Fresh from her weekend sales pitch, the Justice Secretary will deploy straw man after straw man as she tells Parliament of the need to sack more police officers in pursuit of the impossible quest of perfection in public confidence in policing; neglecting of course to mention that the same promises have been made with every change to such rules since the beginning of time (including the last three under her current government).
Today’s debate will no doubt hear of Dame Eilish Angiolini who unsurprisingly agrees with her own recommendations from her earlier review of police discipline processes south of the Border that police officers should be held hostage in jobs they want to leave and aren’t wanted in, as sacking them feels more vengeful and in line with the public appetite for blood than “letting them resign”. The rather inconvenient truth this comes at an eye-watering multi-million pound cost to the taxpayer due to endless bureaucracy, legal fees, and salary to those who no longer want to be officers, and ultimately changing not a single thing, will be omitted – for victories no matter how pyrrhic have to be celebrated.
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Grandiose statements and sentiment are often used to disguise the altogether less glamourous realties that it is neglect and failure which creates the impression of a problem that needs to be fixed, and far better to spend your taxes creating the impression of doing something – than actually doing something.
Expect to hear to about the opinion of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS), who will be elevated to messiah-like status as a distraction to the relevance of his increasingly expensive office and it’s near £2m million annual budget. It was his 11th-hour intervention that has led to one of the most flagrant abuses of parliamentary process in recent years; and sees parliament about to vote on issues where not a single word of evidence was asked for or given by those the legislation will directly affect. Due process is somewhat ironically an inconvenience to be avoided at all costs in the pursuit of righteousness.
No one will cite HMICS reports that lack of training and organisational negligence is having a greater impact on public confidence than almost anything else – for such reports, like those on the impact of ever-lowering of standards for police recruitment, or pitiful quality of police reports resulting in ever more cases simply being binned by the Crown Office don’t exist. There will be no word on the fact police supervision was hollowed out under the rule of former Chief Phil Gormley in his brief, yet disastrous, stint in Tulliallan, undoubtedly creating the perfect environment for declining standards across the entire service. No word also that officers with barely any experience themselves are now acting as mentors to those with none, or that training in skills and standards are now virtually non-existent compounding every one of these problems yet further.
Few will argue that conduct of police officers should be subject to scrutiny. Fewer still that they should be vetted and that they should be able to maintain a vetting standard during their career. But beyond being blinded by words – few know or care what that actually means.
Trainee officers at Tulliallan (Image: Getty)
Let’s be frank, the police service is hardly an impartial arbiter of behaviour and standards. The massaging of stats and outrage over stop and search was denied. The illegal hacking of journalists’ mobile phones was also denied – and three subsequent inquires into it, frustrated. The manipulation of police numbers to give the impression of more than there are continues unchecked, and all that’s before we get to outrages like the decades-long failures in the Emma Caldwell murder investigation, the allegations of bullying by the afore mentioned Gormley, or the even more recent misuse of a police vehicle as a taxi by its current chief Jo Farrell.
The belief that a police service which regularly shows it is incapable of exercising impartial judgement will suddenly do so justly when it comes to its own officers is frankly risible. Face-ism remains the only acceptable form of discrimination within the police service. Too many good people suffer at its hands and I know many the service would gladly have sacked under a veil of secrecy if it could. Police vetting is a complex thing which despite the impression of being open and transparent, is anything but. It is substantially subjective and if you fail you don’t have to be told why.
Despite the sack cloth and ashes routine presented with tedious pronouncements of institutional this, that, and the next thing, police leadership is highly partial and capable of extreme pettiness and vengeance against its own. No worker should be in a position where they can be sacked on the whim of their employer and never be told why. Yet that is precisely what today’s parliament will support.
The police moved heaven and earth to find who it believed had briefed journalists in the Emma Caldwell case, hacking the phones of two officers in its efforts to find them. Those whose behaviour lacked any shred of integrity were protected in pursuit of those who did. Today’s vote will ingrain the ability for such behaviour to continue unchecked – for if you believe a police service capable of the most egregious law breaking wouldn’t have used secretive powers to dismiss these officers I have, as the saying goes, a bridge to sell you.
Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and former general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations. He remains an advisor to both