By Andrew Argo

TAYSIDE POLICE last night defended their handling of an incident in Broughty Ferry at the weekend in the wake of criticisms that they were not on the scene quickly enough and that they let a councillor’s phone call about the incident go unanswered for 10 minutes.

A spokeswoman for the force said, “Officers did attend an incident in Brook Street in Broughty Ferry at around 8 pm on Saturday night. A 16-year-old boy was subsequently arrested and reported to the procurator fiscal.”

They also responded to Broughty Ferry member Charles Webster, who said he waited in vain yesterday for 10 minutes for someone to answer his phone call to force HQ to find out about policing in the area at the time of the incident.

A force spokesperson said, “Our control room was fully staffed at the time concerned and there is no way that a call would have gone unanswered for 10 minutes if it came through on the 223200 number.

“We have had one or two complaints from the public about calls to us not being answered, and when we have looked into these complaints we have found no trace of these calls. We have had engineers in, and this whole issue is the subject of an ongoing investigation.”

The episode had been brought to light by Councillor Webster, who had been troubled by what he had learned of an apparent confrontation between groups of young men in Brook Street at 8 pm on Saturday.

He had been alerted by butcher David Craig, who arrived at his Brook Street shop yesterday morning to find blood on the pavement outside from the alleged altercation two nights earlier.

On the opposite side of the street a shop window was boarded up.

One of Mr Craig’s employees was said to have witnessed a melee, and he said she told him the police did not arrive until half-an-hour after the trouble began.

Mr Craig said, “The incident had occurred at least 24 hours earlier but blood was still on the street. I had to phone the cleansing department to ask them to clean it up, which they did.”

He continued, “The same sort of thing happened twice last year and both times I had to phone the cleansing department.

“All this bother is doing nothing for Broughty Ferry—fights between gangs that the police aren’t dealing with and the debris being left behind which isn’t being tidied up.

“Considering the amount of pubs, clubs and restaurants there are in Broughty Ferry you would have thought that this area would have been an obvious candidate for stringent policing. This doesn’t seem to be happening.”

Mr Craig reported his concerns to Mr Webster, who yesterday said he first tried to phone the burgh police station to discuss Saturday night’s incident but received no reply.

Mr Webster continued, “I then tried to phone the headquarters in Dundee on the main number, 223200, to discuss the trouble in Broughty Ferry and what could be done to tackle it.

“I made the call about 12.07 pm and was hanging on for a good 10 minutes. The phone kept ringing and there was no answer.

“In the end I just gave up.

“The only other number I could have phoned was 999, but that is for emergencies and the public aren’t supposed to use it if it is not an emergency.

“These incidents happening and the inability to speak to the police about what is happening is very disturbing. This is not the service that the public deserve.”

Mr Webster said he was not blaming individual police officers for what he regarded as the communications failure, but he believed the Tayside force should re-examine procedures if it was not responding promptly to street violence and not dealing with telephone calls in an efficient manner.

Chief Superintendent Ian Alexander, divisional commander for Dundee, last night said, after examining control room records, “The incident came in to us at 20.12 pm on April 9 and we responded with the first officer on the scene at 20.17 pm.

“We dealt with the incident and at 20.42 pm our officer asked for the cleansing department (of the council) to clean the walkway.

“At 20.46 pm the cleansing department came back and said they would attend.”