Policing Scotland

Daniel Donnelly, Kenneth Scott

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134041862
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first modern book on policing in Scotland and aims to provide an up-to-date and authoritative account of recent developments, taking full account of the impact of devolution and the work of the Scottish assembly. A concern throughout is to look at Scottish policing within a broader UK and comparative context, assessing both differences and similarities with policing south of the border. Contributors to the book are drawn from both academics and practitioners and include chapters on the history and development of policing in Scotland, its structure and organisation, Scottish devolution and policing, the role of policing within the wider Scottish criminal justice system, crime and policing, community policing in Scotland, policing drugs, policing and youth justice, human rights legislation and Scottish policing, and the management of Scottish policing.

Chapter 1

---

Introduction: policing Scotland

Daniel Donnelly and Kenneth Scott

Ask any Scottish police officer whether or not policing in Scotland is different from that in England and Wales and there is likely to be an almost intuitive, affirmative answer. Ask about the precise nature of these differences and how they have come about and the answer is likely to be less clear and, indeed, may be quite vague. Once the fact that Scotland has its own laws and legal system has been identified, it becomes more difficult to articulate specifically what it is about policing north of Hadrian's Wall that makes it peculiarly Scottish.

These are the issues which this book seeks to explore. Is policing in Scotland in any way different from that which pertains in the rest of the United Kingdom or not? If it is different, in what ways is it so and are the differences fundamental or are they merely an adaptation of a British model of policing to a specific locality? What are the main characteristics of modern policing in Scotland and how have these developed over the recent past to what they have become today? Is the Scottish police likely to generate its own models of policing for the future or will it simply copy what is done elsewhere?

The aims of this book are therefore threefold. The first aim is to fill a gap in the police studies literature because very little has been written about policing in Scotland. The second aim is to describe how Scottish policing works, not only for an academic audience with a comparative interest in such matters, but for the general public in Scotland who pay for and interact with this important public service. The third aim is to provide some analysis of policing in modern Scotland in the context of new and emerging ideas about the nature, purposes and methods of policing that are developing throughout the world and to determine how far Scottish policing is maintaining its own traditions and characteristics or is becoming a localised example of global trends.

The study of Scottish policing

The study of policing has been a growing phenomenon throughout the world in recent times. Police studies has emerged from a combination of academic disciplines which relates to the activities, individuals and organisations concerned with law enforcement, the investigation and prevention of crime, public order, and the processes of criminal justice within society. Academic research into policing in Britain is usually dated from the pioneering sociological study by Michael Banton (1964) entitled The Policeman in the Community. Since then the study of policing and the police has become an established field in its own right with its own issues and agendas. As well as a growing number of academic books, the range of specialist journals has continued to expand and there has been a significant increase in research into policing from both academic and public policy sources.

Policing in Scotland has received very limited attention within this expansion of police studies and police research. Many regular publications tend to be of an official or semi-official nature rather than studies carried out by independent researchers. Some of these originate with police organisations themselves, such as in the statutory annual reports required of each chief constable and of HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary for Scotland. Others are studies commissioned in the past by the Scottish Office and now by the Scottish Executive, for example through its Social Research Unit (www.scotland.gov.uk/socialresearch) and the Inspectorate of Constabulary has begun to engage in some research activity in support of its inspection tasks (www.scotland.gov.uk/hmics). However, because this kind of research emanates from government and requires co-operation from chief constables, there is a tendency for it to express the officially sanctioned views of the Scottish police tradition rather than providing any wider critical perspective.

