It's a shame that this incident broke too late to be included in this discussion of NCHI recording and the police.
The good news, however, is that this lack of generosity to free speech doesn't have to be the end of the story. Earlier this year, the government quietly, and sensibly, legislated to allow the Home Secretary to take over from the unelected College of Policing the power to dictate how NCHIs are recorded. Whoever occupies the Home Office under the new PM needs to exercise this power quickly and rewrite the guidance.
The problem with the current regime is that it prioritises the need to seek out and suppress the hate that supposedly lurks everywhere. It gives little primacy to free speech. Its wide reach resulted directly from, and was a hurried reaction to, the 1999 Macpherson report into the way the police responded to the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Macpherson saw 'institutional racism' in the Met’s indolence in seeking out the thugs who murdered him. There are now serious question marks over both the assumption of institutional racism and the hypothesis of a pervasive climate of hatred.
www.spectator.co.uk/article/will-the-police-finally-see-sense-on-non-crime-hate-incidents-
I'm not at all cheered that the College of Policing is failing so badly that one of its functions has to be centralised.
In the same way as the debates in the HoL correctly anticipated the logical outcome of the GRA 2004, there were people at the time of Macpherson who foresaw what would happen and how this would be used.
It would be good to know if the existence of NCHI have helped the people whom they were intended to help.