It was the great philosopher Forrest Gump who famously once said: “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.”
Well as I sit in front of my computer screen opening up Freedom of Information Act e-mail responses I have some of those very same feelings on the vicissitudes of life.
What will my e-mails contain? Will they be rejections? Incomprehensible garbage? Or, will they be the proverbial ‘strawberry cream’ that I can turn into an exclusive news story.
Never has this phenomenon been better exemplified than by my investigations of police forces enquiries into Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs).
They were brought in so that police had a record of incidents where people were being rude, hostile or aggressive, but not in a way that strayed over the line into being criminal.
It was thought they might be helpful in building up patterns of behaviour that could in the future become something criminal like an assault.
However, the issue of NCHIs has become something of a hot potato with many people claiming police are wasting their time recording incidents of thin-skinned moaners taking offence at the slightest comment or sideways look.
My investigations on the specifics of what sorts of incidents the police have recorded have unearthed some real gems that have made the front page of The Sun not once…. but TWICE.
The first time I did the investigation I uncovered a case where a person reported to police that they felt their barber had been rough with them after they got into a discussion over the Ukraine war.
Another case saw a person claim to police their neighbour was trying to get under their skin about a football match result by leaving their dirty underwear hanging on the washing line for days.
The resulting story made the front page of The Sun https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/31867648/police-wasting-time-probing-hate-crimes/ and was followed up by many of the other national newspapers https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1980089/dirty-underwear-non-crime-hate-incidents.
Last week I revisited the same topic, and as I opened up the e-mails I had that same sense on anticipation as Forrest did as he scoured his chocolate box.
What did I find this time? The cases which I could never have imagined were somebody complaining about a Scotsman singing Flower of Scotland from the platform of Carlisle railway station and an employee upset by a colleague bragging about the positioning of their Where’s Wally tattoo on their genitalia.
Again it was taken up as a page one story on The Sun https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/35603824/police-hate-crime-trans-woman-loo-scottish-song/and received extensive coverage in the rest of the media the following day.
It just goes to show that with a correctly phrased question the FoI Act can elicit unimaginable details from public bodies, which can provide great news stories.
As an aside having trawled through the examples of many NCHIs the vast majority are cases of people being horrible, and often racist and homophobic, to random strangers, neighbours and even family members.
It would seem the system was brought in to cover quite valid concerns. It is just that some of the more bizarre incidents are probably best ignored or shrugged off rather reported to an already overstretched police force.
