SCOTLAND’S most senior police officer has admitted that a lack of clarity between Scottish Government guidance and legal regulations has led to people being wrongly issued with penalty notices.
Chief Constable of Police Scotland, Iain Livingston, has also warned that the introduction of quarantine measures has been “problematic” for officers.
Mr Livingstone, who appeared before MSPs on Holyrood’s justice sub-committee on policing, stressed that officers have had a duty to “support highly-restrictive measures on personal freedoms, of movement and association which has never been seen before”.
The top officer said that when all parts of the UK were following the same path during the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak, it was easier to police the pandemic, but when there was “divergence for an entirely legitimate reason”, that has “added to some of the challenges”.
READ MORE: Lack of public health staff means 'volatile' targets for quarantine checks being missed
He added: “At times, what sat in guidance and what sat in regulation wasn’t always clear. We haven’t always got everything right.
“Even within the service, in good faith, some of our officers in a handful of cases have issued fixed penalties which on review by sergeants and by supervising officers have said ‘that’s a breach of the guidance but it’s not a breach of the regulations’ and we’ve withdrawn those fixed penalties.
“I think the five-mile issue a number of weeks back was a case in point where actually somebody going beyond five miles for exercise, that wouldn’t generate the issue of a fixed penalty but it was still the right thing not to go beyond your local area to try and stop the spread of the virus.”
Mr Livingstone was quizzed about the requirements for overseas arrivals from certain countries to quarantine for 14 days – with those who flout the rules at risk of enforcement action.
He said: “The quarantine arrangements, I think, have been problematic. It took Public Health Scotland a number of weeks to set up an appropriate process with Border Force.
READ MORE: Coronavirus in Scotland: Police to crack on house parties from Friday
“In the early weeks of that, for reasons that Public Health Scotland had, we were not passed any information – it was felt that this was personal health information and for reasons of confidentiality, that information wasn’t passed to us.”
He added: “The direct referral from Public Health Scotland has actually only started at the early part of this month. The number of enforcement actions on the part of Police Scotland has been relatively low – that's consistent with what we see across other parts of the United Kingdom.
“It’s very much policing was seen as the backstop to the quarantine requirement – the primary purpose was for self-regulation – people doing the right thing.
“I think those processes have improved but they were slow to get off and running.”
Mr Livingstone added that when additional countries have been added to the quarantine list, such has been the case recently with Spain and France, “that causes a degree of difficulty and confusion”.
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