Police Scotland cites strong conviction rate for domestic abuse cases amid row over policy

Assistant chief constable Bernie Higgins told Holyrood’s Justice Committee that of the 34,000 charges brought in the past year, 80 per cent resulted in convictions.

He was defending the single force’s approach to domestic abuse after Calum Steele, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation (SPF), told MSPs that officers were no longer able to use their discretion.

Prosecutors have also complained they are being forced to take a rigid approach to domestic abuse cases.

In a letter published by Scottish Legal News this week a former fiscal complained that “nobody really seems to care about the devastating impact all of this can have on innocent people caught in the web of this policy and all the while the Scottish government, Police Scotland and COPFS continue to adopt a rigid and unrelenting approach in its implementation which in the long-run is just not sustainable.”

According to Mr Higgins, of the 58,000 reported domestic incidents in 2015-16, 29,000 were deemed criminal, resulting in 34,000 charges.

Only 2.5 per cent of cases reported to the Crown Office were not followed up on by prosecutors.

He said: “We have taken a very robust approach to dealing with domestic abuse offenders in conjunction with the Lord Advocate’s guidelines.

“We might make an arrest and the prosecutors decide not to prosecute but that doesn’t mean people are getting arrested without good reason, far from it.

“By any stretch an 80 per cent conviction rate is pretty high. Having 58,000 domestic incidents and dealing criminally with about 51 per cent of them shows there is absolutely an appropriate and proportionate response.

“The notion that every time we are called to a domestic we have to arrest someone is simply not the case.”

He added that officers can still exercise discretion, saying: “The officers will make a professional assessment of whether a criminal act has happened. If there is criminality, they will investigate that like any other crime and if there’s a sufficiency, they will arrest.”

He added: “The conviction rate tends to suggest that those cases reported to the Crown are strongly evidenced.”