At the end of March this year, the British Labour government made a striking announcement: British police will no longer routinely record so-called Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs).
For years, the system has allowed British police to record so-called hate incidents even when no crime has been committed. This has had a particular impact on freedom of speech, as police have monitored social media and recorded entirely lawful statements. At the same time, the system has become a millstone around the necks of both the police and the government, and in March Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced that British police officers should no longer concern themselves with “perfectly legal tweets”, but instead patrol the streets, catch criminals and protect local communities.
To anyone who has followed Britain’s increasingly absurd NCHI practices in recent years, the announcement may look like a welcome return both to freedom of speech and to an elementary principle of the rule of law:
The police should deal with crime.
But it is too early to celebrate. There is little to suggest that either the British government or the police have genuinely abandoned the thinking that created the system. On the contrary, in connection with the reform, the College of Policing explicitly stresses that “the principles established following the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry remain”.
That is worth noting. Because it is precisely in the Stephen Lawrence case and the subsequent Macpherson Report that we find the roots of the practice Labour has now been forced to roll back.
From a Murder to a New Principle of Policing
Stephen Lawrence was 18 when he was murdered in a racially motivated attack in south-east London in 1993. The investigation became a scandal: the police made serious mistakes, the perpetrators were not convicted, and the Lawrence family was failed by the authorities whose job it was to solve the murder.
In 1997, the newly elected Labour government therefore established a public inquiry under Sir William Macpherson. Its report was published in 1999 and had an enormous impact on British policing.
The report recommended that a racist incident should be defined as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”.
This marked an alarming shift from the objective act to the subjective experience: what mattered for police recording was no longer simply what had happened, but how the incident was perceived by the person who felt aggrieved – or indeed by any other person.
But the next recommendation went even further. The definition of a racist incident was to include both “crimes and non-crimes in policing terms”, and both were to “be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment”.
Consider that for a moment:
Crimes and non-crimes were to be investigated by the police with equal commitment.
The Macpherson principle thereby created a grey area: conduct could be entirely lawful and yet still become the subject of police recording and investigation.
If conduct is to become a police matter, the rule-of-law procedure is simple: the legislature criminalises it and thereby defines the limits of state intervention.
A non-crime is a non-crime.
It is almost an institutional law that once a boundary has been made porous, it begins to move.
And that is precisely what happened with the NCHI system over the years. The police came to concern themselves with lawful speech, social media posts, insults and ordinary disputes between citizens – matters that were not crimes but could nevertheless become police business.
The Police Have More Important Things to Do
Now the practice is being rolled back – but not because the Labour government has declared the Macpherson principle a mistake. The government’s own explanation is far more prosaic:
NCHI practices are to be restricted in order to “free up officers’ time to fight crime in communities”. The police should no longer be drawn into “everyday rows and online spats”. Resources are to be devoted to the core tasks of policing.
It is not difficult to see why.
British police have serious problems solving ordinary crime: in 2025/26, for example, more than eight out of ten recorded vehicle theft cases were closed without a suspect being identified, while for several categories of theft the proportion of cases resulting in a charge is very low.
At the same time, the British public’s assessment of the police has deteriorated markedly. In 2015, 62 per cent believed their local police were doing a good or excellent job. Ten years later, that figure had fallen to 49 per cent.
It is against this backdrop that the Labour government has now decided that officers should no longer spend their limited time on “perfectly legal tweets”.
This looks less like a philosophical breakthrough than a necessary act of prioritisation – and that is exactly what it is.
The Thinking Remains
The College of Policing has stressed that the thinking established following the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry remains unchanged. Even after the rollback of NCHIs, British police will still be able to record information about non-criminal incidents.
That is precisely why developments in Britain are worth watching from Denmark. Britain has one of Europe’s oldest and strongest traditions of the rule of law, and when even British institutions can make a boundary as elementary as that between crime and non-crime relative, there is reason to be vigilant.
The most interesting thing about the rollback is precisely that it does not amount to a fundamental rejection of the underlying approach, but merely a restriction of the practice.
The reform is therefore a reminder that institutions can correct the consequences of an error without acknowledging the error itself.
And then the error has not been corrected. It has merely been put on hold.
