Lord Sahota
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Non-Crime Hate Incidents
Lord Sahota Excerpts(1 day, 5 hours ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness is right that one of the purposes of non-crime hate incident assessments is to assess whether there are potential problems or challenges in a particular area. Last year, for example, 44% of religious hate crime offences targeted Muslims, while 24% targeted Jewish people, and there were 82,490 race hate crime offences. That is useful information, but the questions are: what do we do about non-crime hate incidents generally? Should we record them? Do we follow them up? Do they lead to prosecution? Are they a good use of police time? However, the evidence gathered by some of that information is valuable, which is why the College of Policing and the police chiefs’ council are making a genuine assessment, having already said that the non-crime hate incident regime is not fit for purpose.
Lord Sahota (Lab)
My Lords, it will be a sad day when police stop investigating non-crime hate incidents. In the last 10 years, I stood for Parliament twice, and I was the victim of such incidents both times. Non-crime hate is an early warning sign of what is happening in our society so that police and the politicians can keep an eye on it. Does my noble friend the Minister agree?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Again, there are robust mechanisms in place to deal with harassment, racial prejudice and other forms of harassing and abusive and threatening behaviour. The key element of a non-crime hate incident is that it does not reach a threshold of a crime incident but is, in essence, a method of collecting information. For example, in my noble friend’s case, if there were persistent and regular non-crime hate approaches that did not reach that threshold, it might well indicate to the police that there were other aspects of community cohesion behaviour they needed to investigate. The review will decide what happens in terms of police activity following up on a range of matters, and that is what we are awaiting shortly with some interest.