Frontline officers in Scotland have said they "can’t cope" with a slew of hate crime reports made under the SNP’s new controversial law.
Around 8,000 hate crime reports were made in the first week of the legislation coming into force, with some officers left confused about when charges should be made.
Chairman of the Scottish Police Federation David Threadgold warned that the law was being exploited to fuel personal and political vendettas.
Claims also emerged on Monday that police had dismissed a complaint about a relative of an SNP politician, who allegedly posted an antisemitic image online because the complainant was not Jewish.
Threadgold told the BBC: "Police Scotland have gone public and said that on every occasion, reports of hate crime will be investigated.
"That creates a situation where we simply cannot cope at the moment. Officers have been brought back in to do overtime shifts, and the management of that is simply unsustainable.
"When you have vexatious complaints, people who look to weaponise this legislation or who make these complaints for personal gain or political point scoring, then that creates a problem for the police which can affect public satisfaction in my organisation.
"Now, the First Minister in Scotland can talk about his confidence, and Police Scotland’s ability to deal with vexatious complaints as he has done, but what we have never seen before is the scale of the complaints are coming in around one piece of legislation."
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Police officers received just two hours of online training which said had not been adequate to equip them to make difficult judgements around complex issues such as how to balance freedom of speech.
The 8,000 complaints that were made in the first week of the legislation do not include a "small number" of new hate crime reports which were linked to the Rangers vs Celtic Old Firm game on Sunday.
However, a former police officer told the Scottish Daily Mail that her complaint about a Facebook post, which depicts a Nazi swastika within a Star of David, had been dismissed after she was quizzed about her own ethnicity.
She said she had given a statement to police on Saturday but was told that the complaint would not be taken forward because she was not Jewish. Under the legislation, the ethnicity of the complainant does not determine whether a crime had been committed.
More to come...
