UK think tank says hate-incident focus weakens crime fighting

The focus by some U.K. police forces on tracking alleged hate incidents is hampering their ability to fight serious crime as well as risking “a broader chilling effect” on free speech, a British conservative think tank says.

Non-crime hate incidents, or NCHIs, are recorded by British police although they don’t rise to criminal thresholds. NCHIs have been in the spotlight after a recent investigation by police in Essex into Allison Pearson, a journalist at the Telegraph, for allegedly inciting racial hatred with a social media post made in November 2023.

The efforts have been criticized due to a lack of clarity about what counts as an recordable incident. NCHIs have become a point of contention between the Labour government and the opposition Conservative Party.

In a report released on Monday, London-based Policy Exchange cited official figures that police in Essex, northeast of London, recorded 21.5 NCHIs per 100 officers in 2023, more than twice the national average and well above the rates in cities like London or Manchester.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is looking into expanding the monitoring of alleged hate incidents to better track antisemitism and Islamophobia, reversing previous Tory policies. At the other end of the spectrum, Conservative lawmakers are calling for ending the need for police to record NCHIs, in order to protect free speech.

“The ‘Non-Crime Hate Incident’ regime is having a devastating impact on the public and their perception of policing,” said David Spencer, head of crime and justice at Policy Exchange. “Too often police chiefs have chosen to focus their attention on matters other than the fight against those crimes which most affect the public.”

Many police forces in England and Wales don’t publish the number of NCHIs recorded or their rules around logging such incidents.

Even when they’re recorded, NCHIs may be not be logged correctly, according to the think-tank. It cited an inspection by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary finding inconsistencies in how forces were reporting the incidents. About one in four NCHIs case files analyzed by that report had been incorrectly recorded by the police.

NCHI reports take up significant police resources as they involve hours logging and investigating each case by officers and other staff members. Police forces spend about 60,000 hours yearly on NCHIs, the Policy Exchange analysis found.

The think-tank said this raised questions about how police resources may be diverted from tackling crimes like murder, rape or burglary, for which conviction rates are often low.

Policy Exchange set out several recommendations, including abolishing the requirement of police to log NCHIs; raising the bar for classifying cases as hate incidents; and creating a centralized data base on NCHI recordings made by each police force.