'Police streets not tweets!' Reform's policing adviser backs end of non-crime hate incidents

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 anticipated U-turn, Mr Sutton told GB News: "I do welcome it, it's something we've been saying would be our policy for some time, and it's nice to have this validation again.

"Other people are accepting what we're saying, and it makes sense, but I think we need to be cautious. We need to see what replaces it."

Detailing his main issue with current non-crime hate incidents, he added: "There is a place in policing for logging these sorts of incidents as intelligence items only because obviously, if you're getting a sudden uptick in hate occurrences on a particular neighbourhood or particular estate, then you want to know about it, so you can take steps to try and stop it.

"The thing for me, the big thing for me is these are not crimes. They should not be attributable to an individual person, and they certainly shouldn't show up in DBS checks or vetting checks or something like that. If that's where we're going with it, then I think, yes, we can welcome it."

Noting that Reform's policy will include a "wider strategy around free speech", Mr Sutton explained: "It will be a wider strategy around free speech that we're working on, which will include a clear statement, clear training for officers and a clear statement for the public.

"What is free speech, what is hate, what is incitement, what is abuse, what is offence? And we think that if we publish those guidelines and then policing sticks to them and enforces them fairly, then we will be in a much better position than we are at the moment, when it's rather piecemeal and different enforcement practices are taken by different forces."

Questioned by host Andrew Pierce on whether he believes the "explosion of social media" is to blame for the rise in non-crime hate incidents, Mr Sutton responded: "Yeah, I think so.

"Social media is something that perhaps we weren't really prepared for as a society, and that includes policing. There is this horrible mistake that people make by thinking that the online world is the real world. And what we've found from talking to people and talking to communities and talking to people in the neighbourhoods, is that they are much more concerned about policing of the real world than they are policing with the online world."

He added: "And that's where the shift in focus has to come so that we're away. It's the trite phrase 'don't police the tweets, police the streets', but this is very much part of it.

"But I do stress, we can't just stop recording them because there isn't a role for this.

"We used to call them tension indicators years and years ago when I was serving, and you do need that in being on a particular estate in a particular neighbourhood, you need to know so you can nip it in the butt and can take action to stop any real problems happening."

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

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."

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.