THE “bad guys” have the edge over Police Scotland as the single force’s digital capacity falls behind, it is claimed.
David Page, deputy chief officer of the single force, says it needs around £200 million for new technology to catch up.
Addressing the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) board in Edinburgh yesterday, he said: “What we try to be very clear on here is the risk of not doing this.
“Our officers and our staff have been struggling for six years with poor technology.
“It makes their job more difficult, it gives the bad guys an edge over us and it means that we don’t support the public as well as we should do.
“If we don’t invest and we don’t make this improvement that gap is only going to get worse, which means we’re only going to fail to serve as we should do.
“That’s with today’s situation.
“If we look at 2026 and the type of investment that criminals are making, serious organised crime is making, and the way that they exploit technology at pace, we will fall rapidly behind the curve.
“So there’s a real public interest in us getting this invested and getting this delivered.”
Fewer than 3000 of the country’s 17,000 officers currently have mobile devices to enable them to record data on the move.
Restrictions in the police force’s digital frameworks also mean that users are forced to enter the same information repeatedly.
Meanwhile, the failure of a £46m scheme in 2016 means a patchwork of systems is still in use.
The i6 system was supposed to make them uniform.
The force says its intended upgrades would allow a saving of up to £35.5m every year by 2022.
Page, who said there is “always risk in an ICT project of this scale”, insisted the force will not be “big bang-ing anything in” to avoid “risk” to every day services.
He told the board: “The opportunity here is huge for us.
“If we continue as we are now, we will be a very expensive national asset that’s not effective.”
The board has now given initial endorsement to the digital, data, and ICT plans, with an outline business case due in the autumn for further approval.
SPA chair Susan Deacon said: “We recognise the huge amount of work that’s been done to get it to this stage and indeed how much more work is required to take it to the next stage.”
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