Why our police service has to be prepared to change

HEN the SNP began its first term in government 10 years ago, it promised it would always keep 1,000 more police officers than it had inherited. The 1,000 threshold was a keystone pledge in the new Government’s policy on justice and for years the then justice secretary Kenny MacAskill said the extra officers had helped to reduce crime.

A decade on and it all looks rather different. As part of its new 10-year plan, Police Scotland has revealed officer numbers are to be cut by 400. There will be no immediate effect, but the level of recruitment will start to slow from 2018 onwards, thereby signalling the end of one of the Government’s most high-profile policies.

The theory is that, by moving officers from backroom to frontline, there will be no effect on operational capacity, although it will be always be hard to see a cut in numbers in a positive light. The decision also comes at a fraught time for the police service in Scotland following the resignation of Moi Ali from the Scottish Police Authority over claims she was being silenced, and the continuing crisis of the £188 million funding gap.

In recent months, Chief Constable Phil Gormley has also been pointing out how workloads are changing. Increasingly, with dementia taking hold in Scotland, officers are dealing much more with vulnerable elderly people. The rise in cyber crime is also a profound change in what is required of the police.

In the face of all these changes, Police Scotland needs to consider what the service should look like in years to come and it can now do so free of the Government’s promise on officer numbers, which was always focused more on populism than the realities on the ground.

Frontline services will need to be protected but the force may have to look at involving civilian staff much more in areas traditionally handled by officers. We also have to ask whether new forms of crime have to take priority over some of the incidents that have traditionally taken officers’ attention. When the nature of crime changes, the country’s police service needs to change too.