The Chairman of the College of Policing (CoP) has said that recording trivial incidents is distracting officers and undermining public confidence.
Lord Herbert of South Downs told the Times Crime and Justice Commission that the government should consider scrapping the practice in its present form, making him the most senior policing figure to criticise how hate incidents are logged.
“We need to prevent harm, we need to ensure that minorities are protected and be alive to things like antisemitism but on the other hand we must ensure that police are not drawn into the trivial,” he said. “We want to apply a commonsense approach, where the police officer would receive a complaint and they would be able to say, ‘We’re sorry, we can understand you find that offensive but it’s not a matter for us’.”
Asked whether the non-crime hate incident category should be scrapped, he replied: “Potentially.”
He added: “I think it has become an impediment to the police doing what we want the police to do, which is ensure that they are preventing harm, identifying where there is risk of harm, ensuring that it can be prevented, because I think that the category itself has become controversial and a distraction from what the police need to be doing.”
The CoP is in consultation with Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, about rewriting the guidance governing the recording of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) in response to inconsistency and controversy over its misuse.
Cooper wants police to record NCHIs only when there is a clear risk to community tensions under new “commonsense” guidance. She wants to focus predominantly on incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia to give the authorities better warning of rising abuse against Jewish and Muslim communities.
While the home secretary is ultimately responsible for the code, the College of Policing will rewrite the guidance for officers to implement.
The College of Policing Board and the National Police Chiefs’ Council have written to the home secretary, with the support of HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, calling for the category to be looked at in the round to ensure that the right balance is struck between the collection of data to prevent harm and the right to freedom of expression. The three most senior bodies in policing believe that the review could result in a move away from the current concept of non-crime hate incidents.
Lord Herbert, a former Conservative policing minister, said: “We need to make it absolutely clear that where incidents are trivial they should not be recorded or not recorded in that way. I think we have to go further now and look at the whole system and ask whether it is correctly balanced because I think the public sense is that it is not.
“Where I think this is especially damaging is if there is a perception that the police are not doing the basics but are being drawn into territory they should not be on.
“I think every police officer has the sense they want to be able to deal with criminality, they want to keep the public safe, that’s their mission. But if it is perceived that ‘I reported a crime, nothing happened’ and then you read that police went around and appeared to start investigating something that was way short of a criminal offence, you look at that and think that’s not the correct priorities.”
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