The senior officer who wrote down details of a fatal car crash which police failed to attend for three days was following guidelines given to other control rooms, The Courier can reveal.
Bosses instructed two sets of despatch staff to record details of incidents using a pen and paper before emailing them to workers in Dundee.
By tragic coincidence, the instructions were handed down as John Yuill and Lamara Bell lay by the side of the M9, 51 hours after the force was alerted and a sergeant, untrained in the force’s new computer system, recorded details of the call by hand.
John was dead at the scene when officers responded to a second call about the vehicle. Lamara passed away on Sunday.
The note to all staff in Glasgow Govan and Motherwell says: “Please paper log the incident and sent (sic) to Dundee control room email address, the same as we would for Inverness and CC (carbon copy) in Glasgow Service Centre.
“If it is an urgent incident then please alert supervisor if necessary to call the urgent priority control room number for Dundee to alert them of the incident.
“Depending on nature and urgency you call them yourself also.”
The email was sent on July 7.
Lamara, 25, and John, 28, had left a camping trip to Loch Earn on July 5 and a non-emergency call was made later that day to report a car down an embankment near the Bannockburn slip road on the M9.
That call went to Bilston Glen, near Edinburgh, after the Stirling control room was closed in January. The leaked email trail also reveals some calls from Dundee are now filtered to Glasgow.
Democrat leader Willie Rennie said: “For police bosses to be instructing staff to handle calls in such a chaotic and unconventional manner is breathtaking.
“It has shuddering echoes of the M9 crash incident.”
A Police Scotland spokesman insisted the email outlined a “contingency process” for members of the public selecting the wrong option after dialling the non-emergency 101 number.
He added: “It is not a standard response. It simply ensures that where a call is received in the west, it can be quickly highlighted to the control room in Dundee.”