Police have been accused of “marking their own homework”, after a review into Essex Police’s handling of an investigation into journalist Allison Pearson not only cleared the force of wrongdoing, but concluded that the incident should have been recorded as a non-crime hate incident (NCHI) – despite prosecutors swiftly dismissing the case and the force itself deciding otherwise.
Pearson, an award-winning Telegraph columnist, was visited at her home by officers on Remembrance Sunday and informed that she was under investigation for stirring up racial hatred over a social media post she had published and quickly deleted a year earlier. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped the case four days later, ruling that there was no realistic prospect of conviction.
Essex Police subsequently decided not to record the matter as an NCHI, deciding it fell under the category of being “trivial, irrational or malicious”.
But now a review into the police handling of the case, carried out by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), has concluded that the Essex force had been wrong to reach this conclusion, raising fresh concerns about the use of such records to regulate lawful speech.
The report stated: “We did not feel the circumstances of this complaint met the criteria for exclusion … Our view was that if the circumstances are applied (without consideration of the crime) to the authorised professional practice and Home Office Code of Practice on non-crime hate incidents, we feel that the report would not be deemed to be trivial, irrational or malicious.
“We think the circumstances meet the requirements of the national standard for incident recording for a non-crime incident.”
Reacting to the report, Pearson said she was “not surprised” that the NPCC had absolved Essex constabulary of wrongdoing, describing it as an example of the police “marking their own homework”.
She questioned why police ignored case law on free expression and failed to apply basic principles of proportionality. “It doesn’t matter how courteous the attending officers were,” she said, in response to a section of the report that heaped praise on the officer who spoke to Pearson at her home, describing him as acting in a “polite” and “exemplary manner”.
“That is a deflection from serious questions about why the law wasn’t followed and why common sense wasn’t applied,” she added.
Lord Young, Director of the Free Speech Union (FSU), criticised the suggestion that Pearson’s tweet should have been treated as a non-crime hate incident when police should be investigating real crime.
He said: “It’s disappointing that the NPCC thinks Allison’s year-old tweet, which she deleted almost immediately, should have been recorded as an NCHI.
“The reason Allison’s case caused such an outcry is because the public doesn’t want the police to be wasting their time investigating and recording ‘non crimes’ when there are so many actual crimes going unpunished.
“According to the most recent data, Essex Police only solved 13.5 per cent of crimes in 2023. Why are they spending time investigating Allison’s tweets when they should be policing our streets?”
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp also weighed in, arguing that police “should not be harassing journalists” or prioritising social media disputes over more serious crimes. “Incidents such as this, where there is no realistic prospect of imminent criminality, should not be investigated or recorded as NCHIs either,” he said. “That infringes free speech and wastes police time.”
Mark Lewis of Patron Law described the NPCC report as internally inconsistent and accused the police of attempting to cover their tracks. “It is hardly surprising that the police, having marked their own homework, declare themselves to have done nothing wrong.”
For the avoidance of doubt, ‘non-crime hate incidents’ really are as Orwellian as they sound.
In 2014, the College of Policing (CoP) came up with the concept of the NCHI in its Hate Crime Operational Guidance (HCOG). As defined in this document, an NCHI is any incident perceived by the victim or any bystanders to be motivated by hostility or prejudice to the victim based on a ‘protected’ characteristic (race or perceived race, religion or perceived religion, and so on).
“Perceived” is the operative word here, since as the guidance goes on to note: “The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required.”
In other words, according to the CoP, the recording threshold for an NCHI is that someone had taken subjective offence to something perfectly lawful that someone else has said or posted online, whether it’s directed at them or not. This effectively invites performative offence-taking, creating a system where subjective perception trumps objective evidence.
Few realise the sheer scale of NCHI recordings in England and Wales since their introduction. In the five years following the publication of the CoP’s guidance, the FSU estimates that more than 250,000 NCHIs have been recorded by police forces in England and Wales. That’s an average of 66 per day.
Little wonder, then, that the police don’t have time to send an officer round to your house if you report a burglary. (Between 2015 and 2021, 964,197 domestic burglary investigations ended without a suspect being identified).
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the vast NCHI system now embedded in England and Wales is that, under section 113B(4) of the Police Act 1997, chief officers are required to disclose any information they “reasonably believe to be relevant” to a background check. In other words, police may release NCHI logs to prospective employers conducting background checks on job applicants.
How often police actually disclose NCHI records remains unclear, but the chilling effect is undeniable. As Lord Macdonald KC, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, put it in the Times “NCHIs have consequences. They are not anonymised. They sit forever against the names of the alleged perpetrators without any real investigation or right of appeal… We need hardly imagine what an HR manager would make of a job applicant with a police history of hate.”
The FSU has recently helped several individuals get NCHI records deleted. Members can access our guide on how to challenge these records here.
And if you’re not yet a member but would like access to this, and the many other informative guides we provide, click here – membership starts from just £4.99 a month.
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