TRIGGERnometry - May 03, 2024


Why Are the Police Investigating “Non-crime”？

Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Beautiful Noise Hamza Youssef Harry Miller Sweet Caroline Sarah Fillmore Murdo Fraser Philip K. Dick Melissa Poulton Suella Braverman Rachel McLean George Orwell Priti Patel Amber Rudd Sez Etzong Bedfordshire Redditch Brexit
How Wokeness is Destroying the British Army - Steven Edginton The Atheism Delusion - Konstantin Kisin

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

178.73

Word count

1,710

Sentence count

89

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Non-crime hate incidents have been on the rise in recent years in England and Wales, and in Scotland, they are on their way to becoming more common than ever before. But what exactly is the difference between a hate crime and a non-crime incident? And what role do the police have in investigating them?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:06.520 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
00:00:11.780 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:00:15.780 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:00:22.660 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, The Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:00:27.120 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.
00:00:30.580 What business do our police forces have in investigating non-crime?
00:00:35.520 Is this not the precise opposite of their purpose?
00:00:38.240 It would be the equivalent of a doctor who limits his attention to the vigorous and the healthy.
00:00:42.980 And yet this is precisely how our law enforcement officers are spending much of their valuable time.
00:00:47.500 Between 2014 and 2019, almost 120,000 non-crime hate incidents were recorded by forces in England and Wales.
00:00:55.860 Estimates now suggest that since then the figure will have risen to well over a quarter of a million.
00:01:01.780 In Scotland, the situation has arguably got even worse, what with the introduction of the SNP's new hate crime law.
00:01:08.180 Police Scotland is already stretched to the limit, which is why it recently announced its proportional response strategy.
00:01:14.180 That is to say, the police will no longer investigate vandalism or theft if the crimes are unlikely to be solved.
00:01:21.040 And yet First Minister Hamza Youssef believes that non-crime ought to be a priority.
00:01:26.300 Here's what he had to say in a recent interview with STV.
00:01:29.080 In terms of incidents and hate crime incidents, it's important that they are recorded because what it does is it gives police an idea of where there might be spikes in hatred.
00:01:37.340 That behaviour might not be criminal, but they can then see a pattern that is simply done so police can see if there's a rise in anti-Semitism, for example,
00:01:44.040 or a rise in homophobia right across the country.
00:01:48.720 It's important that police are able to monitor any patterns of hatred that might emerge.
00:01:52.180 It has apparently escaped Youssef's attention that the rate of non-crime has escalated in recent years because there is no evidential threshold required for such incidents.
00:02:01.740 They are recorded by police even when there is no evidence of hatred other than the perception of the victim.
00:02:08.720 And these numbers become wildly inflated the more that the police appeal to the public to report them.
00:02:14.120 Who would have thought that people with a grudge might exploit such a system?
00:02:17.600 Youssef's comments came about because a Scottish Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser, discovered that the force recorded a non-crime hate incident against his name.
00:02:27.300 This was a result of criticism he'd posted online of the SNP's policies on gender self-identification.
00:02:33.360 Choosing to identify as non-binary is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat. 1.00
00:02:38.920 I'm not sure governments should be spending time on action plans for either.
00:02:42.620 And Fraser is not the only politician who has fallen foul of the non-law in recent times.
00:02:48.280 In 2017, the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd had a non-crime hate incident recorded against her because she referred to migrant workers in a speech at the Tory party conference.
00:02:58.540 Someone took offence and contacted the police.
00:03:01.100 That was all it took.
00:03:02.020 And Rachel McLean, the MP for Redditch and Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party, was in the news in December for reposting a tweet in which she referred to Green Party candidate Melissa Poulton as
00:03:12.920 a man who wears a wig and calls himself a proud lesbian.
00:03:17.540 This happened to be a statement of fact, but this didn't stop the West Mercia police adding the dreaded mark against her name.
00:03:23.540 So where has all this come from?
00:03:24.740 In 2014, the College of Policing, the Quango responsible for training police forces in the UK, introduced non-crime hate incidents. 1.00
00:03:33.360 They had no mandate from the government.
00:03:35.260 It was more a case that activists who believe in the need to control the language of the public had become predominant, as they have in so many public institutions.
00:03:43.080 The idea would be that even if someone hadn't committed a crime, signs of hate needed to be monitored in case these sentiments developed into criminal activity in the future.
00:03:50.900 Philip K. Dick once described this kind of thing as pre-crime.
00:03:55.080 He thought he was writing dystopian science fiction, but in actuality, he was predicting the state of the UK in the early 21st century.
00:04:03.000 Non-crime hate incidents work in the following way.
00:04:06.100 If someone feels insulted or offended and perceives that the slight is motivated by hate, they can contact the police and the person in question will have a hate incident recorded against them.
00:04:15.100 They usually won't be informed and the only way to find out is to submit a subject access request.
