The most ridiculous non-crime hate incidents

The police investigation into Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson was thankfully dropped last week. After officers knocked on her door earlier this month, to interrogate her over an old tweet, Essex Police say they will take no further action.

Pearson may be free, but Britain’s thoughtpolice never rest. According to figures compiled in 2017, around nine people in England and Wales are arrested every single day for what they say online. While most ‘problematic’ thoughts don’t meet the criminal threshold, the Free Speech Union estimates that 65 people per day are recorded as having committed a ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI). The NCHI is a policing tool that allows officers to record acts or speech that, while not criminal, are ‘perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice’. As you might have guessed from the subjective definition, literally anything you do or say could be logged as a NCHI, as long as there is a snitch willing to report it and a police officer willing to record or investigate it.

Here are some of the most dubious and ludicrous ‘non-crimes’ logged by the thoughtpolice:

Playground insults

While you might imagine a ‘hate incident’ to involve some truly vile, bigoted and hurtful language, what ends up in the police logbook wouldn’t sound out of place on a junior-school playground. In Norfolk, police recorded a NCHI after someone called a Welshman a ‘sheepshagger’. In Cambridgeshire, a German woman reported an NCHI after her neighbour compared her to a ‘Rottweiler’ dog during a dispute over parking. So far, so infantile.

As it happens, literal playground insults have been investigated as hate incidents, too. The Times revealed this month that a nine-year-old child had a NCHI recorded against his name for calling another pupil a ‘retard’, while two secondary-school girls were reported for saying that their classmate smelled ‘like fish’.

‘Offensive’ jokes

Because NCHIs need only be ‘perceived’ as hateful, there need not even be an actual victim involved. In 2018, an Asian man jokingly remarked that his friend (who is also Asian) looked like a terrorist. The man at the butt of the joke took no offence, but an eavesdropping do-gooder clearly did, and so the interaction was reported to the police and duly recorded.

It’s not just jokes about race that can land you in the police’s hate log. Trans ideology is also no laughing matter, according to Humberside Police. In 2020, former police officer Harry Miller was investigated for a series of humorous tweets poking fun at the gender wars. One said: ‘I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me.’

Political activism

We are all familiar with the weekly ‘hate marches’ on London’s streets, but while expressions of outright anti-Semitism are often overlooked by the Met, the police took a much dimmer view of a retired teacher sending a polite letter about abortion, and a man who announced his plan to campaign for Brexit. Both were logged with NCHIs.

Even mainstream politicians aren’t safe from this. In 2016, Tory wet Amber Rudd, then the home secretary, was slapped with a non-crime hate incident, thanks to a speech she gave about immigration. An Oxford professor reported her to West Midlands Police, although he later admitted he hadn’t actually listened to the supposedly offensive speech, but was merely appalled by the media’s coverage of it. As the police guidance on non-crime hate incidents makes clear, ‘hatefulness’ need only be ‘perceived by the victim or any other person’ – and there is no requirement for that ‘other person’ to have been present or even vaguely aware of the incident itself before the police record an NCHI.

Mild inconveniences

Although NCHIs primarily deal with ‘problematic’ speech, they have also turned the little nuisances and annoyances that are part of everyday life into a matter for police.

Neighbourly disputes are a common starting point for NCHIs. In 2021, a North Wales resident was irritated that a neighbour had ‘hung a very large, soiled pair of underpants on their washing line’ for the previous two months. The so-called victim perceived this as a hate incident, because they had an Italian surname and Italy had recently beaten England in that year’s European Championship final. No evidence for this motive appears on the police log.

In 2017, a dog was accused of sparking a ‘racial incident’ after pooing on someone’s lawn. A year later, it was revealed an elderly woman had been interviewed under caution and slapped with an NCHI after beeping her horn too loudly while waiting at a petrol station. Apparently, she was suspected of being racist.

Poor customer service can also qualify as hateful. When a man accused his barber of cutting his hair ‘aggressively’, allegedly after learning that he was a Russian-speaking Lithuanian, City of London Police treated this as a hate incident. A drug dealer was once slapped with an NCHI, after a customer claimed he’d been ripped off due to his sexuality.

What these examples show is that literally anything you say or do can now be a matter for the thoughtpolice. The ‘non-crime hate incident’ is as ludicrous as it is authoritarian. It’s high time we scrapped this Orwellian policing tool.