400 officers face axe in latest police shake-up
Jobs go as force faces £200m deficit Community hubs to replace police stations New specialists to fight cyber crime
POLICE Scotland is to axe 400 officers to tackle a £200million deficit.
They will be replaced by fewer cybercrime specialists drafted in to counter online fraud and web deviants.
The public will be encouraged to report crime by emailing smartphone pictures or footage of incidents direct to police.
The cuts, to be phased in by 2020, leave the SNP’s pledge to keep officer numbers at 1,000 more than the 2007 level in tatters.
Scottish Tory justice spokesman Douglas Ross said it was ‘absolutely imperative’ the changes did not ‘deplete the front line of policing in Scotland’. He added: ‘The Scottish Government has been in sole charge of justice for nearly a decade now and these bleak warnings are a result of its choices.’
The drive to shape the force over the next decade – outlined in a review entitled Policing 2026 – will focus on a plan to ‘do more with fewer people’. Deloitte was paid £700,000 to help with the proposals.
Police will be stationed in community ‘hubs’, paving the way for more station closures. The review claims there is less need for uniformed officers and a more pressing requirement for civilian staff with IT skills. It did not contain estimates on staffing, but Chief Constable Phil Gormley and Scottish Police Authority (SPA) chairman Andrew Flanagan revealed details in Edinburgh yesterday.
Mr Flanagan said there would be no reduction in officer numbers over the next year. But recruitment levels would be slowed down ahead of 2020, resulting in a reduction of around 400 officers.
About 170 cyber specialists would be brought in, while bosses are hoping to transfer 300 officers from administrative and other duties to the front line.
But Calum Steele, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federa- tion, representing rank-and-file officers, said: ‘The notion you can return 300 officers to frontline duties at the same time as reducing overall numbers by 400 is fanciful. The one good thing about this report is that it lays bare the consequences of the cuts that have happened and those that are yet to come.’
Unveiling Policing 2026 yesterday, Mr Gormley said: ‘We will recruit more specialist staff, with analytical and cyber expertise. These roles will form a critical part of Police Scotland’s operation mission.
‘We will continue to recruit police officers in sizeable numbers. There will be no change to the number of officers next year but as operational productivity increases, we will reduce levels of recruitment between 2018 and 2020.’
Mr Flanagan said the SPA is anticipating a ‘small reduction’ in police officer numbers by 2020, adding: ‘I must stress we will not reduce police officer numbers until we see these productivity gains. Actually, we are anticipating the amount of operational policing will increase through to 2020.’
Scottish Labour business manager James Kelly said: ‘In the last few years we have seen thousands of vital support staff cut as Police Scotland tries to meet the SNP’s underfunded election promise of 1,000 extra officers. We need to give officers and staff the support and resources they need, rather than having a force constantly trying to balance the books.’
Scottish Lib Dem justice spokesman Liam McArthur said: ‘This strategy represents an opportunity for the SNP Government to admit where they went wrong with centralisation and, after years of mismanagement, help get the police service back on an even footing.’
The Policing 2026 report is now open for public consultation, with Police Scotland due to submit the final proposals to ministers in June.
Justice Secretary Michael Matheson said: ‘We have provided an enhanced £61million reform budget for 2017-18 to support the transformational change outlined in this draft strategy.
‘The public will always be interested in the number of police officers on the beat.
‘We will pay particular attention to such issues before approval of the final strategy.’
‘Absolutely imperative frontline is not depleted’
IN the hit US crime drama The Wire, police commanders are grilled about crime figures in tense meetings with their bosses.
One scene shows a snarling police commissioner ordering them to fiddle felony and murder statistics – or face being ousted from their jobs.
The scrutiny of such figures is no less fierce in Scotland, where the SNP’s claim of crime falling to a record low has become an all-toofamiliar mantra.
But last week, statistics were published which would have had Baltimore’s top bobbies in The Wire mopping sweat from their brows.
Murder, rape, serious assaults and robberies have risen, while detections have fallen – with a remarkable 40 per cent of rapes unsolved.
Unlike their Baltimore counterparts, members of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) – the very definition of a toothless watchdog – seemed remarkably relaxed about escalating crime and fewer culprits being brought to justice, when they met last week.
And yesterday part of the reason for that complacency – mirrored at the highest levels of government – became clearer with the publication of the Policing 2026 report.
Its task, completed with the help of Deloitte – a firm of consultants which banked nearly £700,000 in fees – was to look ahead to the next decade and predict how crime and, therefore, policing will change.
