A former Metropolitan Police commissioner has urged ministers to review the use of non-crime hate incidents in the wake of an investigation into a Telegraph journalist. The Telegraph has the story.
A new report, published on Monday by the Policy Exchange think tank, urges ministers to abolish the recording of the incidents by police after finding they take up 60,000 hours of officers’ time every year and distract them from fighting crime.
In response, Lord Hogan-Howe said the Government should study the report and consider whether police should be investigating the incidents at all.
His comments come after a row sparked by the investigation into Allison Pearson.
The award-winning Telegraph journalist was visited by Essex Police officers at her home on Remembrance Sunday, who told her she was being investigated for inciting racial hatred with a post on social media from a year before. The force later dropped the investigation.
While Pearson was being investigated for a crime, it prompted widespread scrutiny and criticism of non-crime hate incidents, which do not meet the criminal threshold but are recorded by police.
Lord Hogan-Howe is the most senior policing figure to criticise non-crime hate incidents.
He said the original aim to log incidents that could lead to racist attacks after the murder of Stephen Lawrence was “well-intentioned”, but the way the rules had been introduced had led to “little debate about their efficacy”.
The peer said police had no powers to investigate or interview “suspects” in non-crime hate incidents, which meant it had caused public concern when officers had done so.
“Whether something is a non-crime hate incidents is a subjective test based on guidance, producing inconsistent outcomes,” he said. “Parliament, rather than the College of Policing, has to decide whether the police should be investigating people for non-crime hate incidents and how they are recorded.
“I would urge ministers to look closely at this Policy Exchange report to inform the path they intend to take.”
In its report, Policy Exchange estimated that police officers were spending up to 60,000 hours a year investigating some 13,000 non-crime hate incidents, diverting them from fighting actual crime.
Its analysis suggested that Essex Police, the force that investigated Pearson, spent more time per officer on non-crime hate incidents than other, larger forces.
Last year, Essex Police recorded non-crime hate incidents at a rate of 21.5 per 100 officers a year – twice the national rate and three times that of the Metropolitan Police, four times that of Greater Manchester Police and 10 times that of West Yorkshire Police.
Under the current guidance, the personal data of alleged non-crime hate perpetrators can only be recorded if the incident is “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and where there is a “real risk of escalation causing significant harm or a criminal offence”.
However, Policy Exchange said the definitions used by police for “hostility” were so low that they included “unfriendliness” and “dislike”. This, it said, “distorted the prevalence of genuine ‘hate’ incidents”. It recommended the definition threshold should be raised.
Worth reading in full.
