The end of ‘non-crime hate incidents’

The abolition of this policy is welcome, but it leaves unanswered how such an authoritarian experiment was ever allowed to take root.

What could be more humiliating to a police officer than being compelled to investigate ‘non-crime’? This has been the situation in the United Kingdom for almost twelve years, a sinister symptom of the woke movement and its incredible vice-like grip on our major institutions. Finally, according to a report in today’s Telegraph, the concept of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) is to be scrapped entirely. Perhaps now the police can get back to investigating, well, actual crime.

And yet we should take a moment to consider how it is we ever reached this outlandish situation in the first place, or why it is that so many sensible and intelligent people found themselves making excuses for this most authoritarian of developments. It will doubtless be one of those head-scratchers for future historians, and yet such is the insanity of our times that it was enabled by parties on both the left and the right.

Let’s put this bluntly. Back in 2014, upon hearing that the College of Policing (the body responsible for the training of officers in England and Wales) had introduced the recording and investigation of ‘non-crime’, politicians should have been unanimous in their condemnation. One would have expected various MPs to take a stand in parliament. Questions such as ‘What about free speech?’ or ‘Has the College of Policing gone rogue?’ or simply ‘What the hell is going on?’ should have reverberated around the chamber. Instead, our elected representatives could barely even muster a shrug.

The policing of ‘hate’ is a nonsensical concept in the first place. Over hundreds of thousands of years, humankind has evolved to distinguish allies from enemies, to channel hostile emotions towards rivals in the interests of self-preservation. Hatred is an emotion as fundamental to our species as love or fear or anger or joy. One cannot possibly legislate it out of existence. This is a truth that the ruling classes across the western world are apparently reluctant to face.

For instance, in the wake of the Bondi Beach atrocity in which two antisemitic extremists took fifteen innocent lives, the Australian government is now determined to crack down on ‘hate speech’, as though the ideology of Islamism can be tamed by criminalising nasty words. Men who hate Jews and believe it is righteous to murder them will not become model citizens by limiting their speech. Again, those head-scratching historians of the future will have bleeding scalps by the time they’ve made sense of any of this.

At least in the UK, this experiment in thought-policing is apparently coming to an end. But unless the authorities reflect on why they enacted such an obviously blockheaded policy in the first place, the general authoritarian trajectory of the country will not be diverted. It is insufficient for the police to declare, as they have now done, that NCHIs are no longer ‘fit for purpose’. They never were. As for their newly proposed ‘common sense’ system, by which intelligence gathering of anti-social behaviour will be limited to only the most extreme forms, this too fails to grapple with the problem. Why has no-one asked the question of how it took over a decade of pure folly for the police to reach the conclusion that common sense might be worth a try?

Let’s remind ourselves of how this farce began…

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