Law and order. The deal’s simple — if a law is broken, justice must be served.
But in 2024, over half of the public said they lacked confidence in the police to tackle crime in their area. Try reporting a burglary, vehicle theft, or robbery and it will fail to receive the resource, time, and attention it rightfully deserves. And whilst minor in comparison to more violent, complex crimes, these crimes slowly chip away at the trust we hold in our communities.
You might have seen the stories. A nine-year-old at school calls a classmate a “retard”. Two teenage girls tell another pupil she “smells like fish”. Unkind? Yes. Playground cruelty? Of course. But instead of a quiet word with a teacher or a call home, the police are brought in. The incident is logged, official records are made, a permanent digital footprint for name-calling. That’s what Britain has become in 2025. A country where officers are tied up documenting playground spats, treating childish jibes like national security threats, as real crimes are pushed to the back of the queue.
What we’ve got now is a different beast — the so-called “non-crime hate incident”. You didn’t quite break the law, you just said something daft and got yourself logged like you’d robbed a bank.
Non-crime hate incidents are being misused. Their purpose has strayed far from the original intent following the 1999 Stephen Lawrence inquiry, which was to highlight imminent risks of crime — not to record a wide array of minor insults.
In recent years, police forces have logged an average of 13,000 of these. That’s 13,000 cases where no law was broken, but time, attention, and public confidence were stolen. If we want the public to trust the police, we need to untie the hands of officers and free them to focus on real crime – the crime that matters. Theft, violence, gangs, anti-social behaviour. These are the things that ruin lives, wreck neighbourhoods, and keep decent people up at night.
And that’s exactly why the Conservative Party are taking action. This week, we put forward an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to bring an end to these surreal “non-crime hate incidents”. Labour had the opportunity to put this right and back our amendment, but they blocked it and let this madness continue. The Conservatives will continue to speak out for the freedom to speak, joke, think, and live without fear of a knock at the door. Because free speech is the foundation of a free society. And if you lose that, you lose everything else with it.
Let the police be the police. Let them get back to what they’re here to do and not trawling social media. And let’s rebuild the trust that keeps a free society standing tall.
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The post Matt Vickers: ‘Let the police be the police — time to scrap non-crime hate incidents’ appeared first on Politics.co.uk.
