Police Scotland have been caught in a row over their new hate crime laws after a woman who reported an anti-Semitic Facebook post was ‘quizzed about her ethnicity’.
The woman, a one-time officer in the force, reported a post showing a swastika in a Star of David, reading ‘Nazism = Zionism’.
She claimed the image was posted by a close relative of an SNP government minister.
After reporting it to the police, she says she was quizzed about her own ethnic background before the complaint was discarded because she ‘is not Jewish’.
The woman told the Mail Online: ‘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 though all these?”
‘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 outwith 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.”‘
Metro.co.uk has reached out to Police Scotland for further comment.
General Secretary of Scotland’s Police Federation, David Kennedy, previously told the Sunday Times: ‘The number of complaints that translated into actual hate crime investigations is extremely small.
‘I believe that less than 1 per cent of these complaints are translating into actual hate crime investigations.’
Scotland’s new hate crime law went into effect one week ago – but most of what the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 includes isn’t new.
For the most part, it bundles together other hate crime rules into one package – but one particular policy, an offence for ‘stirring up’ hatred, has proved controversial.
‘Stirring up’ means behaviour from someone that ‘that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive’ to incite hatred, the law states.
Stirring up racial hatred has been in the books since 1986 but MSPs branched the definition out to also cover: age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics.
The maximum penalty is a prison sentence of seven years.
The act states that freedom of expression must be considered when deciding if behaviour is ‘reasonable’. It also uses the definition of the right laid out in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes protection for ‘ideas that offend, shock or disturb’.
Critics of the law, including JK Rowling, X owner Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan, have said the law – described as ‘ludicrous’ by the Harry Potter author – curbs free speech.
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