Tuesday briefing: Why everyone’s suddenly worked up about ‘non-crime hate incidents’ | Police

Good morning. A journalist visited by police over an erroneous tweet. A barber accused of racism over a dodgy haircut. And someone in Warwickshire reported for refusing to shake hands. These are some of the examples cited in recent days in an escalating media storm over “non-crime hate incidents” recorded by police.

The problem, frequently laid at the door of the woke mob, is so catastrophically vexing that former Conservative MEP and Daily Telegraph columnist Daniel Hannan declared it evidence of “the bleak reality of our DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] police state”. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has now said that the police should apply a “common sense and consistent approach”, an apparent nod to the criticisms of how the system works. And there are some reasonable objections to the status quo. But there are also important reasons for its existence that have very little to do with haircuts or handshakes.

Today’s newsletter attempts to sort the legitimate questions from the performative outrage. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Unemployment | Teenagers will get training at the Premier League, Royal Shakespeare Company and Channel 4 in a government drive to get hundreds of thousands into jobs or education. The scheme is part of a suite of changes to the welfare system and out-of-work support being announced today.

2. US politics | Donald Trump said on Monday he would sign an executive order imposing a 25% US tariff on products from Mexico and Canada. He said the tariffs would only be lifted if Mexico and Canada clamp down on migrants and illegal drugs crossing the border, and promised an additional 10% tariff on Chinese imports.

3. Storm Bert | Forecasters, environment officials and politicians have been criticised over the warnings issued before Storm Bert and the fitness of flood defences to cope with increasingly common extreme weather. The Met Office defended its work, saying that the storm was “well forecast, 48 hours in advance”.

4. Regulation | Britain’s financial sector watchdog is “incompetent at best, dishonest at worst”, according to a damning report by MPs and Lords which called for a big shake-up. An examination of the Financial Conduct Authority found “very significant shortcomings” after a series of financial scandals.

5. Health | Weight-loss drugs can reduce the risk of worsening kidney function, kidney failure and dying from kidney disease by a fifth, according to a study. Compared with placebo, GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic reduced the risk of kidney failure by 16% and the worsening of kidney function by 22%,

In depth: ‘A non-crime – what the hell?’

Two weeks ago, the Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson wrote a column describing a visit from police to her home on Remembrance Sunday. “It was to do with something I had posted on X (formerly Twitter) a year ago,” she wrote. The officers couldn’t tell her what the offending post was, but said someone had reported it as a non-crime hate incident (NCHI), Pearson claimed. “A non-crime – what the hell?” she wrote, complaining that their action had “defiled Remembrance Sunday”. And thus a news event was given its wings.

As the story has metastasized in recent days, it has turned into a wider complaint that NCHIs are an affront to freedom of speech – and an egregious waste of police time. But the general hysteria that has decorated the front pages, both in reference to Pearson’s case and others, is not always based on a fair reading of the facts. Here’s what you need to know to make sense of it.

What is a non-crime hate incident?

You could be forgiven for thinking, given the sudden intensity of media attention, that NCHIs are an innovation of the contemporary wokerati. In fact, they have their origins in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry in 1999.

Before that, the then Association of Chief Police Officers defined a “racial incident” as “any incident which includes an allegation of racial motivation made by any person”. But Sir William Macpherson’s report into Lawrence’s murder recommended that – partly because of a view among communities of colour that the “white” version of such incidents was generally accepted by police – the term “racist incident” should explicitly include both crimes and non-crimes. “Both must be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment,” Macpherson said.

Since then, rules around NCHIs have been set out by the College of Policing and expanded to cover other protected characteristics like disability, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity. The College of Policing’s 2014 guidance says that even when no crime has been committed, any report “must be recorded regardless of whether or not [the complainant is] the victim, and irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element”.

In 2023, partly in response to a court case which found that the recording of NCHIs interfered with the right to freedom of expression, the then home secretary Suella Braverman published new guidance. It said that incidents should only be recorded when “clearly motivated by intentional hostility”, and that the right to free speech should be prioritised. In August this year, Labour home secretary Yvette Cooper was reported to be considering reversing that change to improve monitoring of antisemitic and Islamophobic abuse that could escalate into violence.

Why are we talking about this now?

Because of the Pearson case, basically: there have been 177 newspaper articles about NCHIs since her column was published, versus 38 in the previous six months.

But the Pearson story does not appear to have been an NCHI at all. After her initial column, Essex police said that bodycam footage showed that, in fact, she was told that the complaint was of a potential criminal offence of inciting racial hatred online. Pearson’s original post showed police with two people of colour holding up the flag of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, a Pakistani political party founded by Imran Khan; Pearson reposted it with the comment “look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters”, apparently because she confused the PTI flag with that of Hamas. She later deleted the post.

Essex police have since dropped the case. There may be an argument here about where the bar should be for police investigations of hate crime – but that is not the controversy that is being aired.

In any case, the peg of the Pearson column has been used for a wider excavation of examples of NCHIs perceived as overzealous. These have not always told the full story.

