AN ALLOA man has been given unpaid work after fracturing a police officer’s finger as he violently resisted arrest.

Conor Preston admitted causing an injury to the PC on October 14, last year, while being arrested in connection with an assault that was later dropped.

Officers were called out his address on Maree Court following reports of a disturbance.

The police encountered Preston and in the course of dealing with him a struggle broke out which left the PC with a fractured finger.

The 25-year-old was initially facing three other charges in relation to the incident, including one charge of behaving in a threatening or abusive manner by seizing a woman's mobile phone and her keys and refusing to return them.

He was also accused of shouting and swearing, as well as assaulting the female by pushing her on the body, causing her to fall from a bed to the floor, striking her head and causing her glasses to fall and break.

The original charge then alleged he grabbed her by the throat, pushed her head against a wall before hitting her head with a mallet and repeatedly kicking her on the body.

A final allegation claimed he pushed one of the police officers when they arrived at the scene.

During a trial at Alloa Sheriff Court, Preston, of Maree Court, Alloa, was found not guilty of all offences leading up to the fracturing of the officer’s finger.

And so last Thursday he appeared at Alloa Sheriff Court for sentencing on the single offence.

Preston’s lawyer, Jim Savage, said that his client accepts that he struggled violently but said that he “felt he had done nothing wrong”.

Sheriff David Mackie sentenced him to a community payback order (CPO) which requires 135 hours of unpaid work to be carried out in the next six months.

Police assaults are fairly common in Scotland, with frontline officers in the Wee County facing the threat of violence on a regular basis.

A previous investigation by the Advertiser found that at least one officer is assaulted in Clackmannanshire every week.

Recently, a teenager was charged with assaulting nine cops in one evening, while in September last year a 37-year-old man was jailed for attacking officers in Tillicoultry.

Offences relating to struggling violently with police, or resisting arrest, are just as common and are as likely to cause injury.