Latest in a litany of failure by the SNP’s single force
LAMARA Bell was left dying by the M9 for three days after a road crash near Stirling on July 5, 2015. Her partner John Yuill, 28, died soon after the crash but Miss Bell, 25, lay alive in the vehicle for three days because of a Police Scotland communication shambles – now the subject of a report to the Crown Office.
ON October 26 last year, Inverness OAP Albert Insch dialled 999 on his mobile. Police responded quickly – to the wrong address. Nineteen hours later the 72-year-old was found dead on the floor of his sheltered home. Initially police had told Mr Insch’s family that his 999 call could not be traced so no officers had been despatched.
POLICE took a week to respond to reported concerns about a man who was later found dead – after wrongly claiming no officers were free. The body of Andrew Bow, who was on police records as a vulnerable person, was found at his Edinburgh home in March 2016, seven days after police were told of fears that he had died. during the botched search for a vulnerable grandmother suffering from dementia who died after vanishing from her home. Janet McKay, 88, was found dead on waste ground in September 2015, eight days after being reported missing from her home in Knightswood, Glasgow. It later emerged that three days after the pensioner went missing, police were told of a sighting of her boarding a bus heading for nearby Clydebank, Dunbartonshire, where her body was eventually found.
A MAN reported missing who police had been trying to find for more than four weeks was later found dead in his home. Police Scotland is the subject of an on-going PIRC investigation over efforts to trace Arnold Mouat, whose body was discovered at his house in Bo’ness, near Falkirk, two weeks ago. The force deployed search and rescue officers, dog units, mountain rescue teams and divers in the search for the 64-year-old during a large-scale, month-long hunt. But the search for the married father of four ended when officers returned to his home address – where he was last seen 30 days earlier – and found his body.