A Scottish police officer who took his own life in May 2026 has been identified as a serial rapist who attacked at least nine women over 14 years. The case has set off one of the biggest internal investigations in Police Scotland's history (The Guardian).

The officer, PC Alan Greer, was born in Australia in 1978. He joined Strathclyde Police in 2009 and spent 17 years on the force with what appeared to be a clean record. When he died by suicide on 6 May 2026, he was 47 years old and had a wife and child. His family and colleagues reportedly had no idea about his violent secret life.

The investigation started when Greer's first known victim came forward in late 2025. She was a woman he had raped in her Glasgow home in 2012, after she had called the police to report being the victim of a crime. Her report led to an anti-corruption investigation — an internal police probe focused on officers breaking the rules or committing crimes. That probe eventually found eight more victims. Five of them were sex workers whom Greer attacked while he was off duty. A BBC Disclosure investigation also revealed that Greer had used hundreds of sex workers during his time as a police officer, and investigators expect to find even more victims as they keep working.

Once the 2012 victim filed her report, the investigation team traced her original emergency call and found out which officers had responded. They discovered that Greer had repeatedly looked at her case file in the years after the assault. Detectives then found Greer's mobile phone number and searched it through police databases. That search turned up information from 2018, when a Glasgow sex worker had reported that the person owning that phone number was a violent customer. At the time, no one had connected that information to a serving police officer.

As the investigation went deeper, detectives watched every keystroke Greer typed on police computers. They found he had been searching for traces of a complaint linked to a sex worker's phone number. A Scottish judge then gave them permission to search Greer's home and take his devices. On those devices, officers found thousands of graphic videos and images.

Investigators have not even gone through half of the files they seized. From what they have reviewed so far, they identified five sex workers who were seriously sexually assaulted and two female police officers whom Greer photographed inappropriately during training. Some of the attacks were so violent that, if Greer had survived, police would have tried to charge him with attempted murder.

Assistant Chief Constable Lynn Ratcliff, the senior officer in charge of the investigation, said the evidence was "truly shocking." She said Greer had abused his power by going back to someone he first met through his police duties. Ratcliff also said no warning signs had been missed, but she acknowledged that Greer would not pass today's background checks — the process police use to decide if someone is safe and trustworthy enough to serve.

The timeline of Greer's death raises questions. On 5 May 2026, social workers and local police visited Greer's home to make sure his family was safe. He died by suicide the next day.

A source close to the investigation compared the case directly to the Wayne Couzens scandal, calling it "Police Scotland's Wayne Couzens moment." Couzens was a serving police officer in London who murdered Sarah Everard in 2021. His case revealed serious failures in how police checked officers' backgrounds and handled warnings about dangerous officers.

The comparison matters. In both cases, serving officers used their position to find and target victims. In both cases, questions arose about whether warning signs were already sitting in police systems but were never acted on. In Greer's case, the 2018 report from a Glasgow sex worker — describing the owner of his phone number as a violent customer — sat in police databases for about seven years before the investigation finally found it.

The questions do not end there. Greer looked at his first known victim's case file again and again after the 2012 assault, and no system ever flagged it. He used police computers to search for complaint traces linked to a sex worker's phone number while he was already under investigation. He photographed female colleagues inappropriately during police training, where other people could have seen him. Ratcliff's claim that no warning signs were missed, combined with her admission that Greer would fail today's background checks, suggests a gap between what the system could have caught and what it actually did.

The broader concern is whether police systems can stop dangerous officers before someone gets hurt, or whether they only react after a victim comes forward. Police Scotland now faces the same hard questions that hit the London police after Couzens: are its background checks, intelligence handling, and professional standards strong enough to catch predatory officers early — or do they wait for harm to happen before connecting the dots?