after year, as it climbed to record highs — in a city where the crime rate overall was falling, but where racism was doing the opposite.