A decade before any official UK legislation was introduced to tackle hate crime, a group of Bristolians got together to tackle the racist violence they were witnessing in their communities. Alex Ardalan-Raikes MBE, who was the first case worker of what became Stand Against Racism & Inequality (SARI) in 1991, said that in the early days they had to deal with a lot of ‘brutal racial attacks’.
People would come to the charity after getting their windows smashed by far right racists and in one case a local shopkeeper and his family were beaten up, leaving the grandmother in intensive care. Alex who is now SARI’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) said in recent years there have been fewer organised race-based violent attacks but people are now seeking their help much earlier on.
Following the introduction of legislation recognising hate crime and projected characteristics, SARI expanded its remit to work with all victims of hate crime. “We’ve had some awful cases of adults with learning difficulties being exploited and frogmarched to cashpoints and beaten up if they don’t get money out,” explained Alex.
After graduating from Bristol University, Alex began doing case work with SARI at 22. Although she had previously thought she would go into social work she ended up joining the organisation due to the lived experience she had of racism growing up as the only minority ethnic family in a small town just outside of Reading.
There are incidents that Alex dealt with as a case worker in her early twenties that she will never forget. The case of Marlon Thomas which left him in a waking coma after racists attacked him at a funfair is among those which will stay with Alex forever.
Speaking about some of the incidents in the 1990s and early 2000s, Alex said: “There were some very serious cases of police harassment. We had one young black male who was really being targeted because his brother was up to no good but he used to run into our office for safety.
“We had a horrible case of a far right attack on a Pakistani shopkeeper and his family. It was horrific, there were about 20 white men who stormed the shop and beat them up.
“The grandmother had to throw herself over the six-year-old grandchild to keep her safe and she was put into intensive care, a lot of the family were very badly injured. There was a friend of the family who was a Caribbean guy who was in the shop that day; he was trying to help the family but he couldn’t and he was also beaten up.”
While SARI did not go national, it ended up expanding into Somerset and Gloucestershire early on as a result of the demand from victims of race hate crimes. Small business owners on Middle Street in Yeovil were having their windows smashed on a weekly basis, they were unable to afford the constant repairs on get insurance before SARI stepped in.
Among the initial steering group was Batook Pandya MBE who led the organisation which became SARI until he sadly passed away in 2014. Part of the work of SARI was to get the police to charge the perpetrators and take the victims seriously. Batook, who was very good at negotiating with the police, ended up forming the Kingswood District Racial Harassment Forum as a response to a series of coordinated racist attacks taking place in Fishponds, Staple Hill and Kingswood.
Speaking of the incidents which led to the first strategic forum being set up, Alex said: “We discovered that an organised group were going through the phone book trying to look for foreign sounding names. At that time SARI was the main way of finding out what was going on.
“Batook was really good at negotiating with the police and getting across how serious it was and we brought them on to some incidents. We’ve never beaten around the bush when it comes to letting authorities know what they need to be doing, we basically argue as hard as we can on behalf of our clients to get the best results we can and to get them taken as seriously as possible.
“When the Fishponds attacks started happening we set up a strategic group with the police, it was the first of its kind and led to strategic forums all over Avon and Somerset and the other authorities. As a result they launched a major investigation and caught the main protagonist.
“People arrive with us, not being taken seriously, not being listened to, not getting any action taken. Even now if you look at our evaluations one of the things we measure is how people find the police before and after working with SARI and we measure that for other agencies and find a really big shift in how much better people find the authorities after we’ve got involved.”
Nowadays multi-agency working is much more established and means that when SARI gets cases which are tricky to resolve and involve action across different agencies, they are able to address them with a panel. Alex said that when all the authorities are working together it becomes easier to resolve issues which could have continued for years without their intervention.
SARI now partners with other organisations to support them in tackling a more diverse range of hate crimes. In a more recent case, they supported a married couple with learning difficulties who were facing constant abuse from within their community which involved verbal abuse and getting their windows smashed.
SARI worked with social workers in trying to resolve the hate crime which also involved racial abuse. The couple were left with no money at the end of each month due to their home being constantly broken into and having to make constant phone calls over the repeated incidents.
Reflecting on the organisation over the last 30 years, Alex added: “Batook left a real legacy but I’d like to think that SARI still has the same level of passion and fight, I think our reputation hasn’t changed, it’s still really high. We are not perfect but we get very good feedback.
“There are some things about us that will never change and that’s that we are really client led and that’s Batook, he always used to say that the client needs to be in the driving seat and we remain true to that. We haven’t tried to go national, we’ve stayed rooted in the community we serve.”