Criminal Justice Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, April 26, 2023

Official Report 508KB pdf

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Policing and Mental Health

The next agenda item is consideration of correspondence that we have received in relation to policing and mental health. I refer members to paper 2.

Before I open the discussion to members, I thank the Scottish Police Authority and all the attendees at last week’s conference on workforce trauma. It was a worthwhile event that included contributions from a range of stakeholders. There were some very powerful lived experience contributions. It was reassuring to hear about the level of commitment to make positive and lasting change for officers and staff. We heard about what is already in place and a bit about the work that is under way to effect the change that is needed. There was quite a lot of honesty in the room, particularly around the role of supervisors and leaders, which led to a constructive session.

We have received correspondence from Police Scotland, the SPA and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland. Members will find a summary of each of the responses at the beginning of paper 2. I will open the discussion to members.

In the main, the responses that we have seen today are slightly disappointing and suggest a reluctance to be open and honest about the tragic suicide of police officers. I have raised the issue repeatedly in the chamber, in the committee and in writing. Every time that I do so, more people come forward with shocking and frankly heartbreaking accounts. One of those is a former detective officer of high rank with more than 20 years’ service. I will call him P for the purpose of this account, and I thank you, convener, for allowing me a bit of time to explain the case.

The officer was working on a murder investigation in which a colleague was implicated of criminality. P was immediately suspended from duty. He says:

“Two professional standards officers informed me I was suspended without any explanation of the allegations against me. I had my warrant card taken from me and was told, ‘You better get yourself a trade. You’re going to need it.’ This was a threat of sacking before any investigation had been carried out. I was sent home and had barely any contact from the police for nearly a year.”

He describes that as

“a bewildering experience as I had NO involvement whatsoever in the crime.”

He twice went on to attempt to take his own life. He eventually saw a psychiatric nurse who told him that he needed to see a clinical psychologist. He asked the police for assistance with that but was told that it could not help—it did not offer that service—and that he should “keep my chin up”.

He became isolated at work and was given menial jobs that he says

“destroyed my self-esteem and resulted in a mental breakdown”

and further suicidal thoughts. He and other officers who were subject to investigation were

“lumped together in one place to undertake”

what he and they saw as “meaningless chores,” such as paperwork.

He became friendly with a young officer in his 20s, who I will refer to as, “L”. L was accused of an assault, despite closed-circuit television footage apparently showing him to be innocent. Two years later, L was still under investigation. P says:

“L confided in me that he could not bear the pressure and felt absolutely hopeless. I knew he had very recently emailed professional standards explaining this to them, demanding answers. L received a bland response, telling him the investigation was ongoing.”

A week after the email, L took his life. The location was significant to policing, but I will not state that publicly. Within hours of L’s death, officer P entered his workplace. He said:

“I was immediately summoned by a senior officer and told without hesitation, mere hours after L’s death, that this was absolutely nothing to do with him being under investigation and Police Scotland were not responsible in any way. I was utterly dumbstruck and disgusted at this utterly ignorant explanation in the immediate aftermath of the death of my friend.”

P spent five years under investigation, until he was dismissed without notice last year. He describes the process as a “kangaroo court” operating on the balance of probability. He said that the investigation was one-sided from the start and that he “never had a hope” of being vindicated. It is worth noting that no criminal proceedings were taken against him. He says:

“I am still dogged by these feelings and suicidal thoughts to this day. It seems that protecting Police Scotland’s reputation is the ONLY thing that matters. There was zero sincerity or compassion for what had happened. Just protect the organisation’s reputation at all costs, and THAT is the root cause of all these issues.”

P knows of other cases that resulted in officers taking, or attempting to take, their own lives. I have heard many other, similar, accounts and I will probably hear more after this meeting. I have repeatedly raised concerns about the damage done by the complaints process. I have four key points.

There is a failure to record the number of officer suicides and whether those officers were subject to internal investigation.

