SPECIAL REPORT by BILL HEANEY
Police officers up and down the country work tirelessly every day to keep us safe, and we thank them for that. But as we saw this week, those brave officers are being let down, Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer told the House of Commons on Wednesday.
What he didn’t say was that concern about policing in Scotland, where it is a devolved matter, is widespread – and that the situation in West Dunbartonshire has been highlighted by recent court reports of rape cases in the local media.
People are fed up with not seeing police officers on the beat and with seeing police vehicles speeding through the town from the divisional office at Crosslet, siren blaring and blue lights flashing, to what are often minor incidents such as shoplifting in the High Street.
There used to be a [much criticised] police van sitting for much of the day in Quay Street, but it now appears that the Force is so short-staffed that this no longer happens.
Sir Keir raised this matter of policing at Prime Minister’s Questions when he said: “Dame Louise Casey found institutional homophobia, misogyny and racism in the Metropolitan police. I accept those findings in full. Does the Prime Minister?”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was appalled to read the descriptions of the abhorrent cases of officers who have betrayed the public’s trust and abused their powers.
He added: “Let me be clear: that is and was unacceptable and should never have happened. We have taken a series of steps already, and the Government will also now work with the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to ensure that culture, standards and behaviour all improve.
“At the heart of this matter are the people whose lives have been ruined by what has happened, and I know that the whole House will agree with me that it is imperative that the Met works hard to regain the trust of the people it is privileged to serve.”
Kate Forbes, Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Iain Livingstone. Policing problems ahead for the Scottish Government.
What has not been talked about widely however is the fact that Iain Livingstone, the Chief Constable of Police Scotland, is soon to retire, and that the new First Minister, who will be appointed to succeed Nicola Sturgeon on Monday, will have to take a great interest in who will succeed him to address the police problems being experienced up here.
Keir Starmer said policing was just not a problem for London alone – “Nobody reading the Casey report can be left in any doubt about how serious this is, or doubt for a second that it is restricted to the Met.
“The report lays bare how those unfit to join the police are aided by patchwork vetting systems that leave the door open.
“If the Government backed Labour’s plan for proper mandatory national vetting, we could end the farce that sees different police recruitment standards in different forces. Will he back that plan so that we can make speedy progress?”
The Prime Minister replied: “There is no need to back that plan, because we are already taking action to tackle the issues raised in the Casey report. Two months ago, I met Dame Louise Casey and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and we introduced a series of measures.
“For example, the College of Policing is currently updating the statutory code of practice for police officer vetting that all forces legally have to follow; all police forces are in the process of checking their officers against the police national database; and in weeks His Majesty’s independent inspectorate will report back on its re-inspection of all forces’ vetting procedures.
“These steps will of course not undo the terrible damage done previously, but we owe this action and more to the victims and survivors to ensure that such tragedies never happen again.”
The national police college at Hendon is where police officers earmarked for a top job, even here in Scotland, do “finishing school” training.
Keir Starmer said: “The problem with the Prime Minister’s answer is that what he refers to is not mandatory. How can it possibly be right to have different standards for recruitment in different police forces?
“No wonder the Casey report criticised what Dame Louise calls the Government’s ‘hands-off’ attitude to policing over the last 13 years, but let us call it what it really is: sheer negligence. The report also exposes chronic failures by the police to deal with rape cases, with officers using ‘overstuffed…or broken fridges’ to store rape kits from victims.
“On his watch, the rape charge rate is 1.6%, yet the Government still have not backed Labour’s plan to have proper, high-quality rape and serious sexual offences units in every police force. Why not?”
The Prime Minister said: “The way rape victims were treated by the criminal justice system was not good enough. That is why the Government published an ambitious rape review action plan.
“It is right that we have extended Operation Soteria across all police forces in the country. We have also tripled the number of independent sexual violence advisers, improved the processes of collecting phone evidence and cross-examination, and, since 2010, quadrupled funding for victim support services. That is a Conservative Government doing everything we can to support victims and tackle predators.”
But Keir Starmer wasn’t having that. He said: “People are fed up to the back teeth with a Government who never take responsibility and just try to blame everyone else. If Government Members are proud of the fact that over 98% of rapists are never put before a court, let them shout about it. They should be ashamed of themselves.
