“Non-crime hate incident” (NCHI) recording is about to come back with a vengeance in the UK.
The recently-elected Labour government has decided to reverse the previous cabinet’s decision to stop wasting police time by having them report such huge numbers of these, often in reality trivial events.
However, even before this policy u-turn engineered by Labour, there were already 12,340 NCHI reports in the first half of the year, rights group Big Brother Watch revealed.
The now former Conservative government hardly put its foot down against such a “granular” (and some would say, absurd) way of policing people’s behavior, that wouldn’t sit oddly with an Orwell novel.
The Conservatives’ solution was to tell the police to report only what they viewed as real risks that could escalate into significant harm – a definition already clear as mud, one might say.
Now, Labour is happy to announce that they are reversing even that attempt at toning down the practice, and the spin to justify this latest decision is that it is needed to “monitor” antisemitic and anti-Islamic “non crime incidents.” Other communities are not mentioned.
This appears to be one of the “band-aid solutions” applied to recent serious rioting in the country, and the UK government didn’t forget to reassure citizens that the right to free speech will – somehow – be preserved in the process.
Just to illustrate what type of “events” the police include in their NCHI reporting – the UK press mentions a case where “a woman said children had used chalk on the pavement outside her home, claiming she was targeted as she was not from the UK.”
In another case, somebody’s “emotional distress” because they were removed from a WhatsApp group was also reported as a “non-crime hate incident.”
However, trying to whittle down this type of “HCHI spamming” to what could reasonably be treated as a threat has now failed.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the new approach would be that of “zero tolerance.”
And – likely of thousands upon thousands of reports, including distinctly dubious ones, every month.
Big Brother Watch noted that in addition to children playing with chalk on sidewalks, “sticking flags on poles” also featured among NCHI reports in the past period.
“Police should protect free speech and privacy by only putting details on file only when necessary,” the group recommended.
