Police Scotland forced to pay overtime to deal with deluge of hate crime complaints
Police Scotland has been forced to pay control room staff overtime amid a deluge of complaints under the country’s controversial new hate crime law, it has been claimed.
David Kennedy, the general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, said that the bill for enforcing the new law by paying for overtime and other costs would total “hundreds of thousands”.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into force on Monday and insiders believe police have received more than 6,000 complaints lodged under the law which created a new crime of “stirring up hatred”.
The legislation passed by the SNP government with Labour and Liberal Democrat support extends long-standing offences around racist abuse to other grounds based on age, disability, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity but not sex.
On Thursday, Humza Yousaf, the SNP First Minister, admitted some of the complaints made since Monday were “vexatious” as Mr Kennedy revealed that the service was now having to pay overtime to control room staff.
He told The Telegraph: “Although there are lots of complaints coming in, a tiny percentage of that are turning into actual investigations. It will all be done within the control room, the control room will be paying extra overtime and using officers from the control room area to do it.”
Mr Kennedy said staff will be “weeding through” complaints to see if they require action and control room staff would be doing the bulk of the work.
“There are not a lot of officers on patrol that are getting overly swamped because not a lot of the complaints are turning into actual hate crime investigations. It will be officers sitting and reading through whatever has been sent in to make sure that there is not any hate crime and that there is not any other crime being reported.
“There is overtime getting paid, they wouldn’t have acquired it if the new law hadn’t come in, they wouldn’t have had the extra work.”
He said the biggest complaint was having no extra funding or extra officers to deal with the new law and while the number of complaints may dwindle the impact will be “weeks or months”.
“It’s going to cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and we don’t have any officers so I don’t care what anybody says there is a detrimental impact on other parts of the force.”
On Thursday, Mr Yousaf urged people to “desist” from making vexatious complaints which were “wasting precious police resources and time”.
He said he was not surprised that the police had rejected the complaints as there was a “very high threshold of criminality” where the behaviour has to be “threatening or abusive and intends to stir up hatred”.
However, he said tweets by Harry Potter author JK Rowling who dared the police to arrest her earlier in the week, “may well be offensive, upsetting and insulting to trans people”.
Rowling hit back and said Yousaf will be ousted from power by a voter backlash over the law.
The author said most Scots were “upset and offended by Yousaf’s bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism” but “we aren’t lobbying to have him locked up for it”.
She tweeted: “I don’t believe in putting people I disagree with in jail. We’ve got a ballot box and that’s where Yousaf will get his richly deserved comeuppance.”
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Only hours after the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into force, Rowling posted pictures of 10 high-profile trans people and ridiculed their claims to be women. She then challenged police to arrest her but Police Scotland said her stance was not criminal.
Separately, Calum Steele, the former general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, said backroom staff working on the “unseen” side of policing were being pulled into investigating reports of hate crimes.
He said the drain on resources would “eventually” hit frontline policing but currently it was affecting back office staff whose work was still important.
It is understood Police Scotland disputes Mr Steele’s claims after he said officers were being pulled from other parts of the force to deal with hate crime complaints. The force was approached for comment on overtime costs.
