THE brilliant and articulate Callum Steele, former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, was on Radio Scotland this morning (February 29) in connection with the sad Emma Caldwell case, with a damming condemnation of policing in Scotland.
“Failure to be honest”, “governance needs to improve”, “lack of accountability”, “future policing in Scotland has lack of sustainability” are all comments from Mr Steele and it is shocking that a former police officer has come to this conclusion.
Once again, a very senior police officer, an assistant chief constable, has apologised for the lack of accountability and this happens far too often. These senior officers are paid vast salaries, in fact the Chief Constable of Police Scotland has a greater salary than the Prime Minister and they are not accountable. Strathclyde Police failed the Caldwell case, Police Scotland has also failed. There have been four chief constables since the SNP’s formation of Police Scotland in 2013 and as many Chairs of the SPA and this is not acceptable. Some chief constables are knighted despite failures and Iain Livingstone’s parting shot was to claim that Police Scotland had “institutional racism, sexism, misogyny, and discrimination” at its core. He was responsible for overseeing these failures and was knighted; why?
Scottish police are no longer investigating “minor” crimes. Police Scotland numbers have reduced and experienced senior officers are taking the pension and getting out. There is a senior executive team of about 17 people with an annual salary bill in the region of £3m/£4m and it is not working. Callum Steele is correct, it would appear that the “sustainability” of Police Scotland is in doubt. Perhaps it is time to appoint him Chief Constable: an able, articulate and principled man, qualities it would appear are sadly missing in the organisation today.
Scotland had eight police forces accountable to local authorities. The SNP created Police Scotland to give it political control of one chief constable. It has been an abject failure and opposition parties must call for a complete overhaul of policing in Scotland.
Douglas Cowe, Newmachar.
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Hold the guilty ones to account
THE lead story on BBC Radio 4’s news bulletin yesterday afternoon was about the conviction of Iain Packer, the man who assaulted and raped many women over more than two decades, and who brutally murdered Emma Caldwell. The second sentence of the report really jarred; it began: “The 27-year-old sex worker disappeared in Glasgow in 2005….”
What on earth is the relevance of "sex worker"? As Catriona Stewart reports today (“She was a good student from a very loving home”, The Herald, February 29), Ms Caldwell was an intelligent young woman with a loving and supportive family. Throwing in the irrelevant fact about her work is the most obvious of dog-whistles, carrying the suggestion that somehow she was of less worth than those in more salubrious occupations.
It's clear from what’s come out in the trial that Strathclyde Police didn’t take complaints of being assaulted by Iain Packer seriously, once they learned that the complainers worked in the sex industry. As a result, he was able to continue to commit grievous and reprehensible crimes against defenceless women for decades.
Police Scotland have apologised for the failings of Strathclyde Police, but I’m afraid that’s nowhere near enough. The failures of officers to properly investigate serious allegations resulted in many more women becoming victims, with all the trauma that will live with them forever. As Ms Caldwell’s family said: “They (the victims) were humiliated, dismissed and in some instances arrested, while the police gifted freedom to an evil predator to rape and rape again.” There must now be an investigation that holds to account those who sneered and turned away when distressed women reported assault and rape to them.
For once it’s the media who come out of this story well. Both the Sunday Mail and BBC Scotland correctly identified Iain Packer as Ms Caldwell’s killer several years ago, without having the powers of investigation vested in the police. Without their persistence, Iain Packer would probably now still be prowling the streets of Glasgow, looking for vulnerable young women to attack.
Doug Maughan, Dunblane.
Endowment exercise
THE nut season is some months away, yet an old chestnut popped up in your paper on Wednesday. I'm afraid that Carlos Alba's assertion that the graduate endowment was just tuition fees under another name is what Jonathan Swift might have called "the thing that is not" ("Did Flynn get his priorities wrong?", The Herald, February 28).
In a nutshell: tuition fees of £2,000 per annum were paid at the start of term by all students to the university; the graduate endowment of £2,000 was a single sum paid after graduation, and only after the graduate was earning over a certain amount of money, into a government fund to support poorer students.
The kernel of the matter would be to know how those poorer students are now being assisted, as over 20 years since the graduate endowment was abolished, the original fund must have been used up long ago.
Jane Ann Liston, St Andrews.
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Pregnant pause for thought
JIM Kearns (Letters, February 29) states: "I can confidently state without exaggeration that the most dangerous place for a pre-born child is in the womb of a 'pregnant person'."
It is, but that’s because every pre-born child is in the womb of a pregnant person. There is no other place for it to be.
Julie McAlpine, Alexandria.
Save us from local accents
WITH the news that Martha Kearney is leaving the Today programme ("Kearney set to quit role on Today", The Herald, February 27) we will lose a presenter who never garbles her words, misreads the time or speaks so quickly that words become lost and unimportant words become emphasised. We are fortunate in that most of our newsreaders and presenters are a pleasure to listen to. I shouldn't highlight any in particular but I must mention Neil Nunes and Vigi Allis. I could listen to them reading a telephone directory.
Tonight I heard on the radio that we should introduce more local accents. Why can't it be acceptable to speak a form of English that is understood by the whole population? By all means keep local accents alive in local areas but the BBC is a national broadcasting service. How easy do Cornish people understand an Aberdeen accent or vice versa?
I await with trepidation the first newsreader with a glottal stop.
Kathleen Gorrie, Helensburgh.
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