There is “cause for cautious optimism”, say the Free Speech Union as the UK College of Policing moves to all-but-abolish what are called ‘Non Crime Hate Incidents’ (NCHIs), the thought-crime tool that has become notoriously associated with swatting-like disruption of conservatives.
The practice of recording complaints about alleged “hate” speech which does not meet the threshold of being considered actually criminal, on the police’s national crime database is to be all but ended, the College of Policing is to propose in the coming weeks. If the recommendation is accepted by the government — and that appears likely — it would mean the practice of the police creating secret, non-appealable blacklists of Britons that can stop them getting jobs through the records appearing as red flags on background checks may end.
The Daily Telegraph states the proposal will say “Holding information about non-crime incidents on a crime system is not the right solution” and that Lord Herbert, the chairman of the College of Policing, said: “NCHIs will go as a concept. That system will be scrapped and replaced with a completely different system.
“There will be no recording of anything like it on crime databases. Instead, only the most serious category of what will be treated as anti-social behaviour will be recorded. It’s a sea change.”
There are, however, indications that even under this “sea change” the system is not to vanish altogether. It will be replaces by a “common sense” approach instead, although whose idea of what common sense means is yet to be defined, and there has been no definite statement that the past 25 years of NCHIs entered onto the police national computer will be deleted. It was stated that some monitoring will remain so not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
The Free Speech Union, which has steadfastly campaigned against NCHIs, said the development means “there is cause for cautious optimism” and said they will “monitor developments closely and ensure NCHIs are consigned to the dustbin of history.”
In a statement the campaigning group said NCHIs have had a “chilling effect” on free speech and have been “weaponised by militant activists” to silence their opponents. They said:
Most pernicious of all, NCHIs can appear on enhanced DBS checks and prevent people from getting jobs — for committing a non-crime.”
… It’s estimated that NCHIs take up to 60,000 hours of police time annually, with more than 13,000 recorded by forces across the country in the year to June 2024. Forces up and down the country have overzealously logged NCHIs, rather than focusing on solving real crime on our streets. In 2023, 90% of all crime went unsolved.
It’s time to police our streets, not our tweets.
While NCHIs have been criticised and challenged for years, it is their weaponisation by radically pro-transgender lobbyists which appears to have become the proverbial straw breaking the camel’s back, with the arrest of famous Irish comedian Graham Linehan by British police earlier this year over tweets he posted while not even inside the United Kingdom heralding the end. An investigation by London police into Linehan collapsed so comprehensively in October that the force said they’d simply no longer investigate NCHIs altogether.
The force said they no longer wanted to be involved in “toxic culture war debates” and wanted to free up their officers to “focus on matters that meet the threshold for criminal investigations”.
This change of attitude follows years of police forces defending the importance of NCHIs. As reported in 2018, the National Police Chiefs’ Council responded to the revelation that thousands of hours of police time was absorbed in investigating non-crimes by calling the work “a vital role in helping prevent hate crime… Victims and those feeling vulnerable should report any incident of hate crime to the police.”
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