Police Scotland don't seem to be much better than the Met.

[andrewducker]

This is from a friend who works for Police Scotland, who seem to have all the same issues that the Met do.

I raised concerns in 2017 about a colleague who was racist, homophobic & made misogynist comments on a daily basis. I feared raising a complaint because of a general macho culture in the office & this person's popularity so I expected a backlash. The comment which eventually caused me to complain was him telling my colleagues I was hormonal and that women were really only on this planet for one thing.

I was victimised for raising this concern, my managers didn't contact me for 3 months as I asked for support. I had a breakdown. He was disciplined and sent back to the same office as me. A friend and colleague and manager of another team got me moved in to his office. He later left the organisation.

The perp would stand outside my office and intimidate me. I raised concerns. They did nothing. I was the problem. He made further racist comments. They did nothing. My direct line manager told me that they were recruiting a new member of staff to go in the shared office. It was a female. They have no other females in that office after I left.

I had also been told by another colleague that he had been forced out of that office due to bullying. He had had a disagreement with the perp who then started a campaign against him. I raised another concern that this incident and putting a female in that office with the perp who was allowed to continue his behaviour, was an issue. They suspended me. My line mgr agreed with me, he wrote to the head of ICT to say so. They allege that I am guilty of gross misconduct.

Now, if that is how Police Scotland deal with the raising of concerns over red flags, it doesn't surprise me that the Met or others would do the same.

Comments

[autopope]

Policing as an institution seems designed to attract violent authoritarians.

Violent authoritarians have a predisposition towards abusive behaviour -- it crops up everywhere.

I see no easy solution that doesn't involve root-and-branch redesign of policing, including the social approach to crime prevention and public protection, and also including a total cultural change in the institutions tasked with law enforcement. In particular, the creeping infiltration of British policing by American style militarized policing practices needs to be stopped dead, but this goes way beyond that.

Certainly a minimal change has to be removal of the power of arrest from solitary or off-duty officers. In Scotland it typically takes two cops because of the legal requirement for corroboration: a two-cops rule would probably have prevented PC Couzens from abducting, raping, and murdering Sarah Everard. But this is still a minimum change to patch a single failure mode -- not a general solution to the problem of violent authoritarians exercising a license to bully and oppress.

[dewline]

It really worries me that Ottawa police officers on patrol-car duty generally work solo.

[snippy]

I've read that LEOs are much less likely to be aggressive if they are alone; in pairs they become aggressive (performative toward the other LEO) and defensive (again, performative - don't let the bad guys get you).

[dewline]

An interesting counter-argument in defence of that practice...

[danieldwilliam]

One of the more beneficial elements of the defund the police campaign is to shift the responsibility and the funding for a range of interventions away from the police and to properly funded and authorised specialist services.

I have a pal who was a police inspector who lamented that the police were often acting as a front-line social services organisation or a front-line mental health crisis organisation and they were not really designed for it, not particularly good at it and not funded to support it.

[alithea]

Yep, I've had to phone the police twice in my life and both times the situation would have been better handled by social services, but the first incident was in the middle of the night and the second was a Sunday at the beginning of lockdown when pretty much everything was shut down. I really did not want to phone the police in the second situation but didn't have much choice and was very relieved indeed when the two officers who arrived treated the person in need of help with understanding - notably they sent a WPC with a male colleague but probably only because I'd repeatedly assured the call handler that no-one involved was threatening violence or attempting actual criminality.