I WON’T miss Stephen House. As my colleague John Finnie said yesterday, his decision to quit as chief constable is one of the few good calls he has made.

But replacing one person, even within a hierarchical organisation like a police force, doesn’t change a culture. There is a real concern that Police Scotland will continue to operate according to the House style, even once he has departed.

It has been a style that all too often justified the concerns many people had at the amalgamation of Scotland’s police forces into a single organisation. Rather than picking up good practice from across the country, and ensuring that local priorities were respected, there was an unhealthy tendency to impose from the centre.

The sight of armed officers on routine duties in Scotland shocked many people, and became a touchstone issue. But I can’t help relating it to an earlier experience of House’s approach. Just more than five years ago he was challenged over his commitment to having electroshock weapons, such as Tasers, carried by officers on routine patrol. Strathclyde Police (as it was then) had previously issued them to qualified firearms officers, and just like other firearms they were kept secure rather than holstered by beat officers. House was intent on a pilot in which they would be issued to other officers after just a three-day training course.

Like the human rights organisation Amnesty, I and other MSPs raised serious concerns about this proposal. These weapons are classed as firearms, and it seemed very clear to me that the decision to treat them in any other way was a political one. But week after week, the Justice Secretary refused even to state a view and repeatedly described this as an “operational” matter for Strathclyde Police. Roll forward a few years, and that’s exactly the response the Government offered when the routine carrying of firearms was challenged.

On other issues, assurances about respect for local policing approaches evaporated quickly after the creation of Police Scotland. Whether you favour Glasgow’s methods of policing the sex industry, or the more “harm reduction” approach favoured in Edinburgh, the choice between the two is clearly not just an operational one.

It is a question of policy, and though the political debate about this issue is far from over it was surely overstepping the authority of a chief constable to impose the Glasgow approach on Edinburgh. As venues that had been licensed by Edinburgh City Council were raided by Police Scotland, sex workers were left feeling degraded by police officers’ tactics, more vulnerable to exploitation, less willing to carry condoms, which many feared could be used as evidence to prosecute them, and excluded from the decisions that directly affected their lives.

On a host of other issues, House’s successor will find serious challenges waiting. The overuse of powers to stop and search children, even when clear promises had been made to rein in that practice, has risked losing the confidence and trust that our tradition of policing by consent relies upon. The handling of the fatal car crash in Bannockburn this July remains to be fully investigated, but few people would doubt that there were serious failings that are organisational in nature.

Perhaps the most clearly political issue is the revelation of a Police Scotland surveillance programme aimed not at organised criminals, but at journalists exercising their basic freedoms. We’ve seen confirmation in recent years of long-suspected surveillance of peaceful political activists, including by Strathclyde Police under House. It now appears that freedom of the press is under as much threat as the freedom of citizens to organise together on political campaigns. Here, again, the dismissive phrase “operational matters” is an unacceptable excuse.

Beyond these specific issues, there remain fundamental problems with the single, centralised organisation of Police Scotland. How can one national body achieve meaningful local accountability? How can the power concentrated in one chief constable be kept properly in check, when his authority comes to rival that of the Justice Secretary? How can Parliament properly scrutinise both the role of government, and the role of Police Scotland?

It’s simply not good enough to be told by Ministers that issues such as surveillance or deploying routinely armed police officers are operational matters – these are deeply political questions that relate to the kind of policing we want to see in Scotland. We need more than a change of nameplate on the chief constable’s office door.


The National view, August 28: Stephen House is right to go but problems have still to be solved