Barber reported for 'hate crime' after giving 'rough' haircut to customer following Russia-Ukraine chat

A number of “ridiculous” hate crimes have been reported to the police this year, including a German woman who became offended when she was compared to a Rottweiler.

Police forces have been accused of wasting “valuable time” on logging these complaints, instead of focusing on “real crime”.

From June 2023 to June 2024, over 13,200 non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) were recorded across the UK.

Government guidance says that NCHIs are only supposed to be recorded by police when they are “clearly motivated by intentional hostility” and could result in further escalation.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp told The Sun: “The police should not waste any valuable time on incidents like this. There is plenty of real crime they should be preventing and solving.

“An aggressively-administered haircut is not a police matter.

“The police should only spend time investigating or recording actual criminal allegations or incidents where there is a real and imminent risk of criminality subsequently occurring.

“The Government needs to urgently update the guidance to ensure this is the case. This nonsense undermines confidence in policing.”

Former-Met detective Peter Bleksley added: “This is ridiculous and shows how disconnected police are from what the public want.

“No wonder there is a crimewave in this country. The guidelines suggest you should only intervene in cases like this where there is fear of escalation — who ever had a fear of escalation after a bad haircut?!”

A City of London Police spokesman told the publication: “The report was made online and later withdrawn.”

Downing Street has said that the Home Office would reassess its guidance to protect “the fundamental right to free speech”, after journalist Allison Pearson became subject to an police investigation regarding a social media post she made a year ago.

On Thursday, Essex Police dropped its probe into the journalist amid mounting criticism of the force.

Earlier this week, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request submitted by The Times revealed that children as young as nine-years old are among the people being probed over NCHIs.

The nine-year-old in question called a fellow primary school pupil a “r**ard”, whilst in another instance, two secondary school girls are being looked into after they said another student smelled “like fish”.