A frank admission by Chief Constable Jo Farrell on Police Scotland is a welcome diversion from the usual shying away from spelling the truth - and a warning the Government would do well to listen to, says Herald columnist Calum Steele, a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation

Most of Scotland’s public services are led on an understanding that no one says anything overly problematic in public. That is especially true of our police service, where the inherently opaque concept of “maintaining public confidence” is frequently uttered as the reason everyone stays schtum on the realities of the problems facing the service.

We need only look back at some of the word salads that have been generated over the past few years to pay homage to the sheer creativity of the internal spinners in the polis when it comes to its responses to genuine areas of concern.

The closure of police stations is claimed to deliver a more responsive service to communities. The horrifying drop in applicants to the police has, we are led to believe, helped deliver a more diverse police service (whatever one of them is) with no drop in the rigorous recruitment standards – aye right! – and the justification for a £300,000 vanity spend on a military-style armoured car that will never turn a wheel in anger is that it “can be used in a number of scenarios linked to major incidents and improves options to keep people safe” (which is fine as long as you ignore the reality that it’s not been seen in public since it was bought in 2022 – and the........

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