As Police Scotland send officers to help in Northern Ireland again, how the Scottish Government has made them the only UK force able to help with such ‘uncommon’ demands

Professor John Robertson OBA

From BBC Scotland yesterday:

Police Scotland has agreed to send officers to Northern Ireland after two nights of disorder in Ballymena. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) asked for extra support under mutual aid arrangements following violent scenes in the County Antrim town. The deployment will involve an undisclosed number of public order officers who are trained to police civil unrest.

Police Scotland previously sent 120 officers to Belfast last summer after a number of PSNI officers were injured during several nights of rioting and disorder in the wake of attacks on children in Southport, Merseyside.

Mutual aid agreements are uncommon and are generally “incident based,” according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn84wgnpqwgo

There’s not a word in the report from the police union or from opposition voices to remind us of the carefully selected statistics to suggest that police staffing has been cut by the SNP. This kind of thing they love:

You have to wonder why this latest report does not connect the two.

You see, above, they do remind us of the help last year in the wake of this:

Protestors throw a garbage bin on fire outside a hotel in Rotherham, Britain, August 4. REUTERS/Hollie Adams

From BBC UK last July:

Police were unprepared for the scale of disorder that broke out in part of the UK following the Southport knife attacks, a police watchdog has found. Police intelligence did not predict the “rising tide of violent disorder well enough”, according to the review of their response to the worst UK unrest in more than a decade.

Chief Inspector of Constabulary Andy Cooke praised officers for their “immense bravery and personal sacrifice” while protecting the public. But he warned it was “clear” that police had missed opportunities to prepare for widespread disorder, and that earlier incidents involving “extreme nationalist sentiment” had been underestimated.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpvn0dnnyj3o

From BBC Scotland in 9 August 2024, in what must be an unauthorised ‘Scotland is the best‘ report by a junior reporter not yet ‘inducted‘:

Police Scotland is considering a request to send 120 officers to Northern Ireland following several nights of anti-immigration riots in Belfast and other parts of the UK. Jon Boutcher, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), said his officers were exhausted and could not “stand alone to deal with disorder like this any more”.

Mr Boutcher said the PSNI needed support as it had been allowed to “decay” in recent years. The National Police Coordination Centre, which provides support to forces across the UK, said it was considering a request from the Police Service in Northern Ireland (PSNI) for back-up from other forces.

“As a national service, Police Scotland has the ability to flex resources where the need is greatest in order to keep people safe,” said a Police Scotland spokesperson.

{The FM] said Police Scotland had “formidable” resources that could be deployed flexibly across the country if required. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77lxyz7702o

How was this possible?

From the Safer Communities and Justice Statistics Monthly Data Report : July 2024 edition:

Crime has fallen by 53% since 2008-09. Results from the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey (SCJS) show that around 1 in 10 adults were victims of crime in 2021-22 (10.0%) compared to 1 in 5 in 2008-09 (20.4%). The estimated number of crimes fell by 53% over the same period, and by 18% since 2017-18. 

https://www.gov.scot/publications/safer-communities-justice-statistics-monthly-data-report-july-2024-edition/pages/3/#page-top

IMPORTANT – This is not based on police reporting which is known to understate the actual level of crime but on The Scottish Crime and Justice Survey (SCJS), a large-scale (5 500 interviews) social survey which asks people about their experiences and perceptions of crime in Scotland and is considered ‘gold standard’ research methodology ie very accurate.

In crude terms, you’re half as likely to be victim of crime than you were 17 years ago. How’s that for real news utterly unacceptable for our MSM’s agenda?

Despite this massive fall, there are actually slightly more police officers, as of March 2024, than there were, 17 years ago, at the end of the last Labour Government in March 2007:

From Police Scotland data, 7 May 2024:

Scotland’s Chief Statistician has published statistics on Police Officer Quarterly Strength, which gives the number of full-time equivalent police officers employed by Police Scotland.

The key findings of the statistics are:

There were 16,356 full-time equivalent (FTE) police officers in Scotland on 31 March 2024

This is an increase of 122 FTE police officers (+0.7%) from the 16,234 FTE police officers recorded at 31 March 2007  https://www.gov.scot/publications/police-officer-quarterly-strength-statistics-31-march-2024/

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