Italy

How hate crime data is collected

Italian legislation does not provide a definition of hate crime. Hate crimes, like all other crimes, are recorded by competent police officers. There is no instruction or policy document to guide police in identifying and recording hate crimes.

Initial crime reports, including victim information and information about police action and legal qualification, are entered into and stored in the Sistema di Indagine (SDI) investigation crime database. The SDI is organized according to different criminal law provisions, which are marked on every report entered into the system. For this reason, the SDI system only serves to register the strands of hate crime mentioned in the law, including ethnicity, nationality, race, religion or crime against national linguistic minorities. There is no specific marker for each bias motivation in the SDI, so crimes cannot be distinguished from one another in the database according to motive. Crimes committed on discriminatory grounds other than those explicitly outlined in the law (e.g., gender identity or sexual orientation) are entered into the SDI as ordinary offences.

A separate system exists for monitoring these additional strands of hate crimes. The Observatory for Security against Discriminatory Acts (OSCAD) collects reports of these crimes. Not all the reports collected by OSCAD are included in the SDI database. In 2011, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between OSCAD and the National Office against Racial Discrimination (UNAR) of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. UNAR and OSCAD exchange information about incidents on this basis. Through this mechanism, UNAR submits to OSCAD hate crime cases reported to its contact centre.

A government unit is responsible for managing the national SDI database, including hate crimes. The Service of the Multi-Agency Information System is part of the Ministry of the Interior's Central Directorate of Criminal Police of the Department of Public Security.

As the SDI does not allow hate crime bias motivations to be distinguished, only aggregated data on all monitored strands of hate crime are available. This aggregate number includes hate crimes committed on the grounds of race/skin colour, ethnicity, origin, minority status, citizenship, language, bias against Roma and Sinti, and bias against religion (including anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Christian and other religions).