Amidst the mayhem associated with Bonfire Night over the past fortnight, the routine job of policing our streets doesn’t stop, but the mass deployment of riot officers to quell the trouble makes it so much harder.
I went out on patrol last week to see for myself just what “routine” looks like, and it should worry us all. I have no doubt many readers have experienced slow responses to calls and have wondered what’s going on. What you won’t know is how many vehicles are off the road, how many officers are off sick, and what those at work must deal with.
At Wester Hailes station five vehicles were off the road, not only because of incidents like the brick thrown through the windscreen which left a female officer badly injured, but because of modern, sensitive technology. When a fault light goes on, which they do regularly because police cars are driven more heavily than your average family runabout, the vehicle is out of action.
Once out on the road, officers can’t just switch on the “blues and twos” to beat the traffic, so we spent an age crawling through Colinton to check out an address in Oxgangs associated with a missing person with mental health problems. And the person was still missing. Next call was to Longstone for a call by concerned neighbours about a person who also had mental health issues but who turned out to be fine.
Then there was an urgent call about a threatening gang of youths in Gorgie. But even at pace, there is little that can be done when faced with roadworks and it took over 20 minutes to get through, in which time a group of darkly clothed teenagers swaggered past. They were probably the cause of the complaints, but at that point not obviously breaking the law. And sure enough when we reached the location, nobody was there.
We must have lost over half an hour to traffic problems on just three calls, and two of those were more matters for social services, not police. Add that to ongoing staffing problems – Wester Hailes has four officers on long term sick and these posts must remain vacant – and a picture of unrelenting pressure is quickly apparent and no wonder some officers experience burnout.
Fast forward to Tuesday night when a Broomhouse resident reported a gang of about 25 balaclava-clad youths, some armed with baseball bats, were firing giant fireworks at flat windows. They wrote to me asking what action police were taking.
“For the next three hours the scheme was virtually held under siege as they roamed about setting off fireworks and in one case throwing bottles into a car park. Why were the events of last year not seen as a warning to what could happen?” he wrote.
They were even alleged to have attacked the Calder Road petrol station, with all the potential for catastrophe. “As a society we cannot allow masked armed groups to take over our streets, but we need decisive action from our politicians and police force,” he said, and I couldn’t agree more.
As long as police are under-resourced, overstretched and forced to operate as social workers, then communities will feel threatened by gangs of disaffected youths who feel they can act with impunity.
