Retired Greenock policeman Kenny Morrison reflects on career

Kenny Morrison’s spell of almost 40 years in the force took him from Greenock’s east end to the front lines of British policing in London, Paisley, Glasgow, Ayrshire and Inverclyde.

During his time working in the police, Kenny played an important in role in global events like the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and worked alongside his colleagues to respond to major incidents like the 2007 Glasgow Airport attacks.

And while not all of his experiences have been positive ones, the 59-year-old says his desire to work with the public and be out in the community has never diminished.

Kenny joined the police in 1986, after seeing an advert for the Metropolitan Police in Greenock’s old careers office.

Having spent his whole life up until that point living in Greenock’s east end, he made the journey down to Hendon Police College, where he was shown the ropes of working in the force.

Kenny Morrison spent almost 40 years in the police. (Image: George Munro) Kenny told the Tele: “I’ve always had a public focus. I’ve always liked working with people rather than being stuck in an office and I decided I fancied working for the police.

“That’s what I enjoyed, that interaction – there was some good and some bad, but you had to be professional.

“When I arrived in London it was right at the start of community policing to try and integrate the community with the police.”

Unfortunately, Kenny’s career in the police got off to a tragic start when one of his fellow Hendon graduates died while on the job in his first week.

He said: “One of the individuals who went to Hendon with me was killed in our first week by a drink driver.

“That was a huge experience I had to recover from.

“When I speak to individuals that are thinking about police, I’m always saying they need to be aware of the emotion - the aftermath of things when you have to tell relatives, and how you deal with your own emotions after big events.

“Back then, the whole shift would come together as one, which always happens in traumatic circumstances, and we’d talk through where we were and how we were getting on.

“Now we have fully qualified individuals who can deal with that, but back in the 80s it was experienced individuals who were on shift that would go 'these things happen, let’s move on', and that was basically it.

“You would just box it and go, because the role and the professionalism it requires still needs to be maintained when something like that happens.

"In my total service I’ve unfortunately been on a shift where three officers have been killed.

“It never gets easier. Death never gets easy.”

​Kenny worked in northwest London in a variety of uniformed and plain clothes roles before the area’s unaffordable property prices forced him to move back to Scotland in 1990.

He then spent six years in North Ayrshire in community policing and immediate response roles before, in 1996, being transferred to Paisley.

Away from his work as a lecturer in police studies Kenny trains the next generation of Inverclyde athletes. (Image: George Munro)

Kenny spent the remainder of his career working in the west of Scotland and Glasgow’s south side, holding down a number of senior positions.

He also earned seven commendations during his career, for a variety of heroics which included saving people from fires, performing CPR to save lives of members of the public and disarming crooks wielding knives, baseball bats and firearms.

But Kenny says one of most memorable and surreal experiences of his career was when he was working in a senior role in Paisley when St Mirren won the Scottish League Cup in 2013.

He said: “This doesn’t go down too well locally, but I did the open top bus parade when St Mirren won the cup.

“I was right at the front of the parade, a boy from Greenock’s east end, and I had the responsibility for everything that happened on the ground.

“I had a relationship with the players anyway because we’d speak to them about what the behaviour should be. We knew what we had to do because the whole town was going to close with the amount of people who were going to turn up.

“It’s probably one of the few events in Paisley that had so many people turn up, but there was no bother.

“The surreal moment for me was Danny Lennon, who was the manager at St Mirren, had the league cup, but he had to take it back to Ferguslie. 

“The traffic was so heavy, and he and I had to walk it back.

“It was crazy watching people sitting in traffic, you could see them looking round and thinking ‘that looks like Danny Lennon with the cup’.”

Since his retirement in 2016, Kenny has taken up a role as a lecturer at West College Scotland, where he delivers an NC Police Studies course.

He and a colleague deliver the 18-week programme to people of all ages who want to find out more about being a police officer and help those interested to apply.

“I retired and did nothing for a while," he said, "but there was a role advertised at West College Scotland in the Waterfront Campus for a lecturer for police studies.

“There’s two of us now at the Waterfront who deliver the course. We tell you everything you need to know about being a police officer.

“We give people all the experiences they require to be a police officer. We explain the application process, the recruitment process and the training process.

“Anybody who’s not sure whether they want to be a police officer, if they come our course by 18 weeks they’ll have made a decision.

“It’s like any emergency service. You’ve got to want to do it.

“For me the reward at the end of every course is getting individuals who maybe didn’t want to  come to college or they’ve been through school and had challenges into a good place.

“I still like interacting with the public and get plenty of chances to do it, but I don’t tend to do as much conflict management now as I used to do when I was working!”