Britain’s unrepentant thought-criminals have cheered following the news that the Metropolitan Police has promised to stop probing non-crime hate incidents. The irony, of course, is that the police never investigated NCHIs in the first place: the entire category is a bureaucratic afterbirth of complaints which failed to meet the criminal threshold for a hate crime. An NCHI is merely a record that someone has taken offence to another’s words or actions.

Yesterday’s announcement from the UK’s largest force came just after the confirmation it was dropping its case against comedy writer Graham Linehan. The Father Ted creator had joked that if a man identifying as trans enters a female-only space, women should “make a scene… and if all else fails, punch him in the balls”. For that, he was arrested at Heathrow, taken to a police station, held in a cell and questioned until his blood pressure spiked so seriously he had to be taken to hospital.

Fortunately, Linehan’s fame meant this flagrant overreach didn’t go unnoticed. His arrest drew rebukes from Prime Minister Keir Starmer, J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk and even the office of President Trump.

The Met spokesperson explained yesterday: “The Commissioner has been clear he doesn’t believe officers should be policing toxic culture-war debates, with current laws and rules on inciting violence online leaving them in an impossible position.” The apparent policy change seeks to “provide clearer direction for officers, reduce ambiguity and enable them to focus on matters that meet the threshold for criminal investigations”.

In other words, the police will continue to do exactly what they have already been doing. Barrister Sarah Phillimore knows how sinister that can be. She raised more than £50,000 to get an NCHI scrubbed from her record — a mark that would have appeared on an enhanced DBS check. On X, she called the Met’s announcement “breathtaking, dishonest, cynical spin”. In her view, not investigating NCHIs is precisely the problem: it leaves untested allegations festering in police files.

Phillimore’s ordeal is far from unique. In 2021, former officer Harry Miller had to go to the High Court after police turned up at his workplace over “transphobic” tweets. In the ruling on his case, Mr Justice Julian Knowles said of the police’s actions that “in this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

Following the case, forces were told by the Home Office and the College of Policing to exercise “common sense” to protect free expression. Yet little changed. NCHIs continued to be logged against citizens who offended the feelings of those within the five “protected strands” of hate-crime law: race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity.

Between 2014 and 2023, 43 forces across England and Wales recorded more than 133,000 of these “non-crime crimes” We may never know how many were equally absurd, or how many people have seen their livelihoods and health suffer because someone took offence.

The persistence of NCHIs points to a deeper malaise. Today’s officers aren’t merely enforcing laws — they’re policing social orthodoxy. And at a time when every misstep can be shared online, perception matters more than ever. Already this week, a video has gone viral of a Jewish man being told by officers that his Star of David necklace might cause “offence” to pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

British policing rests on the fragile principle of consent — the understanding that the public cooperates because it trusts the police to act impartially. By siding with activists against majority opinion, officers have squandered that trust, alienating the very people whose cooperation they depend on: the ordinary, law-abiding public. The Met’s slippery statement suggests the top brass may, at last, sense the danger. But until they stop policing opinion instead of crime, they risk finding themselves in a country where no one consents to being policed at all.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.

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