Control rooms are the nerve centre of a police force. They are where calls, both 999 and non-emergency, are directed. Decision-making, speed of thought and action, and local knowledge are all critical.
Yet we’re slashing their numbers in Scotland; centralising resources to save money; replacing highly-skilled and trained civilian staff members with officers who should be on the streets to safeguard a political dogma wholly unmatched by the reality of our justice system.
On February 7 2014 The Courier reported a leaked document, compiled by CCTV coordinator Mark Waterfall.
It said public and officer safety would be “compromised” by the closure of the Glenrothes control room.
Chillingly, the report concluded the loss of vital services in Fife “could lead to the possibility of someone receiving a serious injury or ultimately loss of life”.
That was 17 months ago. Now flawed choices made Police Scotland have been laid bare. Tragically, it has taken the deaths of two young people to make politicians face up to problems after months of dismissing concerns as “scaremongering”.
Lamara Bell and John Yuill lay in their crashed car by the side of one of the country’s busiest roads for three days. A call was made to police but it was taken by a sergeant, backfilling because there were not enough trained civilian workers.
He could not operate the computer system, so wrote the details down on paper. We don’t know what happened next within Edinburgh’s Bilston Glen control room, which covers Fife but the information was not logged.
What we do know is that John was dead when the couple were eventually found in their vehicle. Lamara was taken to hospital with serious injuries and severe dehydration. She died on Sunday morning.
This newspaper uncovered evidence of other control rooms being told to follow the very practice of noting things using a pen and paper, which the senior officer did. The First Minister and Justice Secretary may not think that indicates a systemic failure but it is difficult to see it as anything else.
The SNP has a remarkable ability to make itself Teflon-like when it comes to sustained criticism about its domestic policies. Yet it has to face up to the fact it created Police Scotland. It controls Scotland’s justice system.
Is it useful, then, for ministers to let Chief Constable Stephen House take the flak in an effort to make sure the mud doesn’t stick to them? Of course it is.
In their defence, budget cuts hampering public services are a grim fact of UK politics at the moment. This makes life tough. But being in government is about making tough choices.
Do we really need “a thousand extra officers?” Not if they’re in back rooms doing jobs they’re not trained to do on higher wages than their up-to-speed civilian equivalents would be.
Big decisions need to be made by Justice Secretary Michael Matheson. He may have inherited a mess created in the main by his predecessor, whose record in office seems to unravel more and more with every passing day.
However, Kenny MacAskill is not in charge now. Neither is Alex Salmond. It is Mr Matheson and Nicola Sturgeon.
Not cleaning up this utter justice shambles will be an unacceptable failure.Alex Salmond was defeated by two Tories in FifeSo it turns out Desmond Swayne, Minister of State for International Development, is a bit of a character.
For a start, he’s a Conservative MP who likes to call people “comrade”.
But the member for New Forest West in Hampshire does have some interesting tales about his time at St Andrews University.
There’s an often-repeated story about Defence Secretary Michael Fallon defeating former First Minister Alex Salmond in a student election.
So when Swayne kicked into a remarkably similar sounding tale during a briefing with Scottish journalists in Whitehall, there was a bit of scepticism about it.
In fact, there was downright suspicion he was just going to make himself the centre of attention and erase his fellow government minister from the fables of political history.
But no. It turns out the former SNP leader was beaten twice during his period of activism in North East Fife.
When the students’ union decided to distance itself from the National Union of Students, unsurprisingly, Salmond proposed an independent Scottish version be set up.
Swayne opposed it, it went to a vote and the people said No. All sounds a bit familiar. Still, at least the two were good to have a pint together afterwards.
And he didn’t spare us. His parting shot was the press corps are pussy cats, apparently. We’ve been called worse.Who knows better?Given the electoral rout suffered by Labour, particularly in Scotland, back in May it’s no surprise a bit of soul searching is going on.
Major internal reviews are being carried out across the UK into how and why the party got things so wrong when it came to convincing
voters to back it. Each area of the country has been assigned to a different senior figure within the party.
Who’s looking at the situation north of the border? Ex-shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran, a big Jim Murphy supporter who lost her Glasgow seat with 30% swing to the SNP.