| Two weeks ago, the Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson wrote a column describing a visit from police to her home on Remembrance Sunday. “It was to do with something I had posted on X (formerly Twitter) a year ago,” she wrote. The officers couldn’t tell her what the offending post was, but said someone had reported it as a non-crime hate incident (NCHI), Pearson claimed. “A non-crime – what the hell?” she wrote, complaining that their action had “defiled Remembrance Sunday”. And thus a news event was given its wings. As the story has metastasized in recent days, it has turned into a wider complaint that NCHIs are an affront to freedom of speech – and an egregious waste of police time. But the general hysteria that has decorated the front pages, both in reference to Pearson’s case and others, is not always based on a fair reading of the facts. Here’s what you need to know to make sense of it. What is a non-crime hate incident? You could be forgiven for thinking, given the sudden intensity of media attention, that NCHIs are an innovation of the contemporary wokerati. In fact, they have their origins in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry in 1999. Before that, the then Association of Chief Police Officers defined a “racial incident” as “any incident which includes an allegation of racial motivation made by any person”. But Sir William Macpherson’s report into Lawrence’s murder recommended that – partly because of a view among communities of colour that the “white” version of such incidents was generally accepted by police – the term “racist incident” should explicitly include both crimes and non-crimes. “Both must be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment,” Macpherson said. Since then, rules around NCHIs have been set out by the College of Policing and expanded to cover other protected characteristics like disability, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity. The College of Policing’s 2014 guidance says that even when no crime has been committed, any report “must be recorded regardless of whether or not [the complainant is] the victim, and irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element”. In 2023, partly in response to a court case which found that the recording of NCHIs interfered with the right to freedom of expression, the then home secretary Suella Braverman published new guidance. It said that incidents should only be recorded when “clearly motivated by intentional hostility”, and that the right to free speech should be prioritised. In August this year, Labour home secretary Yvette Cooper was reported to be considering reversing that change to improve monitoring of antisemitic and Islamophobic abuse that could escalate into violence. Why are we talking about this now? Because of the Pearson case, basically: there have been 177 newspaper articles about NCHIs since her column was published, versus 38 in the previous six months. But the Pearson story does not appear to have been an NCHI at all. After her initial column, Essex police said that bodycam footage showed that, in fact, she was told that the complaint was of a potential criminal offence of inciting racial hatred online. Pearson’s original post showed police with two people of colour holding up the flag of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, a Pakistani political party founded by Imran Khan; Pearson reposted it with the comment “look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters”, apparently because she confused the PTI flag with that of Hamas. She later deleted the post. Essex police have since dropped the case. There may be an argument here about where the bar should be for police investigations of hate crime – but that is not the controversy that is being aired. In any case, the peg of the Pearson column has been used for a wider excavation of examples of NCHIs perceived as overzealous. These have not always told the full story. One Sun front page proclaimed that “Dodgy haircut is hate crime” (rather than, er, literally a non-crime); but the story eventually explains that the complainant was a Lithuanian who felt that his barber was aggressive after a discussion of the war in Ukraine because he spoke Russian. The Daily Telegraph reported that“police recorded non-crime hate incident over handshake refusal in alleged gender row”, which would seem to imply that the issue was a difference of opinion over gender politics. But Warwickshire police’s record said that the victim thought that the refusal was, instead, because of their gender identity. Such cases certainly aren’t crimes, and there is an entirely legitimate debate about the fact that police record them – but nor do they appear to be the pure nonsense that much of the coverage suggests. What are the best arguments in defence of NCHIs? The case for the recording of NCHIs begins with the idea that doing so allows officers to monitor patterns of behaviour that could indicate a wider problem brewing. Another argument is that they allow those in groups that are frequently subjected to prejudice to report incidents without having to ascertain themselves whether or not a crime has been committed. As Danny Stone, chief executive of the Antisemitism Policy Trust, wrote for ConservativeHome in 2022: | 