Former police officer Harry Miller has won a Court of Appeal ruling which makes the recording of non-crime hate incidents an unlawful interference with freedom of expression and a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
Humberside police visited Miller in January 2020 after he retweeted a comic verse about transgendered people. Police told him his Twitter activity, despite not committing a crime, would be recorded on a police database as a ‘non-crime hate incident’, which could show up on his criminal record.
Senior judge, Dame Victoria Sharp, said “The volume of non-crime hate speech is enormous and then police do not have the resources or capacity to investigate all the complaints made”.
A freedom of information request has found that between 2014 and 2019 police forces in England and Wales have recorded 119,134 ‘non-crime hate incidents’.