Scottish universities and higher education institutions have paid relatively little attention to the police compared with other parts of the criminal justice system, although, as this volume demonstrates, that is changing. An honourable exception to this is the Centre for Police Studies at the University of Strathclyde, which in the 1970s and 1980s published primarily on police management issues (see Bradley et al. 1986). The director of the Centre, Professor Roy Wilkie, was also instrumental in developing management within the Scottish police service, especially through his contributions to the command courses for senior officers at the Scottish Police College over many years. He also promoted scholarship within the service itself by persuading a number of senior police officers to undertake postgraduate research degrees. One of these, who was a chief constable twice in Scotland, went on to publish his thesis as a textbook on police accountability (Oliver 1997), but it is concerned with Britain as a whole and contains limited, though insightful, references to the Scottish situation. The writings of another of the original Strathclyde group, Professor Neil Walker, have given due weight to policing in Scotland in terms of police culture (Walker 1994), general developments (Walker 1999) and the constitutional framework (Walker 2000), although he is probably best known for his work on transnational policing and police co-operation in Europe (for example, see Walker 2003).

The growth in academic studies of policing in the United Kingdom has contained relatively little description and even less analysis of Scottish policing. Most of the major works in the field deal with ‘British’ policing as a singular entity and even the delineation of the police in Scotland is variable. Some works, such as Benyon et al.'s (1995) review of police forces in Europe, clearly do recognise Scotland as a country apart in policing terms. Many careful studies of policing in Britain explain that their focus is really on England, or at most England and Wales; for example, Reiner's (1997) classic study of the politics of policing. In other cases the line that is followed is not to define the police jurisdictions being discussed at all (see Bowling and Foster 2002). Thereafter, it is assumed that there is a ‘British’ form of policing and the discussion deals solely with England without reference to other parts of the UK. There are some signs that this tendency is beginning to change and that police studies literature is at least identifying the possibility that Scotland is different. The otherwise comprehensive Handbook of Policing, edited by Tim Newburn (2003) directs its readers who wish to find out about Scotland to the work of Neil Walker (1999). In Leishman et al.'s (2000) review of core policing issues, Scotland receives little mention, apart from a chapter on drugs policing co-authored by a Scottish senior officer, but the point is usefully made in the introduction, with regard to the creation of new parliaments and assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, that ‘the implications of these developments for British policing are many and complex, not least the question of whether we can continue to use the term British policing in the same way ever again’ (ibid.: 5). Against this background of relative neglect it isironic that the pioneering work of Banton (1964) was written when he was alecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and his book contains a detailed chapter describing a typical shift of police work in an unnamed Scottish city, which was almost certainly Edinburgh itself.

In one of the few published textbooks on the Scottish criminal justice system as a whole, Walker (1999) argues that:

The policing of Scotland, like the policing of any territory with its own political and cultural identity, consists of a distinctive but broadly familiar set of social practices informed by a distinctive but broadly familiar pattern of historical development.

(ibid.: 94)

One of the purposes of this book is to differentiate the ‘distinctive’ of Scottish policing from the ‘broadly familiar’ of policing in Britain as a whole and to seek to map the contours of the policing of Scotland in these terms. Some areas of difference in Scottish policing are well known: the separate legal system, for example. Some areas are beginning to emerge; for instance, the role of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Executive in initiating their own devolved agendas and policies in relation to policing. However, many others are unexplored, such as how the police in Scotland deal with crime, the effectiveness of accountability mechanisms, evaluations of operational policing or the relationship between the police in Scotland and the people of Scotland. Within the considerable constraints of space, time and the existing knowledge base, Policing Scotland is an attempt to begin the process of describing and analysing these and many other topics that constitute the core of police work, activity and organisation in the northern part of the United Kingdom.

The Scottish public and the police

Without doubt what policing in Scotland does share with the rest of the United Kingdom is an adherence to the guiding principle of ‘policing by consent’. This principle implies that policing is carried out on behalf of, and with the support of, the public. It finds embodiment in the idea that police men and women are not high-powered officers of the state, but are ordinary citizens armed with only a limited range of additional powers and subject to exactly the same rule of law as the rest of society. As a consequence the received wisdom is that police work can only be effective where it functions with the consent and co-operation of the general public.

