Old fashioned crimes, like car theft and burglary, have certain characteristics that can be annoying for the police.

For one thing, laws have to be passed to define them. That takes time. The public must be consulted. Politicians get involved.

For another, to charge someone with a traditional offence, police have to go through the inconvenient rigamarole of gathering evidence. They have to present that evidence in court. Even then, judges and juries can be unhelpful. To get a conviction over the line, a case has to be proven ‘beyond reasonable doubt.’

The New Zealand police have found a creative way around this quagmire. They are training their officers to ‘recognise, record, and respond’ to ‘hate incidents.’

According to police materials, a hate incident is “anything the complainant feels is hateful towards them as a member of a minority group.”

The new approach is as elegant as it is efficient.

Gone is any need for legislation, with all the associated definitional problems. A hate incident is literally anything a complainant from a minority group says it is.

With hate incidents, the evidentiary process is also greatly expedited. In fact, there’s no need for any evidence at all. Best of all, the courts, with their vexatious insistence on ‘due process’ and ‘burden of proof’ will not be involved.

Regrettably, not all police are happy with the training. A few antediluvian officers think the constabulary should stick to enforcing actual laws. Some of those malcontents contacted the Free Speech Union (FSU) to complain that they didn’t sign up to be ‘thought police.’

Representatives of the FSU met with Police Commissioner Andrew Coster to discuss the concerns of the officers who had contacted them. The Commissioner said that he is concerned too, although not about the hate incident initiative itself.

No, what bothers Commissioner Coster is the attention the FSU has drawn to the new approach. He is worried that the publicity might “undermine public confidence in national institutions.”

In fact, the very name of the Free Speech Union contains the solution to his difficulty. The police training manual on hate incidents provides him with the means to shut down this seditious pressure group.

You see, while the hate incident provisions rightfully leave the fraught matter of definition up to complainants, the manual does provide some helpful examples.

As it turns out, one of those examples is using the heinous slogan, ‘Free Speech.’