Reflections on the Online Police Discrimination and Hate Crime Course

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From time to time, we like to take a step back and reflect on what we’ve learned from delivering a Facing Facts Online course. This time, we’re looking at the Police Discrimination and Hate Crime course, which ran for the first time from 29 October to 21 November 2024.

Why This Course?

Institutional discrimination is the flip side of hate crime. If communities experience or hear about police brutality, racial profiling, or institutional bias, they are less likely to report hate crimes. The result? Victims lose access to safety, justice, and support.

Yet, many hate crime training programs don’t adequately cover police racism and discrimination. Officers may not recognise their own biases or realise that standard procedures can have disproportionately harmful effects on some communities. Civil society organisations, in turn, often want to learn more about police powers and accountability to better support victims.

That’s why we designed this course—to create a space where police officers, victim support providers, and other professionals could explore these complex and challenging issues together.

What We Aimed to Achieve

Participants left the course with the ability to:

Recognise different types of discrimination in policing—individual, institutional, systemic, and historical.
Understand the impact of racial profiling and repeated police stops on communities, trust, and hate crime reporting.
Explore the role of community engagement and evidence-based practices in fair policing.
Apply human rights principles to police activities, from profiling to border pushbacks.

What Did Participants Take Away?

Feedback suggested that the course will have a longer term impact on how participants approach police discrimination and hate crime:

“I will start advocating for better training and accountability measures within law enforcement.”

“As Chief Inspector of the Judiciary Police, I warned my team to avoid acting according to stereotypes and to see all citizens as equal.”

“I will start using racial profiling more in my trainings.”

And beyond knowledge, the course also left participants feeling empowered:

“I loved it, I learned a lot, and it changed me.”

“More confident than before the course.”

The Making of the Course

At Facing Facts Online, we design our courses using the ADDIE model. Standing for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation, this iterative process begins with analysing learners’ needs, followed by designing the instructional approach, developing the content, implementing the course, and evaluating its effectiveness.

Having identified the knowledge gap, we focused on understanding the specific perspectives and challenges for our multi-stakeholder learning community. Clearly some police officers and specialist victim and community support providers will have differing and even opposing perspectives in this area, which we knew we needed to explicitly address throughout the learning design. Indeed our instructional design team was made up of subject matter experts from across these professional groups and we benefited from discussing questions such as whether profiling can ever escape the risk of bias and discrimination and whether and what alternative policing tools can be used. Through this process, we set learning objectives, designed learning activities and agreed the flow of the course.

We also wanted to experiment with weekly mini-projects for the first time, to give learners the opportunity to apply what they learned to their own context. These were very well-evaluated in the course evaluation.

“The mini-projects were essential to learning the concepts.”

Finally, we asked an external reviewer to evaluate the course, especially since a large part of it covers racial profiling—a key form of police discrimination, which was outside our immediate expertise. The reviewer’s feedback led to key changes that foreground the community impact of this illegal practice.

The Tutor Team

For the first time, we brought in three external tutors with deep expertise on the topics. Amina El-Gamal, Nick Glynn and Piotr Godzisz. They played a hands-on role, introducing modules, leading tutorials, and providing feedback on mini-projects. Participants overwhelmingly valued their contributions:

“The tutors’ contribution was great, facilitating access to all content and helping me overcome my difficulties with the English language.”

“Feedback was great from all three tutors. Thank you!”

Recruiting the Right Mix of Participants

We put a lot of effort into recruiting a multi-stakeholder learner group. Getting police officers on board is always challenging due to bureaucratic hurdles and approval processes. We also engaged Equality Bodies for the first time, targeting specific network members best placed to contribute.

This was also the first Facing Facts Online course with a participation fee, which meant setting up new payment and invoicing systems!

Our recruitment strategy included targeted email campaigns, social media promotions, and partnerships with CEPOL, the European Commission, the Council of Europe, and ODIHR. While we didn’t get as many police participants as we’d hoped, we were very pleased with the number of recruited learners and their participation. The groundwork we laid will help us in future courses.

Who Took Part?

The course brought together participants from 13 organisations across 12 countries. Most worked at the national or European level, balancing local and regional approaches to hate crime and discrimination.

Out of 23 participants, 17 successfully completed the course—a strong completion rate of 76.47%.

What Worked Well? What Could Be Improved?

Course Structure

Participants found the structure clear and well-organized:

“The course was structured so that I could understand the underlying concepts.”

“The clear outline of the modules and the good overall structure of the course supported my learning.”

Interactive elements were especially valuable, with quizzes, case studies, and mini-projects cited as helpful.

Some participants noted the need for more representation from state institutions:

“To include more participants and/or guests from state institutions like police, prosecutors, judges, etc.”

This is a key goal for our next course.

Course Length & Content Balance

At just three weeks, this course was shorter than most Facing Facts Online courses, which typically run for six weeks. We wondered if it would be too tight—but participants felt the timing was just right, with over 90% agreeing with the statement,

“The course length was appropriate for the topics covered.”

Social Learning & Peer Interaction

Research shows that social learning—through discussion forums, peer interaction, and live tutorials—is crucial for online learning about hate crime and hate speech.

This was evident in participants’ feedback:

“The discussions with others were very interesting.”

“There was a respectful atmosphere and encouragement from instructors.”

One area for improvement was small-group discussions. Some participants felt that the lack of tutor presence during the live tutorials led to difficult moments:

“At some point, I felt overwhelmed because no one was in charge to make sure we followed the structure and that everyone had time to participate.”

Initially, we encouraged social learning through learner-only groups. However, based on participant feedback and considering the sensitive nature of the topics discussed, we have decided that tutors will be present to facilitate respectful and constructive small-group sessions while preserving the benefits of peer-to-peer learning.

Looking Ahead

This course has reinforced our commitment to tackling police discrimination in hate crime training. Moving forward, we plan to:

Recruit more police participants, starting earlier in the process.
Ensure tutors are present in small-group discussions.
Continue refining the balance between content, interaction, and self-paced learning.

This was just the first edition of the Police Discrimination and Hate Crime course, but it certainly won’t be the last. We’re excited to build on this experience and strengthen our approach in the next round.

Interested in learning more? See our in-depth report on Learning about hate crime and hate speech online: Needs and motivations of a multi-stakeholder community of practice. Got thoughts or feedback? We’d love to hear them! The next Police Discrimination and Hate Crime course will run from 29th April to 22nd May. Submit your contact details in our contact form to be informed when we open new course registrations.

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