Logging hate incidents can help fight crime, say police

POLICE CHIEFS have defended officers’ rights to record “non-crime” hate incidents ahead of a court challenge, saying the measures help “monitor tensions” among communities.

Former police officer Harry Miller will take his case against the College of Policing to the Court of Appeal this week. In 2020 Mr Miller lost a legal challenge against the college to make guidance for officers about recording such “non-crimes” unlawful.

As part of the same legal challenge, Mr Miller won a case against Humberside Police related to one complaint concerning a limerick about transgender people that he tweeted.

Police visited the workplace of Mr Miller, who is from Lincoln and is now a businessman, and told him he had committed a “hate incident”.

A judge ruled that officers had unlawfully interfered with Mr Miller’s right to freedom of expression.

Iain Raphael, assistant chief constable from the College of Policing, said the guidance was designed to crack down on crime rather than speech.

“Non-crime hate incidents can be precursors to subsequent violent crime,” he said. “Without recording these incidents, we would not be collecting the information across communities which police need to monitor the build-up of tensions within a community.

“We would risk the police having a blind spot in their local community, hampering their ability to protect members of vulnerable and marginalised groups, and preventing future criminal behaviour.”

In February 2020 The Telegraph

‘Without recording these incidents, we would risk the police having a blind spot in their local community’

reported that just under 120,000 “noncrime hate incidents” had been recorded by police since they were introduced in 2014. Yesterday Mr Miller called Mr Raphael’s suggestion that recording these helped prevent crime “disingenuous”.

He told The Telegraph: “The only thing they have clamped down on so far is free speech. I wasn’t running around naked or anything … they clamped down on me because of what I said.”

Mr Miller said he had spent between £100,000 and £200,000 taking his cases to court, adding: “This is not about me – this is about doing what’s right for Britain.”