A SENIOR police officer has warned this year’s parades season in Scotland could once again be “challenging”.
Police Scotland Deputy Chief Constable Will Kerr said there had been “significant tension” around some marches in 2019, with a number of events requiring a police presence of more than 500. He said he fears the same may be the case this year.
The force had to call in riot police, mounted officers, a police helicopter and dog units to deal with “significant disorder” at a march in Govan, Glasgow, at the end of August last year when “disruptive” counter-protesters met a planned Irish Unity march.
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At another march, a policeman was injured when he was struck by a pyrotechnic thrown by a protester.
Kerr, who spent almost three decades as a police officer in Belfast, told a Scottish Police Authority (SPA) board meeting in Edinburgh, that the “parade season in 2019 ended with some significant tension”.
He said: “Some of those events were very resource-intensive for us, one or two of the parades in particular in September last year in Glasgow took more than 500 officers to police. We don’t know the extent to which that residual tension is going to work over into the parading season this year.
“Glasgow City Council, the Scottish Government and a range of others are doing a significant amount of work to try to minimise and mitigate that tension.
“But my intuition tells me it is going to be a challenging year around the parading season.”
Police Scotland Chief Constable Iain Livingstone told the SPA there had been an almost 20% rise – from around 1500 to 1800 – in the number of loyalist and republican marches in Scotland in 2019.
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