Free speech advocates like me need to stop talking about the meagre gains we made under the last government because the present one seems to be listening carefully, taking notes, then gleefully reversing each one. First it torpedoed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Then it threatened to put the ‘legal but harmful’ stuff back into the Online Safety Act. Now, Yvette Cooper has said trying to get the police to record fewer ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) was a dreadful mistake.
A non-crime hate incident was recorded against a man for whistling the Bob the Builder tune
To grasp just how potty this is, you need to understand what an NCHI is. Dreamt up by the College of Policing in 2014, it’s defined as an aggressive act that’s perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards them because of their disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity (or because the perpetrator imagines them to have one of these protected characteristics), but which isn’t a criminal offence. According to the College, such acts should always be recorded as NCHIs, even if there’s zero evidence that the perp was in fact motivated by hatred. The perception of the victim, or indeed a third party, is all that matters.
Presumably, the College’s rationale for saying no evidence of hatred is required is because there’s no risk that the aggressor is going to be prosecuted – it’s a ‘non-crime’ after all. But having an NCHI recorded against your name has serious consequences, because it can show up in an enhanced criminal record check and prevent you getting a job as a teacher or a carer.
If you think that sounds like a gold-embossed invitation to woke activists – and disgruntled neighbours – to file vexatious police reports, you’re not wrong. In 2017, a speech about foreign workers by the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd triggered a complaint from an Oxford physics professor to West Midlands Police, who duly recorded it as an NCHI. Not absurd enough? Consider this: in 2020 an NCHI was recorded against a man for whistling the tune to Bob the Builder, which the ‘victim’ claimed was motivated by racial hatred.
As you might imagine, investigating all these reports takes up quite a lot of police time. An FOI request in 2020 revealed that police forces in England and Wales recorded 120,000 NCHIs between 2014 and 2019 – an average of about 65 a day – and the total has probably doubled since then. But the Home Secretary thinks investigating and recording 65 ‘non-crimes’ a day isn’t excessive. That’s a bit odd, given that not a single burglary was solved in nearly half of England’s regions last year. Shouldn’t the police be focusing on actual crimes?
In a newspaper story trying to untangle Yvette Cooper’s reasoning, a Home Office ‘source’ (presumably one of Cooper’s spads) said the department was ‘committed to reversing the decision of the previous government to downgrade the monitoring of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate, at a time when rates of those incidents have increased’. That was a reference to a statutory instrument laid by Suella Braverman last year that forced the College of Policing to issue new guidance telling the police to limit the recording of NCHIs to just those episodes where the subject involved was actually motivated by intentional hostility or prejudice towards a person based on a protected characteristic – mere perception isn’t sufficient – and where there is a real risk of significant harm or that a future criminal offence may be committed.
The reason Braverman did this was not, as Cooper seems to think, because she doesn’t give a fig about ‘anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate’. Rather, it was because Harry Miller, an ex-copper who had an NCHI recorded against him, took legal action against the College of Policing and secured a judgment in the Court of Appeal which found the guidance the police were following was incompatible with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Data Protection Act 2018.
So the Home Secretary is grumbling because, thanks to her predecessor, the police are no longer routinely interfering in our right to freedom of expression and our right to privacy and – if I’ve understood this correctly – she wants the College of Policing to revert to the perception-based recording of NCHIs, even though the Court of Appeal said that was unlawful. It’s a bit rich, given that Sir Keir Starmer poured so much vitriol on the previous government for ignoring human rights and not following the rules. When it comes to free speech, apparently, those things don’t count.
Comments