Following the death of Stephen Lawrence, a black male who was murdered in a racially motivated attack in London in 1993, there was an increasing concern about the rise in racially motivated crimes. As such the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 was introduced and contained within it the provisions for preventing and criminalising racially aggravated offences. According to section 28 of the Crime and Disorder Act an offence is racially motivated if at the time of committing the offence or immediately before or after, the offender demonstrates towards the victim any hostility based on the victim’s membership or presumed membership of a racial group. Over a decade later, the Equality Act 2010 was passed and similar to the Crime and Disorder Act, it prohibits unfavourable treatment of others based on the grounds of protected characteristics such as race. This concept is known as direct discrimination and is outlined in section 13 of the Act. A person (A) directly discriminates against another (B) if, because of a protected characteristic, person A treats person B less favorably than person A treats or would treat others. The concept of direct discrimination outwardly appears to be somewhat already incorporated in the Crime and Disorder Act. Hence a critical analysis of the Crime and Disorder Act will assess the extent to which this is true.

As aforementioned the Crime and Disorder Act introduced the criminalisation of racially aggravated offences, namely racially aggravated assaults, racially aggravated criminal damage, racially aggravated public order offences and, racially aggravated harassment. However, offences such as murder and robbery we not included in the Act as racially aggravated crimes as they already carry very high sentences. As such it was necessary to define what is meant by racial group mentioned in section 28 (1)(a) of the Act. A racial group defined for