Member

I also note that the muddle of discretion and subjectivity associated with what constitutes hate, and which is associated with the promiscuous use of non-crime hate incidents, has been very damaging to the credibility of criminal justice and the notion of it as non-partisan, not least because non-crime hate incidents have been used by police in a particularly one-sided way. The noble Lord, Lord Kempsell, explained that some police forces were zealots and some were normal. On the one hand, the reporting of these appears to be driven by bad-faith complainants using them to harass political opponents, as has been described in other speeches; but there is seemingly the danger of some politicised police officers also joining in—activist officers using NCHIs to punish wrong-think, the wrong kind of opinions, with a knock on the door.