The Free Speech Union welcomes the commitment made today
by Acting Deputy Police Commissioner, Jill Rogers, that
Police will remove all ‘non-criminal incidents’ that
were flagged for ‘perceived hate’ prior to 1 November,
2024. Following pressure from the Free Speech Union last
year, Police changed the subjective threshold for hate
perception, and have entirely abandoned subjective
‘non-criminal hate incidents’ as a category.
These
are important steps to ensure Police remain focused on
actions, not thought, and retain the trust of the community,
says Jonathan Ayling, Chief Executive of the Free Speech
Union.
“Training previously released by Police to
‘recognise, record, and respond’ to ‘hate speech and
hate crime’ was a reckless path to pursue. We applaud
Police’s willingness to acknowledge the unavoidable
weaknesses of subjective thresholds for hate, and their
decision to change the training they implemented, and to
abandon subjective non-criminal hate incidents
(NCHIs).
“However, at a recent meeting
between Police and the Free Speech Union, we were told it
was not possible for Police to correct the data that had
been collected while the subjective threshold for ‘hate’
was in place. This meant Police were choosing to keep
records of Kiwis linked to subjective ‘hate incidents’,
even though those incidents no longer matched the Police’s
own definition of ‘hate incidents’. And these Kiwis may not
even have known about this.
“Under the
previous threshold, as many as 100 flags a month were
applied to individual’s records held by Police for
perceived hate. Once the subjective threshold was removed,
this dropped to two or three a month – some months with
none at all. This clearly demonstrates how worthless these
subjective flags were. The Free Speech Union insisted Police
had no place retaining this data that had no value to them,
and that could easily be weaponised.
“Police are
right to commit to taking steps necessary to remove these
misleading flags from profiles over coming months, and to
reject perception-based tests for questions as unavoidably
subjective as
‘hate’.”
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