Tens of thousands of race hate crimes are going unreported every year in the UK, a new report has found.
Disturbing new figures reveal that such crimes are going reported as community leaders warn they do not have faith in the police to investigate such offences.
According to the Independent, a government study found that the proportion of hate crimes being recorded by police in England and Wales has fallen by almost 20 percent in the past three years.
Less than a fifth of allegations of racially or religiously motivated crime are now investigated, the report found.
Campaigners claimed that the discrepancy showed the police were 'no longer looking' for hate crime.
Based on two years of data it found that there were an estimated 278,000 hate crimes a year - of which 154,000 had an element of racial motivation, the report said.
Official police figures have recorded only 42,236 hate crime offences in the past year and just 30,000 racially aggravated crimes - 15 percent of the total reported in the Crime Survey, it added.
