Professor John Robertson OBA
From Police officer quarterly strength statistics: 30 September 2025 published today:
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 16,441 full-time equivalent (FTE) police officers in Scotland on 30 September 2025
- police officer numbers increased by 14 FTE officers (+0.1%) in the last quarter from 30 June 2025
- police officer numbers increased by 14 FTE officers (+0.1%) in the last year from 30 September 2024
- this is an increase of 207 FTE police officers (+1.3%) from the 16,234 FTE police officers recorded at 31 March 2007 1
From Recorded Crime in Scotland, 2024-25 published in June 2025, the above table showing a 39.8% fall in recorded crime since the last days of the Labour/Lib Dem coalition in 2007.
Can the SNP get some credit? If it was the opposite way round and crime had climbed nearly 40% under them, they’d be getting daily media pelters.
Sources:
- https://www.gov.scot/publications/police-officer-quarterly-strength-statistics-30-september-2025/
- https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/statistics/2025/06/recorded-crime-scotland-2024-25/documents/recorded-crime-in-scotland-2024-25-tables/recorded-crime-in-scotland-2024-25-tables/govscot%3Adocument/Recorded%2BCrime%2Bin%2BScotland%2B2024-25%2Btables.xlsx
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
I saw at Al Jazeera English news, they reported that crime is sky high across the ‘UK’.
I did comment saying this is not the case and why…someimes they get it right but like most media they tar Scotland with the same brush as England in any negative reports, sigh.
LikeLiked by 2 people