THE Chief Constable of Police Scotland, Stephen House, has conceded that "some" stop and searches carried out by his officers are "made up".
House said the vast majority are conducted "properly" but he admitted having "concerns" about allegations of officers putting in ghost entries into the system.
He also defended his right to a controversial allowance to help pay his housing costs, saying: "I took the package as offered to me, and I'm not about to renegotiate it."
Stop and search is a tactic promoted by House and used to catch suspects in possession of drugs, knives and stolen goods.
Over 500,000 searches have been carried out since the formation of Police Scotland last year.
However, former officers told this newspaper that police were making up bogus stop searches due to the pressure from their bosses to keep the numbers up.
The system for entering details of a search does not require a name and address to be input, an omission it is claimed results in bogus entries.
In an interview with the Sunday Herald, House said he had not heard this, but added: "I'm not naive enough to think that there aren't occasions where, out of the number of stop and searches we do, there aren't one or two that we feel are not high quality. Unfortunately, on occasion, you get cops that cut corners. The vast majority of them are done properly."
Asked if the allegations concerned him, he said: "Of course it concerns me." He added that "precious few complaints" were made about stop searches, but when it was put to him that there would be no-one to complain if some searches were made up, he said: "Well, yeah, some of them are being made up. You're not suggesting the majority are."
On his housing allowance, the perk older officers still receive, he said: "I have to say to you, it's been part of my terms and conditions since 1981 ... It's the same for every single officer who joined before 1994."
On whether it was unfair for him to get help with his mortgage while civilian police staff jobs were being cut, he said: "You call it that, 'special help with your mortgage', but it's just another line in the pay packet. I don't see it like that ... [Police staff] took the job that they took under terms and conditions. They have taken voluntary redundancy under very clear terms and conditions. Each person deals with life in their own way."
Gerry Crawley, a regional organiser for the trade union Unison, said: "We are all meant to be in this together, but the cuts are focused on support staff. Not all police officers get a cut of the £10 million housing allowance, only a proportion. I'm sure most officers would support the retention of jobs across the country, rather than see some colleagues get an historic allowance. It is not right and not fair."
Graeme Pearson, the Scottish Labour spokesman for justice and a former police chief, said: "There's a growing acknowledgement that for negative stop searches nobody at headquarters can check to see if they have taken place.
"When I asked about this issue at the sub- committee on policing, it was acknowledged there was a problem."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article