“The truth is simple: after 13 years of Tory Government, crime is out of control and people are paying the price. After 13 years of Tory government, they have done nothing on standards; neighbourhood policing has been shattered; and burglars and rapists walk the streets with impunity.
“It is the same every week from the Prime Minister: whether it is the cost of living crisis, crime running out of control or the state of the NHS, why is his answer always to tell the British people they have never had it so good?”
Nicola Sturgeon never mentioned the police in her valedictory speech – or in any of her answers at FMQs – at Holyrood today, but the subject will soon be high on the agenda of the next First Minister.
Should Ms Sturgeon’s successor be Kate Forbes, she would do well to have a word or ten with South Uist islander Calum Steele who is in the process of retiring as general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, about how the police are perceived from inside the force.
In an interview with veteran journalist Brian Wilson, Calum was forthright in his views.
Here is an excerpt from that interview:
While still a young officer in Tarbert, Calum stood for election as the islands’ representative for the Scottish Police Federation, covering Orkney and Shetland as well as the Western Isles. He lost by one vote but, once based in Dingwall, tried again and this time was elected as the local SPF representative for the Highlands.
From there, he rose quickly through the union ranks and was elected as General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation for the first time in 2008. It is a highly democratic organisation and each term lasts for three years, so Calum is bowing out now with five elected stints under his belt.
In terms of Scottish policing, it has been a period of enormous change, the biggest upheaval being the formation of Police Scotland in 2013 at which point all local authority responsibility for policing, through regional Police Boards, disappeared. They were replaced by a Scottish Police Authority accountable direct to the Scottish Government. It was a case of “Northern Constabulary no more…”.
Calum describes it as “arguably the biggest political decision taken in Scotland since devolution” and after a decade his report card on Police Scotland is distinctly mixed. Without doubt, he says, it has made the investigation of serious, organised crime more effective. Whether that required all police functions to be centralised into a single force is another question.
He says: “It has undoubtedly come at the expense of physical policing, particularly in rural communities. It is not just the buildings that have been lost but in many cases the contacts between police and public. In more and more communities, people do not see the point of phoning the police”.
He says that the break between local authorities and policing has been “a massive, massive failure … I am pretty sure that if there had been the previous level of input from elected representatives, the scale of cuts and closures would never have happened”. The Scottish Police Authority, says Calum, might know about finance “but have no idea what is going on in communities”.
Calum’s background makes him particularly aware of the damage done by police station closures in the islands and he rhymes off the ones that have been lost over the past decade in Lewis and Skye, both of which have been centralised around a single station. When I last interviewed him, Calum described Tarbert as “the best station, not only in the Northern Constabulary but in the whole of Scotland”. Now it too has gone.
One effect of this swingeing programme of closures, he says, is that the police no longer have “intelligence systems about what is happening in an area because there is no engagement with the people and nobody on the ground to feed in information. Matters that would have been reported and dealt with in the past become tolerated because people don’t see any point in reporting them”.
Calum’s period in office at the SPF has coincided almost exactly with there being an SNP government at Holyrood. The first Alex Salmond administration, he says, was “very good”. He explains: “I don’t think they expected to be there long and there was a willingness to cut through the bureaucracy and talk direct to people and to listen. They wanted to get things done”.
Thereafter however, the relationship cooled. “I think when they created the single police force and the SPA, they thought that was policing done. I don’t really understand it. They always want to say they are doing things better than in the rest of the UK, but they have seen from the rest of the UK what happens when you cut police numbers and budgets, yet they seem determined to go down the same path”.
[It is believed that a major reason for the retirement of Chief Constable Iain Livingstone is that Police Scotland were – and are still being – starved of funds by the Scottish Government. Editor]
In the course of his SPF career, Calum has become deeply involved in international police organisations and will continue in a role he has held since 2010 as Secretary General of the International Council of Police Representative Associations – an umbrella organisation for police trade unions around the world – or at least parts of it.
