WE CANNOT yet know whether history will be kind to the first Chief Constable of Police Scotland, Sir Stephen House, but the events and politics of the past three years have not been as he chooses to leave office nine months early.
Since being sworn in as chief constable in October 2012, six months ahead of formal force reorganisation, he has faced the sheer logistics of merging nine constabularies into one at the same time as wave after wave of political noise offstage and some uncomfortable decisions and events, some avoidable, some less so.
Born in Castlemilk, he spent his adolescence in London. When he came back after a successful career working his way north he cut a feisty but impressive figure. It is worth recalling that many politicians calling of late for Sir Stephen’s head and bemoaning the force merger actually backed the creation of Police Scotland. Labour joined the SNP in voting in favour, the Conservatives abstained and the only opposition came from the Liberal Democrats and Greens. Increasingly strident criticism of the force in some quarters has smacked of hypocrisy.
The Herald backed the idea of a single force in principle but with the proviso that local accountability and decision-making would be safeguarded by creating designated local senior officers for every council area with a statutory duty to work with councils to shape local services. The failure of this to work might be the most damning verdict by history on Sir Stephen.
Resentment has festered within the force, with mutters about “House rules” and being “House trained”, while the new force jettisoned Edinburgh’s social policy of using regulated saunas to control street prostitution. A similar lack of nous in the extension of Strathclyde force approaches to armed policing to the Highlands was another case in point, fuelling an unnecessary controversy over how and when trained police officers should deploy their guns.
Too often, Strathclyde writ large became public relations disasters. There is a justification for saying that decent youngsters who wanted weekend fun in Glasgow were happy to submit to a voluntary search in order to feel more confident that they were entering a knife-free zone.
That is the epitome of what flexible, local policing should be. But extending “voluntary” searches across the country and applying them to young children seemed absurd. Who could not see that? From the earliest days of the single force the fall-out between the chief constable and Scottish Police Authority chairman Vic Emery was a high-profile own goal for the creation of a new service, and here the blame lay squarely with the Scottish Government. Ministers should never have allowed this to become a public spat.
But in becoming our most senior police officer Sir Stephen inadvertently became a political figure, and politicians stand or fall by the impact of events. His is a public role and he became a lightning rod for criticism on high-profile issues from those who failed to land a blow on the SNP Government. Police Scotland were not their only target after the M9 deaths and the death in custody of Sheku Bayoh. It all piled up, threatening to bury the successes of achieving the unified force, or the successful policing of the Commonwealth Games. Having overseen the creation of Police Scotland, Sir Stephen perhaps hands on a less poisoned chalice.
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