A student from Doncaster has set up a site for residents to rate the safety of each local area after he was a victim of hate-crime a month after moving in.
Alex Powell, 20, a Biology student in Sheffield was walking home with his boyfriend in June, a few weeks after moving in.
“We’d walked about 20 minutes from the cathedral holding hands. No one batted an eye until we got to my road”, he said.
“One of the houses at the end of our road is dodgy, people are always in and out and there’s always someone hanging around.
“We got to the end of my road and someone sitting outside this house started shouting at us, calling us gay bastards, shouting slurs. He told us he would bash our heads in, and asked us if we were willing to die for it (holding hands)”.
In a Freedom of Information request to South Yorkshire Police, data revealed that hate crimes across South Yorkshire have been on the rise since 2018, going up 33% between 2018 and 2022.
Of those crimes, 20% were recorded as transphobic or regarding sexual orientation.
Laura Moynahan, councillor for Manor Castle and Park Hill, said: “I think it’s really something to be admired to find something positive out of a negative experience. It shows great initiative.
“I think the site should establish a partnership with the Police, maybe incorporating joint reporting through a QR code. I wouldn’t want it to stop people reporting crimes.
“We have a lot of incidents of anti-social behavior that people complain about, but they aren’t logged because they aren’t reported to the police- ergo it doesn’t inform Police where they need to patrol and give the correct statistics.”
Alex says the man was still shouting after them as they walked away.
“We went round the back gardens into my house so they wouldn’t be able to see where we lived. If they knew that, god knows what they’d do.
“You can see where it happened from my house, I always check it before leaving to make sure it’s safe. I make an effort to not walk past it.”
Having only just moved in, Alex describes feeling a sense of dread when going out in this area he knew nothing about. Not wanting his boyfriend to stay there alone, he asked his Dad to drive them back to his family home in Doncaster for a visit.
This is Alex’ third year living in Sheffield and the first hateful experience he can remember having in the city.
“We had a horrible experience, it was a hate crime. And we live on the same road, so we can’t escape this area we don’t feel safe in anymore”.
A couple of weeks after the incident, Alex got to work on a website trying to prevent other students from going through the same thing.
“I was talking to my parents and they said it’s a shame that you don’t know anything about the area other than what the agents tell you.
“I went to a viewing once and a tenant passed us a note secretly saying ‘i wouldn’t take this if I were you’ because the area was nice but the house was terrible.
“I wanted to do something like that on a larger scale, in the interests of keeping people safe.
Students should have a full picture before they go.”
The website has a map with color coded tabs on each location, operating like a traffic light system.
There are eight categories where you can report incidents. You can log hate crimes based on sexuality, gender, religion, ethnicity. There’s a category for noise, burglaries, damage; and ‘other’.
Areas are given an average rating out of 5 and all entries are anonymous.
Alex said, “As much as we want people to report things that aren’t so great, we want people to log the positives of living somewhere as well. Despite everything, I love Sheffield.”
The site requires you to enter an email, but Alex says it’s confidential and gets deleted after a year.
“I would like to partner with some sort of lettings agency to try and get them to put their properties on the pages, eventually I would like it to expand to other student cities. I set it up with a housing officer so unions and letting agencies wouldn’t have any qualms with it.
“The site needs yearly pushing, obviously new students move in every year and they need to be made aware of it.”
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To rate an area in Sheffield, fill in the UniZones form here.
To search what your area is rated as, Visit the UniZones site here.