The madness of Police Scotland bosses knows no bounds

Wait – what?

Any sane person reading that has to ask why on earth a petition is needed to call for something so inherently sensible it must be happening already – only to then come to the painful realisation that the institutions of the state have taken leave of their senses and that the asylum has been over-run.

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Such a head-scratcher has it proved that the Scottish Parliament Petitions Committee has had this particular gem on its books for the past three years without a conclusion seemingly any closer than before. And it’s not like anything controversial has happened, like say a shambolic attempt to bring self ID to the statute book, or rapist Adam Graham or the paedophile Borders butcher Andrew Miller coming before the courts, that could possibly have caused these institutions to pause and ask if maybe this particular petition had a point, and crucially should be addressed.

Last week, as the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre was being eviscerated for its damning treatment of women, Police Scotland in a courageous “hold my beer” moment stepped up to remind us all that insanity was still an essential component in policy decisions at Tulliallan Castle.

In an almost Stockholm Syndrome-esque desire for ridicule, it chose last week – of all weeks – to remind the world it had taken leave of its senses and recorded the gender of sex offenders, paedophiles, and rapists based on self-identification. But that wasn’t enough – this particular cake had room for not one cherry but two. The service announced that doing so was ‘consistent with the values of the organisation,’ and its pièce de résistance was that this practice promoted ‘a strong sense of belonging’.

Well, isn’t that just tickety-boo!

The sad thing is I can visualise the meeting where these lines were dusted down and sent out. There is no question simple enough asked of the polis that doesn’t generate a word salad of a response. Squeeze in some corporate guff about values and the job, as they say, is a good-un. The smugness and delight at batting away the pesky press last Thursday was however completely undone by Friday’s headlines, and internal crisis meetings followed. If only that could have been foreseen.

Rank and file officers are being let down by bosses, says former Scottish Police Federation chief Calum Steele (Image: free)

But here’s the thing – this petition has been rumbling on forever. Not once have the police been interrogated over the lunacy of its policy. Not by parliament and not as far as can be seen by its own oversight body, the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), either.

What is arguably the most contested and controversial area of current political and societal debate has not seen a second of scrutiny applied to it by anyone. That, dear reader, is an absolute disgrace.

Now, it’s no secret I’m no fan of the quango model of oversight for the police. There is no denying the SPA has brought some great people aboard and that in many areas its professionalism is head and shoulders above what went before. That being said the lack of democratic input is a failing that cannot be overcome by anything other than wholesale change. One thing above all others shows that and it’s the inability, or even worse, unwillingness to scrutinise in the public interest what the hell the service is thinking on this subject.

Senior officers should be skewered as to whether they perceive a conflict in telling women they will take their complaints of sexual assault seriously, whilst simultaneously telling them the gender “feels” of their attacker help promote a sense of belonging.

They should be tormented relentlessly as to whether they have a grain of awareness as to the devastating impact their tone-deaf policy has on public confidence. They should explain why they think it's OK to put upon a female officer, who is probably too afraid for her future career to say no, why she should help gratify a sex offender’s penchant for exerting power over women by having her undertake the indignity of running her hands over his crotch during a search.

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At the very least I’d expect any scrutiny body worth its salt to have a degree of curiosity about such things. But not the SPA. That might cause some rumbles and the chairman can’t have that.

The SPA has long and pitiful history in holding the service to account. It completely failed on stop and search; was forced to have its meeting in public after deciding the public gaze was a distraction, and it dithered and delayed over a misconduct investigation into former chief, Phil Gormley. More recently it signed off on the purchase of a £200k armoured car that will never turn a wheel in anger, and is overseeing the effective eradication of remote and rural policing as though it’s a mere accounting exercise.

I’m sure Martyn Evans, the SPA’s chairman, is rather smugly thinking he’s managed to steer clear of the controversies that had dogged all of his predecessors but this long-running passive ambivalence to the most controversial issue in policing today is a stain on the reputation of the board which surpasses all that has gone before.

I’d start a petition to get him to do his job if I thought it would change anything.

Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations