A knock at the door from police officers, asking you to “check your thinking”, sounds like fiction straight from the pages of a George Orwell novel. Yet over the last 5 years, the police have recorded 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents” in the UK.
Now, new guidelines say that police should focus on catching criminals rather than policing Twitter debates. It’s extraordinary that this glimpse of sanity should feel like such a breakthrough, but after such an embarrassing stretch of pointless speech-policing – culminating in an ex-police officer being visited at work over entirely lawful views expressed on his Twitter account – it really is.
The recording of non-crime hate incidents is a well-intentioned practice emerging in the aftermath of the Macpherson report, which made serious recommendations about tackling racism in policing following the Metropolitan Police’s incompetent investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s murder. It is important for the police to record information that could be used as part of a criminal investigation – but recording thought crimes and mean tweets is a serious mission drift that does nothing to allay concerns about police incompetence.
The recording of non-crime hate incidents has done nothing to address serious allegations of racism in policing but rather has turned police forces into the agents of Big Brother, keeping lists of people accused of all sorts of trivial transgressions or even expressing unpopular views.
This has culminated in officers recording an incident of a boy, calling one of his peers, aged 11, “shorty” and putting a mark against the name of a man who whistled the tune of Bob the Builder, where the motivation was interpreted as discriminatory and hateful. Worryingly, these records can be revealed in enhanced DBS checks despite no actual criminal act taking place. With a lack of transparency around the information that is recorded, many people may even not be aware of their alleged wrongdoing.
Last year, Merseyside Police was forced to apologise after parading an electronic billboard displaying the message “being offensive is an offence”. Thankfully, the police are finally realising that this is not the case. A landmark 1976 European Court of Human Rights ruling regarding free speech in the UK (Handyside v United Kingdom) found that “freedom of expression…is applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population.”
Being offensive alone is not an offence and yet, through the recording of trivial twitter spats and compiling lists of individuals for their micro-aggressions, officers have treated it as such. All of this has a serious chilling effect on free expression. When the state scorns or blacklists those for simply saying the wrong thing, we all feel obliged to self-censor. This has profound consequences for our society because when people are not able to speak freely our horizons shrink.
In the context of violent crime continuing to rise, police should focus resources away from the Orwellian world of non-criminal transgressions and back to the world of crime. The alternative is a downwards spiral towards a more authoritarian Britain where unfriendly tweets can see you cancelled not just by your peers but also by the state.
Mark Johnson – Legal and Policy Officer.
The Telegraph – It’s high time for the police to finally stop recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’