Federation chairman says officers are not prepared for ‘unsustainable’ task of dealing with thousands of reports under new law
Source - Daily Telegraph
08/04/24
Police Scotland “can’t cope” with a deluge of hate crime reports made under the SNP’s new law, frontline officers have claimed.
David Threadgold, chairman of the Scottish Police Federation, also said that officers remained confused about when charges should be made, 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 the law 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.
‘We have not prepared our staff properly’
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.
“One of the biggest challenges that we’ve got in policing at the moment if you accept that the scale and the volume that we have got is simply unmanageable, is that we have not prepared our staff properly,” Mr Threadgold added.
“We’ve not given them the opportunities to ask the ‘what if’ questions during the training that has been provided by Police Scotland, to interpret this legislation to the satisfaction of the public.
“The confusion, the interpretation, that can exist by people who look at this new legislation through their own viewpoint, creates confusion for police officers in Scotland who are trying to deliver this law.”
The 8,000 complaints that were made in the first week of the legislation do not include a “small number” of new hate crime reports which were linked to the Rangers vs Celtic Old Firm game on Sunday.
Meanwhile, a former police officer told the Scottish Daily Mail that her complaint about a Facebook post, which depicts a Nazi swastika within a Star of David, had been dismissed after she was questioned about her own ethnicity.
She said she had given a statement to police on Saturday but was told that the complaint would not be taken forward because she was not Jewish. Under the legislation, the ethnicity of the complainant does not determine whether a crime had been committed.
The woman said: “They were very much for not taking the complaint at all. One said, ‘We’re snowed under with all these complaints. How are we supposed to get through all these?’ I said, ‘That’s not my problem. The First Minister has said he wants people to report these things; he’s very keen for everything to be reported’.
“The officer called me later that afternoon. He said, ‘Can I ask you, are you Jewish?’ I said no. He said, ‘I’m going to ask you again; it’s just because I need the box ticked. Do you identify as being Jewish?’ I said no, I’m not going to lie to get anybody charged.
“He said, ‘Well, that falls outside the parameters. It won’t be moving forward as a crime. It will be logged as an incident, but it will not be going further criminally’.”
In a separate radio interview on Monday morning, Mr Threadgold said police were “making this up on a case by case basis” and that the police officer would have been “working through a set of instructions” to decide on whether a crime had been committed.
Concerning the Facebook post, Police Scotland said an investigation was ongoing.
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘We have worked with partners, including Police Scotland, to ensure effective implementation of the Act, and the timetable for commencement has allowed for the delivery of a robust package of training and guidance for police officers. Training officers is an operational matter to Police Scotland.”
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