Scottish FA chief executive Ian Maxwell has spoken out on refereeing safety after recent threats to John Beaton.
The referee and his family had to be placed under police observation due to threats made following the decision to award Celtic a late penalty against Motherwell, from which they scored to win the game and put them in a better position to eventually pip Hearts to the title.
The SFA hit out at the role of managers who criticise decisions on a weekly basis as well as the media.
Maxwell has now had his own say as he told Sky Sports: "We're working hard on refereeing safety. I had to spend one night on the phone trying to organise police protection for one of our match officials. And at that point you just realize that everyone's gone too far and that cannot be acceptable in any shape or form.
"We put out a very robust statement where we outlined that we cannot and will not accept that type of behavior going forward. So again, it's something that we need to look at in terms of how we deal with clubs, how we deal with club statements, how we deal with players and managers who will happily deflect after matches that they've lost.
"We've got a hysterical media backdrop at the moment which is discussing and heightning instances and talking about bias and talking about corruption and all those things we need to stamp out of the game because it's not helping anybody.
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"We need to have referees; we're not going to have much of a game without match officials. Referees are always going to make mistakes; they will always make mistakes as long as football goes on. But it can't be the over-analysing and the forensic examination of every decision depending on which shirt the player's wearing, which team you support you think is right or wrong. We need to get back to the referees are out doing the best job that they can under really difficult circumstances and how do we make that as easy for them as possible?"
The Scottish Senior Football Referees' Association recently stated that they would consider all options open to them, but Maxwell dodged the possibility of the officials going on strike.
Asked that question, he said simply: "Referees want to be protected on the pitch. They're at their place of work; they should be protected on the pitch and we need to do everything we can to make sure that that's the case."
The governing body's chief executive went on to hit out at criticism of VAR, insisting it is doing the job expected of it and.
He added: "I say this every year: VAR is doing what it was designed to do. It's reducing the number of incorrect decisions. The number of decisions that we've got right stands scrutiny against any other European nation.
"Any conversation I have with European counterparts, we always end up in a group therapy session because everybody keeps talking about their referees being the worst on the planet and everybody wants to see changes.
"As I said, the reality is mistakes will be made. VAR is eradicating some of those mistakes. We talk about the system that we've got and I want to be clear from a system perspective. You hear people talking about 'VAR llite' - we have the same VAR system as over half the other UEFA national associations. We've got the same number of cameras, we've got the same number of technologies, we're not doing it on the cheap.
"But referees will make mistakes. We need to avoid the toe-colorers, the really obvious ones, and we need to try and eradicate them. I know that William and Martin Atkinson are working hard with the refereeing community to make sure that we do that. But VAR is reducing the number of errors we've got in the game and that can only be a positive."
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