This has not been a good few days for Scotland's police service, as news of compensation pay-outs to the tune of some £18 million over the past few years grabbed the headlines. On top of that, a whistle-blower revealed continued internal pressure to record rape suspects by their chosen gender identity, in contradiction to recent assurances made by the Chief Constable that biological sex would be recorded.

Truth be told, the police compensation pay-outs story is one of those hardy perennials that comes around every so often. And to be fair, it would be remarkable if a police service — dealing with the near-constant pressure of rapidly changing real-life events — didn’t get it wrong from time to time. To err is human, and all that.

And whilst there are far fewer of them on the roads, a vehicle fleet in which hardly an engine gets the chance to go cold from one end of the day to the next is also likely to have the odd metal-on-metal encounter with others. Paying out for such things is to be expected.

If that were the end of it, I suspect the vast majority of us would shrug our shoulders and take a pragmatic view that there wasn’t really much to see here. But as with so many things in policing, that is a long way short of the whole story — and the service’s approach to dealing with these incidents, and the inevitable questions the payments invite, points to something altogether more concerning.

Read more

Our police service has wholeheartedly embraced a sackcloth-and-ashes approach to institutional failings of misogyny, racism, and sexism. Our Chief Constable was barely a few hours into the job when she told us all she agreed with her predecessor — who himself had had a Damascene........

© Herald Scotland