Policing the path to change

Retired detective chief superintendent Sam Faulds shares the highs and lows of her 31-year policing career

By Gemma Fraser
Head of content

Policing the path to change

Retired detective chief superintendent Sam Faulds shares the highs and lows of her 31-year policing career

By Gemma Fraser
Head of content

“I can remember attending domestic incidents as a very young cop 30 years ago, and the answer would be that the husband or the male partner would be told to go and stay at his mother’s or a friend’s overnight, and that was it somehow solved,” recalls Sam Faulds.

“And I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable that this is not right, he’s just going to go back and do it again.”

Thankfully, policing has moved on since those early days of her career – and though her modesty would maintain otherwise, the recently-retired detective chief superintendent has played a significant role in that.

As the former head of Police Scotland’s Public Protection Unit, Faulds (pictured above) has overseen countless initiatives introduced over the years to help protect women and girls from violence and sexual abuse, and also to help improve the experiences of those who have unfortunately become victims of these types of crimes.

“Society saw it as a behind-closed-doors thing,” continues Faulds.

“It’s funny when I speak to older aunts, older relatives, who’ll say to me, ‘if your team were around when I was young, he would have got the jail and my life would have been different’.”

Scotland in 2024 is very different to the country it was when Faulds joined the police in 1993.

Now the Disclosure Scheme for Domestic Abuse Scotland (DSDAS) gives people the right to ask about the background of their partner and find out whether they have been abusive in the past.

It also gives police the power to tell people they might be at risk.

And the issue is now a political priority, with the Scottish Government’s Equally Safe Strategy providing a focus on early intervention, prevention and support services to tackle the root causes of gender-based violence.

“It’s not that it didn’t happen before,” continues Faulds. “It did happen and was hidden away. Now it’s just not hidden away.

“We talk about it, and people will get arrested for it, and you actually see domestic cases going to the High Court, which was not a common thing unless it was murder when I was very young in the police.”

Despite being modest about her own personal achievements, when pressed on success stories the floodgates begin to open as she shares her reflections from her home in North Lanarkshire, while keeping one eye on her lively toddler.

Faulds admits to being “particularly proud” of Police Scotland’s That Guy campaign, the hugely successful crusade encouraging men to take responsibility for sexual violence against women by examining their own behaviour and that of their friends and others around them.

“It’s been stolen with pride by forces all over the world,” says Faulds. “They’ve all got their own versions of it.

“And that was something very different for the force when we first started to work on that with the comms team and marketing.

“I can actually remember putting it in front of Dep Graham [former deputy chief constable Malcolm Graham] – he at the time was in charge – and showing it to him and saying, ‘right, you need to front this up because it needs to be a man, and you need to front it up’. And he was like, ‘eh…’ because on first viewing it made people react.

“But that meant it was working. And he did front it up, and it was probably one of the most successful law enforcement campaigns we’ve ever seen.”

One of Faulds’ last jobs before she retired in August was to sign off Police Scotland’s latest That Guy sexual crime prevention campaign, which has just been launched as reports of sexual crime continue to rise.

Between April and September this year, 1,400 rapes were reported to Police Scotland, an increase of 19.5 per cent on the same period the previous year, and nearly 7,600 sexual crimes were reported in total.

Aimed at men aged between 18 and 35, the campaign continues the same theme as the original initiative launched in 2021, encouraging them to intervene and to stop a friend potentially committing a sexual offence.

“For how many years did the police, not just in Scotland but globally, tell women how to keep themselves safe?”, says Faulds.

“No. It should be about changing perpetrator behaviour and targeting perpetrators.

“We should be victim-centred but perpetrator-focused all the time. That’s the police’s role.”

The way Police Scotland now tackles online child sexual abuse and exploitation is another legacy left behind by Faulds.

“When I first went into post, we’d been given an HMICS (His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland) report, a number of recommendations in it were really critical of us, and we didn’t have a particularly strong response,” she says.

“You can help a person turn from being a victim to a survivor just based on how you are with them”

“We do now.

“We target people every single day across the country.

“We’ve got three online teams, north, east, and west. We use covert tactics.

“So, the response to online child sexual abuse and exploitation has transformed in the last few years, and that’s one of the other things that I’m particularly proud of was leading that work to fix that, because it’s so important and changes kids’ lives if you can intervene early enough.”

Faulds is a fierce advocate for police getting it right for victims from the outset – because she knows how important it is that they feel heard and supported from the moment they decide to share their ordeal with a stranger.

She also knows how vital the relationship is between police and other agencies, including Rape Crisis services, and spent her career forging and nurturing these.

“If they [police] don’t get it right at the outset, it has an effect for the person’s entire life,” she says.

“You can help a person turn from being a victim to a survivor just based on how you are with them.

“Some people choose not to ever report, but the people who do choose to report, we have to give them all the time and support that they need, and that’s why the third sector partners are so critical and that’s why I was so passionate about bringing them on board with the police, having multi-agency meetings, multi-agency forums with partners.

“And I felt like I was apologising quite a lot. The police get it right a lot of times, but we also don’t always get it right.

“You’re talking 14,000 officers, trying to teach them all the impact that they can have… quite difficult, really.

“But how difficult is it to report something like that and then find that people aren’t listening or they’re not responding how you might expect?”

With radical changes to the justice sector being considered at Holyrood – including removing the ‘not proven’ verdict so often used in rape trials – Faulds hopes much-needed progress is on the horizon.

She was part of the review group, chaired by Lady Dorrian, tasked with improving the experience of complainers in sexual offence cases in the Scottish court system.

