Non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped, says ‘anti-woke' police chief
Non-crime hate incidents have gone too far and should be scrapped, the head of Greater Manchester Police has said.
Sir Stephen Watson said the policy had been introduced with good intentions but was now past its 'sell-by date'.
He stressed it was not the job of the police to involve themselves in people's arguments, and said the collection of non-crime hate incident data had fuelled the accusations of two-tier policing.
In a speech to the Policy Exchange think tank, the Chief Constable, who was knighted in the King's recent birthday honours list, urged police forces to get back to basics in order to restore public trust and confidence.
He also hit out at the impact human rights legislation was having on policing, saying it was not right that foreign criminals who 'fecklessly fathered children' could then avoid deportation by claiming the right to a family life.
A non-crime hate incident is defined as an incident that falls short of being criminal but is perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person with a particular characteristic.
Non-crime hate incidents were introduced in 2014 following recommendations made in the Macpherson Report into the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence.
They are intended to provide forces with an intelligence picture of community tensions and help them understand where problems might suddenly arise, but have often resulted in police intervening in social media spats, with critics claiming they have a chilling effect on free speech.
There are also concerns that they serve as a distraction for stretched police officers, who would be better off concentrating on serious crime.
Asked if he believed whether the policy of collecting non-crime hate incident data should be scrapped, Sir Stephen said: 'Simple answer – yes, I think it should. I think the policy has passed its sell-by date.'
He said it was the 'antithesis' of doing the basics and was at odds with the public perception of what was right.
Sir Stephen conceded that the policy was introduced so police could have a better understanding of vulnerable people in their communities.
But he added: 'What it morphed into was pretty much anybody with a protected characteristic who perceived themselves to be a victim of an incident, because of that, was automatically recorded. I think that's a mistake, and I think it went too far.'
Sir Stephen was also critical of the impact some areas of the Human Rights Act was having on policing and confidence in the justice system.
He said: 'The Human Rights Act is part of the panoply of the legislative machinery within which we have to operate. And candidly, you know, as a police officer it is less helpful for me to pontificate on what the legislative framework should look like. It's simply observing what it is and faithfully serving it in the public interest.
'However, there are manifestations of the Human Rights Act, which I think impacts policing and society more generally, I mean classically, foreign national offenders and the ability to deport people.
'It seems to me that is entirely unhelpful, particularly when people are simply claiming on the basis of having, very often, fecklessly fathered the number of children in our country, that they somehow shouldn't be deported because they have the right to a family life. Well, I suspect most of the public beg to differ.'
Greater Manchester Police was in special measures when Sir Stephen was appointed four years ago, but he has turned the force around thanks to a traditional, no-nonsense approach to policing.
He said getting the basics correct was vital if police forces were to deliver what the public expected.
He added: 'It's picking up the phone, it's getting to people. It's turning up looking like you can pull the skin off a rice pudding.
'It's about being smart, it's about being professional, it's about being compassionate, it's about being diligent.
'It's about understanding the law, and it's about demonstrating to the public that you care and you're hungry to help because they don't ring us because they want to talk to us, they ring us because bad things are happening in their lives, things that are causing them and their families great consternation.
'It's about recording all crime faithfully, it is about investigating every reasonable line of enquiry for a single crime, and it's about locking people up. And it's about doing all of this with vim and vigour to demonstrate to the public that we're there to be relied upon.'
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