Struggling police are STILL paying the price for the SNP’s savage cuts

By Graham Grant

A POLICE service fit for the 21st century, well-equipped and with access to state-of-the-art technology, was promised when the single force was launched.

That was six years ago yesterday, on April 1, 2013, as inauspicious a date as you could have hoped for, though in reality it was timed to coincide with the start of the new financial year.

And yet last week rank-and-file officers at their biennial gathering complained about threadbare kit, and clapped-out patrol cars with up to 140,000 miles on their clocks.

Computer systems were ‘dysfunctional and contradictory’ at the inception of the force, as Chief Constable Iain Livingstone concedes, but Police Scotland is still decidedly low-tech – a situation that isn’t changing fast.

The 2016 collapse of the glitch-ridden ‘i6’ supercomputer project, now rarely mentioned by name in police circles, like ‘Macbeth’ in the theatrical world, was a disaster that set tech reforms back several years.

Grand plans for body-worn cameras to help officers obtain real-time video evidence are ‘on hold’ – hardly surprising given the state of near-constant budgetary turmoil in which the force appears to exist.

The latest financial documents reveal a £56.2million gap between the police’s proposed capital spending and the funding from the Scottish Government this year – so officers are likely to be stuck in patrol cars so old that some are said to be held together with duct tape for a while longer.

Challenged about the cash crisis last week, Mr Livingstone said streamlining eight forces into one was saving the taxpayer £200million a year, a remarkable achievement which doubtless eliminated a great deal of duplication and waste.

But the manifesto for a modern crime-fighting service, which does more with less – the original rather sketchy plan for the single force – is now about as worn-out as the government that devised it: in short, we were sold a pup.

At the Scottish Police Federation (SPF) conference last Wednesday, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said policing had taken a ‘battering’ from the Press, and yet he claimed most people were perfectly happy with the quality of service offered.

He cited a statistic from a Scottish Government survey which found near-universal approval among those who had had to deal with the police: 95 per cent of them said officers had been polite.

Mind you, respondents included alleged criminals (one wonders if the cell was also to sir’s satisfaction).

The same research, the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey, found only 40 per cent of adults were aware of regular police patrols in their area, down from 56 per cent in 2012.

This is a stark finding, but perhaps shouldn’t shock us – the SPF has warned beat policing has more or less died out in large swathes of the country.

It seems many beat bobbies have taken up semi-permanent residence on social media – where they have been pictured dressed up as penguins or hooking plastic ducks at community events.

One of the most revealing reports on policing in recent times, published by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS), the official watchdog, found that the majority of frontline officers in the Greater Glasgow division were ‘disillusioned’.

But the research also sent a torpedo through the top brass mantra that people tend to want to contact officers, or hear from them, online: actually only a handful in an HMICS survey said they favoured social media updates.

Many were in fact keener on the old-fashioned idea of being able to ring up their local station direct, though HMICS cautioned that this would be a retrograde step (and in any event the likelihood is their local station has been shut down, or turned into a gastropub).

Police chiefs and ministers never tire of telling us that eight out of ten calls they receive have nothing to do with crime – instead they relate to missing person reports, or people with mental health problems.

But SPF general secretary Calum Steele pointed out last week that these calls are often about criminal behaviour – for example breach of the peace in the case of someone with mental illness causing a disturbance in the street.

The difference is that nowadays, prosecution in such cases wouldn’t be an option.

While the detention of the mentally ill is not the SPF’s goal, rank-and-file officers are concerned that the constant reference to the statistic about 80 per cent of calls being unrelated to crime could lead to more plans for manpower cuts.

The SPF also warns that police are picking up the slack for other services, such as the NHS: why, the SPF reasonably asks, should police have to cover for the failures of other organisations?

That ‘battering’ Mr Yousaf complained about wasn’t exactly unmerited either, during a time when the force was in the grip of a hierarchical meltdown: the first chief, Sir Stephen House, quit in 2015 after a string of controversies, including the M9 tragedy, when a woman was left dying by the roadside for three days after alleged call-handling blunders.

His successor, Phil Gormley, pledged a shake-up but found himself on ‘special leave’ as the subject of multiple bullying probes – which were only shelved when he quit last year, leaving the field open for his deputy, Mr Livingstone, to take up the reins.

That scandal revealed deep fault-lines in the oversight of policing, including the myriad blunders of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), which gave Mr Gormley the green light to come back to work during the bullying investigations – before being slapped down by then Justice Secretary Michael Matheson.

Much has been swept under the carpet, not least the allegations against Mr Gormley, who may soon be giving evidence about his experience before MSPs – revisiting a controversy ministers had hoped was consigned to history.

There was also the small matter of an illegal spying operation targeting journalists’ sources, in the midst of the Emma Caldwell murder probe.

Last year, everyone involved was cleared of misconduct, despite a report which found that those behind the snooping acted ‘dishonestly’ by ‘wilfully and deliberately manipulating intelligence’.

And claims of a distinctly Life on Mars variety, that undercover officers burned evidence of alleged mismanagement in a garden incinerator, are the focus of an ongoing internal inquiry by Deputy Chief Constable Fiona Taylor.

They pre-date the launch of Police Scotland, but raise serious questions over the way undercover teams were led, and whether any changes have taken place since then to reassure the public about the way they are run.

Mr Livingstone must also know that the future of policing consists of more shabby compromises designed to cut costs even further, and more empty rhetoric from Mr Yousaf.

Why the SNP chose our most important public service to be the main casualty of its ruthless cuts agenda – when there was so much waste elsewhere, in local and central government, and in our bloated quangos – remains a mystery that neither the single force, nor anyone else, is ever likely to solve.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on April 2, 2019.