iPaulina

While the details surrounding her case are flimsily backed up, the general consensus amongst newspapers is that on Remembrance Sunday police officers arrived at her home. They informed her that she was under investigation for tweets made a year ago which were ‘potentially inciting racial hatred online’. The police officers could not tell Pearson which tweets specifically the allegations were about, but she and other journalists seem to have deduced that it was a misinformed post regarding what she thought protestors were expressing support for. At the time when it was posted, the tweet came under fire for being inaccurate and unpleasant, and was soon deleted by Pearson.

Under the Public Order Act of 1986, inciting racial hatred is a crime. However, there was not enough evidence to charge Pearson of this or anything else; thus, the investigation was dropped. When the police were questioning Pearson, she thought that she was being investigated for an NCHI, whereas The Guardian and the Essex police claim that she was in fact being investigated for the crime of inciting racial hatred. This is a result of evidence provided by body-worn cameras on the police officers as the incident took place; unfortunately, I was unable to find footage of this on the internet. Despite the fact that this case turned out to be fairly unrelated to NCHIs, conversation surrounding their existence has been triggered and I think that it is an interesting and important discussion to be had.

According to the government’s official webpage on the issue, NCHIs are incidents where a person commits an act ‘which is perceived by a person other than the subject (the perpetrator) to be motivated – wholly or partly – by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.’ In this case a ‘particular characteristic’ means a characteristic which must be protected under hate crime legislation, including race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity. As the name suggests, NCHIs are not crimes. When they arise, NCHIs are recorded by the police and theoretically could be used as evidence should the person in question commit an actual crime later down the line.

The British criminal justice system has been around since the Norman conquest; for nearly 1000 years it has been the determiner of whether a person’s actions warrant punishment. When it comes to which situations the police should investigate, there is, in my view, an excellent line already drawn up: things that would actually be criminal if the suspect were found guilty. Of course, as situations and social climates change, the law needs to be tweaked accordingly; for example, there would be a number of problems if we still legalised child marriage (as we did until 1929). However, I would argue that UK law is well set up for dealing with hate crimes. Furthermore, if it were to be decided that the law is inadequate in this respect, surely we should change what is considered a criminal offence, rather than having the police interrogating individuals who will never even get the chance to defend themselves in a criminal court?