Violent crime is down, soothe the politicians. Gunfire on our streets tells a different story.
By Graham Grant
THE war on gangsters is fought on many fronts – but the police nerve centre is at the Scottish Crime Campus.
A futuristic £73million structure, it is tucked away, with little to identify its function, next to the M73 at Gartcosh, Lanarkshire.
It was here that Detective Inspector Frank McCann told me just nine months ago that gangland warfare was becoming less common.
Mimicking the creation of the single police force itself, he said organised crime groups were in fact co-operating and collaborating with each other in the style of US Mafia ‘families’ – violence was bad for business.
Since then there has been an explosion in underworld feuding – a resurgence of gang-related activity that many had hoped was consigned to history.
Days after Mr McCann’s reassurances last November, a suspected gangland ‘hit’ took place in Kinning Park, Glasgow when Euan Johnston, 26, was shot in his Audi. Two people have been charged with his murder.
Ross Monaghan was shot in the shoulder after dropping off a child one morning at St George’s Primary School in the Penilee area of Glasgow in January, as families watched in horror. A man has been charged with attempted murder.
Monaghan was acquitted of the notorious gangland murder of Kevin ‘Gerbil’ Carroll in an Asda car park in Robroyston, Glasgow in 2010.
The escalating violence is a product of the long-running rivalry between two gangs, the Lyons and the Daniel families, for control of Glasgow’s heroin and cocaine market.
Enforcer Carroll was notorious for deploying power-tools and blow-torches in the service of his boss Jamie Daniel, a heroin trafficker who died of cancer last year.
In May, Daniel’s nephew Steven, nicknamed ‘Bonzo’, was attacked by three men with machetes after a car chase.
These outbreaks of extreme violence demonstrate that sometimes simmering underworld conflicts can erupt suddenly into everyday life, putting shoppers, children and motorists at risk.
The resumption of high-profile hostilities calls into question the police assessment last November that feuding was becoming a thing of the past.
But it also undermines the rhetoric of police top brass and ministers, which claims that Scotland is getting safer.
This analysis overlooks the fact that some violent crime is rising and murders have soared by 30 per cent in the last year, from 49 to 64 – fuelled by gangland carnage.
Former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill once vowed that wiping out criminal gangs was a ‘priority for this Government’.
New Italian-style laws created a ‘package of offences’ targeting the ‘top of the criminal networks right down to the street drug-dealer and the professionals who either facilitate such crime or turn a blind eye to it’.
The offences became law in 2010 and range from involvement in or directing serious organised crime to failing to report it.
But official figures last year showed that despite prosecutors receiving police reports of 760 serious organised crime offences under the new laws since 2010, there had been only 14 convictions – with nobody convicted in 2015–16.
This is despite police intelligence suggesting that about 200 serious organised crime syndicates are operating in Scotland, some of them as multi-million pound ‘businesses’, ‘employing’ up to 4,000 gangsters.
Meanwhile in November last year, days after Mr McCann’s overly optimistic analysis of organised crime trends, SNP boasts of getting tough on gangsters were exposed as a sham.
It emerged that the number of arrests of gangsters and their bosses had fallen – while the number of criminal syndicates had grown.
This was despite Justice Secretary Michael Matheson’s claim that ‘huge strides’ were being made in the war on organised crime.
Police Scotland says its approach to organised crime has become more ‘creative and innovative’, to get ahead of organised groups which switch their focus between drugs, fraud, counterfeit sales and cyber-crime.
But the force’s own figures last year showed the total value of all criminals’ ill-gotten gains identified for seizure had fallen by £11million in a year, with crime groups’ cash accounting for about £1.7million of that sum.
The estimated annual ‘turnover’ of Scots organised crime is around £1billion.
The Scottish Government said last November that there were 196 serious organised crime groups – but according to another document by Police Scotland this was an increase from 176 at the end of the 2015–16 financial year.
The renewed police focus on disrupting the gangs’ income streams from counterfeit sales, and increasing community policing, is logical and may well pay longer-term dividends.
But the suspicion grows that the tactical switch – and the budget cuts which rank-and-file officers claim have led to some investigations into drug-dealers being shelved to save money – have failed to turn the tide against the gangsters.
While police apparently came to the conclusion that the fighting was over, the underworld hit back with a series of brutal attacks that appear to have left police chiefs reeling.
The looming loss of up to 400 officers, as police concentrate more on tackling cyber-crime, may prove a further impediment to reining in the violence that now threatens to spiral out of control on our streets.
And it will not have escaped the attention of gang bosses that the leadership of the single force is in turmoil.
Chief Constable Phil Gormley faces the possibility of losing his job over a probe into bullying allegations.
Lame-duck Scottish Police Authority boss Andrew Flanagan clings to his post despite having announced his resignation in mid-June – again over bullying claims.
In the midst of the growing violent crime wave, Mr Matheson published a blueprint for the future of the criminal justice system last month.
Comparable with Stalinist propaganda, it overlooked the mounting chaos within the single force – and made highly dubious claims about an improvement in public safety.
Indeed Mr Flanagan, soon after he had announced his resignation, produced a report that proclaimed the single force an unalloyed success despite a long list of calamities since its launch in 2013.
Evidence of disarray and acute denial at the highest levels of law enforcement can only give succour to the gangsters.
It now appears that hit-and-run attacks, in which vehicles are used as weapons, are becoming the favoured modus operandi for organised criminals.
Being caught with a gun could lead to a 10-year sentence – compared to five years for a dangerous driving offence.
This is a realm, of course, where jail time for many is an occupational hazard – but it is vital that the justice system responds to the tactical change.
As the Mail revealed recently, the proportion of violent thugs who dodged prison in 2015–16 was 54 per cent, compared with 49 per cent in 2007–08, when the SNP came to power with its ‘soft touch’ justice agenda.
The tragedy is that it may well take the serious injury or death of a ‘civilian’ caught up in gangland violence to produce the ‘get tough’ approach the justice system so badly needs to put a stop to the bloodshed.
