One of the very hardest things any police officer has to do is to tell a loved one that their son, daughter, husband, or wife has been killed. The checking, double and triple-checking that you have the right address, the deciding between yourself and your colleague who is going to break the news – before the final walk of what feels like a thousand steps to the door.
There are of course formalities to be navigated, but the only training any police officer receives in how to pass on the dreadful news comes from older, wiser colleagues who have seen it all before. Make sure your cap is straight; turn the radio down so there are no distractions when you talk. There are no prizes for long drawn-out narratives about the how, as almost without exception every single person who opens that door instinctively knows what you are there for the second they see your face anyway. The deliberate removal of the cap as the ultimate sign of respect before delivering the news removes all doubt.
No matter the circumstances, the occasion demands solemnity. What you say, and how you say it, will be forever etched in the minds of the loved ones. I pray to God that in this new age of policing, where baseball caps have largely replaced the old uniform skip cap, the service maintains the dignity of these occasions – and does not have officers delivering such news looking as if they have just stepped out from behind the counter of a fast food restaurant.
Deaths from anything other than old age and illness will always make headlines, and whenever there are headlines, you can be certain a suite of governmental policies and strategies will exist to help tackle them.
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Last week Transport Scotland briefed Scottish ministers that new UK-wide proposals to improve the safety of young drivers – who are disproportionately represented in the annual road death statistics – don’t go far enough. Restrictions on passenger numbers, curfews, an even lower drink-drive limit, and “P” plates were all suggested as necessary. Given the reserved nature of driving licences, the potential for an early spat with Westminster is inevitable. A performative clash is always a great distraction from failures closer to home.
I have first-hand experience of the tragic waste of life that occurs on our roads, and I’ve knocked on too many doors to deliver devastating news to families. It never gets any easier and the reasons – especially with young drivers – never change. Too much car and not enough driver is the simple distillation in almost all cases.
For as long as I can remember there have been targets to reduce road deaths. The current target to cut them by 50% makes as little sense as all that have gone before. At its core, it suggests that the loss of around 85 lives on the roads each year would be regarded as a success – and that is just the beginning of the madness that reveals what kind of priority road safety really is.
The policing of the roads in Scotland has reduced dramatically in recent years. A decade of cuts has seen a 10% reduction in dedicated traffic cops, which can leave as few as half a dozen double-crewed cars covering the entire trunk road network of the country. And like the proposals to curtail young driver night-time driving, Scotland now has so few officers on the roads that you won’t see a traffic car after 3am.
Compared to drug deaths, however, road fatalities barely register. More than seven and a half times the number of people killed on our roads lose their lives to drugs in Scotland each year. If drug deaths were reduced to road death numbers, ministers would be popping champagne corks! All lives are not truly equal.
The photos of young men and women – often with the rest of their lives ahead of them – adorn our screens every time a life is lost on the roads. They are human – real – we feel their loss and acknowledge the devastation their deaths must bring to their families.
But I haven’t just knocked on the doors of those killed on our roads. I’ve also delivered the news of lives lost through drugs. Let me tell you – there is no hierarchy of devastation or pain and anguish felt by those left behind – only shattered lives to be rebuilt.
And yet when it comes to the value of life, our government clearly believes some lives are more important than others. As I’ve said in previous columns – no one really cares about the lives of junkies. This shows too.
On the roads, the suggestion is that freedoms need to be restricted to save life. With drugs the opposite is the prevailing logic. The libertarian drive towards normalisation of drug use – with “safe” consumption rooms, heroin-assisted treatment, and a reluctance to pursue possession offences – routinely ignores the criminality of drug use and instead frames it as primarily a health issue.
That has led to much less police attention being directed towards the detection of drug offences, as the absence of any real meaningful sanction makes it an endeavour unworthy of police time. Little wonder therefore that cheap drugs flow freely across all corners of the land – and every community sees and feels it.
I have knocked on too many doors after both road crashes and drug overdoses. The sound is the same. The screams that follow are the same. The lives destroyed are the same. Yet the way we treat them couldn’t be more different.
This is policy incoherence at its worst, compounded by hollowed-out policing in both cases. We plan to restrict freedoms on the roads while surrendering on drugs, all while having fewer officers to do anything meaningful about either. The message to families is brutal: some deaths we will fight to prevent, others we will manage and accept.
This is no way to run a country. A society that agonises over every road fatality but normalises over a thousand drug deaths a year has lost its moral compass. If we are serious about stopping that knock on the door, we need the same urgency, the same willingness to be tough, and the same determination in both fights. Lives do not come with different values. Our politicians should not pretend they do.
Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and former general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations. He remains an advisor to both.
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