The law did not change. The instruction did.

The story

Officers in Scotland are being "encouraged not to arrest people" because of a lack of space to hold them, the head of the Scottish Police Federation has said. David Kennedy told BBC Radio Scotland that with police offices and stations closed, "they don't have the capacity anymore." A report found the number of people arrested and brought to custody centres in Scotland fell by 15,451 in a year, from 99,216 to 83,765. Police Scotland said officers are not encouraged to avoid making arrests, and that it is inaccurate to suggest otherwise.

The reframe

Nobody has proposed changing the law on any of the offences this affects. Whatever conduct justified an arrest last year justifies one this year in exactly the same words, on exactly the same statute book. What has changed is capacity: fewer custody suites, fewer open stations, and, on David Kennedy's account, an informal steer from above that adjusts to that shortage without any minister standing up to announce it.

This is selective enforcement in close to its purest administrative form, the kind the manuscript describes as often defended on grounds of practicality: no system can apply every rule uniformly, resources are finite, and priorities must be set. Taken alone, that sounds reasonable. The problem, on the manuscript's account, emerges when selectivity stops being an exception and becomes the default mode of operation, which is precisely the gap between the 99,216 arrests of a year ago and the 83,765 of now.

A 15,451-person fall in arrests, driven by cell space rather than crime rate, is selectivity operating at exactly that scale. It is not one custody sergeant on one night making a judgement call about whether a cell is free. It is a pattern large enough to show up in a national report, produced by decisions made far from any individual arrest, about how many stations stay open and how many cells exist to receive the people the law says should be detained.

Police Scotland's denial matters less than it might seem to. Whether the instruction was formally issued or simply understood, absorbed through the practical reality that a station with three usable cells cannot process the same volume of arrests as one with twelve, the effect on the person deciding whether to make an arrest is identical. The manuscript's account of what enforcement becomes once it stops tracking the written rule and starts tracking what the system can currently bear applies here without needing to resolve that dispute: justice depends on consistency, not severity, and a system that enforces rules unevenly does not reduce wrongdoing but redistributes it.

Redistribution is the accurate word for what a capacity-driven drop in arrests actually does. The offences that would previously have led to a cell now lead to something else, a warning, a report for later action, a decision not to pursue it at all, and which of those a person receives depends less on what they did than on how full the custody suite happened to be that night, and how loudly the instruction not to fill it further had been passed down the chain. The written offence has not moved. The practical threshold for being arrested for it plainly has, and nobody outside policing was ever asked whether that trade was one they would have chosen.