Police chief calls for ‘common sense’ approach on non-crime hate incidents

The Chairman of the College of Policing has warned that logging non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) is becoming a “distraction” from real police work.

Lord Herbert of South Downs told The Times Crime and Justice Commission, which will recommend criminal justice reforms next year, that there should be a wholesale review of NCHIs to consider whether they should be scrapped.

According to Freedom of Information responses, British police forces recorded 13,200 NCHIs in the year to June 2024.

Unbalanced

Lord Herbert said there should be a “commonsense approach” that allows a police officer who receives a complaint to be able to say: “‘We’re sorry, we can understand you find that offensive but it’s not a matter for us’”.

“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.”

He emphasised that it is “especially damaging” if the public believes the police are neglecting the basics and officers appear to “start investigating something that was way short of a criminal offence”.

The Times Crime and Justice Commission comprises experts including former police chiefs, business leaders, lawyers and academics and says it “aims to address the most urgent issues facing the police, prisons, courts and victims of crime”.

‘Wasting time’

Speaking to TWR-UK, The Christian Institute’s Deputy Director Simon Calvert said people “want the police to be concentrating on real, serious crime, and instead they’re wasting time recording spurious allegations which don’t actually benefit policing”.

“The problem of over-recording is a serious problem, it takes apparently something like 60,000 hours of police time. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary did a review of 120 non-crime hate incidents and hate crime records and found that 25 per cent of them were wrongly recorded”.

He highlighted that NCHIs may only be discovered after DBS and employment checks, adding: “How many of us have got NCHIs recorded against our names that we don’t even know about?”

Home Office

In August, the Home Office announced that Yvette Cooper would increase the burden on police officers to keep records of ‘hate incidents’ which are not criminal offences.

The move reversed the previous Government’s policy, where former Home Secretary Suella Braverman told the police not to interfere with a person’s freedom of expression “simply because someone is offended”.

The College of Policing, National Police Chiefs’ Council and the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services have urged the Home Office to ensure that any new policy does not endanger freedom of expression.