Police Scotland says 84-incident gang feud across central belt has ended

Police Scotland said a six-month gang feud that drove 84 separate incidents across Edinburgh, Glasgow and the wider central belt had ended after dozens of arrests and what officials described as a “resolution of differences” between rivals. The violence began in Edinburgh in March and spread through a run of fire-raisings and attempted murders that forced one of the force’s largest ongoing investigations.

Chief Constable Jo Farrell described the case in an update to the Scottish Police Authority as “a deeply concerning war between rivals.” Police Scotland later identified the inquiry as Operation Portaledge, the name Farrell revealed publicly for the first time as she set out how the feud flared in March and escalated in April. Earlier reporting linked the violence to two rival crime families, the Daniels and the Lyons.

The arrest totals climbed steadily as the investigation widened. By late May 2025, police said 35 people had been detained in connection with the feud. By late June, that figure had risen to 49, alongside the recovery of 14 stolen vehicles and the review of 3,000 hours of CCTV footage. A brief resurgence of gang-related violence earlier in the year brought another burst of incidents and more arrests before the violence subsided.

Farrell said the feud had ended for multiple reasons, including those arrests, while police were also pursuing crime group leaders based abroad. That wording matters: it points to a mix of pressure from enforcement and some form of internal change within the gangs, rather than a single arrest wave stopping the violence on its own. If the feud did cool because rival groups concluded they had lost more than they could gain, that would reinforce the case for sustained investigations that hit leadership, mobility and finances, not just the foot soldiers on the street.

Farrell, appointed in 2023 after a six-week selection process, is Police Scotland’s first female chief constable. The scale of Operation Portaledge, and the spread of its violence from Edinburgh into Glasgow and beyond, showed how quickly local gang retaliation can become a national policing problem when feuds move across city boundaries and into organised, repeated attacks.