Top officer admits ‘chronic erosion’ of frontline police
POLICE Scotland is suffering from a ‘chronic erosion’ in the number of frontline officers, a senior officer warned yesterday.
Chief Superintendent Ivor Marshall said a ‘lack of clarity’ over where officers should be deployed has hit local policing.
Mr Marshall told Holyrood’s justice committee he believes Police Scotland has taken resources away from the frontline to deal with major inquiries or antiterror duties.
Responding to Labour MSP Daniel Johnson, who asked whether the creation of specialist divisions in the force had come at a cost to local divisions, Mr Marshall said: ‘There probably is lack of clarity about where the resources need to be in a local level and whether or not those demands are being addressed appropriately, whether we’ve got that right, and whether the withdrawal of resources that used to be in local policing to support those centralist roles has been the right thing.’
Mr Marshall, president of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents, said the constant demand on resources was putting local policing in a ‘very, very difficult’ position.
He told MSPs: ‘Sometimes what you’re fighting against is the acute challenges – perhaps of a sex abuse inquiry that needs to be resourced in the time-critical way, or firearms resources that need to be uplifted because of the terror threat going up – so it’s acute and the strategic commanders have to make that decision to put resources to that and that has to come from somewhere.
‘The most obvious place where it all trickles down and comes from is from the front line – operational uniform resources – because you always tend to take people away from there. The question is, [with] that chronic removal over time, what’s happening there?
‘I know our federation colleagues, who are more in tune with the frontline officers in uniform, feel that that chronic erosion, perhaps, is not being seen and that there’s a stretch in local policing which is getting to a very, very difficult point.’
The committee is reviewing Scotland’s single police and fire services more than five years after they were launched.
MSPs also heard from Professor Nick Fyfe, of the Scottish Institute for Policing Research, who said local knowledge built up by frontline officers should be valued.
He said officers have been concerned about ‘the redeployment of officers from local policing teams into those specialist services and then not being replaced’.