Dear Scottish Government,

Information known to this requester is that there is a Scottish Government document with the title ‘Scottish Crime Recording Standard Crime Recording and Counting Rules’ from September 2020 that appears to show that filing a false police report when no crime has in fact taken place is now recorded as a “no crime" incident.

It is the understanding of this requester that the codes 038003 Public mischief (including wasting police time) and 038004 Falsely accusing (named) person of crime were historically used to record crimes.

It might be anticipated that since the 1 April 2019 when the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 became law that crimes under 038004 Falsely accusing (named) person of crime may be viewed as gender-based violence and coercive control. It would reasonably be expected that the act of provisioning Police Scotland with false information about a person, irrespective of whether accusations of a formal crime were being made, would be constitute the filing of false police report. Examples of such false police reports could fall under the general category of “bad mouthing" or “reputation destruction" which could form the basis of a serious course of conduct crime known as “coercive control” with Police Scotland acting as the proxy agent for that coercive control. One could imagine if such coercive control were to be used to the point of a prosecution then were the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) to have a “clandestine agreement" with a defence solicitor then the COPFS could reasonably be viewed as proxy agents for the coercive control as well.

As per the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 please provide the following information recorded on Scottish Government systems:

1. All current crime codes associated with filing a false police report.
2. The crime codes associated with filing a false police report that were in operation prior to 1 April 2019.
3. The current crime codes associated with filing a false police report when that report is “aggravated” e.g. when the false report relates to a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 or there are minors (children) involved.
4. The description associated with all of the above crime codes of filing a false police report i.e. what the code specifically relates to.

To assist the Scottish Government in responding to this request these false police report codes would include those incidents where the perpetrator uses a delegated representative such as an Independent Domestic Abuse Advocacy Service (IDAAS) advocate, a social worker or a child contact centre employee to file the false police report on their behalf e.g. via the ‘Partners' Intelligence across Public Protection’ system, an inter-agency referral discussion (IRD) meeting, a multi-agency risk assessment conference (MARAC) meeting etc.

It is understood by this requester that the Scottish Government does not acknowledge the existence of the term “parental alienation” but the Scottish Government should now be fully cognisant of how false police reports (including those submitted on behalf of the perpetrator by an agent) that relate to children are being routinely filed by malicious and vindictive ex-partners and that Police Scotland are using the interim Vulnerable Persons Database (iVPD) to transfer these false police reports onto the social work systems of local authorities thus breaching the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) Article 8 rights of the victims of these false police reports.

Thank you in anticipation of your response within the statutory timescale.

Yours faithfully,

Kenneth Thomson