There was a bit of a stushie this week over reports the police in Scotland will no longer investigate every reported crime. The Tories called it dangerous. Labour said trust in the service would be damaged. And the Police Federation said the public was being badly let down. Not a good day for police PR.

On the face of it, the criticism is understandable. Someone breaks into your shed and steals your tools, your bike’s nicked from outside the Co-op, your jacket goes missing from the pub, and when you report it to the police, they say: sorry sir/madam/other, we will not be investigating this offence, have a nice life, yours sincerely, Police Scotland.

Of course, it wouldn’t be said in those exact words – the official jargon is the crime has been “directly filed” – but the consequences are the same: the offence is recorded in the system and that’s the end: no further investigation. A decision to “directly file” in this way would only be taken, say the police, if there was no “reasonable lead”.

But what are we really talking about here? Some of the critics seem to be suggesting Police Scotland will now be routinely turning a blind eye to all minor crimes, but that’s not quite true. Every reported offence, no matter how minor, will be assessed but a decision will then be made about what the proportionate response should be; if there’s no clear lead to follow up, it’ll be dropped.

That’s going to be frustrating obviously for the guy who’s had his bike nicked from outside the Co-op, and anyone else in similar circumstances, but it’s important to check how we feel about such cases and what the police and the courts should be doing about relatively minor offences. We also need to look at why the police might be making this decision now, and more broadly whether they’re getting their approach to crime right. The police say they took the decision after a successful pilot in Aberdeen, but there’s more to it than that, some of it troubling.

First, the police approach to minor offences. It’s reasonable for the Tories to ask which crimes will be affected by the extension of the pilot and how the police will make their decisions. But the logical conclusion of their criticism is that the police should be investigating every minor offence with the same rigor and persistence and that’s never been the case. Decisions have always been taken about the importance of an offence and the likelihood of a successful result and for obvious reasons: resources are finite and always will be.

Worrying about certain minor offences not being pursued is also looking at the problems with the justice system the wrong way round. Speak to anyone who works in a prison and they’ll tell you that we’re still sending too many people to jail for relatively trivial offences. In other words, one of the big problems with justice isn’t that we’re failing to pursue minor offences, it’s that we’re pursuing them way beyond the point where it’s reasonable to do so.

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None of that disguises the real reason the police have made the decision they have. Labour says the SNP should give the police the resources they need to keep neighbourhoods safe, but given we’ll never be safe from the risk of some crime, that sounds like a recipe for infinitely increasing funds. Having said that, the recent decisions to change/reform/cut police and justice services, including this most recent one about not investigating certain crimes, have clearly been taken because the Scottish Government isn’t providing the police with the funding they need.

You can see the consequences of that failure all over the place. Last year for example, I spoke to serving police officers who told me what was happening at Glasgow’s CCTV operations centre in London Road. Basically, the place is now no longer monitored between 3am and 3pm, restricting a service the police rely on, and it’s because of budget pressures. The same applies to the recent decision to restrict police attendance at mental health-related incidents; it’s taking up resources that are badly stretched and the chief constable Jo Farrell said the police must now focus only on their “core duties”.

But let’s look at what the core duties apparently are because there’s some confusion, including in the police and in government, and that’s a problem for a service struggling to cope. The Scottish Government Act that set up Police Scotland in 2012 says the main purpose of policing is to “improve the safety and well-being of persons, localities and communities”, but is that right? Why no mention of crime? Shouldn’t that be Priority No 1? Perhaps then the well-being of persons, whatever that might be, would take care of itself.

The rather woolly focus on well-being, which comes directly from the top, may also help explain why a force that’s having to make cuts is actually expanding in another area that has the potential to suck up precious resources. You may have noticed over the weekend that Police Scotland were posting on X about hate crime: “hate has no place in Scotland”, they said. There was also a link to a Crimestoppers website that defines hate crime. A lot of time and money is being spent in this area ahead of the launch of a new specialist unit to enforce the SNP’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act.

The concern many of us have is that the perfectly reasonable and proportionate approach the police are now going to take to some minor crimes will not be applied in the same way to hate crimes. The definition the police were pointing us to at the weekend is shockingly vague and misguided: a hate crime, it says, is any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by malice or ill will towards a social group. In other words, one of the ancient cornerstones of Scots Law, that the intention of the perpetrator is crucial, has been scrapped, ditched, chucked out the window.

What this logically means, if this is the definition the police will apply, is that officers will have to accept complainants at face value whenever they say they’ve been a victim of a hate crime and the potential consequences of that are obvious: certain people and certain opinions being classed as hateful for potentially trivial or vexatious reasons. It’s been called the weaponisation of hate crime and it has the potential to be a big and growing problem for Police Scotland.

The answer, and there’s still time to do this, would be apply the test of proportionality and reasonableness which Police Scotland say they’re going to apply to certain minor crimes to hate crimes too. Hate crimes are a real thing, of course they are, but so is the phenomenon of perfectly reasonable opinions being labelled as hate crimes, and so the police should be considering in every case whether it is serious and whether it should be investigated or followed up. They should also absolutely be considering the intention of the person who made the comment.

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This is all good legal common sense I would have thought, but it especially makes sense in a landscape where the police are struggling to fund their work and are being forced to make cuts. They need to spend wisely, and they need to prioritise their resources, and that must mean, in the never-ending story of austerity, shifting their focus from certain areas: minor crimes that are never likely to be solved and personal opinions that should never be considered a crime in the first place.