Police Scotland include sex shop in list of locations where you can report a hate crime

Yeah right… ‘but Mary - I was just going in tae report a heinous crime, honest!

You can imaging it, can't you? A distressed person stumbles into Ann Summers and cries, "She called me a pig in a wig! Report it to the Police!"

"Oh, how awful - you don't look anything like a pig. Oh, are you Nigel Farrage?"

Or are these places meant to be more like a victim support service (for, noticeably, one sort of hate crime only and it ain't antisemitism for example).

So you report it but you also get a free hug/sympathetic tutting etc?

Otherwise I can't see how it's better than calling 101

It's fairly easy to report a crime or a witness report or "something suspicious that may or may not be a crime", in the usual way.

You can call 101 or you can go on your local police force website eg London Met police, and fill in quite a simple online form. I've done it more than once and I'm lazy as anything, it's that easy.

Why would you need shops etc to be reporting centres? How odd, I'm genuinely not understanding. Is it a sort of triage, ie the shop chooses which reports to escalate to the police? We already have 101 for that.

I'm missing something here.
Why was there a need for third party reporting anyway?
Why not report directly to a police-run contact point set up directly to deal with hate crime?

YY, exactly! Either it's worthy of reporting to the police or it's a vexatious waste of time. Why are they trying to collect more reports than those prepared to report to the police?

I'm missing something here.

Why was there a need for third party reporting anyway?

Why not report directly to a police-run contact point set up directly to deal with hate crime?

Why add a sex shop/mushroom farm/... extra point to the triangle?

How will confidentiality be guaranteed?
Who will be responsible for data protection?
Will staff in the reporting centres be safe if it is known that someone might have reported to them?
etc. etc. etc.

This is the sex shop posting about attending a protest of 'transphobic media'.

https://twitter.com/lukeandjack/status/1462035738338467841/photo/1

What about GDPR.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24181930.police-scotland-use-glasgow-sex-shop-hate-crime-reporting-centre/

Post from the JKR thread:

Well, I've been through the lists of third party reporting centres published by Police Scotland.

https://www.scotland.police.uk/contact-us/reporting-hate-crime/third-party-reporting-centres/

The lists largely consist of Councils, Churches, Housing Associations, Community Centres, Youth Clubs, women's aid, Rape Crisis, leisure centres, libraries, etc.

Here is just a handful of the hundreds of third party reporting centres where you can inform on your neighbours:

Aberdeen University Students Union
The Redeemed Christian Church of God
Ayrshire LGBT online
SACRO (remember Mridhul Wadhwa's partner is/was part of Sacro)
LGBT Youth (under Police Scotland investigation, founded by James Rennie)
Oasis Youth Centre Dumfries
Men Only Tayside
6VT Edinburgh Youth Cafe
Shakti Norton Park - where Mridhul Wadhwa used to work
Glasgow Women's Library
Luke and Jack (a sex shop in Glasgow)
Harper Mcleod - a solicitor's firm in Inverness
East Kilbride Shopping Centre
Farne Salmon & Trout
Tweedside Caravan Park
Monaghan Mushrooms

How are all these people going to be trained, vetted, supported? Mushroom farmers, sex shops, librarians, are going to be taking people's details, to pass on to the police, now?

That's just the branches of the Glasgow Stasi! I'm assuming they're not doing it for nothing. I wonder what this is costing?

I have so many questions about this. Are minimum wage workers being expected to deal with victims of crime and taking evidence and do the police's job for them? What is the safeguarding and vetting procedure for these people? Is anyone monitoring the veracity and integrity of these crime reports? If you are a victim or defendant in a court case, does the initial reporting to a sex shop or mushroom farm affect the viability of the chain of evidence?

I thought everything was online these days. What's the point of trekking to a sex shop?

What does that say about the type of people they are expecting to report?

Seriously?
A sex shop and a mushroom farm?