How police are cracking down on ‘hate speech’ – while burglaries and shoplifting go unpunished

A police visit to Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson in response to a post on social media last year has raised questions about the monitoring of freedom of expression.

Tens of thousands of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) have been recorded since 2014, at a time when the normal procedural work of police in England and Wales has collapsed. These messages are speeches or messages that police say are “motivated by prejudice,” but do not meet the threshold of a crime.

Despite no crime being committed, individuals are recorded by police and the incidents may even show up in background checks known as disclosure and barring checks.

Despite the potential seriousness of the reports, police forces are not required by the Home Office to report their use, leaving journalists at the mercy of piecemeal freedom of information requests to individual police forces.

According to an earlier FoI request from The Telegraph, an estimated 21,480 NCHIs were registered annually across 34 of the country’s 45 armed forces between 2014 and 2019. In 2019, the police issued only 11,000 fines for crime across all police forces.

A high-profile lawsuit in 2020 highlighted the scale of the issue, and last year Suella Braverman, then interior minister, called for a crackdown on their use.

Instead, 11,690 NCHIs were issued by 30 armed forces in the year ending June, an almost identical number to the year before, according to an FOI request from the Free Speech Union. A number of forces recorded double-digit increases year-on-year.