Police Scotland pays staff overtime to process hate crime reports

‘Although there are lots of complaints, a tiny percentage are turning into investigations’

‘It is going to cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and we don’t have any officers’

POLICE SCOTLAND has been forced to pay control room staff overtime as the deluge of complaints under Humza Yousaf’s hate crime laws exceeded 6,000, it has been claimed.

David Kennedy, the general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation (SPF), said that he expected the force’s bill to the taxpayer for overtime and other costs to total “hundreds of thousands” of pounds.

Insiders believe that the force has now received more than 6,000 complaints since the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into force on Monday. Police Scotland has said it is collating the figures.

Mr Yousaf admitted he was “very, very concerned” by the number of “vexatious” complaints being lodged under the new law but claimed he was not surprised.

This is despite him telling Sky News on Monday there was “absolutely no evidence” to support warnings that there would be a large increase in the number of vexatious hate complaints.

Barely a day after the legislation’s introduction, it emerged that Police Scotland has been inundated with more than 3,000 cases.

The Tories said that the force would receive 1.4million complaints in the first year if that rate continued.

Critics had predicted the legislation would be “weaponised” by activists and a deluge of cases would tie police officers up for hours, preventing them investigating more serious crimes. Police Scotland has pledged to investigate every complaint.

The law has been described by the Scottish Conservatives as the “biggest ever burden placed on Scotland’s police force”, and 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.”

He said that staff will be “weeding through” complaints to see if they were required 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 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,” he added.

Calum Steele, Mr Kennedy’s predecessor, said that backroom staff working on the “unseen” side of policing were being moved onto 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.

A person commits an offence under the Act if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive,” with the intention of stirring up hatred based on the protected characteristics.

The legislation extends long-standing offences around racist abuse to other grounds on the basis of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity but not sex.

Mr Yousaf said: “It’s not a huge surprise that when legislation is first introduced there can sometimes be a flurry of vexatious complaints.

“We’ve obviously seen that and I would say to people don’t make vexatious complaints – you should desist – because what you’re doing is wasting precious police resources and time.

“But I am very, very concerned about the fact that we have seen those complaints, but at the same time I know that police are very adept at dealing with vexatious complaints, they do it every day and they know how to treat them.”

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.