Policing is about making hard choices - and it always has been

Read what I have to say about this, in my latest column, published in today's Scotsman (10th June 2025).

Without adequate resources, what are the police to do less of ?

It was no coincidence when last week police chiefs in England and Wales publicly warned that unless more funding came their way some policing tasks could not be done. The week before the government’s Spending Review is prime time for shroud waving , all non-ringfenced departments will be doing it , either by the front pages or the back channels.

But that doesn’t mean the problems are not real. Policing structures south of the border desperately need reformed , but that in itself is expensive , and in the meantime police forces face the intractable problem of increasing demand and shrinking resources. Something has got to give.

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Here in Scotland , our national police service is the end result of a long process of reform, but after 12 years of cost cutting it too is struggling to make ends meet. The recent rise in employees national insurance didn’t help, adding millions to the wage bill, but with well over a billion pounds taken out of policing since 2013 the underfunding is deep seated.

Policing is a people business and if savings are to be made it’s inevitably the head count that suffers. Police Scotland has now got fewer staff than at any time in its existence and are finding it hard to recruit. The Covid pandemic changed much, including the world of work. Home and part time working are now seen as a right rather than a privilege. For that and other reasons a life in policing is not been seen by some as the attractive proposition it once was. Anti-social hours, and regular exposure to aggression and violence do not come top of many checklists.

But there are other problems in policing, one illustrated perfectly by a recent news feature on the work of Police Scotland’s Online Sexual Abuse Unit. In yet another societal change since the pandemic, online sexual offending has risen by 30 per cent in the last decade, with no sign of levelling out. Rising demand of this kind must be met with a professional response, and that means more specialist officers, taken from the street and trained for their onerous task. Online crime is just one example of societal change that affects policing, but there are many more, and while it will be cold comfort to today’s police chiefs, the truth is that from the dawn of policing it has always been this way.

For close to two hundred years policing has been adapting to change , whether it was the coming of the railways and travelling criminals in the 19th century, or the introduction of the motor car with all its problems and new legislation in the early 20th century, there has always been a need to adapt and make hard choices. In my time the appearance of illegal drugs in the 1970s changed everything once again, and remains of the most deadly destroyers of young lives and drivers of crime. Then came the internet and the digital world that changed the world of crime again . Throughout, the police service has prioritised and adapted - but there’s a limit, and police chiefs are right to pose the question. It’s easy to take on more and more new tasks, but with shrinking resources it eventually means we must do less of others.

And that’s the real question for our political leaders . Without adequate resources, what are the police to do less of ?