Words by Gemma Fraser
Head of content
Photos by Greg Macvean
“Alright wee man?” asks Sergeant Emma McNaughton as she approaches a small group of youngsters huddled together outside Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel on Princes Street.
“That stuff’s bad for you,” she tells the ‘wee man’ in a friendly tone as she removes the open can of caffeinated alcohol drink Dragon Soop he has failed to hide from her – and pours its remains onto the road.
The boy doesn’t complain – in fact there’s more resistance from a passer-by who captures the moment on his phone – and after checking the group are all OK, McNaughton moves on.
We are on foot patrol at the east end of Princes Street as part of Police Scotland’s Operation Verbeia, targeting antisocial behaviour in the city centre.
The area has become a hotspot for teenagers over the past few years, who travel into the centre from other parts of Edinburgh, as well as from towns and cities across Scotland. Free bus travel – which makes it easier for young people to travel around – has been blamed for a rise in antisocial behaviour.
The operation has been largely successful since it started around three years ago, vastly reducing the number of young people hanging around causing trouble, but there are still enough regulars and newcomers each week to keep the community police officers busy.
“The east end of Princes Street has for years been a hotspot for antisocial behaviour,” explains Inspector David Duthie.
“It’s year-round, but during the summer months we will increase resources.
“It’s predominately over-consumption of alcohol, young people getting over-excited in the city centre, there can be elements of violence, elements of drug-taking.
“We’ve always said Verbeia is a positive operation in terms of positive engagement with the public, but there’s also the element of enforcement that needs to be carried out. When there’s criminality, we obviously target it robustly.
“If there’s young children who are drunk, we’re duty-obliged to tell their parents. They are vulnerable people, they are children, so we need to support them and make sure they are taken to a safe place, like back home and in the care of their parents.”
Tonight’s Friday night Operation Verbeia team are briefed by McNaughton at Gayfield Square, one of a handful of police stations in the city centre.
Sergeant Emma McNaughton
Following a couple of weeks of sunshine, the continued nice weather is expected to bring more people out, and the officers are teed up accordingly.
Brought in from other parts of the city to aid the operation, McNaughton outlines the key hotspot areas to them, and highlights the main priorities of the operation: maintaining public safety, providing reassurance, and high visibility foot patrol.
The public transport hubs – St Andrew Square, Waverley station, east end of Princes Street, St James Quarter and up to Calton Hill – are the targets. The Old Calton cemetery is a good place to start, she tells them, as it is an early meet-up point for youngsters looking for a secluded spot to drink whatever alcohol they manage to get their hands on.
With the key message being “firm but fair” the team are dispersed, with a reminder to be proactive and positively engage with the young people they meet, without putting themselves at any risk.
Shadowing McNaughton for the evening, we head out around 6.30pm, parking the unmarked police car – one of the force’s electric vehicles – opposite the strip of bustling restaurants on St Andrew Square.
The sun is still shining, and office workers are catching the last of the day’s rays in the well-kept gardens, while the tables outside Wagamama and Gaucho are already filling up.
It’s not long before we spot our first group of young teens across the road, soaking up the sun on the roof top above Waverley Market shopping centre. A prime location, according to McNaughton.
We pass a young girl sitting on the ground beside a homeless man outside the Apple Store.
“You ok?” McNaughton checks. She nods and scarpers.
We wait at the pedestrian crossing as we plan to walk up Waterloo Place.
“Excuse me, do you know where there’s a Greggs?” a young man with a Glaswegian accent asks, to which McNaughton dutifully responds.
“Tourist information service,” she laughs.
Two minutes later her skills are called upon once again by some German tourists looking for directions to their Queen Street hotel.
Not one to take her eye off the ball, she simultaneously calls in for CCTV to look out for a guy she has spotted on an electric scooter going along the east end of Princes Street.
“There’s so much that goes on in a city centre, it’s absolutely brilliant for that,” she says.
“It’s difficult at times when you come across the challenging groups.”
And it’s not long before that happens.
While the first few encounters we have with groups of teens are positive and polite – McNaughton is first offered a rose stem (minus the flower), and then a doughnut (which she declines) – another group sitting at a bus stop are less friendly.
McNaughton asks what they are doing, but they are in no mood for sharing.
One of the boys becomes agitated and says he has PTSD from interacting with the police, demanding she leaves him alone. The others say she has no right to talk to them as they are minors.
