THE government has just endorsed the continued recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’. No, the mainstream media didn’t report it. No, the government didn’t issue any formal policy or advice. Instead, it wrote a response to a petition to ‘abolish non-crime hate incidents’. And it hid its endorsement within a lot of two-faced obfuscation. Indeed, the response unwittingly signals a doubling-down on two-tier justice.
One of the government’s arguments is that NCHIs are established and normalised, so don’t change them, you radical! Early on, the government’s response reminds us that NCHIs go back a quarter of a century, since 1999, following a recommendation by the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
That recommendation was actually for the recording of ‘racist incidents’. This is not controversial as a matter of intelligence, given rules on compartmentalisation, anonymisation and eventual deletion, except as relevant to the investigation of crime.
The current government’s response disarmingly spins NCHIs as intelligence. I quote: ‘NCHIs are recorded by the police to collect information on incidents which may be motivated by hate and which could escalate into more serious harm, but which do not by themselves constitute a criminal offence. For many years, the police have monitored data relating to these incidents, where necessary and proportionate to do so, in order to monitor tensions and protect individuals and communities from serious crimes.’
Intelligence-gathering sounds justified, right? Except that the inquiry of 1999 did not justify the recording of intelligence. NCHIs are over-compensatory penance for the authorities’ failure to gather the facts on the Lawrence murder in 1993.
The inquiry of 1999 was an illiberal over-reaction. It described as ‘institutionally racist’ the whole of Britain, not just the Metropolitan Police officers who covered for the murderers.
The inquiry recommended that non-crimes should be investigated with as much effort as crimes, which inevitably reduces the effort available for investigating crime, and for protecting freedom of expression. From then on, Britain descended into casual repression, casual crime, weak law enforcement and two-tier justice – by protected versus unprotected demographics.
By the 1990s, the semantic frame ‘racism’ was already in use too broadly, to capture any ‘hate’ – not just literal hate but any politically incorrect differentiation (eg religious preference is often described as racist, at least if you’re Christian). Inevitably the police started recording ‘incidents’ broadly, such that a person could rebut a neighbour’s complaints about noise by accusing the neighbour of racism.
NCHIs are not just illiberal. They contribute to the tribalism that destroys British manners and cohesion: two-thirds of homeowners report problems with neighbours.
The current government endorses a broad interpretation of racism. Its latest response reminds us that in 2006 the national government ‘expanded [NCHIs] to include race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, and transgender identity’. Thank you, Tony Blair . . . again.
The recording of NCHIs is not by national government, it is by police forces, so sensible constabularies could (back then) choose not to waste resources on this illiberal practice. But this was the decade when progressivism conquered liberalism and made Britain institutionally woke, such that no police officer could rise to the top without spending most of their/zer/ver time in conference about the hideousness of whiteness and masculinity.
Notice that I wrote that police forces ‘could’ choose not to record NCHIs back then. By 2014, they ‘must’. The decider was not the electorate, not an elected minister, not even an elected minister’s civil servant. No, the decider was the College of Policing, which issued guidelines with the following paragraph:
‘Where any person, including police personnel, reports a hate incident which would not be the primary responsibility of another agency, it must be recorded regardless of whether or not they are the victim, and irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element.’
That was in 2014. Thank you, fake conservative David Cameron.
For all the College’s caveats about ‘professionalism’ when handling NCHIs, and about avoiding ‘thought-policing’, the College mandated the recording of any report of hate – however slanderous, however private, however non-criminal.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council endorsed the College of Policing in 2014. When don’t they endorse each other? They’re equally woke. And unaccountable. They are two quangos amongst the thousands that run this country by over-represented minority interests. Their ‘independent’ and ‘professional’ ethos is championed by ministers who don’t want electoral accountability for unpopular policies, and who don’t want the effort of holding anybody else accountable, as long as everything is moving in the same undemocratic, illiberal, woke direction.
So which organisations are endorsed by the current government to review non-crime hate incidents? Well, let me quote: ‘The National Police Chiefs’ Council, supported by the College of Policing, are reviewing the use and effectiveness of non-crime hate incidents. The Government will await the outcome of this review.’
Oh, wait, did you think that non-crime hate incidents had been reviewed already? Well, true, in 2021 the Court of Appeal ruled that the College of Policing’s guidance interferes with freedom of expression. Except the College of Policing isn’t accountable, remember!