There has been a routine decision by the Crown Office not to hold a fatal accident enquiry in any of the cases that we know about, unlike in England and Wales, where an inquest would be conducted as a matter of routine.

There is a lack of willingness by all parties to explore cases where there is evidence that the complaints process may have been a factor.

It also appears that the SPA is willing to accept Police Scotland’s position, which can best be summarised as “nothing to see here”.

I know from P, and from the many other officers and families I have been speaking to, that there is a fundamental lack of faith in the process and that many of them are willing to speak out. They do not quite know how to do that, but they certainly do not intend to let it rest. Thank you for the time, convener.

Thank you for raising that case. I am sorry to hear that account. We cannot, of course, investigate individual cases or issues, but I say on behalf of all members that we take the issue really seriously, hence the work that we have been doing in the past few months. Thank you again for raising the issue.

I thank Russell Findlay for bringing those cases to the attention of the committee.

Would you agree that the accounts that you have given seem to cross over into the area of how police officers are treated in the disciplinary process? You have outlined more than one thing. It is a cause of concern to me if it can be two years into an internal process before any allegation is made. I can understand how that would affect officers’ mental health. Is there another element to what you have outlined, which is that the internal processes of disciplinary action against police officers should not take two years?

10:30  

For what it is worth, I think that, given what police officers often experience in carrying out their duties on the front line, they are undoubtedly more susceptible and prone to mental health issues. We have been addressing separately what appears to be a lack of support generally, and it appears that Police Scotland, the SPA and the federation are all very much behind efforts to improve that, which is to be welcomed.

However, separately, there is a cohort of officers who have been subject to allegations of wrongdoing—sometimes minor and sometimes more serious—and whose cases can be characterised as basically taking far too long and apparently being unjust, on the basis that a conclusion is reached before the evidence is even looked at. A sense of abandonment and hopelessness is feeding cases of officers either attempting to take their own lives or successfully completing suicide. I think that there is a reluctance on the part of the authorities to look at that element because, according to survivors and families, there is some culpability on the part of those authorities for what has occurred, as they have not responded to concerns that the officers are in a bad way because of the process.

Would anybody else like to come in?

I will not take too long. I commend the committee for spending a lot of time on the issue. The story from Russell Findlay was interesting, and it reminded me of the session that the committee held in private and anonymously with people who had similar experiences. All committee members sat in on various groups and listened to some of the stories, so we have already heard such points from others—the similarities are striking. To this day, I still have strong thoughts about the couple of individuals who I met and the sorry state of affairs that they were in. They were grown men who were broken as a result of the system.

There are lots of warm words, as I would expect to read in such a response from Police Scotland, and I do not doubt for a second that there are senior staff in the organisation who want to do something about the issue and who take it seriously—nobody wishes ill on their employees. However, what has come through is that a lot of buzzwords are being used but there is nothing that addresses some of the underlying factors and recurring themes that the committee has heard about and that I would like to be addressed.

There are some specific and clear issues. I said that I was not going to be long, but here I go with lists, convener. The first, which is important, is the churn of higher ranking officers, which seems to lead to huge issues around change management in the organisation. We heard direct experience of the effect on officers when someone new comes in with a new direction of travel and says, “It’s my way or the highway.” That has an effect on junior ranking members of staff, who not only do not have the confidence to challenge it but are in an organisation in which that is actively frowned upon—it is a hierarchical organisation.

The second issue is the poorly organised human resources support and processes. That has emerged in some of the protocol failures that we have heard about around disciplinary matters.

The third issue is the management of long-term sickness. Some officers feel that they are just seen as problematic, especially if they do not have a physical injury. People with physical injuries are perhaps dealt with more positively by their peers or by management, because the injury can be seen and it is perhaps seen as a sign of bravery and service. However, being off for mental ill-health, which is an injury in its own right as a by-product of the job, is somehow seen as a weakness. That is affecting people and the mental health support is clearly inadequate.

