Hansard

I am pleased to open the stage 3 debate on behalf of the Scottish Greens and to support the Police (Ethics, Conduct and Scrutiny) (Scotland) Bill. I thank everyone who has worked on the bill, including the committee members, clerks and researchers, those who have given valuable evidence, and the successive cabinet secretaries with whom I have had positive and fruitful conversations. I thank all the organisations and groups that have sent in briefings or with which I have had very helpful conversations over the course of the bill’s passage.

Most of all, I thank those people who have shared their personal stories so bravely and generously. Stephanie Bonner lost her first-born child—her son, Rhys—when he was only 19. That is more than enough grief for anyone to bear. However, the pain of his death was multiplied by the failure of Police Scotland to investigate it properly, the betrayal through the lies that she was told, the way in which her simplest questions were met with what she has described as a “wall of silence”, and the four years that it took just to get through the complaints process. Nothing that we do today can redress those wrongs. Her questions have never been answered. She does not even know where to lay her flowers.

What we can do, though, is to honour Rhys’s memory and Stephanie’s courage and compassion, for she does what few would be prepared to do: she speaks for not only herself but all who have experienced the pain and betrayal of police failures and the obstruction and intimidation that are used to defend the indefensible.

Others, including Magdalene Robertson and Bill Johnstone, have generously shared their own terrible experiences to help develop and scrutinise the work of the bill. We stand in gratitude, admiration and respect.

Our society, and the legislation that has been passed in this and other places, gives an extraordinary range and depth of power to its police officers. That power can be misused in the most horrific ways. The bill that is before us was instigated by the work of Lady Elish Angiolini. It represents one strand of response to the recommendations of her report on the police complaints system, which was published in 2020.

Between that report and the introduction of the bill, she was called on to chair another inquiry, which was into a crime that prompted grief and rage across the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. Sarah Everard was a young woman of 33 who was raped and murdered by an elite Metropolitan Police officer in an act of premeditated and deliberate femicide. She was murdered because she was a woman, because he was a misogynist predator, and because the recruitment, vetting and management processes that should have recognised his utter unsuitability for any position of power were broken or non-existent.

As Stephanie Bonner has been, Sarah Everard’s relatives have been heroic and selfless in their determination to bring about change—to shine a light on that culture of misogyny, those institutional failures and that lack of attention, foresight and care. Those failures are perhaps especially evident in the Metropolitan Police, but no force, including Police Scotland, is entirely free of them.

Not only misogyny but racism and other forms of discrimination are embedded deep in institutional cultures, attitudes and processes. That fact has been acknowledged at the highest levels. That is why I end by remembering Sheku Bayoh and reiterating my sorrow, sympathy and solidarity with his family as they endure their own long wait for answers and accountability.

The work that we do here, this afternoon, can bear fruit only if it is part of a wider endeavour of transforming our systems, challenging our institutions and making genuine, open and accessible justice a reality for us all.