Sir Leslie Sharp, a former Strathclyde Police chief constable, has died at the age of 85.
The region's top cop courted controversy by using public funds to buy weapons from criminals, just to get them off the streets.
Sharp took up his post in 1991, becoming the first English chief of the UK's biggest police force outside London, where he was born.
At the time, the region was in the grip of an unprecedented crime wave.
Housebreakings, drugs, violence and murder were on the rise and the service was stretched to the limit and under-resourced.
A lover of code-named anti-crime initiatives, arguably Sharp's most controversial was Operation Spur, designed to take guns and ammunition off the streets.
Fresh from the success of a housebreaking initiative and a second intelligence-gathering operation, Sharp launched Spur – which determined that every criminal arrested, no matter how minor, would be quizzed on where guns could be bought and who had them.
One officer said: "We thought he was mad but it turned out almost everyone in Paisley and Glasgow knew someone who knew where to get a gun.
"We'd pull in a shoplifter and end up with a Kalashnikov.
"Sharp got a lot of heat from politicians but never wavered. He didn't care that we were paying money to criminals."
Along the way, Sharp boosted the force's numbers while improving officer training and the use of protective equipment.
He could justifiably look back at his record and say, as he did in 1995, that Strathclyde was a safer place to live when he left than when he joined.
A personal low point was the tragic death of PC Lewis Fulton, a 28-year-old officer who was fatally stabbed during a call-out in
Glasgow's Gorbals in 1994.
The death prompted the force to introduce body armour.
One notable challenge in Sharp's time was the Chinook helicopter crash on the Mull of Kintyre in 1994, in which 25 passengers and four crew were killed.
He would later say he was proud of the way the force handled the tragedy.
Sharp joined the Met Police in 1956.
He was awarded the Queen's Police Medal early in his career and knighted in 1996.
He died at a care home in Berkshire on January 18 after a cancer diagnosis.
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