“I was really privileged when I was still serving to sit on Lady Dorrian’s group, and they were looking at how we change the response to rape and sexual crime from within the justice sector,” she tells 1919.

“And when you listen to the partners, the women who work in Rape Crisis centres, the women who are on the ground dealing with victims, and they tell the stories, and you speak to the victim survivor groups and they tell you how the police responded to them or how they felt when they were questioned in court – and you know that 100 per cent it needs to change.

“You can only hope that the reforms make it easier for victims to report and to go through the justice process because right now it’s just horrific.”

Often it is the little things that can have the biggest impact, but it is only through listening to those with lived experience that this impact can be understood.

“Here’s an example that’s a really simple change,” she says. “Before I finished, we were dealing with women from the deaf community, and there’s legislation that if somebody wants to report a sexual crime or domestic abuse, they can select the gender of their interview officer.

“But there’s nothing that says they can select the gender of the interpreter. And speaking with the women through a sign language interpreter, they were explaining that actually one of them gave her account of her experience and it was a male language interpreter and he was not able to convey her distress, how she felt, the trauma that she felt.

“He was just signing the words but wasn’t conveying it properly.

“So, we worked with various divisions and put out a memo asking that best practice dictate that you should allow the victim – where you have to use the services of an interpreter or a translator – to give them the opportunity to select the gender.

“Then it is things like routes in and out of court. Sometimes it’s really simple things that make the biggest difference to the victims, but it’s trying to get that change across the board and across the entire country.”

But, she adds, the changes between 1993 and now are “significant”.

“We have trained solo officers, rapes are investigated by a minimum DI, there’s a senior investigating officer for every rape, we make referrals to Rape Crisis or Beira’s Place or whichever service the victim feels that they want to be engaged with.

“We allow people somebody sitting with them now and can have an advocate from one of the Rape Crisis services.

“We don’t do the medical examinations in the room in the police station, because that’s how bad it used to be.

“The changes are significant, but there’s still a way to go.”

“There’s no shame in saying, ‘this is not for me’ because you do yourself a disservice, but possibly worse you do the victims a disservice”

Faulds was fresh out of university when she joined Strathclyde police, one of the eight legacy forces before the creation of Police Scotland in 2013.

With her dad a paramedic, and mum a school nurse, public service was very much a career path young Faulds wanted to go down – although she was torn between policing and teaching.

“I was very much brought up with a sense of public service,” she recalls. “My parents were probably proud and worried in equal measure when I joined the police, because that was their daughter and my mum was worried it’d be violent.

“I chose the police over teaching and didn’t look back.”

As with most of the young female cops back in the early ’90s, Faulds was very quickly taken off shift and sent to work in the female and child unit, as it was called then.

“It was almost a rite of passage for females back then,” she explains. “There were very few females, you were lucky if there were two or three per shift in the station, so everybody took their turn going into the female and child unit.”

What was initially supposed to be maternity cover turned into a much longer stint for Faulds and her passion for working in that area was ignited.

“The people that we were dealing with were really vulnerable, and you sort of could see, even then, that some of the work you were doing was actually making a difference to people’s lives,” she explains.

But the nature of the work, both back then and in today’s public protection unit which Faulds went on to head up, is among the most difficult that any officer has to undertake: child abuse, human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, violence against women and girls.

How did Faulds cope with dealing with the reality of the unimaginable for all those years?

“I guess you either love or hate that work,” she says. “It takes quite a lot to stay in it, and it can take quite a bit out of you, but I really enjoyed it.

“I think that you become very, very passionate about it but there really is a shelf-life because everything you deal with is tragic. There’s sadness around it. Somebody has been hurt or abused.

“I think it’s healthy to go out of it even if you’re so passionate, but you go back in. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that and I’ve done that a few times over the years.

“It definitely isn’t for everyone. And there’s no shame in saying, ‘this is not for me’ because you do yourself a disservice, but possibly worse you do the victims a disservice, if you’re in that job and you’re just not coping with it or it’s not for you.

“You won’t be giving it 100 per cent, and that’s what it needs.”

Faulds developed her own coping mechanisms – switching off from work when she got home was a priority – but dealing with traumatic events for all those years is always going to leave scars.

“When I was talking to people when I was retiring, you start to think back and you think back to some of the really horrible things that you dealt with like cot deaths.

“Child deaths are dealt with very differently now, they’re all investigated properly.

“You think back to the children that died, that as a police officer I had to carry out the house wrapped in a blanket, and can still remember all of their names. All of their names.

“And that’s trauma. The fact that 25, 26 years on, I could tell you their names and what happened to them, it just sticks in your mind.”

Faulds says that despite her long career, when it came time to retire, she still felt a sense of leaving before she was quite ready to.

“It’s one of those jobs that I didn’t want to leave,” she says. “I kept thinking, ‘that still needs fixed, and that still needs fixed’.

“But, you know what, something will always need fixed in public protection because that’s the nature of it. There will always be more that you can do, and I could be there until I was 80 and it still wouldn’t be done.

“We wouldn’t have eradicated child abuse or domestic abuse or sexual crime because those people will still be out there.

“So, it was time to go.

“[Assistant Chief Constable, lead for Major Crime and Public Protection] Steve Johnson did say to me before I went, ‘you’ve left it in a really good place’. And that was something that meant a lot to me.”

Now Faulds has a different role to commit herself to full-time: motherhood.

“I’m actually spending my retirement running about crazy after a one year old,” she says.

“I’m older than the average mum but I’m hoping that she’s going to keep me young because I never stop now and we’re on the go 24/7.

“I don’t know how I had time to work.”