Police ordered to stop wasting time on Twitter squabbles

Non-crime hate incidents will officially be abolished five months after Scotland Yard’s chief ordered the force to stop investigating Twitter spats .

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said he didn’t believe officers “should be policing toxic culture wars” in the wake of a row over the arrest of Father Ted writer Graham Linehan for comments about trans people made online .

Chief constables were accused of failing to concentrated on crimes such as murder and robbery in favour of “everyday rows”.

Under current rules, forces are expected to look into acts which appear to be motivated by hostility towards people with certain characteristics including race, religion, disability or gender, that fall short of being crimes.

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There will be no automatic wiping of the incidents from people’s records after the decision and can appear in background checks for job applications.

A nine-year-old who called a primary school classmate a “retard” and two schoolgirls saying another smelt “like fish” are among some 10,000 NCHIs recorded annually.

City of London Police had a hate complaint from a man claiming he’d been given a dodgy haircut.

The Lithuanian said his barber was “aggressive and rough” because he spoke Russian.

Essex Police dropped its case against Telegraph writer Allison Pearson for alleged incitement of racial hatred over a year-old deleted post online.

Scrapping NCHIs will give officers more time to focus on their day-to-day policing, ministers hope.

The move, which comes after a College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council review, will see a tighter definition of what constitutes an incident requiring police involvement.

Fewer reports will automatically trigger a police record under the plans, with officers and call handlers recording information only where there is a clear risk of harm.

“Instead, they will be doing what they do best: patrolling our streets, catching criminals, and keeping communities safe.”
“This is simply a rebrand of non-crime hate incidents with a more restrictive triage process,” he said.

“Reports are still logged, personal data still recorded, and disclosure rules are unchanged.

Officers and staff will still be tied up monitoring incidents that do not meet the criminal threshold, at a cost in time and resources.

“People want the police focused on catching criminals and keeping streets safe.

Conservatives have been consistently clear the police should get back to basics and non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped to free up police time.”
NCHIs were introduced after the racist murder of student Stephen Lawrence in 1993.

An inquiry into his death set up a system for reporting and recording hate incidents and crimes.

During a Lords debate earlier this month, his mother, Labour peer Baroness Doreen Lawrence of Clarendon said insults can lead to violence.

She urged peers to consider “what implication” abandoning the system could have.

“It depends on how you see non-crime hate and it depends on who’s at the receiving end of that,” she said.

“Now for me, it led to the murder of my son.

“Now, individuals who think they’ve got the right to walk around and talk about, especially, young black men in a certain way, what starts off as just verbal, it leads to violence.”
She added: “How do you move forward if it moves from verbal into violence and you have no way of tracking back where it started from?”
Stephen’s father Neville Lawrence said the decision was going back on Lord Macpherson’s inquiry following his son’s death.

He told the Daily Mirror: “A lot of people are going to get really angry and maybe turn to violence.

There are supposed to be laws to make sure people can live decent lives.

“If the police aren’t going to record these incidents then who are?”
Irish comedy writer Linehan was arrested at Heathrow Airport last year on suspicion of inciting violence over three posts he had made on X.

His arrest sparked debate, with Conservative politicians and Harry Potter author JK Rowling among those voicing their outrage.

“We have clearly established the current approach does not meet the expectations of either.

“Today we are setting out a fundamentally different way of handling reports so that officers can focus efforts on their core duties of preventing crime and protecting communities, while making clear that lawful free speech is not a police matter.

“Recording of non-crime hate incidents represents a very small proportion of overall police demand and while well intentioned, there has been a disproportionate use of the process which has eroded public trust.”