The British government said it plans to scrap the Orwellian “non-crime hate incident” system in its current form in favour of dedicating police power hours to actual crimes.
While, as the name implies, they don’t actually rise to the level of a crime, the recording of a NCHI could still come with serious consequences for those accused, with a police record of the supposed incident being made available to some employers through background checks. Many are never even notified that such a record has been created, they are not proven in court, and in most cases the ‘hate incident’ flag against an individual’s name can’t be challenged.
Last month, the College of Policing said that non-crime hate incidents “will go as a concept” and be replaced with a “completely different system”. This followed London’s Metropolitan Police force saying in October that they would no longer investigate NCHIs after the controversial arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan over posts he made on social media.
On Sunday, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood confirmed that the government is set on scrapping the category as well, telling The Telegraph that she wants police officers focussed on “catching criminals, cutting crime, making sure that people in our neighbourhoods feel safe.”
“I don’t want them to be policing perfectly legal tweets. I want to make sure that they’re focused on the day job,” she said. “I want them to get out of the business of essentially policing social media. That’s not where they need to be.”
It is unclear exactly what will come in place of the NCHI, and whether the thousands of existing records will be deleted. However, the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, said last month that police will only the record “the most serious category of what will be treated as anti-social behaviour” rather than all offensive statements.
Home Secretary Mahmood said: “I expect to see them changed, absolutely. The question is, what do you do instead?
“And the current position is not acceptable, so that will not stand. There will be a new legal framework. The current framework is not working and it does need to change.”
The Labour politician said that the government will release a new framework after a review from Lord MacDonald on hate crime and public order. Mahmood said that there may still be some form of police recording to “gather intelligence on people who might be committing crimes”.
Since being implemented as a category in 2014, well over 130,000 so-called non-crime hate incidents have been recorded by police. This has included multiple children, including a nine-year-old for reportedly calling a classmate a “retard” and saying that some girls in his class smelled “like fish”.
The legal basis for the recording of NCHIs came under question in 2021 when former police officer Harry Miller won a legal case against the practice, with the appeals court ruling that it breached his human rights and that it would have a “chilling effect” on freedom of speech.
Although the move to scrap NCHIs was hailed by the Free Speech Union as “encouraging”, the organisation noted that “the devil will be in the detail” and that thousands of people are still being arrested for comments made online every year in Britain.
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