In Defence of Non-Crime Hate Incidents

A guest post by Titania McGrath.

Free-speech extremists are up in arms about the police recording “non-crime hate incidents”. According to recent reports, over thirteen thousand NCHIs have been recorded in the last year and a half. It is genuinely shocking to hear that so many citizens in the UK have been not breaking the law and getting away with it.

The Times has revealed that even school pupils have received NCHIs. In two particularly chilling cases, a pair of secondary school girls said that a peer smelt “like fish” and a nine-year-old child referred to a classmate as a “retard”. I find this deeply offensive. As a committed intersectional social justice activist, it is inevitable that many of my closest friends are retarded.

It is disturbing that such children are free to roam the country, when they should clearly be confined in state-funded oubliettes, perhaps somewhere remote and inaccessible like the Shetland Islands or Wales. Those who know their history understand that children eventually turn into adults. One day a child is calling someone a retard, the next day he’s invading Poland. It’s a slippery slope.

The sheer extent of non-crime hate incidents proves what I have always suspected: that the UK is the most hate-filled and racist country in the world. Something must be done urgently to curb the intolerance and bigotry that is spreading like herpes in our society.

Some reactionaries on the right claim that recording “non-crime” is “like something out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”. If they took the time to actually read the book, they would realise that it’s full of great ideas. 

As the government’s website points out, the recording of non-crime hate incidents is essential to prevent them “escalating into hate crimes”. Indeed, studies have shown that all hate crimes are preceded by moments of non-crime. For instance, before the Hatton Garden Gang stole £14 million worth of jewellery in their famous heist of 2015, there were periods of time when they were not stealing jewellery.

The litany of officially recorded non-crime hate incidents is truly terrifying to read. There was that man in Bedfordshire who whistled the theme tune from Bob the Builder at his neighbour in a racist way. There was the dog who expressed its racism by defecating outside its victim’s house. There was the case of ex-cop Harry Miller who committed an act of literal violence by retweeting an offensive poem.

Then there was the evil barrister Sarah Phillimore, who stirred up hatred by posting an image of her puppy along with the caption “my dog will call me a Nazi for cheese”. Thank God that all of these incidents have been logged as NCHIs by police. For all our sakes, we need to keep an eye on these terrorists.

Logging non-crime hate incidents is also useful so that we have a handy watchlist of right-wing politicians who are not being sufficiently progressive. Amber Rudd, former Home Secretary, was logged with an NCHI after she used the phrase “migrant workers” in a speech at the Tory Party conference. She clearly should have said “culturally enriching pillars of the community”. 

Other examples include Murdo Fraser, a Scottish Conservative, who was given an NCHI when he compared being non-binary to identifying as a cat, as though either were anything other than courageous and empowering. And Rachel Maclean, formerly the MP for somewhere called Redditch, reposted a tweet that suggested that an individual with a penis couldn’t be a lesbian. Everyone knows that genitals have literally nothing to do with sexual attraction. In fact, if a straight man refuses to fellate a female penis, that just proves he’s actually gay.

And let’s not forget the journalists. Allison Pearson, a writer for the rabidly fascist Telegraph, is belatedly being investigated by police for a tweet she posted last year. You might think this is a trivial matter compared to soaring knife crime, but offensive remarks online get reposted thousands and thousands of times. The good thing about stabbings is that they tend to be over and done with relatively quickly.

I think it was Rustie Lee who said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. Fascism begins when the government refuses to incarcerate journalists who say the wrong things.

Perhaps we need to come up with a new term to prevent free speech extremists from complaining about non-crime hate incidents. I would suggest “pre-crime” would do the trick. I can’t believe no-one has thought of this before.

Alternatively there’s a German concept called zersetzung which I think is a wonderful idea. It’s simply a technique to promote social justice by encouraging citizens to behave in accordance with left-wing values. It’s not coercion, it’s simply a matter of gently reminding people that certain views may result in imprisonment or execution.

Ultimately, we must remember that non-criminals are in many ways more dangerous than criminals, because non-crime is far more common. The solution to this, of course, is to make non-crime a criminal offence. At the same time, we should decriminalise crime so that the police can focus their energies on ensuring that non-crime does not go unpunished.

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This is a guest post by Titania McGrath, a social justice activist and slam-poet. She is the author of two books - Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and, for children, My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism.

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