Scottish police call handlers given script to defend Yousaf over hate crime reports
POLICE SCOTLAND staff have been given a script defending Humza Yousaf after he faced a deluge of hate crime reports.
The national force has issued an email guide to all call centre workers and officers advising them of lines to take in response to claims that the First Minister made a racist speech at Holyrood at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Mr Yousaf, then justice secretary, had highlighted the race of a series of high profile figures in Scottish public life in June 2020, pointing out that each of them was white.
He added that at 99 per cent of the meetings he went to he was “the only non-white person in the room” and claimed Scotland “has a problem of structural racism”.
His remarks have since been taken out of context online in a 45-second clip, with billionaire Elon Musk describing Mr Yousaf on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, as a “blatant racist” in October 2022.
Such was the volume of complaints about the remarks that Police Scotland issued a guide on a “form of words” to recite when the public complain about the First Minister under his new hate crime laws. It states that Mr Yousaf had been making reference to his “own personal experience of racism” and that “nothing said in the speech was threatening, abusive or insulting”.
It adds that when the SNP politician had been referring to “white people”, he had been “pointing out a matter of fact”.
The guide said: “There was no malice or ill will towards any person or group displayed in anything said and so it does not meet the threshold to be recorded as a non-crime hate incident.”
The email, issued by Police Scotland’s diversity unit after the hate crime laws came into force this month, also added that the speech was protected under Mr Yousaf ’s rights to freedom of speech.
Police Scotland has been deluged with complaints since the legislation was brought in, many of them about Mr Yousaf.
In the first week of the legislation, 7,152 online hate reports were made, though fewer than four per cent, 240, were recorded as hate crimes.
Sharon Dowey, deputy justice spokesman for the Scottish Tories, said: “It’s a measure of how farcical Humza Yousaf ’s hate crime law is that police officers have effectively been given a script on how to respond to the flood of complaints made against the First Minister under the very legislation that he piloted and introduced.”
‘[The remarks] do not meet the threshold to be recorded as a non-crime hate incident’