Portugal

How hate crime data is collected

Entries on all the police forces’ incident reporting forms include the legal basis of recorded incidents, the characteristics of the incident, the victims and the perpetrators, as well as information about time and place of the incident. Current police forms and databases do not enable the flagging of potential hate crime, capturing bias motivation or recording bias indicators. There is a Manual for data collection that provides guidance for police officers when registering crimes (for the criminal classification of crimes) for statistical purposes. All police forces are obliged to send crime reports filled according to the Manual every month to the Ministry of Justice's statistical department (DSEJI).

The Ministry of Justice is responsible for the centralized collection processes and for producing reliable criminal statistics. Statistics are recorded by police forces, the Public Prosecutors Services and Judicial Courts, and transmitted to the Statistical Information System of Justice. This system is managed by the Directorate General for Justice Policy (SIEJ/DGPJ) through the automatic interface (Citius) for crimes recorded by the Criminal Police and the Police of Public Security, and through parametrized Excel files for crimes recorded by National Republican Guard.

Portugal is making efforts to improve their methodology to produce comparable data particularly on hate crimes, by implementing the main standards of EU FRA and ODIHR, which involves the introduction in the IT systems of the three main police forces the identification of the event as a potential hate crime. To this end, an internal working group was created, composed of the Ministry of Justice, the Criminal Police, the Police of Public Security, the National Republican Guard, the Prosecutor’s General Office, the Superior Council of the Judiciary, the Association for Support and Protection of Victims (APAV), the High Commissioner for Migration (ACM), the Commission for Gender Equality, the Ombudsman’s Office and ILGA Portugal.