A MAN who directed a stream of vile racist abuse towards a female cop at Clydebank police station has been jailed.

A sheriff told Stephen McKenzie that his behaviour in the September 9 incident was “some of the worst I have heard narrated in court, in terms of abusive remarks, in something approaching 40 years of being involved in criminal cases”.

McKenzie, 34, appeared at Dumbarton Sheriff Court for sentencing on Friday – when his own lawyer admitted that she could say nothing in mitigation for the offence. Solicitor Judith Reid told Sheriff Maxwell Hendry that her client had received a 22-month jail term earlier that day from another Dumbarton sheriff, along with an order which will see him supervised for nine months after he is released.

Ms Reid said: “I’ve spent some time trying to get to the bottom of the type of behaviour described in the charge.

“The only explanation I can get from him is that he behaves like that when drunk, but not when sober, and the difficulty he has is that he may get drunk again.

“I’ve emphasised to him that this kind of behaviour is literally costing him years of his life in custody.”

Ms Reid said her client had been diagnosed with ADHD, was illiterate and required his mother to care for him. “He is an easy target in jail,” Ms Reid continued.

McKenzie’s record includes past convictions for spraying an aerosol and igniting it, and shouting, swearing and uttering offensive religious remarks in 2015, hurling sectarian abuse at police later that same year, and kicking one officer and biting another as they arrested him for breaching a bail condition in 2016.

And last year he was jailed for threatening police with violence and telling them “f*** off, you couple of throbbers” at his then home in Montrose Street in October 2018.

Ms Reid asked for McKenzie’s prison sentence to be subsumed into the term he had received earlier in the day.

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But Sheriff Hendry said: “I cannot allow this type of behaviour to pass effectively unmarked.”

McKenzie, described as a resident of the Blue Triangle project in Alexander Street, was jailed for two months on top of the 22-month term passed earlier that morning.