Non-crime hate incidents are dragging police officers into politics, a former Greater Manchester chief constable has warned amid growing calls for a review of the system. Peter Fahy said the Government needed to overhaul non-crime hate incidents because they were diverting officers from their core duties of investigating and solving serious crimes.
The Telegraph has the story.
His call followed a row sparked by a police investigation into Allison Pearson, the Telegraph journalist, for allegedly stirring racial hatred in a tweet a year ago. The case was subsequently dropped by Essex Police.
On Monday, Lord Hogan-Howe, a former Metropolitan Police commissioner, also called for a review of the use of non-crime hate incidents.
He backed a report, published on Monday by the Policy Exchange think tank, which urged ministers to stop police recording the incidents after finding it took up 60,000 hours of officers’ time every year and distracted them from fighting crime.
Mr Fahy told The Telegraph: “It is drawing police into really complex social issues, what might be seen as mainstream political comment, and it’s just not appropriate for the police to be drawn into this. We need to keep police out of these moral debates unless there is clear evidence of a crime.
“Focusing on hate incidents rather than hate crimes has opened up an endless Pandora’s box about how people feel they are insulted and offended. It is then used as a weapon between different groups, with police stuck in the middle.”
He said the future of non-crime hate incidents should be part of a wider Government review of what police should and should not do, and suggested there should be an alternative “civil remedy” to handle such hate incidents that did not involve the police.
Mr Fahy said the “whole tenor of society” had changed since the recording of non-crime hate incidents was introduced, initially to log race hate incidents in the wake of the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
He said that had come before the full development of social media, which acted as a conduit for amplifying incidents that “tend to gain a huge importance”.
“Then they get priority over other more serious crimes just because of the depth of emotion that they generate,” he added. “In reality, there is not a huge amount police can do. I am not sure criminal law is the best way for dealing with this.
“You have to look at it in terms of the police being overwhelmed by work. People feel police are not dealing with issues that the public want them to deal with.”
In September, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary found that many forces were still failing to correctly apply the guidance on non-crime hate incidents.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, has urged police to take a “common sense” approach. She believes logging the incidents – particularly for anti-Semitism and islamophobia – is necessary to enable police to build an intelligence picture around community tensions in order to map trends and prevent escalation.
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