Some of the predictions had a distinctly dystopian feel – for example that ‘automated chat-bots’ would replace ‘human interaction’ – and that climate change would spark more flooding (as if there were no scientific debate on the matter).
Violent
But the key ‘narrative’, to use the buzzword common in police and political circles, was simply that we don’t need as many officers as we currently have because there isn’t as much crime as there used to be (or the money to pay for them).
Also crime, we are assured, is changing: sure, there are still muggers and thugs, murderers and rapists, but a lot of crime is moving online.
Except that there is, inconveniently, the niggling problem of the worst kinds of oldfashioned offending getting worse, including a rise of around a quarter in serious assaults in the past year (implausibly written off by the SPA as statistically insignificant).
Could it be that the SPA is so intensely relaxed about these troubling indications of a rise in violent crime because it doesn’t fit the ‘narrative’ – that we can cut 400 officers because crime is falling?
The cyber-crime specialists being drafted in will doubtless perform a vital function – but it is hard to see how they can counter the growing surge in violent and sexual offences.
More violence and rape is not the ideal context for the exercise in futurology published by Police Scotland yesterday in a corporate glossy brochure.
In one example, a shopping centre’s security guard is seen uploading CCTV images of suspected shoplifters to a police app, allowing officers to use facial recognition software to try to identify the culprit.
But Chief Constable Phil Gormley – who said the police service had become too ‘telephony-dependent’ – is also keen for the public to play detective by emailing in photographs or video footage of crimes to police. Foot patrols could then be despatched and the images kept on file for future court proceedings.
Harnessing smartphone technology is certainly an idea worth exploring, but this effectively outsources investigative functions that for 200 years have lain with Scottish police to the public – who are not trained in crime-fighting.
There is a risk of the wrong individual being filmed or photographed and, more worryingly, the well-intentioned eyewitness may find themselves targeted by the mugger or thug they are recording.
The track record of policing when it comes to technological change is also far from reassuring – last summer, the i6 supercomputer project spectacularly collapsed, and Mr Gormley admitted yesterday that cheaper, ‘off the shelf’ IT systems are likely to be favoured as a replacement.
Yet so much of the 2026 strategy rests squarely on the success of the hi-tech revolution the report envisages.
Officers will also be stationed in ‘civic hubs’ (police stations have become rather passé by 2026), where they will pick up their uniforms equipped with body-worn video cameras.
There is clear enthusiasm for bodycams within policing and indeed on the part of court authorities, which have already produced a separate report calling for courts to use more digital evidence. Until now, there have been question marks over how bodycams could be paid for, given severe budgetary constraints.
But we are assured that the reduction in officer numbers and ‘smarter’ working will free up the cash required.
The 2026 document assumes the widespread introduction of bodycams, though Andrew Flanagan, the SPA chairman who describes the police service as a ‘people-driven business’, assures us there will be a public consultation.
Armed
Mr Gormley’s fondness for wearable ‘tech’ makes him more akin to Robocop than Dixon of Dock Green.
But the track record of Police Scotland on the protection of the basic principle of policing by consent is troubling: remember the debacle over armed policing, when the go-ahead was given for firearms officers to carry handguns on routine call-outs?
Police officers will also be prised away from desks where too many have been languishing in administrative roles – probably around 300.
This is despite years of official denials of officers ‘backfilling’ such roles – largely because the civilians who used to do them had been axed in previous cost-cutting drives.
The loss of the totemic pledge to protect police manpower may prove damaging for the SNP in the run-up to the 2021 Holyrood election.
But the hope is that by relentlessly promoting the ‘narrative’ that crime is morphing and that police officers are no longer as indispensable as they once were, the public will somehow buy it.
Of course, Police Scotland is a political experiment engineered by the Nationalists in response to cuts which they claim were foisted on them by the austerity-obsessed UK Government.
In reality, the SNP had a choice to make about where the axe would fall, and selected policing – no amount of diversionary tactics should persuade us otherwise.
Mr Gormley wryly observed yesterday that ‘necessity is the mother of innovation’, and indeed this was the launchpad for the blundering, disaster-prone behemoth Police Scotland has become.
We should pay heed to Mr Gormley (despite the corporate gobbledegook at yesterday’s launch) and his warning that the police must adapt to the changing nature of crime, while technological reform is clearly long overdue.
But it will take more than a glossy brochure to dispel the suspicion that our oldest and most important public service is paying a heavy price for the SNP’s mismanagement of the justice system.