“Like many of these bodies”, he says, “it started as a fraternal organisation, but its role has been developing, and we have recently gained recognition from the International Labour Organisation. For a hundred years, they regarded the police as part of the state apparatus so they had to be persuaded of the distinction – policing is a function of the state but the people who carry it out are workers”.
Progress in advancing that essential democratic concept is understandably slow but ICPRA supports progress where the possibility does arise. For example, says Calum, there is “a young union in Argentina just now, who we’re trying to help get recognition”. He talks about “codifying the labour rights of police officers around the world” and that on its own sounds like a mission that could keep him busy indefinitely.
However, there will also be calls on his services closer to home. On top of the skills and insights Calum has developed both as a police officer and union leader, he is a highly effective communicator who can hold his own in any environment.
Better still, he can do it in both languages and “doing something for Gaelic” is high on his post-retirement agenda. And that will take him right back to the roots from which he grew.
While still a young officer in Tarbert, Calum stood for election as the islands’ representative for the Scottish Police Federation, covering Orkney and Shetland as well as the Western Isles. He lost by one vote but, once based in Dingwall, tried again and this time was elected as the local SPF representative for the Highlands.
From there, he rose quickly through the union ranks and was elected as General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation for the first time in 2008. It is a highly democratic organisation and each term lasts for three years, so Calum is bowing out now with five elected stints under his belt.
Calum describes it as “arguably the biggest political decision taken in Scotland since devolution” and after a decade his report card on Police Scotland is distinctly mixed.
Without doubt, he says, it has made the investigation of serious, organised crime more effective. Whether that required all police functions to be centralised into a single force is another question.
He says: “It has undoubtedly come at the expense of physical policing, particularly in rural communities. It is not just the buildings that have been lost but in many cases the contacts between police and public. In more and more communities, people do not see the point of phoning the police”.
He says that the break between local authorities and policing has been “a massive, massive failure … I am pretty sure that if there had been the previous level of input from elected representatives, the scale of cuts and closures would never have happened”. The Scottish Police Authority, says Calum, might know about finance “but have no idea what is going on in communities”.
Calum’s background makes him particularly aware of the damage done by police station closures in the islands and he rhymes off the ones that have been lost over the past decade in Lewis and Skye, both of which have been centralised around a single station. When I last interviewed him, Calum described Tarbert as “the best station, not only in the Northern Constabulary but in the whole of Scotland”. Now it too has gone.
One effect of this swingeing programme of closures, he says, is that the police no longer have “intelligence systems about what is happening in an area because there is no engagement with the people and nobody on the ground to feed in information. Matters that would have been reported and dealt with in the past become tolerated because people don’t see any point in reporting them”.
Calum’s period in office at the SPF has coincided almost exactly with there being an SNP government at Holyrood. The first Alex Salmond administration, he says, was “very good”. He explains: “I don’t think they expected to be there long and there was a willingness to cut through the bureaucracy and talk direct to people and to listen. They wanted to get things done”.
Thereafter [in the Sturgeon era] however, the relationship cooled. “I think when they created the single police force and the SPA, they thought that was policing done. I don’t really understand it. They always want to say they are doing things better than in the rest of the UK, but they have seen from the rest of the UK what happens when you cut police numbers and budgets, yet they seem determined to go down the same path”.
“Like many of these bodies”, he says, “it started as a fraternal organisation, but its role has been developing, and we have recently gained recognition from the International Labour Organisation. For a hundred years, they regarded the police as part of the state apparatus so they had to be persuaded of the distinction – policing is a function of the state but the people who carry it out are workers”.
Progress in advancing that essential democratic concept is understandably slow but ICPRA supports progress where the possibility does arise. For example, says Calum, there is “a young union in Argentina just now, who we’re trying to help get recognition”. He talks about “codifying the labour rights of police officers around the world” and that on its own sounds like a mission that could keep him busy indefinitely.
However, there will also be calls on his services closer to home. On top of the skills and insights Calum has developed both as a police officer and union leader, he is a highly effective communicator who can hold his own in any environment. Better still, he can do it in both languages and “doing something for Gaelic” is high on his post-retirement agenda. And that will take him right back to the roots from which he grew.