A year or so ago I was accused of racism.

I was writing about street begging scams and had reported that those involved were believed to be Roma from south-eastern Europe.

Cue real anger. It was wrong, said critics, to mention the ethnicity of the scammers. Worse, it was anti-migrant bigotry to do so.

I agree with this sentiment. Up to a point.

Because, yes, there are too many stories highlighting crimes by migrants - who are, statistics show, roughly no more or less likely to get in trouble as Scottish-born residents.

But do we really want to sanitise our news so that we don't know that, say, members of one of the most marginalised ethnic groups on our continent, the Roma, resort to begging scams?

Do we really want to pretend that there are not specific crime trends in specific ethnic communities?

Well, Police Scotland appears to think so.

Our national force has an internationally enviable record on relations with ethnic minorities.

And senior officers are more than aware of the ethnic niceties of, say, organised crime.

But they can be oddly coy about how they describe the ethnicity of suspects or victims.

Take the Roma. Police don't like to say somebody they are looking for is from that group. So they have come up with one of the most bizarre formulations I have ever heard: "person of eastern European appearance".

This absurd term first appeared a few years ago. I thought it had gone away. But it cropped up last month again in a description issued for two men wanted in connection with a scam.

Of course, there is no such thing as "eastern European appearance" any more than there is a "western European" one.

Do we think there is an all-encompassing description for ginger Udmurts, blonde Lithuanians and olive-skinned Greeks or Bulgarians?

Of course we don't, no more than we think there is a single way of describing Icelanders and Andalusians of western Europe.

And that is before we take in to account the rather obvious point that most of us fail to live up to the stereotypical appearance of our nationality. Nobody thinks all Scots look like Groundskeeper Willie.

No, "of Eastern European appearance" is a euphemism for Roma. But it is not necessarily a conscious one.

Roma, after all, have become the pin-ups of anti-migrant tabloids. Want to whip up concerns over a new wave of low-skilled workers turning up in Britain? Then publish a picture of an impoverished gypsy village, its women in headscarves and men riding horse-drawn carts. Oh, and hint at crime.

Thus something atypical of Eastern Europe has become stereotypical of the demi-continent.

Police and other public agencies aren't immune to such deeply unfair generalisations. But, more than a decade after mass migration from Eastern Europe began we really should be starting to get our heads around basic realities of the region.

And, above all, that must mean understanding the centuries of bigotry aimed at its - and now our - Roma minority. Let's not let politically correct coyness hide the reality of just how marginalised this community is.