Why are the police investigating “non-crime”?

This authoritarian abuse of state power has to stop.

What business do our police forces have in investigating “non-crime”? Is this not the precise opposite of their purpose? It would be the equivalent of a doctor who limits his attention to the vigorous and the healthy.

And yet this is precisely how our law enforcement officers are spending much of their valuable time. Between 2014 and 2019, almost 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents” were recorded by forces in England and Wales. Estimates now suggest that since then the figure will have risen to well over a quarter of a million. 

In Scotland, the situation is arguably about to get even worse with the introduction of the SNP’s new hate crime law. Police Scotland is already stretched to the limit, which is why it recently announced its “proportional response” strategy; that is to say, the police will no longer investigate vandalism or theft if the crimes are unlikely to be solved. And yet First Minister Humza Yousaf believes that “non-crime” ought to be a priority. Here’s what he had to say this week in an interview with STV:

It has apparently escaped Yousaf’s attention that the rate of “non-crime” has escalated in recent years because there is no evidential threshold required for such incidents. They are recorded by police even when there is no evidence of “hatred” other than the “perception of the victim”. And these numbers become wildly inflated the more that the police appeal to the public to report them. Who would have thought that people with a grudge might exploit such a system?

Yousaf’s comments have come about because a Scottish Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser, has now discovered that the force recorded a “non-crime hate incident” against his name. This was a result of criticism he had posted online of the SNP’s policies on gender self-identification:

“Choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat. I’m not sure Governments should be spending time on action plans for either.”

And Fraser is not the only politician who has fallen foul of the non-law in recent times. In 2017, the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd had a non-crime hate incident recorded against her because she referred to “migrant workers” in a speech at the Tory party conference. Someone took offence and contacted the police. That was all it took.

And Rachel Maclean, the MP for Redditch and deputy chair of the Conservative Party, was in the news in December for reposting a tweet which referred to Green Party candidate Melissa Poulton as “a man who wears a wig and calls himself a proud lesbian”. This happened to be a statement of fact, but this didn’t stop the West Mercia Police adding the dreaded mark against her name. 

So where has all this come from? In 2014, the College of Policing, the quango responsible for training police forces in the UK, introduced “non-crime hate incidents”. They had no mandate from the government; it was more a case that activists who believe in the need to control the language of the public had become predominant, as they have in so many public institutions. The idea would be that even if someone hadn’t committed a crime, signs of “hate” needed to be monitored in case these sentiments developed into criminal activity in the future. 

Philip K. Dick once described this kind of thing as “pre-crime”. He thought he was writing dystopian science fiction, but in actuality he was predicting the state of the UK in the early twenty-first century.