In Scotland good relationships between the police and the public are accepted on both sides as crucial to the policing of the country. By and large, the Scottish public is highly supportive of the police, as shown in the outcomes of the Scottish Crime Surveys (SCS). The percentage of respondents saying that the police do a ‘very good’ or ‘fairly good’ job has never fallen below 70% since SCS began in 1982 (Hale and Uglow 2000; MVA 2000). This support is also present in situations where the public come into contact with the police. A consistent minimum of two-thirds of those surveyed in SCS who have reported crimes to the police have been ‘very satisfied’ or ‘fairly satisfied’ with the response (Hale and Uglow 2000; MVA 2000). Research carried out on the attitudes of victims of volume crimes in Scotland (Williams et al. 2004) showed that they were satisfied with the service the police had provided, including the time it had taken the police to respond. Where victims were critical of the lack of information about their cases, this was expressed in terms of frustration at the shortcomings of the wider criminal justice system rather than at the police as such. It is also true that Scottish police forces work hard to maintain the support of the public, partly through extensive involvement by police officers at all levels in a range of community meetings and activities, and partly through the development of media and information services aimed at keeping the public aware of what the police are doing.

Despite this level of interaction between the police and the public in Scotland, there is still a great deal about policing of which the public may not be aware. In 1990, at a time of considerable debate about police reform, the three police staff associations, representing chief constables, superintendents and the Police Federation, described a model of ‘British’ policing:

That traditional British policing is relatively low on numbers, low on power and high on accountability; that it is undertaken with public consent which does not mean acquiescence but a broad tolerance indicating a satisfaction with the helping and enforcement roles of policing . . . [It] is epitomised by the single constable, close to his [sic] community, patrolling his beat with the consent of the general public, armed only with his lawful powers and his use of discretion.

(JCC 1990: 4)

This model, embodied in the popular television series of the 1950s, Dixon of Dock Green, has been subjected to critical scrutiny, particularly by Reiner (1995). He argues that it reflects a mythical form of policing from the past which does not relate accurately either to that past or to modern circumstances. However, it is probably a representation of policing which remains in public memory and against which contemporary police work continues to be judged.

It is, after all, only a small percentage of the population who have any extensive direct contact with the police. Like other modern organisations, the Scottish police forces have learned the value of marketing themselves positively to their public and of presenting positive images about their work. The very real problems, tensions and dilemmas involved in policing in the 21st century are less likely to come into the public domain or to be the subject of informed public debate. In the first two election campaigns for the Scottish Parliament, in 1999 and 2003, law and order has been a significant issue on the agenda of the political parties competing for the electors' votes. Yet the only real reference to policing was in terms of which party would, in government, put more ‘bobbies on the beat’. While this is obviously responding to an expressed public perception of what should be a key issue for the Scottish Executive, namely, providing funding for more frontline police officers, it is far from all that there is to the problems of policing Scotland.

Policing is a major public service in Scotland. It is funded almost entirely by the Scottish taxpayer through both central and local taxation and it is concerned with a range of issues which are of crucial interest to the people and communities of Scotland. How can crime rates be cut? What can be done about levels of violence in our society? How can our local areas be made safer? How do we protect communities from drugs and drug dealers? How do we deal with the risks all around us, from deaths on the roads to preventing terrorist attacks...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Figures and Tables
• Table of Statutes
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Policing Scotland
• 2 The Organisation of Scottish Policing
• 3 Scottish Policing — A Historical Perspective
• 4 Devolution, Accountability and Scottish Policing
• 5 Change and Leadership in Scottish Policing: A Chief Constable's View
• 6 Policing Crime and Disorder in Scotland
• 7 Policing the Scottish Community
• 8 Policing Drugs in Scotland
• 9 Policing Youth in Scotland: A Police Perspective
• 10 Scottish Criminal Justice and the Police
• 11 Police Powers and Human Rights in Scotland
• 12 Semper Vigilo: The Future of Scottish Policing
• Bibliography
• Index