One Sun front page proclaimed that “Dodgy haircut is hate crime” (rather than, er, literally a non-crime); but the story eventually explains that the complainant was a Lithuanian who felt that his barber was aggressive after a discussion of the war in Ukraine because he spoke Russian. The Daily Telegraph reported that“police recorded non-crime hate incident over handshake refusal in alleged gender row”, which would seem to imply that the issue was a difference of opinion over gender politics. But Warwickshire police’s record said that the victim thought that the refusal was, instead, because of their gender identity.

Such cases certainly aren’t crimes, and there is an entirely legitimate debate about the fact that police record them – but nor do they appear to be the pure nonsense that much of the coverage suggests.

What are the best arguments in defence of NCHIs?

The case for the recording of NCHIs begins with the idea that doing so allows officers to monitor patterns of behaviour that could indicate a wider problem brewing. Another argument is that they allow those in groups that are frequently subjected to prejudice to report incidents without having to ascertain themselves whether or not a crime has been committed.

As Danny Stone, chief executive of the Antisemitism Policy Trust, wrote for ConservativeHome in 2022:

Victim-led hate reporting has had significant and important positive impacts for police, and communities, in diagnosing harm, extremism, and failing integration or community-cohesion efforts … We all know that recording rules can be complex, but they should not be a concern to a victim at their time of distress.”

He also noted that failing to monitor a pattern of such incidents can lead to disaster. And he cited the case of Fiona Pilkington, who killed herself and her severely disabled daughter Francecca Hardwick in 2007 after 33 recorded incidents of contact between Pilkington and police regarding abuse from local youths.

Why do critics object to them?

Well, the name doesn’t do them any favours: there is something obviously jarring about the police examining “non-crimes”, even when no action is taken.

In a report by the thinktank Policy Exchange published yesterday, former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Hogan-Howe said that whereas the existence of a crime should be objective, whether something is an NCHI is “a subjective test based on guidance – producing inconsistent outcomes”.

There are also complaints that because the standard for recording NCHIs is one of “hostility”, defined as including “unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike”, it can sometimes fall short of “hate”. Others note that amid intense pressure on police resources after a long period of cuts, they constitute a waste of time.

A recent report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services was scathing about how the system is working in practice, saying that officers sometimes “simply record the incident as a crime rather than consider whether it might be an NCHI or whether no further record is needed”, and may be leaving personal information in reports unnecessarily. In some cases, records did not make clear whether an incident was a crime or not – and those records could be available to prospective employers.

Is this a growing problem?

One objection that appears less well-founded is the idea that NCHIs are growing as part of a general tendency towards “wokeness”. There is no national figure available for NCHIs, but the Free Speech Union produced some figures through freedom of information requests in September. It said there were 11,554 across 29 of 43 forces in England and Wales in 2022-23, and, by annualising numbers taken in a six month period – a slightly sketchy method given the propensity for one-off events to affect the numbers, but we work with what we have – 11,740 the next year.

The FSU noted that a previous FOI request covering 2014-2019 revealed that 34 police forces were recording 21,480 cases per annum. Even allowing for the additional forces, the trend appears to have been firmly in the opposite direction to what you might have presumed. Whatever examples are produced, that does not appear to be evidence of a new crisis.

· In yesterday’s First Edition, we said that the $300bn pledged by developed countries at Cop29 to mitigate the impact of climate breakdown on the developing world would take the form of grants and loans. We should have noted that the Cop29 text also allows for the counting of private co-investing – and while in practice this will only be a small share of the total, it is viewed by some developing nations as a loophole.

What else we’ve been reading

• Imagine directing Othello, a play about interracial relationships, in a society where those relationships were illegal. That was the risk Janet Suzman took when she staged a production in apartheid South Africa. As she writes: “Theatre gains a whole rack of meaning if you’re doing it in, let’s say, forbidden circumstances.” Jason Okundaye, assistant editor and writer, newsletters

• The final deal at Cop29 may not have been the outcome many hoped for, but climate secretary Ed Miliband wrote for the Guardian on the many positives he took from the conference – not least that “Britain is back in the global climate leadership business”. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters.

• Want to be wrestled from the clutches of smartphone addiction? There is no better remedy than art, argues Katy Hessel. Endless scrolling diminishes our humanity, so look away from your screen and at something beautiful and meaningful. Jason

• As Manchester City languish in their worst form in a decade under Pep Guardiola, Jonathan Wilson notes in his newsletter (sign up here!) that no empire lasts for ever – and we might be seeing Guardiola “struggle against entropy”. Charlie

• Once a ship’s captain, Guillaume Picard now feels guilty and concerned about the destruction of the sea by commercial vessels and overtourism. Marseille in the south of France, where Picard is based, has become one of Europe’s busiest cruise ports, and Picard believes it is suffocating. Jason

Sport

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Cricket | In an interview with Donald McRae ahead of his 150th Test, England’s Joe Root says that the greatest pleasures of his career are not personal milestones. “Cricket is a game of failure,” he says. “But there’s always something else, and someone else, you can celebrate.”

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