One of Scotland’s main police control rooms used a fake system to influence response time targets for eight years. Thousands of calls were redirected to a dummy call sign called DUMY at Bilston Glen in Loanhead, Midlothian. The DUMY call sign was used from 2007 to 2015.
Internal systems would document that the calls had been passed to officers but they were still outstanding on the list. This would mean that the police vehicle would not have been dispatched promptly to calls that fall under the high-priority category.
During a closer examination, it was discovered that many calls were ignored and the practice was done to “provide artificial levels of incident management performance.”
The manipulation of the data had serious consequences; Police Scotland was prosecuted and confessed to negligence when answering calls at Bilston Glen, which played a role in the deaths of Lamara Bell and John Yuill.
David Nellaney, a lawyer who represented one of the bereaved families said they were unaware of the DUMY process. This information should have been passed along to the families.
Nellaney added: “I’m astonished to be perfectly honest. I think that puts the wider public at risk if calls are not being actioned… and to not respond to them and put them into a DUMY system whereby there’s no guarantee that they’ll come back to them, is quite shocking.
“I think it probably gives an indication of potentially the practices that were going on. When you adopt that type of practice you’re bringing in factors such as human error, which have played a part in what happened with Lamara and John.”
Moi Ali, who was on the board of the Scottish Police Authority watchdog, said this was the first time she came across this system. “These are exactly the kind of things that should be flagged to the board so that we can start an internal investigation or inquiry,” Ali said.
“So if that was concealed from us, I find that very, very concerning.”
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-65086107