POLICE Scotland failed to communicate and engage on controversial moves to make its armed officers more visible, according to its main civilian watchdog.

The force came under sustained criticism last year after it emerged it had been deploying men and women with guns on their hips to routine calls.

Chief Constable Sir Stephen House has since tweaked the policy - which had made his small band of 275 armed officers more visible than ever before - but not before his force suffered what insiders admit was a PR disaster.

The Scottish Police Authority (SPA) has now said Sir Stephen's force initially "underestimated the community feelings that would be generated among a significant minority of the population from armed police officers being sent to routine calls and incidents".

The watchdog's review of the public impact of such policing also exposed an "absence of a proactive communications and engagement strategy" on the issue. This, the SPA said, resulted in "subsequent public misunderstandings around the scale and deployment of armed officers...and these misunderstandings remain prevalent today".

This criticism of police public relations from the SPA echoes concerns expressed throughout 2014 by major policing figures, such as Niven Rennie, president of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents.

Mr Rennie sparked fury inside the force when he said the armed policing issue could "have been dealt with better".

The SPA's Iain Whyte - a Tory councillor from Edinburgh - said he believed the new report would help to change the culture of communication within the police, pushing force leaders to engage with stakeholders on such key decisions earlier.

"I certainly hope it will and think it will," Mr Whyte said. "For example, the chief has already said there should be a wider debate on body-worn cameras."

Insiders have always expected bodycams - potentially to be carried by all officers rather than the one in 50 that is armed - to present a huge change in the way police relate to the public.

Assistant Chief Constable Bernie Higgins - the officer in charge of armed policing - admitted that communications could have been "far more effective".

Mr Higgins also, for the first time, outlined just how widely armed officers had been used to carry out routine duties, saying they had been involved in some 30,000 interactions with the public in the first year of the new national force. There were no complaints about the fact such officers were armed, he said.

Armed offices in much of Scotland had carried their weapons on their hips for years before the national force came in to being. They had not been regularly used on routine matters. This changed in October. Mr Higgins was not able to say what effect this had had on the number of interactions armed officers had with with public.

He did, however, stress that armed officers had dealt with 1,400 armed incidents in April-December 2014.

The SPA, meanwhile, discovered that despite concerns among a vocal minority, most Scots supported Sir Stephen's policy on armed policing. It commissioned an opinion poll that revealed that just 18 per cent actually knew roughly how many Scottish officers were armed.