analysis

We BELIEVE the decision is sensible and operationally and financially credible and will ultimately lead to Scotland having a police service which is fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Superintendents and chief superintendents across Scotland will, by and large, be the divisional commanders. Their profile will increase together with their responsibility.

There will be 32 policing areas and each local authority will establish some kind of policing plan, in which our members will play a pivotal role.

We believe divisional commanders’ roles and responsibilities within a single police service need to be clearly identified and catered for in the new legislation.

This will allow divisional commanders to work with local elected members and their partners to identify local policing priorities and a local plan.

Clearly there needs to be accountability locally, but also nationally to the new chief constable, and that accountability mechanism needs to be established as an early part of the process.

There’s going to have to be, through the Scottish Police Authority, national police priorities set for things like counter-terrorism, serious and organised crime and e-crime.

Take serious and organised criminals: they don’t stick to geographical boundaries so, for the police, we all have to do our part in terms of tackling that problem.

But it is also important to have the scope to have local policing priorities.

My experience, having been a divisional commander for some time, is that you are given a significant amount of autonomy to run the division and manage priorities. My experience is you get very little micro-management from the chief constable.

The local authority will continue to have a role and will want their resources to be focused on local policing.

There will always be occasions where resources need to be moved across boundaries to tackle a particular problem and there will always be a concern about moving resources from parts of rural Scotland to the Central Belt. However, we will also see specialist services coming to rural areas from the Central Belt.

Police officers are defined by the work they do, not by boundaries.

l Chief Superintendent David O’Connor is president of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents.