COMPLAINTS are part of the job for police chiefs.

Many are vexatious, some are malicious and they are directed at one senior officer or another almost every day.

The accusation levelled at Wayne Mawson, the assistant chief constable responsible for community policing across western Scotland, is anything but routine.

Mr Mawson is alleged to have cheated on the exclusive and prestigious Strategic Command Course he needed to pass earlier this year in order to keep his rank.

In what police insiders say is an unprecedented complaint about a senior Scottish officer, the assistant chief constable is accused of using a key piece of work undertaken by a subordinate when on the course.

The claim, whether true or not, has created a headache for Police Scotland's dozen or so chief officers; chief constable Sir Stephen House, his four deputies and seven assistants, including Mr Mawson.

Sources suggest it also risks exposing what one source called "natural tensions" within the leadership of an organisation that has been in the political firing line since before it formally came to being in April 2013.

That is because Mr Mawson has become the public face of what has proven to be one of the most controversial tactics adopted by the national force: stop and search.

It was Mr Mawson who was grilled in the Scottish Parliament about the practice of carrying out so-called consensual stop and searches on children under 12 earlier this year.

The ACC said such searches would stop. That did not quite happen.

Liberal Democrats justice spokeswoman Alison McInnes demanded he be recalled, saying: "It would be reasonable to question if the Police misled parliament."

Stop and search is every bit as controversial within the police as outwith, albeit often for different reasons.

The main gripe, one of those complaints senior officers are more than familiar with, is that a targets culture has skewed numbers.

Some force insiders point to a faintly perceptible fault line in the leadership of Police Scotland on this and other issues between those, like Mr Mawson, Sir Stephen and Deputy Chief Constable Rose Fitzpatrick, who have come from London's Metropolitan Police and those who arrived through the ranks in Scotland.

Mr Mawson has been ACC since the formation of Police Scotland.

He secured promotion after four years as commander of one of Strathclyde's toughest divisions, the north and east of Glasgow after his arrival at the then Strathclyde Police in 2009.

He had been brought north of the Border in that year by Sir Stephen, who had also worked in London.

But Mr Mawson was made ACC despite not having done the strategic command course, the school for Britain's policing elite.

This spring, at a country house hotel in Berkshire, he joined a few dozen other officers, mostly chief superintendents, for two months of hothousing, preparation for a job he was already doing.

The cheating accusation, which came from an anonymous tip-off to Police Scotland's Counter-Corruption Unit, has yet to be fully investigated.

But even deciding who should look in to the claims, or who ultimately should decide their merits, has sparked debate within Scottish law enforcement.

Police Scotland cannot investigate or judge its own chief officers.

Evidence gathered by the counter-corruption unit has been passed on to the Scottish Police Authority (SPA).

The civilian oversight body must now judge whether the allegations, if proved, would constitute misconduct or gross misconduct.

If it decides that they do, it will pass the matter on to yet another body, the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner.

If it deems such allegations would not constitute misconduct, the SPA can throw the complaint out, take professional "improvement" action or ask for the matter to be dealt with under performance regulations that have still to be defined by the Scottish Government.

"We're still working out who is the investigator, who is the judge in a senior officer case," admitted one insider.

Read: Police chief accused of cheating on exclusive command course