Why are the cops policing playground taunts?

Just when you thought Britain’s speech police couldn’t get any more brazen, now they’re going after kids for playground insults.

Yes, according to a report in The Times, cops have been recording so-called non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) against actual children. A freedom-of-information request has revealed that a nine-year-old earned a place on the NCHI database for calling his or her classmate a ‘retard’, while two secondary-school girls were damned as hateful for saying another pupil smelled ‘like fish’, among other cases.

Needless to say, both of these episodes probably resulted in some hurt feelings – perhaps even a few tears on the playground. But they obviously shouldn’t be a police matter – just as it shouldn’t be a police matter when full-grown adults share a few choice words on the streets or online.

Non-crime hate incidents – introduced by the College of Policing in 2014 – are both a censorious nightmare and a national embarrassment. What started life, supposedly, as a means to keep tabs on hateful behaviour before it escalated into actual crime has long been an Orwellian mess, in which tens of thousands of people have had their names logged purely because someone, somewhere, took offence to something they said. In 2016, then home secretary Amber Rudd even had one recorded against her name, because an Oxford academic took umbrage with a speech she gave about immigration.

Before the Tory government and the courts attempted – apparently without great success – to rein in this alarming practice, official guidance allowed for names to be recorded on the basis of accusation alone, without there needing to be any evidence to back up the hate element. While non-crime hate incidents aren’t crimes – the clue is in the name – they can still appear on advanced background checks, potentially harming someone’s job prospects. As well as chilling free speech, they can have life-ruining consequences.

Even after years of court cases, controversy and new guidelines, there is still a great deal of confusion within the police about what a non-crime hate incident actually is, and when they should be recorded. As The Times points out, according to current rules, NCHIs should only be recorded when the incident is at risk of escalating into a real crime. Even so, incidents within schools aren’t supposed to be recorded at all.

When the police are drawing up blacklists of thoughtcriminal pre-teens you know we have lost the plot. It’s high time the police binned this outrageous, authoritarian practice for good.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.