Kemi is right to take on ‘non-crime hate incidents’

Finally, a major UK political party has promised to abolish ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs). This week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch slammed NCHIs for ‘wasting police time’ and said the state should not be ‘trawling social media for things someone might find offensive’. The Conservatives are expected to try to permanently end NCHIs via an amendment to Labour’s Crime and Policing Bill when it’s debated in the House of Commons next month.

The abolition of NCHIs is long overdue. They are among the most egregious tools in the arsenal of Britain’s thoughtpolice. This is the practice whereby officers record speech or incidents that, while not criminal, are ‘perceived’ as being motivated by hate (either by the ‘victim’ or any other person). While these incidents are, by definition, not crimes, they can appear on advanced background checks and ruin people’s job prospects. According to The Times, 13,200 NCHIs were recorded in the UK between June 2023 and June 2024. The Free Speech Union estimates that police are recording as many as 65 per day.

Everything from expressing the ‘wrong’ political beliefs to hurling childish, playground insults can now attract the attention of the cops. In 2016, then Conservative home secretary Amber Rudd was slapped with an NCHI for a speech she gave on immigration, even though the complainant hadn’t even watched it. Not even children are spared. One NCHI was logged against a nine-year-old for referring to a classmate as a ‘retard’.

Many NCHIs border on the absurd. In 2021, a man complained to the police when his neighbours left a large pair of soiled underpants on their washing line for a number of months. This was recorded as a hate incident on the grounds that the ‘victim’ had an Italian surname, and Italy had just defeated England in that year’s Euros football final. A drug dealer who ‘ripped off’ a customer, and a barber alleged to have given an ‘aggressive’ haircut, are other examples of facile disputes that somehow became the subject of police attention.

NCHIs have their distant origins in the botched police investigation into the racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence. The Macpherson Inquiry that followed recommended setting up a ‘comprehensive system of reporting and recording of all racist incidents’, including those that don’t meet the threshold of a criminal offence. In 2014, the College of Policing used this as a pretext to create the non-crime hate incident. Officers were ordered to start logging any act or utterance ‘perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice’. This entirely subjective criteria meant that literally anything could be recorded as an NCHI. The notion that feeling the collars of schoolchildren and compiling dossiers on soiled underpants has anything to do with tackling violent racism is grotesque.

Badenoch’s pledge should be welcomed by anyone who values free speech and common sense. If only the Tories had done more to rein in our easily offended constabulary when they were still in government. The end of non-crime hate incidents cannot come soon enough.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.