[cstross]

A secondary issue is also policing culture.

As a cost-saving measure due to Westminster-imposed spending cuts, the Scottish government merged all six regional Scottish police forces into a single force, Police Scotland, in 2013.

This involved a game of musical chairs at senior rank as posts were merged, so the senior officers with the best resumes (most people working for them, biggest budgets) ended up getting the plum jobs. In practice, this meant that Police Scotland lost its distinctive regional specialities and became dominated by senior cops from the former Strathclyde police force (i.e. Glasgow). This force was culturally presbyterian and prone to a puritanical zero-tolerance culture, which they exported to the rest of the nation, damaging local initiatives such as Edinburgh's unofficially sanctioned brothels (attacks on sex workers spiked) and setting relations with the LGBT community back by a decade. They also clamped down on tolerance of cannabis, which didn't help, and were notoriously unsupportive of harm reduction initiatives such as shooting galleries.

Police Scotland seems to be improving these days as they re-learn a lot of hard-won lessons about how to do policing in places that aren't the west end of Glasgow, but the combination of an intolerant, harsh policing culture and Theresa May's Home Office calling the shots on drugs was utterly toxic.

[arethuza]

The only time I've encountered someone who displayed open sectarian bigotry was a (distant) relative who happened to be in the Strathclyde police force!

Mind you this was going back a bit (1980 or so) but someone who ranted about the evils of Catholicism to anyone in earshot probably didn't get many counter arguments from their colleagues.

[hogFeast]

Sectarian bigotry is still common. In fact, bigotry in general is still common. What has changed is the self-righteousness and the change in focus onto groups that "deserve it" (i.e. the English, Jews to name two of the most common...not including sectarian obv, as that is just so prevalent).

And I know someone who used to work as a diversity officer (they ran seminars on diversity) for the Police: bigotry runs very deep unf. The slightly bizarre twist recently is that the Police now spends a lot of time on hate crime (i.e. chasing easy arrests on Twitter)...poacher turn gamekeeper I suppose (and again, the self-righteousness is utterly incomprehensible).