Police Scotland “can’t cope” with the deluge of hate crime reports made under the SNP’s new law, frontline officers have warned. The Telegraph has more.
David Threadgold, Chairman of the Scottish Police Federation, also claimed that officers remained confused about who should be charged because of inadequate training.
Around 8,000 hate crime reports were made in the first week of the legislation coming into force, with Mr. Threadgold warning that it was being exploited to fuel personal and political vendettas.
“Police Scotland have gone public and said that on every occasion, reports of hate crime will be investigated,” Mr. Threadgold told the BBC. “That creates a situation where we simply cannot cope at the moment.
“Officers have been brought back in to do overtime shifts, and the management of that is simply unsustainable.
“When you have vexatious complaints, people who look to weaponise this legislation or who make these complaints for personal gain or political point scoring, then that creates a problem for the police which can affect public satisfaction in my organisation.
“Now, the First Minister in Scotland can talk about his confidence, and Police Scotland’s ability to deal with vexatious complaints as he has done, but what we have never seen before is the scale of the complaints are coming in around one piece of legislation.”
Claims also emerged on Monday that police had dismissed a complaint about a relative of an SNP politician, who allegedly posted an anti-Semitic image online because the complainant was not Jewish.
The new legislation, which was passed by MSPs in 2021 but only came into force this month, makes it an offence to “stir up hatred” against protected groups such as transgender people, the disabled and the elderly.
Ahead of enforcement, the SNP Government and Police Scotland launched a campaign urging the public to report all instances of “hate” but have been taken aback by the volume of complaints.
Police officers received just two hours of online training which Mr. Threadgold said had not been adequate to equip them to make difficult judgements around complex issues such as how to balance freedom of speech.
SNP politicians also repeatedly failed to clarify to what extent “misgendering” a trans person, meaning referring to them as a member of their biological sex, would be a crime under the new law.
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