Police officer numbers in Fife have dropped by almost 400

Chief superintendent Derek McEwan said most of their workload is now "non-crime related" with cops who are ill-equipped to deal with mental illness having to sit for hours in A&E with people going through a crisis.

With the thin blue line already stretched he said there is a growing acceptance that they can "no longer deal" with the volume and complexity of such incidents.

Outlining the "hard truth" to local councillors, Mr McEwan said: "We're currently operating with approximately 720 police officers, it was 804 at the start of Police Scotland and 1,103 when Fife Constabulary ended.

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"So of those 720 officers, approximately 120-150 on any particular day are non-operational and can't be deployed on the streets so we're working more and more with a finite resource which we're having to flex in order to deal with the challenges we're facing."

Fife's top ranked cop is in his 30th year with the police and said they are "performing very well" compared to other areas of Scotland.

The divisional commander for Fife, chief superintendent Derek McEwan. (Image: Police Scotland)

However the divisional commander said: "The vast majority of work that the police get is non-crime related. Without a shadow of a doubt it's now 'significant concerns for' type calls.

"For example this morning we came in to no significant crime overnight but we had in the region of 10 missing people who had mental health episodes in their life.

"A number of police officers ended up sat at A&E at the Victoria Hospital with individuals going through a mental health crisis."

He continued: "The chief constable spoke about this recently and started to discuss how the police can probably no longer serve the mental health incidents that we're going to.

"For these types of incidents we do recognise we're not the experts and our untrained police officers are sitting at times for five hours in the company of individuals going through a mental health crisis.

"We can't even say if we're doing them any good or we're potentially doing them harm."

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Mr McEwan stated: "We're probably reaching that tipping point now where we can no longer deal with the business we're faced with due to the demands that are placed upon us surrounding mental health type calls."

At the people and communities scrutiny committee, Cllr Alistair Cameron said there was a "concern" about the amount of police time taken up by missing persons.

Mr McEwan said: "When I joined the police in 1994 we pretty much worked from a system, and it certainly wasn't right, that you weren't missing until you were away for 24 hours.

"The problem we have now is if someone phones the police and reports a loved one hasn't come home from school or work or wherever, we have to record them as a missing person.

"It's the high risk ones that are the most time consuming because that's coming to us as someone that is potentially going to kill themselves and we throw resources at that for obvious reasons.

"Albeit missing people reports have increased, high risk missing persons have increased because we have more people in our communities with mental health challenges sadly, and we have to try and find those people as soon as we can.

"That's a drain on the resource."

He said up to eight officers at a time would be involved in trying to find a "high risk missing person" and added: "If you multiply that by three across Fife at any one time, that's literally the majority of our response police officers wiped off our patrol matrix."