Police Scotland has good initiatives to deal with officers in mental health crises, but it needs to get better at preventing officers reaching that point in the first place, the Vice President of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents has said.
Suzanne Smith was giving evidence to the Scottish Government’s Criminal Justice Committee, which held a session on mental health in policing.
The committee also heard from Scottish Police Federation Chair David Threadgold, and David Malcolm, Branch Secretary of Unison.
Opening the session, the convenor said: “Recent events have more than demonstrated what the public ask of police officers and staff, and the committee is keen to ensure that they are provided with the support they need.”
Suzanne said: “I absolutely believe the Chief Constable’s commitment in respect of doing all she can to support officers and staff…What I would be keen to do is just to accelerate some of those initiatives so that we begin to feel the benefits of those.
“We are very good at the point of crisis, in those reactive spaces when things have gone horribly wrong. But we just need to get better in that space of intervention, prevention.”
1,110 Police Scotland officers were signed off work over the last financial year due to stress, depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Suzanne continued: “I manage the absences for my division, and we have seen an increase in absences when stress is a contributing factor. Some of that is work-related, due to some of the trauma experienced by staff in their roles; some of that is due to external factors: fiscal challenges, other societal impacts as a result of Covid, etc.
“The impact of that is that we’ve got less access to resources, which means we’ve got fewer officers to respond…Over time, there’s rest day disruption, so [officers] are not getting the same rest periods.”
Suzanne also pointed out that police officers were filling gaps in the provision of criminal justice and health and social care. She said that understaffing in those services had “the police leaning into spaces that they shouldn’t be in, which then creates that extra demand when our focus should be elsewhere, doing what the public expects us to do, which is guard, watch and patrol, to some degree, but be visible in our local communities”.
She added: “The Criminal Justice System is not slick enough to work with how we operate. So we need to be better connected. The conversations are ongoing – the Chief has made her commitment really clear in that space, and we just need to get better at other services understanding the implications of their decisions on how our operating model works.”
The committee also discussed the impact on officers when they had to police large events, which could mean working overtime and having their annual leave cancelled.
Suzanne, a silver and gold commander who is heavily involved in planning the policing of large events, said that they created “a huge police footprint”.
She said: “We are definitely moving into that risk-positive space around events, understanding whether there is a value for police being present – is there a significant threat, risk and harm need for us to be there, and if not, we’ve got some really good event companies that come across Scotland to deliver events.”
The committee asked Suzanne if there was any oversight of how many traumatic incidents officers attended. She said there was an expectation that the line manager would do a debrief and ask the officer: ‘Are you okay?’.
But she added: “The real challenge now is around the supervisory ratios and having leaders and supervisors in the right places to have that conversation. As we get slightly thinner on the ground, there are fewer of those people able to do that intervention. We regularly record near-misses in respect to physical injury, but we don’t have a mechanism currently to record a near-miss for trauma.
“But I don’t know how we do that, and I’m not sure you’ll always recognise that that event was the traumatic one until sometime after, because I think we all react differently to trauma.”