By Alan Roden
With Covid restrictions still in place, Scotland preparing to host European Championship games at Hampden, and Nicola Sturgeon revelling in another crushing election victory, the nation’s media was not short of stories to tell.
But in June 2021 we added 1919 Magazine to Scotland’s media landscape to give a louder voice to police officers and those working in the justice sector, to raise greater awareness of the challenges and the successes with those wielding power, and to open a window to policing for the wider public.
This month we celebrate the publication of our 50th edition.
We are incredibly grateful to everyone who has made this possible: the editorial and design teams and all our contributors; the Scottish Police Federation which funds the magazine; and our readers – with 32,000 interactions with last month’s edition alone.
We have repeatedly refined 1919 over the past four years, with a sleeker design and more articles, while maintaining the feel of a print magazine on the screen – and sticking true to the belief there is no job that has such a fascination with the public as that of the police officer.
And while the Scotland of June 2021 feels like a very different time – many people still couldn’t meet indoors in groups of more than six – the issues we set out to expose remain vital today.
In our first edition, we revealed how the mental health of police officers in Scotland was at risk, with around half reporting moderate to high levels of burnout at work.
“As with so many other parts of the health service, Scotland is being left behind”
The relentless nature of policing has not eased since, as depicted in a new video we reported on in April’s magazine.
In 2021 we also started shining a light on the violence that too many cops face as they go about their role protecting the public, with one officer suffering horrific injuries from a meat cleaver.
We continue to expose deplorable incidents, direct from the front line and documented in Scotland’s courtrooms, which is more important than ever given warnings that our justice system does not “effectively penalise” those who assault officers.
We have also given a voice to the campaigners making a difference in how we prevent and tackle crime, and our pages have always included political commentary and reaction, analysing what’s really happening in the corridors of power.
In our first edition, Daily Record political editor Paul Hutcheon prophetically wrote that Nicola Sturgeon “can’t go on forever”, while the three candidates to replace her as first minister all wrote for 1919 a couple of years later, the two men who will fight it out to be first minister in 2026 – John Swinney and Anas Sarwar – gave us their thoughts, and we have repeatedly heard from Justice Secretary Angela Constance on how the Scottish Government is addressing policing issues.
Our very first cover story on the burnout facing officers was raised in first minister’s questions in the Scottish Parliament, with the issues we have reported on repeatedly being picked up by those scrutinising the political decisions which affect us all.
From the outset, as head of content Gemma Fraser wrote in edition one, we recognised that Scotland already has a “strong and successful media, with an abundance of award-winning journalists, newspapers dating back more than two centuries, a wide array of consumer and specialist magazines as well as an ever-increasing pool of news websites”.
That’s why, with the support of the Quantum Communications team of former journalists, we work with our friends in the national and local mainstream media to further amplify the issues we raise every month.
As I wrote when we celebrated our first anniversary, “so-called ‘citizen journalists’ – who don’t have the training of qualified journalists – have tried and failed to take on the mainstream media… that is not what we do at 1919 – we rely on experience and training to deliver a product that is part of the mainstream”.
Thank you to everyone who has helped our magazine create such an impact.
Today, the issues we cover are more important than ever.
Our police force is at risk of becoming a reactionary force, officers are under-resourced and over-worked, the justice system is stretching at the seams, and – as we report this month – the Scottish public fear that crime is on the rise in their local community.
In the pages of this magazine, we will continue to expose the modern reality of policing, hold those in power to account, and give a voice to those on the front line.