Hansard

Vital to any high-performing justice system is a well-trusted, visible police service. Scotland’s police force is respected across the world, but there can be no doubt that, in the past 19 years, the Scottish National Party’s lack of leadership and investment has reduced public confidence and eroded the police’s ability to respond to all types of crime. Police stations are closing, officer numbers are dwindling and crime is not being responded to.

People want to see and feel the presence of the police, but that must mean their presence in all Scotland’s communities. Our communities must know that the police will turn up when crime is reported and that it will be investigated to the highest standards. Violent crime in Scotland is rising—including sexual crimes such as rape and attempted rape—as are domestic abuse and weapons offences.

The increase in the carrying of weapons is understandably causing fear in communities. Will Linden, deputy head of the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, stated:

“The biggest challenge we have is increasing carrying of weapons”.

In the 12 months to April last year, weapons were found 231 times during searches on children—the highest total in eight years—and a 10-year-old boy in Edinburgh was the youngest person to be caught with a knife. Jimmy Paul, the unit’s head, has said that he is worried about recent trends in which young people view violent content online and use social media to organise fights. Although fewer of our older children are getting involved in violence, more of our younger children—eight, 10 and 11-year-olds—are doing so. That trend is of concern, he said.

Scottish Labour believes that strengthening community policing is an essential part of the strategy for dealing with such young children. We would restore at least 360 police officers to the front line in local divisions, which would boost community policing teams. That would mean that every council ward in Scotland would have a named officer who would build relationships in the community and gather intelligence on crime in local areas. We believe that building relationships in our communities is vital to fighting such crime.

We would also reduce the amount of time that police officers have to spend stuck in accident and emergency, through our new mental health response service. Scotland’s police officers currently have to deal with almost 700 mental health-related incidents each day. Between April and October last year, police officers responded to more than 122,000 incidents, which represented one in five of all incidents that officers attended. However, the vast majority of such calls do not involve criminality. Expecting police officers to fill the gap left by our struggling national health service is placing a huge strain on our already stretched police force.

As part of our plan to combine NHS 24 and the Scottish Ambulance Service into a strengthened emergency response health board, Scottish Labour would create a dedicated mental health response division. That would be a default blue-light service for mental health crisis calls, and so reduce the number of calls that would require Police Scotland to attend.

Only this week, David Kennedy, the head of the Scottish Police Federation, highlighted claims that the police are expected to operate like a “nanny force”, by plugging gaps in social services, which is leaving communities without

“adequate protection from serious crime.”

It is reported that 80 per cent of call-outs involve no criminality, with police time being increasingly taken up by public safety concerns, wellbeing checks and mental health crises. That simply has to end.

It is no surprise, therefore, that police morale is at an all-time low. Police officers must be allowed to do the job that they are trained for, as the public would expect. However, our police service has been hollowed out since its creation 13 years ago. Police Scotland has made savings of more than £1 billion, but it has not been allowed to reinvest any of those savings back into our police force. The police estate has been decimated, with a staggering 150 police stations closed in the past two years.

The public consensus is that that is compromising community safety. However, there are still some crimes to which the police do not turn up, as a result of what is called the proportionate response to crime initiative.

It is unacceptable that Police Scotland was the last force in the United Kingdom to roll out body-worn cameras. It is important for police officers to be able to fight crime in the best way, and with the best equipment, but, in Scotland, they have not been able to do that.

Given all that, it is unsurprising that so many officers are choosing to leave their careers early. I see that as the most vital issue in policing today. More than 1,700 police officers have quit the profession in the past two years, and officers are leaving at the rate of 16 every week. Too many officers are disillusioned and are leaving jobs or taking early retirement.

We need to start making police officers feel properly valued, and we need to reverse that trend. There are now more than 1,000 fewer police officers than when Police Scotland was formed back in 2013. It is no surprise that that is having an impact on officers who are currently serving.

The Scottish Police Federation has said that the Government’s budget as drafted falls well below what is needed to stabilise officer numbers and meet rising demand, and we have still to see the full impact of that.

I believe that the most significant task ahead is to deal with the challenge of so many officers who are—as I said—leaving the job early. We must invest properly in the service to sustain police numbers. We must properly support police officers. We must reduce the practice of cancelling leave so that we have a strong, well-equipped police force that serves in communities, so that those communities see that their police officers and their police service are visible to them.

I move,

That the Parliament regrets that cuts to police officer numbers have disproportionately fallen on local divisions, reducing the number of officers on the frontline; is deeply concerned about reports of rising crime, particularly violent crime; recognises that the proportion of people reporting that they feel safe after dark is at the lowest point on record; considers that failures to modernise the court system and support mental health care have resulted in a poor use of police officer time, which should be focused on reducing crime; believes that there is a need to restore community policing, and calls for the creation of community and crime prevention officers in every council ward in Scotland.

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