YOU might have thought fighting crime was a non-negotiable function of policing – if so, you’d better get with the times.
That view is distinctly last century, and things have moved on, hence alarming new figures which show officers in Scotland have handed out more than 100,000 Recorded Police Warnings (RPWs).
They were originally intended for minor transgressions, but their scope was extended to include people caught with cannabis, allowing them to avoid prosecution.
Now they can be given out for possession of hard drugs, though police won’t tell us how many have been issued to those found with heroin and cocaine – arguing it would cost too much to extract the data.
As we reported yesterday, in 2020-21, there were 6,448 RPWs for drug crimes, which pre-dated the change in guidelines from the Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, KC, allowing the warnings to be used in cases involving Class A narcotics.
There were 1,908 warnings for common assaults, 318 for fraud, 25 for fire-raising and, astonishingly, 20 for sex crimes – and they were also used in cases of housebreaking, car theft and driving under the influence of drink or drugs.
Figures show officers in Scotland have handed out more than 100,000 Recorded Police Warnings (RPWs)
The warnings do not count as convictions, those who receive them don’t admit guilt and they disappear from criminal record checks after two years.
Naturally, the police guidance on RPWs is being kept under wraps by Ms Bain and her colleagues.
Irresponsible
Yesterday she took the extraordinary step of sending out a statement saying that anyone caught with heroin or cocaine in a ‘shooting gallery’ – a facility where addicts could inject their own drugs under medical supervision – wouldn’t be prosecuted.
This effectively allows plans for such a clinic in Glasgow to go ahead. Previously they had been blocked, quite rightly, on the basis that the centre would flout the Misuse of Drugs Act. It’s also a deeply irresponsible project which will keep addicts trapped in a deadly cycle of addiction.
Commenting in a statement contained within an SNP Government press release, Assistant Chief Constable Gary Ritchie said that officers ‘will still be bound by their legal duty to uphold the law and will not be able to simply ignore acts of criminality which they see occurring’.
That’s ironic, given that last week we learned the single force is launching a pilot scheme in the North-East where police won’t investigate crimes they deem ‘minor’, such as theft from garden sheds.
It’s hard to imagine a more egregious dereliction of duty than police deciding unilaterally – albeit with the enthusiastic backing of First Minister Humza Yousaf – to opt out of probing certain crimes.
Is this ‘secret justice’? Fears Police Scotland has been hiding crime by handing out warning letters over sex offences
Would that selective approach be tolerated in any other walk of life? Might we see ScotRail announcing that it’s not going to run trains any more, though wearied commuters might reflect that this has already happened?
It continues a long trend of police withdrawal, such as shutting stations so that the force no longer has a meaningful presence in many communities, and cutting beat patrols. The underlying assumption is that some crimes can be safely written off because they’re at the lower end of the spectrum.
For example, the argument goes, a middle-aged man in a decent neighbourhood whose lawnmower is nicked from a shed is a victim of crime, technically, but he’ll get over it. The insurance policy, assuming he has one, should pay for the replacement – depending on the small print – and the chances of finding the culprits are limited, though if you don’t bother to investigate it in the first place then there’s no chance at all.
And frankly, police will privately argue, they have much more serious stuff to be getting on with than the theft of a lawnmower.
Assistant Chief Constable Gary Ritchie said that officers ‘will still be bound by their legal duty to uphold the law’
Victims
But where does this end? It’s not hard to imagine, in a few years, a scenario where police decide that they’d rather not investigate other kinds of crime, and the definition of ‘minor’ will inevitably widen.
Maybe questions will be asked of assault victims during online live ‘chatbot’ sessions: Can you walk? Is your vision blurred? Are you bleeding?
If it’s deemed to be relatively small beer, the matter might well be considered closed: crime these days, it seems, is a matter of interpretation.
The system could be hard-wired to generate a crime reference number, sent directly to your inbox – eliminating the need for any human intervention. Back in May, the now-retired Chief Constable Sir Iain Livingstone said that Police Scotland was ‘institutionally racist and discriminatory’, provoking understandable fury among the demoralised rank and file.
Like the rest of us, they would rather their boss had spoken out to condemn criminals rather than his own staff.
Now many of them are angry that the current leadership has publicly stated that not all crimes will be investigated – it’s not an easy time to be a police officer if you’re interested in catching bad guys, and most of them are.
It is true that Police Scotland is locked in a permanent funding crisis thanks to the SNP, with manpower at a historic low.
But that doesn’t automatically clear top brass of blame for this disgraceful surrender – one that it will come to regret, in time, when crime rates rise, stoked by criminals who know the chances of any effective sanction are somewhere between negligible and non-existent.
In the 2021 SNP manifesto, which had a beaming Nicola Sturgeon on the front page under the title Scotland’s Future, a ‘key priority’ was ‘supporting the police system in Scotland to protect vulnerable people, tackle crime and work with communities for a safe, protected and resilient Scotland’.
There was no mention of approval for police turning a blind eye to certain crimes, but a couple of years down the line that’s precisely where we’ve ended up.
In the courts, guidelines devised by the Scottish Sentencing Council (SSC), set up by the SNP Government, mean that under-25s are treated with kid gloves on the grounds of their supposedly immature brains – leading, in one case, to community service for a child rapist.
Sentencing
In 2021, the SSC, led by Lady Dorrian, Scotland’s second-most senior judge, published an analysis of consultation feedback showing that more than 70 per cent of respondents were against the guidance on sentencing younger offenders.
But the proposal was approved by the SSC after local authorities and charities voiced support for the move.
This lunacy is being foisted on us by an increasingly unaccountable elite wedded to a warped liberal ideology – and we didn’t vote for any of it.
The only beneficiaries are criminals, whose rights have been prioritised over those of their victims for years.
And now, unforgivably, more of them will get off scot-free thanks to soft-touch police and prosecutors, with the blessing of a weak and incompetent Government.