McNaughton knows she is onto a losing battle trying to engage with this group, so she tells them to stay safe and stay out of trouble, and we move on.
Another group – a mix of teenage girls and boys – are sitting on the wall on the open rooftop space beside the entrance to the train station.
Some in this gathering are regulars, and they banter back and forth as McNaughton checks in on them and makes sure they are not intoxicated, and that they are aware the police have eyes on them.
“It’s about them knowing that we are here and we are watching,” she says. “And if they’re thinking about causing any trouble, they know that they will be seen and they might think twice.”
But a couple of the group members start getting a bit lairy, feeding off each other until their behaviour becomes offensive and, at times, a bit threatening.
Insults are hurled at McNaughton about her choice of career – they are unimpressed – while comments are made about her appearance.
One teenage boy claims that other members of the group are carrying drugs and weapons, and the atmosphere feels temperamental, like it could take a downward turn quite quickly.
After we leave them – fortunately avoiding any real confrontation or conflict – I ask McNaughton if she is ever scared approaching groups that are hostile.
She considers the question for a moment. “No,” she replies.
“If you remain calm, you can de-escalate the situation.”
Earlier in the evening she explained that the operation had resulted in good relationships being built between police and the teens, and she is committed to continuing this approach.
“Their response is on the whole good,” she said. “They know us, they recognise a lot of the officers now with that engagement. Depending on the intoxication level it could tip to a wee bit hostile and volatile, but on the whole it’s pretty positive.
“On a Friday it’s a half day for the schools so they can be out from around 1pm, so we focus on being out there and getting that positive engagement.
“We’re seeing quite a wide range of home addresses, from Dundee and Aberdeen through to Fife and the east coast – Dunbar, Musselburgh. They will travel through with the bus passes.
“But we do have a regular group that we do know, and that helps us to engage with them if we do know them. We know their names and we engage with their parents as well. Building that rapport with them helps us.”
We take a wander through the St James Quarter – a popular hangout spot – but all is fairly quiet as the centre moves seamlessly from daytime to nighttime.
One of its security guards comes bounding over, happy to see McNaughton and confirm our own analysis of the situation: there’s nothing to see here.
She tells me a key part of the operation is working closely with local businesses, listening to their concerns, and sharing information whenever possible.
These relationships are so important that Essential Edinburgh, which manages the city centre’s Business Improvement District, funds a police officer to build relationships with businesses.
We head back towards Princes Street, via Multrees Walk and its array of designer shops, and decide to take a wander round the cemetery in case any of the groups we encountered earlier have headed there.
But the only living souls we spot are tourists armed with guidebooks and a couple of drunk adults looking for a shortcut through the graveyard (or at least that’s what they told McNaughton).
As we head back towards Waverley, we pass a group of chatty girls in their early teens running past The Balmoral.
Attracted by the uniform, they stop to say hello.
McNaughton doesn’t know this group and is keen to do a welfare check, making sure they have phones that are charged and telling them to stick together.
“Do you know Tattoo Tony?” one asks. (Tattoo Tony is in fact PC Tony Lawrence, a community cop based in north Edinburgh who has been lauded for his work with young people in the area).
Happy that McNaughton does indeed know him, they chat for a bit longer before getting back to their business.
Their knowledge of Tattoo Tony suggests some kind of pre-existing relationship with the police, and highlights the fact they have travelled into the centre from the north of the city. McNaughton makes a mental note for future reference.
Just then, the Bar Prince doorman at The Balmoral greets McNaughton enthusiastically, and is quick to praise her and her team for the reduction in antisocial behaviour that has in the past blighted the busy thoroughfare outside the hotel.
Now, he says, it’s a “tranquil” experience for the tourists arriving at the plush venue, welcomed by their concierge rather than often intimidating sight of gangs of teenagers.
“I didn’t arrange for him to say this,” McNaughton assures me.
We prepare to bring Operation Verbeia to a close and hand over to the next team whose job it is to police the late night revellers in the city centre as McNaughton concludes it has been a relatively quiet and, thankfully, uneventful evening.
We then hear about some trouble in the seaside suburb of Portobello.
It transpired that while the sunshine brought relative calm to the city centre, busloads of young people had descended on the beach and a large-scale disturbance resulted in armed police being sent in following reports of an alleged stabbing.
A stark reminder for McNaughton and her team of how quickly situations can escalate from peaceful to life-threatening.
