Non-crime hate incidents are set to be abolished today just five months after the Metropolitan Police ceased investigating such cases.
Current regulations require forces to examine acts that appear to show hostility based on characteristics such as race, religion, disability, or gender, even when no criminal offence has occurred.
Ministers stated that ambiguous guidance had led officers to attend homes over "insults and routine arguments."
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said: "Under these reforms, forces will no longer be policing perfectly legal tweets."
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“Instead, they will be doing what they do best: patrolling our streets, catching criminals, and keeping communities safe."
Following a review by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs' Council, a stricter definition will determine when police involvement is warranted, with records created only where a clear risk of harm exists.
However, there will be no automatic removal of existing incidents from individuals' records.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp dismissed the announcement as ineffective, arguing it would do nothing to free up police resources.
Non-crime hate incidents will be officially scrapped
| GETTY"This is simply a rebrand of non-crime hate incidents with a more restrictive triage process," he said.
"Reports are still logged, personal data still recorded, and disclosure rules are unchanged. Officers and staff will still be tied up monitoring incidents that do not meet the criminal threshold, at a cost in time and resources."
Mr Philp maintained that the public wants officers concentrating on apprehending criminals and maintaining safe streets.
"Conservatives have been consistently clear that the police should get back to basics and non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped to free up police time," he added.
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'Under these reforms, forces will no longer be policing perfectly legal tweets,' Shabana Mahmood said
|GETTY
The Met's decision to halt investigations followed the case of Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, who was arrested at Heathrow Airport last year on suspicion of inciting violence over three posts on X concerning transgender issues.
His arrest provoked significant debate, with right-wing politicians and author JK Rowling among those expressing outrage.
Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley subsequently acknowledged that officers found themselves in "an impossible position" when handling online statements.
Assistant Chief Constable Tom Harding, director at the College of Policing, said the current approach had failed to meet expectations of either the public or modern policing.
The Met's decision to halt investigations followed the case of Graham Linehan, who was arrested for three X posts
| PA"Today we are setting out a fundamentally different way of handling reports so that officers can focus efforts on their core duties of preventing crime and protecting communities, while making clear that lawful free speech is not a police matter," he said.
The recording system originated following Stephen Lawrence's murder in 1993 and the subsequent inquiry into his death, establishing a framework for documenting racist incidents and crimes.
During a Lords debate earlier this month, his mother, Labour peer Baroness Doreen Lawrence of Clarendon, cautioned that insults can escalate into physical attacks.
"It depends on how you see non-crime hate, and it depends on who's at the receiving end of that," she said. "Now, for me, it led to the murder of my son."
She warned that individuals who believe they can speak about young black men in derogatory ways often progress from verbal abuse to violence.
"How do you move forward if it moves from verbal into violence and you have no way of tracking back where it started from?" she asked.
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