Controversial non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) are set to be scrapped under “common sense” proposals that will be presented to the Home Secretary next month.
Following a review, the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council have concluded that recording “information about non-crime incidents on a crime system is not the right solution”.
The new ‘PLANE’ guidelines instruct police officers to consider five keywords before only logging serious incidents as “intelligence” reports: Proportionate, Legal, Accountable, Necessary and Ethical. In contrast to NCHIs, such reports would not appear on enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks because they would not be logged on a crime database.
‘Policing tweets’
Chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert of South Downs, told The Daily Telegraph: “NCHIs will go as a concept. That system will be scrapped and replaced with a completely different system. There will be no recording of anything like it on crime databases.
“Instead, only the most serious category of what will be treated as anti-social behaviour will be recorded. It’s a sea change.”
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It was quite clear that the whole regime needed looking at, that there was a perception that the police were being drawn into matters that they shouldn’t have been. I don’t think the police service wanted to be drawn into them. They don’t want to be policing tweets.”
‘Victory’
Founder and General Secretary of the Free Speech Union (FSU), Lord Young of Acton, thanked The Christian Institute and its supporters for “all the campaigning work they have done to get us to the point we are at today”.
He highlighted that it has been “incredibly useful” for both the FSU and The Institute to campaign on the issue of NCHIs.
Lord Acton noted that “without a coalition of groups all pushing in the same direction, we wouldn’t have achieved this victory”.
Graham Linehan
More than 130,000 NCHIs have been logged across England and Wales since 2014. They are not criminal acts, but behaviour deemed to be motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person’s characteristics such as ‘gender identity’.
In October, the Metropolitan Police announced that it would stop investigating NCHIs to “provide clearer direction for officers, reduce ambiguity and enable them to focus on matters that meet the threshold for criminal investigations”.
The move came as the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service confirmed that comedian and writer Graham Linehan would face no further action over “suspicion of inciting violence” against men who identify as women in posts on social media.
Police Scotland apologises to MSP over non-crime hate incident
Belfast councillors rethink noise restriction on street preaching
‘Islam-critical’ ruled a protected belief under equality law