Police resources should not be used to investigate and potentially prosecute “non-crime hate incidents;” the government must put an end to this nonsense.

LET’S hope that the Government means it this time.

Yesterday, Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, announced that she would stop having police report “non-crime hate incidents” that do not involve any physical violence.

2

The whole concept, she said, was “Orwellian”.

“Non-criminal hate incidents must not distract the police from their core duties,” she continued, “and they should not be used to inhibit free speech.”

Fine words, indeed.

But this is exactly what we have heard from conservative Home Secretaries in the past.

Almost exactly two years ago, Priti Patel said the same thing, as did Amber Rudd before her.

A professor from Oxford took offense to a speech Rudd gave at the Conservative Party Conference about migrant workers and filed a formal complaint with the police.

They conducted a thorough probe and concluded that criminal charges were not warranted but that the incident would be documented nonetheless.

Deeply disturbing

However, despite the government’s assurances that it will act and a directive to the police to focus on serious crimes, investigations into Twitter fights and other trivial incidents continue to consume an inordinate amount of police time.

In 2021, a neighbor complained that a man in Bedfordshire was being racist because he whistled the theme song to Bob the Builder.

Someone lodged a complaint against a man from Hampshire in August, and he was taken into custody after he retweeted a meme that rearranged four LGBT Pride flags to form a swastika.

I’m sick and tired of people like Gary Lineker equating their political opponents with Nazis.

Is it really a hate crime to point out that you don’t agree with the unreasonable behavior of a group of political activists?

Kids are disproportionately affected by hate crimes that don’t involve physical violence.

After losing a video game with some friends, the 14-year-old student at a school in Wakefield, West Yorks, was reportedly told to bring a copy of the Koran to school as revenge.

He complied, but in the process he dropped the book, causing some damage that his accusers took to be evidence of his hatred for the book.

True acts of hatred against others are, without a doubt, a grave matter.

There is no justification for the 2018 van attack outside a mosque in North London, the attempted bombing of the Liverpool Women’s Hospital on Remembrance Sunday, 2021, or the 1999 bombing of a gay-frequented pub in Soho.

Actual acts of hatred warrant the harshest punishments.

But the idea of a hate incident that does not involve criminal behavior is disturbing.

It’s not a crime, as the name implies; it’s just something that someone finds offensive.

At no point is the severity of such an event considered inconsequential.

Anything the “victim” finds offensive can be considered a non-criminal hate incident.

It could be any remark with which someone has a political disagreement, like the academic who objected to Rudd’s speech despite admitting he had not actually listened to it, only read reports about it.

However, regulations mandate that police officers document such incidents, and they may surface years later if a person is subjected to an enhanced records check.

If you made a snide remark on the playground when you were younger, it could hurt your chances of getting a job where you would be working with children.

Because he called another boy “shorty,” one young man ended up in juvenile court.

There is an extraordinarily high chance that you or someone you know will encounter this situation.

An estimated 120,000 hate incidents that did not involve criminal activity were reported to English police over the past five years.

Even though the Court of Appeal ruled in 2021 that the investigation into former Humberside police officer Harry Miller for “transphobic” tweets violated Miller’s right to free expression, the entire affair has continued.

What had he tweeted to upset his accusers?

I was born a mammal, but my heart belongs to the sea,” he wrote. Please don’t assume my species.

The case was supposed to prompt a rewrite of national guidelines for how police should handle hate incidents that do not involve criminal activity by the College of Policing.

Woke obsessions

However, the police continue to exaggerate even minor incidents.

Non-criminal hate incidents are being used to make it seem like Britain is a hotbed of racism and hate, even though they do not result in criminal records for those involved.

If you look at the numbers without context, all you will see is a huge tidal wave of “hate incidents” over the past decade.

And yet, this is not the result of genuine social change; rather, it is the unavoidable consequence of directing police to document every public insult.

However, there is a mountain of actual crime that has gone unsolved.

To see if anything happens after you report a crime, try filing a report for a burglary or a case of online fraud.

Suella Braverman is correct in pointing out that “hate” incidents that do not involve criminal activity are diverting police resources.

In its place, they should focus on actual crime and stop catering to “woke” obsessions currently in vogue.

The only question is whether or not she means what she says when she says she will have police stop recording these incidents.

We live in hope.