Scotland’s police are calling on Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill to use his address to this week’s annual Scottish Police Federation conference to announce an end to ‘plea bargaining’ in cases where officers are assaulted.
MacAskill will make a major address to the conference, and SPF general secretary Joe Grant says that MacAskill must act to stop the large number of cases where charges of assaults on police officers are reduced in return for a guilty plea.
Figures from Her Majesty’s Chief Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland show that of 13,000 assaults on police in Scotland last year, under 3,000 saw a conviction secured.
Grant said:
“What we would like to hear is the Cabinet Secretary saying he will enter into discussions with the Lord Advocate to stop plea bargaining of assaults on police and emergency service workers. If you start looking at failure rates; a police officer gets assaulted, hopefully, the assaulter gets locked up as should happen, the report goes to the procurator fiscal or the Crown Office, depending on the severity of it and what happens after that is that we have a series of sifts, not evidential sifts, we’re talking about process sifts and opportunity sifts that lead to too many of those cases not getting to the sheriff as an opportunity to say yea or nay, either you are not guilty or you are guilty and as a result, you are going to spend time in jail.
“It is about the plea-bargaining issue that happens in between where these are turned into breach of the peace instead of assaulting a police officer, which is absolute nonsense.”
The maximum current fine available under the Police Scotland Act is £5,000 but the SPF says the average offender is fined less than £200 for attacking a police officer.
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