THEY were always marketed as the friendly Games but this summer's Common-wealth sporting spectacle was as safe as it was good-natured.

New details show that crime fell in Glasgow during Scotland's busiest ever 12 days of sport, despite a record of influx of visitors to the city.

Chief Constable Sir Steve House revealed that both recorded offending and complaints about public disorder fell during the near two weeks as his still relatively new national force carried out what is thought to be the country's biggest-ever policing operation.

Around 109,000 individual deployments were made during the Games, an unprecedented mobilisa-tion that saw leave and rest days cancelled and officers under huge time pressures.

But Sir Steve, while praising his colleagues, believes the feel good factor may just have helped cut offending.

He said: "I don't think we should dismiss as wishful thinking that Glasgow felt good about itself and continues to feel good about what it did during the Games. It led to people feeling positive about the city and so they should.

"It was great advert. Crime was down and public disorder was down.

"That is not dissimilar with the experience the Met had during the Olympics -or even the World Cup. After all, some people stay home and watch TV."

Some officers did complain about the extra workload with the new force facing the triple whammy of the Games, T in the Park and the Ryder Cup even before the additional pressures of policing the independence referendum.

The force is still dealing with a knock-on effect of delayed rest days and time-off in lieu.

However, Sir Steve stressed most of his officers were delighted to take part in policing what he called a once-in-a-lifetime even, which had a security bill of £90million.

He said: "We had to say to the organisation you can't have annual leave but that is a fairly practical and common sense thing to do.

"The public would expect it is all hands on deck for something like that. There has not been a huge financial cost to it. We are now two months on. Annual leave has been taken. There is still a number of outstanding rest day and time off in lieu issues but we will work our way out of those.

"Sickness was down during the Commonwealth Games, not up. Any view that people can't take their holidays, they will go sick, that is not the way the police service works. We are a public service."

Sir Steve said it would be "almost impossible" for the old Strathclyde force to have mobilised officers from across Scotland to police the games.

A Glasgow City Council spokesman said: "The people of Glasgow put on a fantastic show for the world. Rough Guides recently said the city was the world's friendliest. So it's no surprise to hear that crime levels were low during the summer.

"We're grateful for all the hard work of our colleagues at Police Scotland."

The crime figures will be released later.