Post by Roger HayterPost by SpikeHow on earth did such legislation come about?
It appears that one can be investigated by the police for an incident or
incidents that are not criminal in nature, and an entry made on a database
that likely will either end a career or bar a subject from one, from times
possibly before the legislation came into being. There is no case, no
charge, no trial, and most importantly, no defence possible.
Surely this is Orwellian in nature, giving the State via its functionaries
such as the police free rein to trawl history from times when these now
non-crimes were actually non-crimes. If it wasnt concerning, it would be
bizarre.
I think any objection to this needed to start when the police were allowed to
include unproven allegations and prejudices in enhanced criminal record
checks. This was decades ago now.
It's complicated, and when you look at it more closely it doesn't fit the
somewhat polarised political debate around it.
It's clearly beneficial to the police, and to society as a whole, for the
police to keep records of intelligence-led information about people or
organisations where there is a reasonable suspicion that they are engaged in
crime but where there is not yet sufficient evidence to justify prosecution.
Equally, it's clearly beneficial for all concerned (except, obviously,
criminals) the police to record plausible, but as yet unsubstantiated,
allegations of crime where there is a realistic prospect that further
evidence may subsequently be forthcoming. In fact, a bit more of that type
of recording might have led to the likes of Jimmy Savile and John Smyth
facing justice before they died.
But, on the other hand, it's also something which is clearly open to abuse,
either by the police themselves recording prejudice-led rather than
intelligence-led information or by unquestioningly accepting implausible
allegations that have no prospect of holding up under investigation. And
this is particularly the case where that information may be disclosed to
third parties, for example via an EDBS check.
So there does need to be effective regulation of how and when the police can
record such information, and on how long it should be stored and what should
be done with it. That simple fact is, I would hope, uncontroversial. But
there's clearly going to be a lot of entirely valid disagreement over the
precise form of such regulation. The balance between making it easier to
catch criminals and not making the PNC an instrument of mass defamation
isn't going to be easy to find.
"Non-crime hate incidents", in particular, are almost inevitably going to
fall squarely into that zone of disagreement. On the one hand, it's highly
likely that those who go as far as actually breaking the law - eg, by
scrawling antisemitic graffiti on the wall of a synagogue, or lobbing stones
at the windows of buildings housing asylum seekers - will accompany those
actions with legal, but clearly abusive, messages on social media. So
recording those messages is intelligence-led policing, it helps build the
case against those individuals when they do commit a crime.
But, on the other hand, the vast majority of people are perfectly capable of
controlling themselves to the extent of not resorting to violence against
persons or property, even if they may occasionally lapse into verbal abuse
when they feel provoked (whether justified or not). And, equally, there is a
tendency, particularly on social media, for people to perceive disagreement
as abuse. Just because someone feels triggered by something posted on social
media does not mean that the person making the post has done anything wrong,
other than possibly being clumsy with their wording - which is not, and
cannot possibly be, a criminal offence.
So, just as with any other non-crime data recorded against a person, the
police have to tread a fine line with non-crime hate incidents and do their
best to ensure that they are only recorded where there is a realistic and
non-trivial probability that it may be linked to, or a precurser of, an
actual crime. And, as with any other non-crime data, there is always going
to be valid disagreement about how this should be regulated.
Having said that, the story reported in The Times today does, on the face of
it, contain examples which, if accurately reported (and I'm not suggesting
that it isn't accurate) clearly should not have been recorded as non-crime
hate incidents. To that extent, there is a genuine concern.
But... anecdotes are not statistics. The article gives thirteen specific
examples, of which, assuming they are accurately reported (same disclaimer
as above), nine are clearly not NCHIs by any reasonable stretch of the
imagination (two could be, depending on other information which the article
doesn't include, and both of them I'd definitely have logged if I'd been the
officer involved). That's out of a total of 13,200 NCHIs reported to the
police over a twelve-month period. Now, I'm willing to accept that there
were more than just those, and that the ones mentioned in the article were
chosen because they were a representative sample that are easily understood.
But, even so, the article doesn't give the impression that mis-recorded
NCHIs form a particularly high proportion of the total.
That doesn't mean there's no problem. Given the potential harm that can be
caused by wrongly recording an NCHI, the police do have to think carefully
about them, and in nine of the examples quoted by the report it's pretty
obvious that such thought was almost completely lacking. But these are
individual errors by individual members of the police. And the police are
human just like the rest of us, they, too, make mistakes sometimes.
The report doesn't, to me, give the impression that the police are routinely
and systematically disregarding the guidelines for recording NCHIs. It does,
possibly, suggest that not all individual officers are as well trained in
the guidelines as they could be, although it could equally suggest that the
police are overworked and under pressure to cut corners. It's often quicker
and easier to tell a complainant that yes, you've logged it as an NCHI,
hoping that will satisfy them and you can then forget about it, than it is
to explain why you won't be logging it. Maybe the police should push back
more at unreasonable NCHI complaints. But then maybe we should give them the
resources to do so.
Mark