Scottish police chiefs warn scale of hate crime complaints is 'simply ... trends now

Scotland's new hate crime act is set to overwhelm police officers, frontline leaders say, amid a fall in the number of criminals being charged in connection with shoplifting, fraud and sexual assault.

David Threadgold, chairman of the Scottish Police Federation (SPF), says Police Scotland's vow to investigate every report of hate crime has created a 'simply unmanageable' situation with around 8,000 filed in the first week.

Less than one per cent of the reports made so far have resulted in actual investigations, the SPF says. It also claims officers are being brought in to do overtime shifts due to the overwhelming number of crimes being reported.

Police Scotland says that it is coping with the additional demand created by the hate crime law. Many of the early reports relating to tweets made by JK Rowling and a 2020 speech by Humza Yousaf, for which the force said no action would be taken.

But Mr Threadgold says the potential for the law to be 'weaponised' for personal gain or political reasons threatens to create real problems for staff in the long run.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'Police Scotland have gone public and said that on every occasion, reports of hate crime will be investigated.

'That creates a situation where we simply cannot cope with demand at the moment.

'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 coming in around one piece of legislation.'

He was also critical of the two hours of training given to officers on the new legislation, which outlaws 'stirring up' hate against several protected characteristics such as age, disability, transgender identity and those who are intersex.

Some officers had not completed the video training ahead of the law coming into effect.

Mr Threadgold added: 'We’ve not given them (officers) 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.'

David Kennedy, general secretary of the SPF, has previously described the new law as a 'disaster', claiming less than one per cent of the complaints made were resulting in 'actual hate crime investigations'.

And frontline officer representatives have previously warned that Police Scotland risks becoming a 'reactive force', capable of only responding to major crimes such as murder and terrorism rather than those affecting people on an everyday basis.

Analysis of Police Scotland data carried out by the Telegraph suggests there has been a substantial drop in the number of crimes being 'solved' - those for which an alleged perpetrator has been identified and the case has been taken to court.

Detection rates for shoplifting have fallen from 71.3 per cent to 53.5 per cent since 2011, while the solved rate of fraud crimes - reports of which rose dramatically during lockdown - fell from 57.2 per cent in 2011 to 16.1 per cent in 2023.

Detection rates for rape and attempted rape fell slightly, from 54.9 per cent to 53.3 per cent, despite the number of reports more than doubling over 13 years.

But the overall clean-up rate for crimes has improved from 52.4 per cent in 2011 to 53.3 per cent last year - while the number of crimes reported each year fell by a quarter over that same period.

Police Scotland told the paper of the drop in detection rates for some crimes: 'The data is from 2022-23 when Police Scotland officers were facing an increased demand, which was evidenced by a higher number of calls, and resources were prioritised in these areas.

'Although the challenges facing Police Scotland should not be underestimated, officers continue to provide effective policing to communities across the country.'

It added in a separate statement to MailOnline: 'While we have seen a substantial increase in the number of online hate crime reports being received since April 1, these have been managed within our contact centres and have not impacted frontline policing.' 

A spokesperson for the force declined to confirm how many reports had been made under the Hate Crime Act. 

When the law was enacted on April Fools' Day, police were inundated with what Scottish community safety minister Siobhian Brown described as 'fake and vexatious complaints', including a hoax made in her own name.

Among the complaints were said to be thousands about tweets by JK Rowling, who described a number of high-profile trans women, including some convicted criminals, as 'men'. She dared police to arrest her for the posts.

A 2020 speech made by then-Scottish justice secretary Humza Yousaf, in which he claimed he was often 'the only non-white person in the room' in government meetings, was also the subject of many of the early reports.

Video of the speech was weaponised by far-right accounts seeking to characterise the now-First Minister as anti-white; the footage prompted Elon Musk, owner of troubled social network X, formerly Twitter, to label Mr Yousaf a 'blatant racist'.

But Police Scotland said no crime had been committed in the case of both Rowling and Yousaf - prompting India Willoughby, one of those targeted in Rowling's tweets, to accuse the force of having 'stardust in its eyes'.

She won support from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who said: 'We should not be criminalising saying common sense things about biological sex.' 

Neither Mr Yousaf nor Rowling's remarks were labelled a 'non-crime hate incident' (NCHI), prompting fury from Tory MSP Murdo Fraser, who accused the police of 'political bias'.

Introduced in the wake of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, NCHIs are a mark for incidents judged not to be a crime, but may indicate heightened community tensions.

Mr Fraser has one to his name after he wrote on X that choosing to identify as non-binary - neither exclusively male or female - was 'as choosing to identify as a cat'.

Multi-millionaire author Rowling - who also writes under the male pen name Robert Galbraith - has continued to blast the SNP's new Hate Crime and Public Order Act on the site, where she has 14.1 million followers.

In a 709-word tweet later hailed by Judy Murray, mother of tennis star Andy, the Harry Potter writer defined a woman as a person 'who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes'.

Rowling, who has denied

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