Frontline police officers have warned that the targets culture of the new national force is seriously damaging relations with the public.

They have also raised concerns that pressure to hit quotas will make it inevitable that police officers will massage figures to give the impression targets are being met when they are not.

Police Scotland has consistently denied that individual officers are set targets, including for conducting stop-searches and catching people speeding or urinating in public.

However, frontline officers say the reality is different because the pressure on divisional commanders to meet targets cascades down to officers.

Some measures have been ­particularly controversial - including the drive to increase the number of stop-searches. Across Scotland, officers stopped and searched 186,463 members of the public in the first three months of Police Scotland's existence.

Leaders of rank-and-file officers have now decided to speak out against the culture within Police Scotland, the newly created single force.

David Hamilton, chairman of the north area for the Scottish Police Federation (SPF), gave an example of one pensioner whose recent encounter with the police had left her badly affected.

"For the 70-year-old living in rural Perthshire who gets stopped on her weekly drive to get the newspaper and her messages it is a problem," he said.

"She was given a fixed-penalty notice for forgetting to put on her seatbelt. It destroyed her confidence and she no longer drives. A better outcome would have been to remind her to wear a seatbelt. We have been told that exact story has happened. That is an absolute failure in terms of how this is working.

"We have found pockets where individual officers have been set individual targets, but where [the targets] have come from is not clear. Senior managers are assessed on the performance of their division. They take that pressure and pass it down. Some of the targets are highly arbitrary. It is a binary comparison between one year and the next - rather than looking at real outcomes and trends."

The fear is different techniques - dubbed "gaming" - will be used by officers to create the illusion fewer crimes are being committed and a greater proportion being solved.

Mr Hamilton said: "An example would be that, if you set a target to stop and search kids drinking underage, what officers might do if they find a group of kids and a stash of booze nearby is say that it is 20 positive stop-searches. Gaming is not necessarily out and out lies, but it is about the grey area where you are not comparing like with like."

Police forces have traditionally had Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) but officers say the targets culture is now more pressured and means officers feel they can no longer use their discretion to give someone a warning rather than a fixed-penalty notice.

The concerns of officers were raised in Dunblane last week at the annual meeting of the police federations of Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Andrea MacDonald, chairwoman of the west area for the SPF, said: "Targets for targets' sake is not appropriate. Often the people caught by these protocols are not people who have been in trouble with the police before and it may be more appropriate to tackle it in a different way. Public urinators are not a nice thing, but at a big public event it happens a lot and if we give them a warning that avoids alienating people who would otherwise be law abiding."

She added: "It is about ticking a box, reaching a target and nothing else. We are regularly raising these concerns with Stephen House [chief constable of Police Scotland]."

A Police Scotland spokesman said: "There is no policy of setting individual officer targets in Police Scotland. The force has put in measures to ensure all good performance is achieved within the ethical framework of the organisation."