Mahmood Abolishes Non-Crime Hate Incidents

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has abolished non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) after criticism that they were diverting officers into “policing tweets rather than the streets”. The Telegraph has more.

The Home Secretary has introduced new laws revoking the statutory code that dictates how police should investigate and record NCHIs.

Ministers have accepted police chiefs’ conclusions, in a review led by the College of Policing, that the current system was “not fit for purpose” and had undermined freedom of speech and diverted officers from fighting crime.

Next week, the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council will unveil a new “common sense” system to replace NCHIs, designed to ensure officers only investigate and record incidents relevant to their “core duties” of preventing and solving crime.

An NCHI falls short of being criminal but is perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person with a particular characteristic. The incidents stay on police records indefinitely, and can appear in background checks when people apply for jobs.

The move to scrap them follows high-profile cases such as that of Graham Linehan, the Father Ted co-creator, whose arrest for a series of posts on X was criticised by Donald Trump’s US administration as “a departure from democracy”.

Police forces have also recorded NCHIs against children, including a nine year-old who called a primary school classmate a “retard” and two secondary school girls who said another pupil smelt “like fish”.

The reforms have been set out by Lord Hanson, a Home Office Minister, who told the House of Lords: “The growth of social media in particular, and online polarisation, has drawn the police into disputes that fall outside their core duties.

“Police officers must be able to focus on catching criminals, cutting crime and ensuring public safety, and the present statutory code has not provided the clarity needed to support that focus. It must therefore be revoked.”

He said it would be replaced with a “more appropriate framework” to ensure any incidents recorded by police were “proportionate” and “firmly focused on the most serious” so that police were not drawn into matters where they should not be involved.

“It will do this by tightening the definition of an incident, raising the recording threshold, moving from recording all incidents that are a cause for concern to capturing only those that relate to core policing purposes,” Lord Hanson said.

Under draft guidance drawn up by the College of Policing, NCHIs would no longer be recorded on crime systems, which would mean they would no longer have to be declared as part of checks in job applications.

Incidents that could be recorded will also be more tightly defined to focus on crime. This means they should be “relevant to policing for preventing or solving crime, safeguarding individuals or communities or fulfilling other statutory policing purposes”, according to the draft guidance. …

However, free speech campaigners have warned that a new statutory code was needed to keep police tightly focused on tackling crime rather than spreading into areas they should not.

Lord Young, the Director of the Free Speech Union, said: “The problem with creating the new regime in guidance, unmoored by statute, is that guidance is inherently unstable. It keeps being added to, with different bureaucratic bodies sticking their oars in, and the police end up buried in red tape.

“Remember, the current mess – which everyone acknowledges is unfit for purpose – is a result of ever-more voluminous guidance.

“In my view, setting limits on what ‘non-crimes’ the police can record on their databases and potentially disclose in enhanced DBS checks is properly a matter for Parliament, given its profound implications for freedom of speech. It’s not something that should be left to unelected bureaucrats.”

Worth reading in full.