The police are busy enough without investigating the dead

This is my latest Scotsman column, published today (12th November 2024).

There’s no doubt that our national and local government services are struggling to make ends meet.

A decade or more of increased demand and reductions in funding has left most of our services salami-sliced to the bone.

Apart from our health services, all have suffered and been faced with some difficult choices. In response, many of our councils have hatched innovative revenue raising schemes akin to the robber barons of old, coming up with all sorts of new regulations to tax us by fining us for all manner of things. Car parking charges are the old favourite but now numerous other ‘traffic calming ‘ and Low Emission Zones are popping up, all with convenient ‘enforcement cameras’ aimed at revenue raising. But for some services there is no scope for such stealth taxes, and for obvious reasons our police service is one of them.

Badly hit by budget cuts since its formation, over a billion, yes a billion pounds, have now been stripped out of Police Scotland’s budget since 2013. Since there is no evidence that policing was too generously funded in the first place, such a huge reduction has obviously had a serious impact.

We cannot say we were not warned. The last Chief Constable Sir Iain Livingstone, and the present Chief Jo Farrell have spoken plainly about the growing risks.

Now however, the full consequences are being felt. For a start, police numbers are now lower than at any time in almost twenty years, with the loss of many experienced officers compounding the problem. And there are knock on problems, our courts have been similarly defunded resulting in more police officers being held at court longer with more cancellations.

The problems are far reaching, a recent inspection by The Inspectorate of Constabulary has pointed to the dangerous reduction in traffic patrol officers on duty throughout Scotland. But it’s not only a shortage of staff, the budget for buildings and equipment has always been inadequate resulting in many police stations now being dilapidated and vital safety equipment like body worn cameras being further delayed.

Scotland’s police officers are now the only ones in the UK not routinely equipped with such cameras . It all adds up to a perfect storm of pressures which means that our police are having to cut back on discretionary activities and strictly prioritise its investigations to those most in the public interest. I was thinking about this last week when I read that new allegations of sexual misconduct had been made against former First Minister Alex Salmond, and that despite the fact that he died last month, police were ‘assessing’ the new information.

Without speculating on the motive or timing of these complaints, Mr Salmond is now well and truly beyond the reach of our justice system. Assuming there are no living co-accused, such ‘assessments’ are a waste of precious time our police do not have. We cannot afford to indulge in such nonsense anymore. Our police service has been systematically defunded for over a decade. They now have difficulty enough investigating the living, let alone the dead.