“Common Sense” Is Back: UK Finally Scraps Non-Crime Hate Incident Laws Nationwide

Police chiefs will reportedly seek to scrap non-crime hate incidents in plans they will present to the Home Secretary next month.

The Telegraph reports that police leaders have decided that NCHIs are no longer “fit for purpose” after warnings that recording them undermines freedom of speech and diverts officers away from fighting crime.

Under the plans, NCHIs will be replaced with a new “common sense” system, where only a fraction of such incidents will be recorded under the most serious category of anti-social behaviour.

An NCHI falls short of being criminal but is perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person with a particular characteristic.

They stay on police records indefinitely and can come up in background checks.

The move to scrap them follows high-profile cases such as that of Graham Linehan, the Father Ted co-creator, whose arrest for a series of posts on X was criticized by the Trump administration as a “departure from democracy”.

The plans will be published next month by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and are expected to be backed by Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary.

Lord Herbert, the chairman of the College of Policing, told The Telegraph:

“NCHIs will go as a concept. That system will be scrapped and replaced with a completely different system.”

“There will be no recording of anything like it on crime databases. Instead, only the most serious category of what will be treated as anti-social behaviour will be recorded. It’s a sea change.”

Their exclusion from crime databases means any incidents will no longer have to be declared as part of checks in job applications.

Police forces would be instructed not to log “hate” incidents on crime databases, instead treating them as “intelligence” reports.

Police guidance on the recording of NCHIs was first published in 2005, following recommendations by an inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence – the London teenager who was stabbed to death in a racist attack in 1993.

As The BBC reports, Lord Herbert said “an explosion of social media” in the years since they were introduced has meant police had been drawn into monitoring “mere disputes” online.

Officers do not want to be “policing tweets”, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today program.

Last year, The Telegraph reported that 43 police forces in England and Wales had recorded more than 133,000 NCHIs since 2014.