I notice that there is to be a retendering for the employee assistance programme, which will kick in next April, so it is about a year away. However, that is just a phone number, with someone in an outsourced call centre at the end of the line. I think that they need to up their game on that. However, it really comes down to the point that I made in the first part of the meeting: the fact that they are working with reduced officer and resource levels clearly adds pressure.

We know that we are losing people with experience at the top end, so we have a lot of younger officers who feel that they are getting chucked out on the front line to deal with traumatic situations much more quickly, which was confirmed to me when I went to the SPF event across the road recently. Of course, the officers will have to deal with some horrendous things as part of the job, but they are doing that in their first couple of weeks—they have been in training and suddenly they are dealing with suicides and turning up to other horrendous situations.

It is about both the volume and the type of workload, which has massively changed, as we know. I do not think that anything has been done to address that problem, which goes back to the collaboration issue and the need to remove some of those tasks from front-line officers. You will not solve the problem until front-line officers are able to just do what they are supposed to be doing. The problem is that they are spending their whole day, every day, dealing with quite severe mental health situations that they are clearly taking home with them.

Until we have a much more fundamental and honest conversation about the workload, the volume and the type of work that they are asked to do, I do not really think that we will fix the problem—all that we are doing is tinkering around the edges of how we support police officers when they do have a problem. It is always better to prevent than cure, convener.

I feel that there were welcome words in the responses, but not enough detail.

I want to put on record that I think that the committee is doing really good work on the whole. On the issue that Russell Findlay mentioned and the cases to which he referred, have we as a committee had an exchange with the police, not on the wider issue of mental health but specifically on suicide?

Russell and others have certainly raised the issue in the past, but more in relation to the follow-up that is in place in the aftermath of an officer or a member of staff taking their own life than to probing the issue.

I do not know the answer to some of the questions that Russell has raised—I might have missed the correspondence or whatever. Obviously, the wider mental health issues are incredibly important and we have been doing a lot of work on them, but it would be good for us as a committee to home in on the suicide issue.

That is a good suggestion. Our challenge might be around fitting in that discussion but, given that we have taken a lot of time to explore the issue, I am sure that we could fit it into our work programme along the way.

The first time that I raised the issue was when we had a police witness in to talk about policing and mental health, and I asked how many officers had died from suicide. He said that he did not know and that he would get back to us with those numbers, but he did not do so—it then transpired that those numbers are not recorded.

The SPA and Police Scotland then wrote to us. The SPA’s position was, essentially, that it was aware of a spate of suicides that had been in the public domain and had asked Police Scotland whether work issues had had any bearing on that. The SPA was told by Police Scotland that they had not. I think that that showed a distinct lack of curiosity.

Subsequently, we got a letter from the Crown Office, which set out its reasoning behind not instructing fatal accident inquiries in any of those cases. Judgments are made case by case and there are sensitivities, obviously. However, in the cases in which I know that the officers felt that they were under pressure and had made that clear to Police Scotland, there is surely a public interest in holding fatal accident inquiries.

The only other thing that I might add is that HMICS is obviously undertaking a review around policing. The review is more around the response to people in communities who are distressed or unwell, as opposed to police trauma, if you like, but there is an overlap within that work.

I know that it is hard to separate them, but suicide should be seen as a stand-alone issue. Wider mental health issues are incredibly important, as I said, but suicide is very specific and should be dealt with that way.

Okay, we can look at making that a specific piece of work within the on-going work on mental health and policing.

I have a question that someone can come back to me on.

At the moment, the process seems to be that an inquiry into the unfortunate suicide of a serving officer—I am talking about the police in particular, as opposed to the other emergency services—can arise only if the Crown decides to hold an FAI. Is there another, perhaps legislative, top-down solution, that would mandate some other form of automatic inquiry into such a situation? I do not know what the situation is in England and Wales, which is a different legislative landscape. I am not saying for a second that we should mandate the Lord Advocate to do X Y or Z—although that is always a solution; laws can do that. However, there might be some other form of investigation that could take place or that would have to take place that could be followed by a full-on FAI, if that was what the Crown so decided. In the meantime, it seems to be all or nothing and in far too many cases it is nothing.

