Stretched Police Scotland facing "difficult calls" as it struggles to plug recruitment gap
Chief Constable Jo Farrell - seven months into the job - says her officers are forced to spend too much time on mental health call-outs
Scotland's most senior Police Officer says too much of the force's time is spent on mental health call-outs.
Police Scotland Chief Constable Jo Farrell's been in the job seven months now, having taken over from Sir Iain Livingstone last year.
Asked whether the force was currently under resourced to meet its responsibilities, she said work was being done to turn the tide on an ongoing recruitment crisis, but that officers are often tied up in jobs which ought to be picked up by other services:
“We’re funded to have up to 16,600 police officers, we’re in the process of recruiting those officers, but I have observed in these seven months how there are areas where policing is responding to things that I don’t think are our core business and mental health calls is one of them.”
"It’s not our role to step in and provide support to every individual who has vulnerabilities”
“We get a call on a busy day every 2-4 minutes. It's equivalent of five to six hundred police officers a year.”
“We clearly have a role in relation to where somebody is threatening harm to themselves or to members of the public and there’s a safety issue, but it’s not our role to step in and provide support to every individual who has vulnerabilities.”
The Chief Constable also defended moves to nationally roll out a pilot scheme - trialled in the north of Scotland earlier this year - not to investigate all low level crimes, specifically where there is no CCTV or witnesses. She stressed that where there is a real need, the police will always respond to a call, but pointed to “difficult” choices in terms of how resources were utilised:
“I’ve talked around prioritising frontline and I’ve talked about strengthening that frontline, but what goes with that are some choices, because there’s finite money - we know the position nationally in terms of the public finances. Are they difficult calls? Sometimes they are, but they’re the right thing to do.”
"There are individuals inevitably within big organisations whose standards of behaviour fall below what we would expect. It’s my job to make sure we root them out”
Asked if she agreed with her predecessor Sir Iain Livingstone’s analysis that Police Scotland was “institutionally racist”, Jo Farrell said “I did agree at the time and I do agree with that analysis”. She says work is already underway to change that culture:
“The vast proportion of the people - 22,000 - are very very professional, they have the highest standards, they demonstrate those standards every single day. There are individuals inevitably within big organisations whose standards of behaviour fall below what we would expect. It’s my job to make sure we root them out.”
“What I’ve seen over the last 12 months is occasions where people have come forward and they’ve had the confidence to come forward and call out that wrongdoing. They are signs to me of a culture where people are confident that they will be supported, confident they’ll be believed and that we’re able to identify and remove those individuals from this organisation.”