Meeting of the Parliament 10 September 2024
I thank colleagues for their contributions to the debate. As someone who does not sit on the Criminal Justice Committee but follows its work from the outside, I always find it interesting to see how different committee members and others from outside, such as myself, understand and interpret committee proceedings.
If we were starting from scratch to empower our communities to deal with the problems in their midst—problems of violence, theft and damage; problems of how to keep people safe at large gatherings on streets and highways; problems of contested uses of public space; and problems of acting, as the police so often do, as the agency of last resort for people with histories of pain and trauma—I do not think that the creation of the institution of a police force would be our chosen answer, or at least it would not be the only one.
We need to think about how to reform the way in which police do their work and how they are accountable; how to enact those reforms and ensure that they are properly implemented; and how to scrutinise and exercise the power that the police have. It is right that we as citizens expect the highest of standards in all aspects of the work that the police do. As Jamie Greene, Russell Findlay and others have said, that process of reform is not a one-off—it must be on-going.
Policing by consent relies on trust, and it takes only one bad experience or one negative headline to destroy that trust. Unfortunately, we have had more than one bad experience or one negative headline as far as institutionalised discrimination in the police is concerned. The committee heard too many examples of breaches of that trust by individuals. Once that trust is broken, it takes concerted effort and no small amount of time to rebuild it. The bill is part of that process of reform and of rebuilding that trust.
I share the concerns that some members have raised that many of the Angiolini review recommendations are not dealt with in the bill. I would welcome the cabinet secretary’s provision—if not today, then in the future—of further information as to how her Government will approach those. I will not rehearse the points about the elements of the bill, which we have already heard so much about this afternoon, such as the ethics code, the duty of candour and the changes to the PIRC and its governance. However, I am interested in the details of the amendments that have been suggested, and I will listen with interest to the cabinet secretary’s closing remarks in that regard. I hope that on-going discussions during stage 2 will address some of the questions that Pauline McNeill and others have raised.
As I said earlier, I believe that, as part of the on-going reform of our police service and the way in which it works, we need to think about how we might divest the police of functions that are better carried out by other agencies and other workers, without the punitive load that the police inevitably bring to every encounter, whether or not they want or intend to. Ultimately, we need to ask ourselves whether what we say is the central function of the police—to keep people safe—will ever be compatible with what historically has been its actual raison d’être: to preserve the establishment and the status quo, to protect elites by suppressing some marginalised groups and to resist the transformation of society that we now, in our overlapping crises, need more than ever to survive.
I know that many police officers recognise those contradictions and want to be part of a positive transformation. While we make the incremental changes that we can, including through this bill, let us keep faith with those within and outside the police who look to us for a vision of something more—one of a police system that serves all members of our community and of a society in which we can all trust it to do what it is here to do.
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