Police in England and Wales will no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents, a major policy shift announced by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. The UK Government says the system will be replaced with one focusing on preventing and fighting real crime. Non-crime hate incidents are acts appearing motivated by hostility based on protected characteristics but which do not constitute a criminal offence.
They were introduced after the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. The Metropolitan Police announced its decision to cease investigating non-crime hate incidents last year. Peers have voted to scrap non-crime hate incidents as part of the Crime and Policing Bill.
I have experienced first-hand the dangers of this flawed policy and its implications for free speech. SNP ministers should be telling Police Scotland this practice must stop to avoid the risk of criminalising Scots who haven’t done anything wrong. Measures being taken elsewhere in the UK in relation to non-crime hate incidents don’t go far enough, but in SNP-run Scotland there is complete silence on this issue.
In Scotland, the Scottish Conservatives will pledge to end Police Scotland's recording of non-crime hate incidents in their Holyrood election manifesto. Police Scotland has previously said it will continue with its current policy on non-crime hate incidents. The force admitted guidelines for issuing non-crime hate incidents were not applied consistently in Murdo Fraser's case.
The College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs' Council reviewed non-crime hate incidents and recommended a new approach. The specific new system that will replace non-crime hate incidents in England and Wales has not been detailed by the UK Government. How police forces will handle reports that may lead to genuine harm under new 'common sense' rules is also unspecified.
That would ensure more time is spent on policing our streets rather than people’s tweets. At a time when the police are continuing to deal with the consequences of savage SNP cuts, this can no longer take up any of their valuable time.
The threshold for purging non-crime hate incident records from police files, as proposed in Lord Young's amendment, remains undetermined. Whether other UK police forces beyond the Metropolitan Police and Police Scotland will adopt similar changes to their policies is not yet known.