Contribution
I referred to the comments made by previous speakers on this group who talked about police wasting their time recording. The two groups of people I have just referred to have tried to report these incidents and have not been able to get them taken particularly seriously. Therein lies the problem. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, that there has to be new, revised, clear guidance about how the police need to process these things. It may be that there will be many that are not now processed, but we cannot just say that we should get rid of non-crime hate incidents in their entirety.
A lot of the other speeches during this debate have talked about the polarisation in our society being because people are now saying things to others, with people becoming offended. We discussed this briefly last week. The things being said to people on the street would not have been said five or six years ago. People might have thought them as they walked past, but it was quite rare. We are deeply offended if it targets us. We often do not recognise when we are being offensive to other people. I say again: there is something about the way our society is working at the moment that means we have to learn to look at ourselves, not just at the others we do not like. The police, who are literally trying to police all this, are in a very invidious position. They need tools to record information because it helps them to assess and understand when other things happen. It is much broader than non-crime hate incidents, as I have alluded to already.
Paul Giannasi OBE, the national hate crime lead for the police, has been reviewing the current protocols and his recommendations for a new code of practice will be very welcome. I am sure, from what the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, has said and from what I have heard elsewhere, that there certainly will be changes. We have to understand that the key issue here is balancing those individual rights: the absolute freedom of expression as expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton—he and I had a debate about JS Mill last week—alongside the state’s obligation to protect citizens against targeted victimisation. The police must be able to gather intelligence and evidence and log symbolic messaging to targeted groups. All the other things—about whether those end up on DBS—can be looked at as part of this review, and I am sure they will be. But the police need to see that bigger, wider picture.
One of the problems about the Lawrence murder was that the police were not watching what was happening in that community in the months and years running up to it. That institutional blindness was certainly one of the things that came out of the inquiry. As others have said, the monitoring of such incidents was the result of the recommendations by Sir William Macpherson as part of his public inquiry in response to Stephen Lawrence’s murder.
I come back to this point: in terms of practical value, the police must be able to record incidents that do not in and of themselves amount to criminal offence, because many crimes, such as I described with harassment, and indeed with stalking, require evidence of a course of conduct. People say to me, “Oh, but stalking is always about relationships; that’s not about a hate crime”. Quite a lot of stalking is actually non-domestic, and it is targeted at somebody because of a particular characteristic.
I finish on the point I made right at the start about the evidence that police need for this course of conduct if behaviour escalates. If a group of people go out and do things again and again, there is a point at which it is going to tip over. I was party to and a survivor of something that ended up as 132 crimes; once the police saw all the evidence that we had been holding of the earlier non-crime hate, it was extremely helpful when things started to escalate. Reform is absolutely needed. We hope that the review will have recommendations for a new regime. But I also hope that it will not leave victims vulnerable, either from perpetrators whose behaviour escalates or from police who are not quite clear about the role they have in recording non-crime incidents.