April 8th 2024.
Protests have erupted across Scotland in response to the recent hate crime laws. The controversy has even reached the doorstep of the police, as Police Scotland has been accused of mishandling a hate crime complaint. The complaint involved a woman, who is a former officer, reporting an anti-Semitic Facebook post. The post featured a swastika within a Star of David and a caption claiming that Nazism and Zionism are equivalent. To make matters worse, the woman claimed that the post was made by a relative of an SNP government minister.
Upon reporting the post to the police, the woman was disappointed to find that her complaint was not taken seriously. She explained to Mail Online that the officers seemed overwhelmed with the number of complaints they were receiving and showed little interest in pursuing her case. In fact, one officer even questioned her about her own ethnicity, asking if she identified as Jewish. When she responded with a no, the officer asked again, seemingly just to tick off a box on their form. The woman stood her ground, refusing to lie in order to get someone charged with a crime. The officer then informed her that her complaint did not fall within the parameters of the new hate crime law and would only be logged as an incident, with no further action taken.
This incident has sparked outrage within the community, adding fuel to the fire of the ongoing debate surrounding the new hate crime law. It has only been a week since the law went into effect, but it has already caused quite a stir. The Agency has reached out to Police Scotland for a statement on the matter. Meanwhile, the General Secretary of Scotland's Police Federation, David Kennedy, has expressed his concerns, stating that the number of complaints that actually lead to hate crime investigations is extremely small.
It's worth noting that most of the new hate crime law is not actually new. It simply combines existing hate crime rules into one comprehensive package. However, one particular policy has caused quite a stir - the offence of "stirring up" hatred. This refers to behavior that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive in order to incite hatred. While stirring up racial hatred has been a crime since 1986, the new law expands this to cover other protected characteristics such as age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, and variations in sex characteristics. The maximum penalty for this offence is a prison sentence of seven years.
The law does state that freedom of expression must be taken into consideration when determining if behavior is reasonable. It also follows 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." Despite this, there have been many critics of the law, including author J.K. Rowling, Tesla owner Elon Musk, and podcaster Joe Rogan. Rowling has even gone so far as to call the law "ludicrous," claiming that it restricts free speech. With such strong opinions on both sides, it is clear that the debate surrounding the new hate crime law is far from over.
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