I will deal with those questions in the order that they came. On national resilience, I agree with the assessment from Shona Robison, and from a number of third sector organisations in particular, that there has been a dramatic improvement in many areas of police investigation and in the police approach to a number of issues. Again, I highlight the evidence from Rape Crisis Scotland and Scottish Women’s Aid, which I found especially compelling on that front.
Police Scotland will seek to continue to improve—“strengthen” is probably a better word—its national resilience around the challenges that we face in relation to security and cyberresilience. It will continue to work on child protection and human trafficking, and on the terror threat, which—looking across the UK over the past 12 months—we know can take many different forms.
There is no doubt about what the police have done in and around the area of sexual offences and domestic abuse, on which the committee heard compelling evidence. We need to ask whether lessons can be learned from the way in which Police Scotland has managed to strengthen that capability, and whether the same approach can be rolled out across other parts of the service. In his evidence, the chief constable quoted an incredibly stark statistic: 320 murders have been committed since Police Scotland was formed, and all but two of them have been detected. I think that he said that the remaining two cases related to serious organised crime—I should say that the investigation and the disruption of serious organised crime is another area in which Police Scotland, from a national perspective, is looking to strengthen its approach and capability.
On the second part of Shona Robison’s question, I imagine that a fair part of the evidence that the committee gathered related to local issues. Again, I thought that the evidence from local authorities was challenging in some respects. They were quite frank in saying that, in the first years of reform, the process had not worked to deliver on their expectations, but I definitely detected from the evidence sessions that many authorities are saying that they are in a much better, and much improved, situation.
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I am also heartened by the chief constable’s words on local matters. I am paraphrasing rather than quoting him directly, but he has said on many occasions that he is very keen to see how we can further devolve aspects of policing to local authorities and ultimately to communities. We are looking at how we strengthen some of those areas from a national perspective, and I heard evidence from local authorities to suggest that the Scottish Government needs to be a bit more involved in some aspects of that local conversation.
The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities police scrutiny conveners forum, which involves the Scottish Government at official level, meets a couple of times a year and helps to add to that process. In addition, there are statutory obligations on the police—and on Government in respect of policing—to engage and consult with local authorities. Of all the committee’s evidence sessions, I kept a close eye on the session that involved input from local authorities, because I am very keen that if improvements need to be made—as the evidence suggests that they do—we should make those improvements.