Chief Superintendent Rob Hay, President of The Association of Scottish Police Superintendents
This week I was invited to Stratford-upon-Avon to attend the Police Superintendents’ Association (PSA) Annual Conference. It’s always a pleasure to meet with colleagues in England and Wales and get a view across the entirety of UK policing.
The conference was really well run, with an excellent variety of speakers. By and large, I saw that we are facing many similar challenges, although we in Police Scotland are at different points on the journey. There are real benefits to meeting with our colleagues from England and Wales and hearing that we are effectively fighting the same battles.
For me, two key issues came out of the conference. First, the twin challenges of resource and demand, and the fact that, right now, demand hugely outstrips the available resource. We also heard a lot about the psychological burden put on officers when they’re overwhelmed by workloads, as well as the amount of scrutiny they face.
Not only do we need specialist welfare support, we also need enough people to do the jobs that are being asked of them. In July and August, as both the President and then Vice-President of the USA visited Scotland, I know many Superintendents who worked two weeks solid. One colleague did 32 days in a row, many of those days over 12 hours in length.
That indicates an insufficient number of people to cope with the demand. The reason we’re even able to police these events is simply through officers’ goodwill and sense of duty. We’re only achieving this level of performance at the expense of officers’ health and wellbeing, and that’s got to change.
We absolutely need appropriate levels of investment and funding from the Government, but we also need chief officers to stand up and be honest about this issue. Chief officers need to acknowledge publicly that there is an unsustainable and frankly inappropriate demand on a lot of people within forces. We have heard over the past few days that that is true in England and Wales, as well as north of the border.
As well as the general camaraderie we got from the conference, there were also real practical takeaways – new ways in which we can support our people. Sometimes we are not at the cutting edge of policing because of budgetary challenges, so it’s useful to see some of these possibilities in an informal context.
I met with Paul Fotheringham from the National Police Wellbeing Service, who’s a former PSA president. We talked about mental health provision for officers in the rest of the UK, and whether we could use some of those same products in Scotland to help our officers.
We were also able to engage with a number of companies that work with the police service, including Corsight, which specialises in facial intelligence technology. That’s a journey that the English and Welsh police forces are further down the line with than we are in Scotland – it could be an incredible technological solution to some of our challenges.
But one of my favourite sessions at the conference was led by the Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, Rob Carden. He spoke about how forces needed to have a contempt for criminality. We need to encourage officers and leaders to be proactive and target criminals, and make their lives as difficult as we possibly can, because they are making the lives of victims in our communities difficult. It’s absolutely something that chimes with me and I’ve no doubt the public would agree that’s where policing priorities need to lie.