Scots OAP ‘carted off in cop van’ after being wrongly accused of hate crime

12 comments

1. This hate crime law seems to be massively backfiring

2. >Officers confirmed there was a “hate crime element” to the callout but said the arrest was made under pre-existing laws which deal with threatening and abusive behaviour.

   This ‘Mild Mannered’ (Spidergran?) OAP was lifted for being ‘threatening and abusive’. Then there’s something about a Tory politician blah blah blah and The Sun being The Sun telling their reader what to think.

3. “But it was the OAP who was lifted by police after the 38-year-old female accused her of using an ableist slur.”

   What was the slur? According to wiki, the r-word is an ableist slur too.

4. Are we going so low as to believing what the S*n prints now?

5. The newspapers seem to be increasingly misrepresenting these stories.

   Firstly ‘being wrongly accused’ just means someone has made an allegation against her, investigating that allegation is literally the job of the Police.

   Secondly she wasn’t even arrested under the new hate crime legislation. If she has been arrested for threatening and abusive behaviour in Scotland then she has been arrested for a Section 38 Criminal Justice and Licensing Scotland Act. Put in simple terms it’s the equivalent of a breach of the peace however the legislation is worded slightly differently.

   A Section 38 can have aggravators or modifiers attached to it. For example if you’re out in the street yelling ‘I hate you gays’ and shouting and swearing you would be arrested for a S38 with a Homophobic aggravation.

   So this arrest has precisely fuck all to do with the new legislation and is quite literally someone being arrested for a breach of the peace which happens hundreds of times a day up and down the country.

   Fuck knows when parliament will step in and actually force the newspapers to print factual information without an agenda or spin.

6. I detest the word ‘m*ngo’ but to arrest someone for it is utterly ridiculous.  It’s bad enough that she didn’t even say it

7. I love when they put OAP in the title of something like this; the most barefaced pandering to narrowminded people. It *must* be an injustice if the person was *old*! Old people are unimpeachable!

8. People get arrested, then the details come out, n they go free.

   Sometimes it’s more peaceful to remove an angry abusive person from a situation.

   It’s inconvenient but so is getting abuse from people.

9. Scotland. Beautiful Highlands but ludicrous government.

10. This is really not news worthy at all. The arrest was not even made under the new legislation. If I was cynical, I’d say this is being intentionally misrepresented in order to contest the new laws.

    Not saying I entirely agree with these new laws as they currently stand given the potential scope for abuse of them, but by the same token I don’t agree with these kind of tactics either.

11. Police investigate an allegation including questioning the person who it was about and conclude it’s false/not prosecutable and release them.

    Complete non story – this is what the police are supposed to do, we don’t want them to try and predict which allegations don’t have any substance without looking into them at all, that would be bad

12. Age isn’t an exemption to commit crime, it still needs investigating.