Police should prioritise tackling violent crime and burglaries instead of questioning people over their social media posts, Sir Keir Starmer has said – his intervention in defence of common sense policing comes just weeks after the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, signalled her intention to ramp up the recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) (Guardian, Mail, Telegraph, Times)
The Prime Minister urged forces to “concentrate on what matters most to their communities” amid the deepening row over the award-winning Telegraph journalist and FSU member Allison Pearson facing a police investigation in relation to a year-old post on X (formerly Twitter), which was initially logged by police as a possible NCHI.
The case led to uproar, with calls growing for the Government to rein in chief constables and scrap NCHIs altogether.
While speaking to reporters en route to the G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Sir Keir was asked whether police should be prioritising freedom of speech over “hurt feelings”. He replied: “I think that, as a general principle, the police should concentrate on what matters most to their communities.
“This is a matter for the police themselves, police force by police force, so they can make their decisions and will obviously be held to account for those decisions.”
In 2014, the College of Policing 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).
Although NCHIs do not trigger a criminal investigation, they are registered on police databases and can come up in enhanced background checks, for example if someone applies to work as a teacher.
Forces are supposed to weed out complaints that are “trivial, irrational or malicious” or relating to “the expression of lawfully held views”.
But a report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in September found many forces fail to correctly apply the guidance. It uncovered evidence that confusion over the rules meant officers were taking a risk-averse approach summed up as “if in doubt, record”.
The report by the police watchdog also identified a lack of knowledge across police forces in England and Wales regarding “the difference between a crime, an NCHI and an incident that is neither”.
Most people don’t realise just how many NCHIs have been recorded in England and Wales. According to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests submitted in 2019, the police recorded 119,934 NCHIs between 2014-18, and at the FSU we suspect that figure is now in excess of 200,000 – an investigation by The Times recently revealed that 13,200 NCHIs were recorded by 45 police forces in the 12 months to June 2024.
One of Britain’s most prominent gender-critical writers, Julie Bindel, recently revealed that two Scotland Yard officers visited her home to warn they were investigating one of her tweets (which they refused to identify) as a ‘hate crime’ (the type of which they didn’t specify) following a complaint from a member of the public (whose identity they wouldn’t reveal).
The officers asked her to voluntarily attend her local police station to make a statement, she said, but she refused, and the matter was later dropped. She described the visit as “Orwellian” and said detectives “could better use their time investigating rape and domestic violence”.
Tom Hunt, a former Tory MP, has also told how a NCHI was logged against him after a complaint was filed by a Labour activist. He had written in a local newspaper column raising concerns that “certain communities” were largely responsible for crime in Ipswich city centre.
Sir Keir’s intervention in defence of common-sense policing comes just two months after the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, signalled her intention to ramp up recording of NCHIs so that anti-Semitic and Islamophobic ‘hate speech’ can be logged consistently by police.
According to a government source: “The Home Office has committed to reverse the decision of the previous government to downgrade the monitoring of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate, at a time when rates of those incidents have increased.”
“It is vital,” the source added, “that the police can capture data relating to non-crime hate incidents when it is proportionate and necessary to do so in order to help prevent serious crimes which may later occur.”
This source appears to be unaware that the reason the threshold for the recording and retention of NCHIs was raised by the previous government was to bring the practice into line with the Court of Appeal’s judgment in Miller v The College of Policing, and not because the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman was less concerned about “antisemitic and Islamophobic ‘hate speech’” than her successor.
According to the Court of Appeal, the manner in which NCHIs were being recorded and retained when the threshold was lower – and the operational guidance police forces were following – was a breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as brought into British law by the Human Rights Act 1998, as well as a breach of the Data Protection Act 2018.
At the FSU we’re concerned that if the statutory Code of Practice introduced by Suella Braverman is withdrawn, which appears to be Ms Cooper’s intention, and the College of Policing is once again given a free hand when it comes to drawing up operational guidance relating to NCHIs, police forces in England and Wales will start breaking the law again.
That’s why we’ve threatened legal action against the Home Secretary if she goes ahead with this plan.
As an organisation, we’re not prepared to stand by while this Labour Government takes us back to the bad old days when the subjective perception of ‘hatred’ was enough to have your name and address logged in a police database.
You can read our latest research briefing on NCHIs here.
And if you’re on X, we’ve also put together a thread (here) detailing some of the most egregious NCHIs among the 250,000+ the police in England and Wales have logged since 2014.
