Police officers and staff have been issued with a script to defend Humza Yousaf from vexatious complaints of racism.
Last week the the police faced a deluge of calls and online reports, many targeting the first minister personally, as new hate crime legislation came into force.
White nationalists in England used the encrypted social media app Telegram to orchestrate mass complaints against the SNP leader in an attempt to overwhelm the system.
Some complainants are referring to a speech Yousaf made in June 2020 at the height of Black Lives Matter which he punctuated with the word “white” when he said that he was often the only person of colour in a room.
Police Scotland, the Daily Telegraph reported, has responded by sending call handlers and other officers and staff an email with a “form of words” to use when dealing with hate crime reports about the speech.
Advertisement
The script, from Police Scotland’s diversity unit, says Yousaf was talking about 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.”
In the first week of the legislation coming into force the police received 7,152 online hate reports. Nearly half of these were on the first day.
• What is Scotland’s hate crime law? The 2024 bill explained
Advertisement
Fewer than 4 per cent of complaints, 240, were recorded as hate crimes. There were 30 non-crime hate incidents.
The Conservatives, the only party to oppose Scotland’s hate crime legislation, have been critical of the way officers record such incidents.
Sharon Dowey, the party’s deputy justice spokesman, 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.”
Other critics of the law, which is the same as in England and Wales on race, have warned that it will provoke vexatious complaints. This week Lord Hope, a retired senior judge, said that he thought the very name of the legislation would confuse people.
He said: “Hate crime is a most unfortunate name,” the former Supreme Court judge said. “It raises all sorts of thoughts in people’s minds, without any idea of what the bill is actually saying.”
Advertisement
Yousaf’s speech has been circulated widely on social media over the past year, but in a short clip where his remarks have been taken out of context. Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, described it as “blatantly racist”. The fact-checking service of The Ferret, however, found claims that the speech was racist to be false.
Earlier this year America’s Southern Poverty Law Center said that Yousaf, western Europe’s first Muslim leader in centuries, and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, were becoming hate figures for anglophone racists.
The Observer, which first revealed the mass complaints plan, did not name the white nationalist leader using Telegram to urge followers to spam Police Scotland. They did say that the individual is a member of the group in the sights of UK government anti-extremism authorities.
