Toby Young, joined Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk TV to discuss the Free Speech Union’s (FSU) threat of legal action against the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, if she goes ahead with a plan to force police officers to record more ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs).
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.”
But as Toby explains, 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At the FSU we’re concerned that if the statutory Code of Practice introduced by the last government is withdrawn, which appears to be Ms Cooper’s intention, and the College of Policing is once again given a free hand when it comes to drawing up operational guidance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.
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.
For the avoidance of doubt, ‘non-crime hate incidents’ really are as Orwellian as they sound – if one is recorded against your name it can show up on an enhanced criminal records check and prevent you from getting a job. That’s right, you might not get a job because you’ve committed a ‘non-crime’.
You can read our latest research briefing on NCHIs here.
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If you’re on X, we’ve also put together a thread detailing some of the most egregious NCHIs among the 250,000+ the police in England and Wales have logged since 2014.
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