The SNP has been criticised for spending £400,000 of public money on a campaign to promote Scotland's new hate crime laws.
The public information campaign, called 'Hate Hurts', urged Scots to report hate crime to the police in the days before the new law came into force April 1.
Police Scotland received 7,152 complaints in the first week of the legislation being in force.
The public information campaign included TV adverts, billboards and social media adverts. It featured the message: "If you witness a hate crime, report it."
Police Scotland received 7,152 complaints in the first week of the legislation being in force
PA
Scottish Conservative justice spokesman Sharon Dowey slammed the legislation as "shambolic", saying the £400,000 should have been put into the police force.
She said: "The huge sum of public money lavished by the SNP on promoting Humza Yousaf's shambolic hate crime law will rightly stick in the craw of Scotland's police officers.
"Police Scotland could desperately use that £400,000 as they plough through the mountain of extra work generated by SNP ministers encouraging the public to report incidents - and which we're told is leading to a huge overtime bill. It also makes a mockery of SNP ministers' apparent shock at the number of vexatious complaints being made to police.
"They ran a nationwide publicity drive, at taxpayers' expense, urging people to report hate incidents to the police, and now have the cheek to wring their hands at the volume of them.
"The SNP's flawed law, which was inexplicably supported by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, is unravelling just as legal experts and the Scottish Conservatives predicted. It must be ditched now."
According to a response to a Freedom of Information Request, filed by the Scottish Daily Mail, last month's 'Hate Hurts' campaign cost £389,689.50.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into effect on Monday, which creates a new offence of “stirring up of hatred” for protected characteristics.
Yousaf said the new legislation "absolutely protects people in their freedom of expression" while guarding "people from a rising tide of hatred that we’ve seen far too often in our society".
The public information campaign, called 'Hate Hurts', urged Scots to report hate crime to the police in the days before the new law came into force April 1
PA
The act was supported by MSPs from Scottish Labour and the Scottish Liberal Democrats, as well as the SNP.
It also creates a new offence of “threatening or abusive behaviour that is intended to stir up hatred” on the grounds of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics.
The SNP could expand their new hate crime laws to offer more protections for transgender people, despite calls for the legislation to be scrapped.
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The Scottish government is proposing new legislation to make it easier to prosecute those who engage in "conversion practices".
The planned changes would mean that attempting to "change or suppress" someone's gender identity or sexual orientation - even if attempting to help them - would become an "aggravator" in cases where another crime has been committed.
As a result, anyone convicted of another offence would face a harsher sentence if it could be proven that they were motivated by wanting to convert someone.
