Metro, Friday 24 July 2026
Metro reports that PC Alan Greer, who joined Police Scotland in 2009 with an apparently unblemished service record, is now known to have been a rapist who also attempted to murder women during a decade-long "reign of terror" beginning in Glasgow in 2012. Eight victims have been identified so far, with more expected to come forward once they are able to be identified. Assistant Chief Constable Lynn Ratcliff said the findings were "shocking," adding that "this officer clearly abused his power." Colleagues told the BBC there were "no opportunities" to spot his offending sooner and that they were "oblivious" to his double life. A source close to the investigation described it as potentially "Police Scotland's Wayne Couzens moment," a reference to the Metropolitan Police officer jailed for the rape and murder of Sarah Everard. Greer died in May, aged 47.
"No opportunities to spot his offending sooner" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and it deserves to be read carefully rather than simply repeated. It is a claim about the limits of what the institution could have known, offered by people inside the institution, about the institution's own failure to know it for a decade. It may be true. It is also exactly the account any organisation would prefer to give once one of its own has been exposed: not that oversight was inadequate, but that the offending was, in principle, unspottable, a misfortune rather than a systemic gap.
Compare that framing with what actually happened. Greer served for over a decade with what colleagues call an unblemished record, precisely the record that Police Scotland's own vetting and internal review processes were meant to notice, if anything was wrong, over that span of years. An unblemished record is not neutral information; it is the specific artefact those processes produce when they are functioning correctly. That the same artefact sat, unchanged, across a decade of serious offending is not evidence that no opportunity existed. It is evidence that whatever the institution's mechanisms for noticing were designed to catch, they did not include this, and the "Wayne Couzens moment" comparison being reached for here is itself an admission that this pattern, officer with clean record, years of undetected serious offending, institution insisting hindsight is the only vantage point from which the problem is visible, is not new. It has a name now because it has happened before.
This entry shows an institution describing a decade of undetected offending by one of its own as an absence of opportunity, rather than as a question about what its own oversight was designed to catch.