So what's happened is officers are encouraged not to arrest people. "They don't have the capacity anymore to arrest the amount of people they used to arrest. "It's not something that's happened overnight, it's happened over years of decay in what the police used to do. Challenged on whether the public could trust a service that sometimes failed to attend, Mr Kennedy distinguished between individual officers and the organisation as a whole. A Police Scotland spokesperson said: "Officers are not being encouraged to avoid making arrests and it is inaccurate to suggest otherwise.