PopCon's Head of Campaigns, Andrew Allison, writes about the visit Allison Pearson received from Essex Police accusing her of a non-crime hate incident.

Non-crime hate incidents. NCHIs for short. I first came across these a number of years ago and wondered what on earth they were and why the police were issuing recorded warnings. If something is a non-crime then it has nothing to do with the police. The police investigate crimes not non-crimes. And hate incidents. What is a hate incident? It is such an all-encompassing phrase that it could be anything that you want it to be - and in practice, regularly is.  

When Allison Pearson wrote in the Telegraph that she had received a knock on her front door and had been accused of committing a non-crime hate incident I was horrified for her; however, I wasn’t surprised. As this report from the Free Speech Union highlights, 34 police forces in England and Wales recorded almost 120,000 NCHIs from 2014 to 2019.  

The police claim that this is some sort of crime prevention measure, like moving a group of youths along before a crime can be committed. But the truth is the opposite. It is a deliberate attempt to police and restrict free speech.  

We don’t know what Allison Pearson’s now deleted tweet said. Essex Police won’t reveal that information. She doesn’t know who the complainant is, although she was told that the complainant is now referred to as a victim. We do know that the tweet is over a year old and that three police forces have been investigating it thus far, and it has also been revealed that Allison may now be facing actual criminal charges.  

Essex Police has accused the media of misreporting the facts. I had to laugh at that. If its press office wasn’t as opaque as a stained-glass window, the media (and the rest of us) wouldn’t have to speculate. Nature abhors a vacuum and the same goes for the media, which one would have thought the press officers in Essex would fully understand.  

You can read Allison’s account of her experience on Remembrance Sunday here. It has been reported across the media (she has received widespread support, including from Elon Musk), and we can only hope that the publicity her case is generating will finally result in the scrapping of NCHIs. Non-crimes are non-crimes. The police ought not to be investigating them, especially as there are already many actual crimes taking place every day which need to be solved.  

I was interviewed on Kevin O’Sullivan’s show on Talk on Wednesday evening about this. Our Director, Mark Littlewood, also spoke about it on GB News. Click on the links to watch them.