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‘We’re embarrassed’: Scottish police despair as they attempt to ‘police the impossible’
After a deluge of complaints, some fear the ‘clumsily’ written new hate crime legislation could seriously harm the force’s credibility
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“Embarrassed.” That’s the word that keeps coming up. After a turbulent inaugural week for Scotland’s hate crime legislation there are certainly louder, more emotional adjectives flying around, but in the messages that have been passing between serving and former police officers across Scotland, the common theme is one of simple embarrassment. In the past few days, whenever Calum Steele, the former general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, has heard from a colleague (and there have been many – his phone has barely stopped buzzing since the legislation came into force), the main feeling has been, as he describes it, a “metaphorical holding of heads”.
There is a sense, he says, among rank and file officers that policing “seems to have lost its compass”. “People are genuinely embarrassed. They feel that the service and by extension [they] as individual police officers will catch some of the public brunt.”
The law itself is “clumsily constructed”, he says, but more than that, it’s the way the legislation has been communicated that has left so many serving officers reeling. “The fact that the service which, just a few short weeks ago was telling Scotland at large that it wasn’t going to be investigating what you could put in inverted commas as ‘real crime’ because of budget pressures and demands, and then on the flip side of that coin says everybody with hurt feelings that believes they’ve been a victim of hate based on their own perception should report it, and they’ll investigate it, and more importantly record it based on that perception.”
On Easter weekend, in the final hours before the legislation came into force on April 1, officers scrambled to complete the two-hour training video that laid out how to operate within the new law. That online training course “would have taken place while calls were coming in”, explains David Threadgold, the chairman of the Scottish Police Federation. “The buy-in from those officers and the ability to understand what is quite complex law just would not have been there.”
The feedback he has received since – feedback being a somewhat neutral term for the long list of frustrations that have landed in his email inbox since April 1 – is revealing. Many have said that, even after completing the training, they remained uncertain about what the changes really meant. They were also left lacking any real confidence that, in practice, they would be able to grapple with “the nuance of incitement of hatred”.
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One experienced officer in his 50s shared his fears that he would struggle to understand the difference between an insult and a true offence. “I am 53 and I’ve been a police officer for almost half of that time,” he wrote. “I’ve performed several roles which have required sound and well rationalised decision-making which has been tested over the years.
“I would struggle to explain the difference between a high-level insult, which I think is allowed and is lawful, and low-level abuse which is criminal.”
Another officer cited the “lack of reference to the Human Rights Act” in the training. Another pointed out that the legislation risks making the police “look inept” and could “result in a loss of public confidence”.
“The [Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act] is 100 per cent open to exploitation,” they said. “Police Scotland is so subservient and fearful of upsetting people in its image that I have no doubt we will be taking complaints from people with little or no pushback.”
On the ground, the law is already adding pressure to a stretched workforce. “At this precise moment in time, the people it’s impacting the most are those that are wading through the 6,000-odd complaints that have been received in the past week or so,” says Steele, who now serves as general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations.
In fact it’s closer to 8,000, says Threadgold, who finds it “inconceivable” that 8,000 people truly felt they were victims of a hate crime prior to April 1. “I have been contacted by people today who have told me the only reason they have recorded a crime is to make a protest point against this Government.”
Officers already find themselves “policing the impossible”, says Steele – particularly “in the larger cities where active demonstrations take place”. “It’s going to impact any police officer that is policing any event where there are opposing factions at play. That’s a difficult situation to be in. They would often be better off not being there and just letting them get amongst themselves and see who’s going to sort it out.”
He fears “the expectation of the public, who now will be chanting ‘hate crime’ at them, expecting people with opposing views to be arrested”. Meanwhile, he says, many officers feel the new law will see them dealing with cases that constitute a personal dispute rather than genuine criminality. “There are too many people who feel that to be offended is a police matter,” he says.
The added bureaucracy isn’t exactly a sweetener for officers, many of whom have already been brought back in for overtime shifts to cope with the deluge of complaints that have landed in the past week. Will it all impact police recruitment figures? Brendan O’Brien, a former police officer who now runs a police recruitment company Bluelight Consultancy, says it isn’t a police officer’s job to decide if they are morally for or against a particular piece of legislation. “There’s a bottom line with police officers – they know they’re going to be serving His Majesty the King impartially and without fear or favour. I’ve been involved in policing since 1985 and I’ve seen all sorts of legislation come and go. You get on with it and do your job because you’ve sworn an oath of office. It’s not your job to decide if you like the legislation or not.”
This is by no means the first time, he says, that policing has strayed into an area outside of its remit. “The police have been the service of last resort for the last decade or so. Now they’re having to be all things to all people. Like with mental health – police increasingly find themselves dealing with those issues when they’re not always qualified to do so.” For O’Brien, it’s just par for the course in modern policing. And SNP ministers are already planning to extend the laws to give more protection to transgender people, by making it easier to prosecute those who engage in “conversion practices”.
Steele points out recruitment levels are already fragile. Numbers have “fallen off a cliff”. There were once 5,000 applications a year in Scotland. “In my time that reduced to less than half that.”
“The value and regard with which people hold policing as a career is not the same as it once used to be,” says Steele. Could this be the final straw for some current officers? He suspects it would take more than the hate crime law to push them, but it isn’t impossible. “If people are inclined towards the door in any event then it is hypothetically possible that this could be the one nudge that they need to push them over the precipice.”