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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