There are a couple of things there. You may recall the correspondence that we received from the Lord Advocate back in January. She said that every death by suicide of a police officer or staff member is fully investigated by the Crown as a matter of course. Obviously, issues around a person’s employment or duties may come into that investigation.

It is also worth noting that we expect to be looking at those issues, when we look at the forthcoming police complaints and misconduct bill, probably in the autumn. That might be the opportunity for us to further probe the issue.

Your points are noted, Mr Greene, and I absolutely agree with them.

I do not disagree with a lot of what has been said, but at one of the round-table evidence sessions it came out that these situations are often very complex and pressures at work or work-related issues might be having an impact on the person. I might be wrong on this, but from what is in front of us, I am surprised that Police Scotland is not open to making some sort of analysis of that.

I know that we would need to be careful about how that analysis was carried out, but maybe work pressures are more of a leading factor. Jamie Greene was talking about various situations that police officers can find themselves in—especially in these times, when they have additional pressures. That could be used to try to find out if there is any pattern, perhaps of officers who attended specific types of incidents or have been involved in specific types of investigations against them. It might not always lead to the tragic situation described today, but might have other impacts on mental and emotional health.

I would like to see that analysis. The committee is taking a lot on and talking about what more the committee can do, but I think that Police Scotland has a bit of work to do here. I know that the committee asked Police Scotland to do that before and the response to that is under paragraph 10 in our papers. I do not think that it said yea or nay to that; it certainly did not say that it was going to do it. There is a bit of work to be done by the police to try to analyse those situations.

Perhaps they are doing that. They might write to the committee to say that they are in the process of doing it or have done it and what they have found.

That is the only way that we can find out what impact the work pressures are having on people’s health because such situations, as everybody round the table knows, are very complicated. Numerous factors are likely to be involved in a person’s wellbeing. The question is what role the job is having and whether a pattern is emerging over case after case of people who are experiencing poor mental or emotional health.

10:45  

Thanks for that, Fulton.

I echo what everyone else has said. We have done a brilliant piece of work in opening up the issue and listening to some of the officers who have gone through such a traumatic time in their lives.

Paragraph 9 on page 2 of the paper on policing and mental health relates to how the redesign of the scheduling system in the courts is progressing. It looks to me like Police Scotland is having to wait for some kind of response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service. Work-life balance is a huge issue. We heard in numerous evidence sessions about the impact that time taken has on other officers’ ability to get their days off. It is huge. We need to push the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and the SCTS to see how the redesign is progressing.

When we attended Glasgow Sheriff Court, there was a bit of pushback about remote access for trials. I do not know whether redesign is getting pushback, but I would be keen to find out more about that. We have just been talking about budgets. Notwithstanding police officers’ mental health, there is efficiency in a smarter way of working if officers access trials remotely.

I agree with all the points that have been made. Work is under way, which is welcome. We should continue this piece of work. It has gained some traction and I am keen that we support it going forward.

On looking more closely at issues around suicide, I am happy to suggest that we insert something further down the line as part of our continuing work on mental health and policing. As I said earlier, I suspect that, under the forthcoming police complaints and misconduct bill, we will consider some of what we have covered.

I had another point in my head, which I have completely forgotten. [Interruption.] The clerk has reminded me that we can circulate the correspondence from the Lord Advocate on her position. In it, she helpfully outlines the Crown Office’s role and explains fatal accident inquiries regarding police officers and staff.

Are members happy with that proposal?

Members indicated agreement.

That concludes our business in public. Next week, I expect the committee to consider several statutory instruments relating to the Fireworks and Pyrotechnic Articles (Scotland) Act 2022. We will also consider a draft report on the Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill and have an initial discussion about our approach to the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill, which has just been introduced.

10:50 Meeting continued in private until 11:47.