UK’s opposition Conservatives are hoping to push through an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that would end the practice of the police recording and acting on “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs).
NCHIs have been the source of much controversy over the last years, both from the standpoint of intimidating and suppressing lawful speech and as a significant diversion of police time and resources away from real crime and toward by-and-large trivial issues.
Though they have been getting logged in their thousands – 13,000 only last year, which translates to 30,000 hours of police time – NCHIs started getting the attention of mainstream media with some high-profile cases.
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Announcing the amendment, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp this week writes in The Telegraph that the UK is “supposed to be the home of free speech – and a country where the police chase criminals, not law-abiding members of the public.”
And once the amendment is in parliament, Philp seems sure the vote would “smoke out” those MPs from the ruling Labour who prefer to control speech (under the guise of combating hate speech), rather than protect freedom of expression.
Conservatives appear to be – now – making free speech a focal point of their political strategy, as party leader Kemi Badenoch also decided not to mince words when commenting on NCHIs, referring to them as “wasted police time chasing ideology and grievance instead of justice.”
The Free Speech Union (FSU) public interest group welcomed Philp’s announcement, and provided a timeline of the introduction and strengthening of the NCHI phenomenon, singling out 2014 when the College of Policing came out with the Hate Crime Operational Guidance, “which formalized the idea that NCHIs would be recorded (and retained) against individuals’ names.”
And that guidance provided a fairly uniquely broad and vague “definition” of what NCHIs are:
“Any non-crime incident which is perceived by the victim or any bystanders to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a protected characteristic: race or perceived race, religion or perceived religion (…)”
It’s worth quoting more perplexing statements from the guidance: “The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required.”
Another thing that is apparently “not required” is for the police to know what, if any help in fighting hate crime some 250,000 NCHIs recorded since 2014 have had.
As The Telegraph wrote earlier this week, “most (police) forces have admitted they carry out no analysis of the data and so have little idea as to their effectiveness in detecting and preventing hate crime.”
Even if the Conservatives’ amendment is adopted, the UK Crime and Policing Bill is burdened by other major issues, such as allowing greater access to citizens’ “driving license information” to all police forces in the UK – and laying the foundations for the police using 50 million+ driving license photos for facial recognition searches.
