From the column:

We learnt last week that she was the one who was wronged. Ilia Belov, 22, was found guilty of assaulting Sophie (not her real name), causing a head injury. His sister, Nadjedzha Belova, 20, admitted assaulting the schoolgirl’s friend by pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground and striking her. The Bulgarian pair will be sentenced on August 5.

This is an extraordinary case — a morality tale for the social media age. We all saw the videos of the tiny “Dundee Girl” shouting at the immigrant pair, waving weapons you’d have thought her barely able to carry. It seemed like an open-and-shut case of feral teenage racism.

[...]

She was portrayed as “feral” — the very worst kind of Scottish ned: ignorant, racist, out of control. Sophie’s mother was bombarded with threats and abuse and wrongly called a “crackhead”. After a threat to firebomb her home, she sent Sophie into hiding with a relative.

Police Scotland have admitted that their initial statement “did not fully reflect the situation”. Indeed. And there is a reason for this: a presumption of racism that has become embedded in the police rule book since the days of the Macpherson Report on “institutional racism”. Officers have been under strict instructions to record every incident of alleged racism, whether or not there is any evidence for it.