The College of Policing took until 2022 to amend its guidance of 2014, in which it concedes that not all reports of hate should be recorded, without specifying any thresholds for ‘trivial’ hate or ‘free speech’. Thus, police forces go on recording NCHIs . . .
Yes, the Home Office could have issued guidance overriding the College of Policing. Yes, the government could have introduced legislation banning the recording of NCHIs. However, Boris Johnson – the Premier at the time – was too distracted by his woke, live-in baby-momma, and by police investigations of his abuse of Covid lockdown rules, to leverage his popular mandate from 2019 into any reform.
Perhaps the only conservative thing Rishi Sunak’s administration achieved was to implement the Home Secretary’s right to ‘issue a code of practice about the processing by a relevant person of personal data relating to a hate incident’, which she did in March 2023, effective June. Thank you, Suella Braverman (no credit to Sunak).
Section 3 of this guidance (still in effect) expects police to practise proportionality, common sense and minimum intrusion when deciding whether to record a report of hate as a NCHI. Section 4 reminds police to uphold freedom of expression. Section 5 reminds police to protect private data and to notify the subject of a NCHI in which the subject is identified.
All well and good, except that the guidance does not add much to what the College of Policing had already conceded in 2022, and does not specify any penalties for non-compliance, except under existing legislation for protecting private data. So police forces go on recording NCHIs . . .
The current government’s latest response endorses the status quo:
‘It is already clear in police guidance and in the code of practice produced by the previous government that trivial, irrational and/or malicious complaints should not be recorded . . . The Home Secretary has been clear that a consistent and commonsense approach must be taken with non-crime hate incidents.’
None of these words (trivial, irrational, malicious, consistent, commonsense) is defined or operationalised. Thus, nobody can be held accountable.
The current government talks out of both sides of its face. For the benefit of progressives, it endorses the current system. For the benefit of true liberals, it promises reform.
‘The Home Office has agreed that the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), supported by the College of Policing, will now conduct a review on the use and effectiveness of NCHIs. The review will cover when the police should record information that has not yet reached the criminal threshold, but which is still deemed necessary to monitor community tensions and keep the public safe. It will also take into account the fundamental right of freedom of expression and recent court rulings in this area.’
But the same quangos already reviewed the same issues, from 2021 to 2022. The current government asks of them nothing beyond what the Johnson administration had sought.
Some time late this year, these two quangos will issue new guidance, with a flash of publicity, amidst claims to have reformed this and that – which will reduce to changes of words, but no changes of expectations.
So police forces will go on recording NCHIs, neglecting crimes (remember, half of Britain’s police forces solve no burglaries) and cracking down on politically incorrect speech and demographics.
Clearly, the current government is mindful of the perception that police forces are tough on speech, soft on crime. It attempts to spin its ‘reform’ of NCHIs as tough on crime. I quote:
‘The Government has also been clear that its top priority for policing is delivering on the safer streets mission to rebuild neighbourhood policing, restoring public confidence, and making progress on the ambition to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls.’
What reads superficially as a commitment to policing is actually a set of signals to progressives that the government will continue with two-tier justice. Spot the signals?
For ‘neighbourhood policing’ read ‘depolicing’, i.e. stay out of neighbourhoods where the police can be accused of hate by self-segregated minorities. For instance, ignore vandalism, rape, internecine violence, and theft in and around hotels housing illegal immigrants, but crack down on protesters against open borders – and call them fascists.
For ‘restoring public confidence,’ read ‘pander to self-segregated minorities’. For instance, when three girls are knifed to death in Southport by Axel Rudakubana, cover up the perpetrator’s Islamism, anti-white racism and unpunished crimes, characterise the facts as ‘right-wing disinformation’, release photos of the perpetrator as a schoolboy but not after his arrest, and sentence the perpetrator after you have already imprisoned those who had Tweeted the facts.
For ‘making progress on the ambition to halve knife crime’ read ‘blame Amazon for selling a knife to Axel Rudakubana’. For ‘making progress on the ambition to halve violence against women and girls’ read ‘persecute white men in family courts for unsubstantiated accusations by bitter ex-partners who don’t want to share the parenting, but turn a blind eye to organised abuse of girls and wives by Muslim men’.
Keir Starmer’s administration is doubling down not just on non-crime hate incidents, but also two-tier justice by race, religion, gender – and politics.
