Chief constable of Police Scotland faces grilling at Holyrood

MSPs brought Sir Stephen’s leadership into question at a justice subcommittee yesterday at Holyrood, with independent MSP John Finnie suggesting he was undermining the work of Police Scotland.

In reference to the consensual stop and searches of children as well as the deployment of armed officers on routine patrols and the closure of police counters, Mr Finne said: “Isn’t that part of the problem, chief constable, that because there is an awful lot of good work going on, it’s being lost because you’ve become the story?”

Sir Stephen said the publicity would not detract from the fact that police officers and staff were doing a “fantastic job”.

Liberal Democrat justice spokeswoman Alison McInnes said trust was “ebbing away” in the police, to which Sir Stephen replied: “I don’t accept the premise that confidence is ebbing away. Confidence levels remain high.”

He was called before the committee because of data released by the BBC which showed a high number of under-12s had been stopped and searched by the police.

Police Scotland said six months ago that it had ended the practice of “consensual” stop and search of under 12s but the numbers showed hundreds had taken place after this claim.

Sir Stephen had told the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), the police watchdog, that he was forced to produce the data by Scotland’s Information Commissioner (SIC) but an exchange of emails between the single force and SIC gave no indication that SIC had pressured the police to release the figures and that they had actually been given voluntarily.

Conservative MSP Margaret Mitchell said yesterday the mix-up was “rather breathtaking”.

She said: “You’re the chief constable.

“The responsibility for communicating with the rankand-file from the top down rests with you. Clearly there has been a huge communication problem here.”

Sir Stephen said the voluntary searches would continue despite them being against police policy.

He said: “It is a judgment call for operational officers. It is their decision. It is them who exercise the power – not the chief constable.

“We don’t want a situation in Scotland where officers are carrying out wholesale consensual searches to under-12s.

“To that end we put in place a policy that saying we don’t want to do consensual searches of under-12s.

“It is policy. It is not law. On a number of occasions, officers have stepped outside the policy, they have not stepped into illegality.

“What we have done is ask them to explain, why have you done that? If there is a fair explanation then so be it.”

The committee was also told that 20,000 stop and search records were accidentally deleted from the Police Scotland database as a programmer had “pressed the wrong button”.