00:04:20.900 Hate is defined as an offence against one of the protected characteristics, and you can find those listed on the websites of the Crown Prosecution Service and the College of Policing.
00:04:30.520 Race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and disability.
00:04:34.860 The SNP has added a sixth category in its new hate crime legislation, variations in sex characteristics, which is apparently related to those described as intersex.
00:04:45.380 Those familiar with UK law will have noticed that this list is a riff on the protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010.
00:04:53.120 Gender reassignment has turned into transgender identity.
00:04:57.500 And the category of sex has been removed entirely.
00:05:00.460 In other words, the law enforcement agencies are using revised lists of their own making to better reflect their ideology.
00:05:08.020 This explains why threats against women for standing up for single-sex spaces tend to be ignored by the police, while those accused of misgendering have been strong-armed into custody.
00:05:18.520 And although nobody has been actually arrested for non-crime, there can be serious implications.
00:05:23.480 There are certain jobs, such as teaching, for which a disclosure and barring service check is a prerequisite.
00:05:29.080 Applicants for posts of this kind are likely to be eliminated from consideration if a non-crime hate incident is flagged.
00:05:34.660 And in any case, the principles of a liberal democracy ought to override such practices.
00:05:39.960 It is deeply sinister and authoritarian to have the police recording lists of citizens who have committed wrong-think.
00:05:46.740 One wonders how many of us have been logged as hateful in this way.
00:05:50.960 A man in Bedfordshire was slapped with a non-crime hate incident for whistling the theme tune from Bob the Builder at his neighbour, which for some reason was interpreted as racist.
00:05:59.680 Other actions that have been recorded as hate incidents by police include a disputed line call in a tennis match,
00:06:06.140 a dog defecating on someone's lawn, and a man saying that he was campaigning for Brexit.
00:06:11.480 Even children's playground insults have been logged as non-crime hate incidents.
00:06:15.980 The lawyer, Sarah Fillmore, who has appeared on my show many times, was recorded as having committed a hateful act when she posted a satirical tweet,
00:06:23.940 which featured a picture of her puppy, along with the caption,
00:06:27.280 My dog will call me a Nazi for cheese.
00:06:31.000 As Fillmore has noted in relation to Youssef's recent comments on the subject,
00:06:34.440 the recording of malicious and ideologically motivated complaints of hate provide the police with zero useful operational information,
00:06:42.100 even assuming they can never get round to analysing them.
00:06:45.000 This is about Sez Etzong, the Stasi technique of psychological degradation to make us afraid, 0.82
00:06:50.720 to make us our own jailers and our own censors.
00:06:54.420 Cheaper that way than prison or bullets.
00:06:56.820 Not only is all of this a huge waste of police resources and taxpayers' money, but it's not even lawful.
00:07:02.340 We know this thanks to the efforts of Harry Miller, a former constable who was contacted by Humberside Police in 2019
00:07:08.240 following a complaint by an offended party about a poem that he had shared on social media which was deemed to be transphobic.
00:07:15.520 Harry, being an ex-cop, knew something was amiss.
00:07:18.700 He asked the officer why the unnamed complainant was being described as a victim if no crime had been committed,
00:07:25.020 and why he was being investigated at all.
00:07:27.560 To which came the baleful response,
00:07:29.940 We need to check your thinking.
00:07:32.160 Thankfully, Harry is a tenacious type who took the police to the high courts with the help of the Free Speech Union.
00:07:37.300 In December 2021, the Court of Appeal ruled that the recording of non-crime hate incidents
00:07:42.800 is plainly an interference with freedom of expression.
00:07:46.460 Earlier that year, the Home Secretary Priti Patel had instructed the police to stop all such investigations.
00:07:52.480 And in March 2023, Home Secretary Suela Braverman published new guidelines reminding police
00:07:57.600 that the recording of non-crime cannot continue.
00:08:01.100 But in spite of these government decrees and a high court ruling that has emphasised its illegality,
00:08:07.520 the College of Policing has merely fudged the language of its guidance and carried on as before.
00:08:13.180 And with its recent hate crime law, the SNP are just taking this to the next level.
00:08:17.720 At some point, this has got to stop.
00:08:20.520 Surely, it's beyond the point now where the College of Policing ought to be abolished
00:08:24.740 and replaced with a service that observes the law rather than the demands of activists.
00:08:30.060 And surely, the Scottish electorate will soon begin to wake up to the authoritarianism
00:08:34.740 that is hardwired into the DNA of its own government.
00:08:38.500 We are now firmly in the age of thought crime anticipated by George Orwell.
00:08:42.620 If those in charge do not understand the importance of liberty,
00:08:45.620 the people will have to remind them, either through the ballot box or through civil disobedience.
00:08:52.100 The alternative is too chilling to contemplate.
00:08:55.920 If you enjoyed this video, please do check out my substack,
00:08:59.040 where all of these articles appear weeks in advance.
00:09:01.720 There's plenty of other material there too, so do check it out.
00:09:04.420 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:09:11.140 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more,
00:09:14.680 featuring all the songs you love, including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:09:20.400 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here,
00:09:24.480 The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:09:27.160 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:09:32.220 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.