“And many of these racial and ethnic diverse communities have a longstanding history, negative history, with the police,” Chief McClelland said. “Do you have that here in Scotland?”

While sectarian tensions between Catholics and Protestants still flare up, racial fault lines are few in the country, so the Houston chief’s question was on the minds of many of the American officials.

But at the lecture last month, and at others throughout the week, the answer from the Scottish police remained the same: How officers think matters more than how they wield force, even in a nation where knives, not guns, are criminals’ weapon of choice.

“If you speak about a protest, for instance, the protest of the blacks in the street, well that’s about justice, unfairness,” Kirk Kinnell, the superintendent of Police Scotland and head of its hostage crisis negotiation unit, said after a lecture. “I would say, ‘That message, we should embrace that,’ because actually, as police officers, we want fairness. That’s why we joined.”

None of the officials from the United States raised the specter of terrorism or the nationwide trend by departments to arm counterterrorism units in their agencies to respond more quickly to mass shootings. Rather, they were concerned with situations in which civilians are armed with a knife or a bat, and tempers need to be calmed.