Ex-Met Police detective backs 'common sense' move to scrap non-crime hate incidents: 'Bureaucratic exercise!'

The plan to scrap non-crime hate incidents is expected to be announced by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Instead, they are to be replaced with a "common sense" system, meaning just a small portion of incidents will now be reported under a serious category of anti-social behaviour.

Delivering his verdict on the move, Mr Hurley told GB News: "It's absolutely common sense. This all came from some bright young thruster assistant chief officer who was tasked or came up with the idea of stopping hurty words in one form or another.

"And as a net result, we created this huge bureaucratic exercise where essentially most people we've got in altercations, whether there are kids in playgrounds or arguments with neighbours, ended up getting non-crime hate incidents recorded against them, which potentially could have come up on the DBS barring checks and affect them for for the rest of their life."

He added: "But the other thing it did, it took policing and police away from the real work, which is protecting us from thieves and violent criminals and getting them involved in essentially neighbourly disputes.

"So we ended up with police being called in the school playgrounds and so on. I'm not saying there isn't a case for police intervening in cases of extreme harassment of people or threats of violence, but what this created was a whole industry. And I might add, as a former police leader, one of the problems that you've actually got with some of your police staff is stopping them picking what I would call the low hanging fruit, and to justify their existence. And the low hanging fruit is this stuff."

Criticising the policy for creating "conflict-dodging officers", Mr Hurley said: "It's easy to go and record non-crime hate incidents instead of go out there and hunt and stop and search burglars and robbers.

"So in a way this enabled what I would call conflict-dodging police officers to, if you like, create work for themselves and conflict-dodging sergeants get involved in supervising this.

"Instead of focusing on the real business, which is dealing with the rapists, the people who assault women, the people who abuse children, burglars, and so on. So yes, it's absolutely common sense."

Questioned by host Andrew Pierce about the investigations and "how on earth" it was allowed to get to this point, he responded: "Well, first off, the system was created, then we brought in, quite rightly, this idea of what's called safeguarding of children.

"And then we over bureaucratised teaching so that teachers needed to cover their butts. So in anything like this, to avoid a complaint, they think, 'oh, let's call the police'. They might have been more responsive to looking at cases of children who disappear off to Africa in the holidays and then come back suffering from pain because they've been subjected to female genital mutilation.

"But this is all too scary and too difficult for teachers too often face up to it and manage their true roles of safeguarding young children from being violated by perverse cultures."

The ex-detective continued: "What we get is, if you bring in these ideas and then you bring in the bureaucracy and you over supervise teachers or nurses or police, and you fill it up with bureaucracy, they naturally will protect themselves from complaints and do the easier stuff of filling the forms, then addressing the real problems."

Research conducted by Guido Fawkes has shown that since the Met's announcement on October 20, the number of NCHIs reported has actually increased.

From August 1 to the date of the announcement on October 20, the Met was recording an average of 50 non-crime hate incidents per week.

But in the week after the announcement, recordings actually went up at an average of 58 in seven days.

The chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, told The Telegraph: "NCHIs will go as a concept. That system will be scrapped and replaced with a completely different system.

"There will be no recording of anything like it on crime databases. Instead, only the most serious category of what will be treated as anti-social behaviour will be recorded. It’s a sea change."