Analysis

FEATURE: A new study into the wellbeing of disaster victim identification (DVI) officers has highlighted the “moral dissonance” experienced by staff that can contribute to stress and psychological strain, the continuing stigma of seeking help and support for their mental wellbeing, and the damaging impact that the media’s glamourisation of crime scene investigation can have on new DVI recruits whose expectations are far removed from the reality of deployment, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: The recent Domestic Homicide Project report highlights that, for the third year running, suspected victim suicides following domestic abuse in England and Wales have overtaken the number of homicides involving current or previous partners; Policing Lecturer Lee Curran, of the Liverpool Centre for Advanced Policing Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, explores the vital role police officers have to play in recognising the links between domestic abuse and suicide, and the potential for early intervention.

INTERVIEW: Ahead of this month’s American Society of Evidence-Based Policing Conference, American University Associate Professor Dr Janice Iwama spoke to Policing Insight’s Christine Townsend about her research into how peer support programmes are designed and delivered in practice, the need to view them as part of wider organisational culture, and why such initiatives require ongoing attention to training and support.

OPINION: With proposed policing reform in England and Wales indicating a move towards a combination of a national police service, regional forces and local policing areas, Capgemini Director Jamie Robinson explores the experiences of the Dutch transition from regional police forces to the Dutch National Police in 2013, and considers what lessons there could be from the Netherlands for the UK’s reform process.

FEATURE: An independent review of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), commissioned by Chief Constable Jon Boutcher and carried out by leading barrister Rachel Langdale KC, has acknowledged the efforts of officers across the force in tackling violence against women and girls, but warns that much more needs to be done to tackle the “clear evidence of sexism and misogyny within the PSNI”, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INTERVIEW: Following the launch of the UK’s National Knife Crime Centre (NKCC), Commander Stephen Clayman, the officer leading the centre, spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about the role of the NKCC, efforts to “join up the dots” to tackle the sale and importation of knives, and the need to improve both data collection and understanding around knife crime.

FEATURE: A recent report into how organisations can maximise value from their technology investments highlights the paradox that many pour investment into new and shiny technology without addressing the impact of the legacy systems that are the biggest barrier to effective digital transformation; Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth says the report has clear messages for policing, particularly in the UK where major reform is on the horizon.

INTERVIEW: Following the recent launch of the UK Government’s new Road Safety Strategy, former senior police officer Ruth Purdie, CEO of the Road Safety Trust, spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about the need for more support for policing’s role in preventing and detecting crime on the roads, alongside “system-wide” change, better sharing of best practice and greater use of technology, if the strategy is to be implemented effectively.

ANALYSIS: With responsibility for the Police Race Action Plan (PRAP) for England and Wales now shifting from a central team to individual forces, Policing Insight’s Ian Weinfass examines the impact and legacy of the work done over the past five years, and speaks to stakeholders about the role of leadership and how the PRAP should be shaping policing in the future.

OPINION: In the final part of the series of articles exploring UK policing’s software landscape, organisational psychologist Michael Stephenson looks at the challenges and opportunities offered by policing’s largest technology supplier – Microsoft – and questions whether policing’s relationship with the US tech giant needs to be significantly restructured as part of modernisation and reform process.

FEATURE: A study into the policing of organised crime in London by Open University Criminologist Dr Sarah Hutton suggests that while “disruption” has become a central metric in UK law enforcements efforts to tackle organised crime, it is a concept that is rarely measured or validated, resulting in a claim rather than proving a demonstrable reduction in criminality, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: A decade after forced marriage was first criminalised and more than 30 years after state-level hate crime legislation was introduced, rates of prosecution in Australia remain low compared to the UK; strategy and reform consultant Kavitha Vipulananda explores the differences in approach between the two jurisdictions, and suggests four steps Australia could take to improve outcomes for victim-survivors of both offences.

ANALYSIS: As global policing enters a new data-driven era, questions continue over how the new technology is perceived by the public; a new study by Dr Javad Pool, Professor Marta Indulska, Associate Professor Ida Asadi, and Professor Shazia Sadiq of The University of Queensland, and Queensland Police Service Data Services Manager Nick Moss, suggests that while most of the community accept the use of data-driven and AI-assisted tools in policing, far fewer trust the technology.

FEATURE: The latest Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment from INTERPOL highlights the “industrialisation” of transnational financial fraud and the likelihood that offending will offending “escalate significantly” over the next five years as artificial intelligence leads to easier entry for criminal networks, prompting the agency to set out a range of initiatives to tackle the threat, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: Five women are murdered in the US every day by a current, former or estranged intimate partner, with intimate partner violence also a leading cause of death of American children; Pennsylvania State University Assistant Professor Dr Kathryn Spearman argues that, with clear warning signs of the predictable and therefore preventable behavior that leads to domestic homicides, the recognition and response of courts, communities and law enforcement to such red flags needs to be better.

INTERVIEW: Ahead of this week’s first UK National Response Policing Conference, ACC Matt Boyle, the National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for Response Policing, spoke to Policing Insight’s Christine Townsend about changing perception of the response role as a specialism in its own right, the importance of response officers in the investigation process, and the need to recognise the role as the interaction where the public experience policing most directly.

OPINION: In the second in his series on UK policing’s software and IT archipelago, organisational psychologist Michael Stephenson explores what modernising actually looks like when the islands of the archipelago cannot simply be rebuilt from scratch, including the constraints to modernisation, how they can be navigated, the police reform process as leverage, and what an effective and realistic modernisation sequence should look like.

FEATURE: UK policing’s current national training approach to child criminal exploitation (CCE) and criminal exploitation (CE) is “largely deficient”, according to a new report from the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre, which also calls for a shift from an enforcement lens to one of vulnerability to tackle CCE/CE and criminal exploitation in drug markets, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

LONG READ: With UK police forces facing a range of challenges including complex demand, declining trust and confidence, and widescale reform, the importance of leadership in policing has never been greater; in his second long-read article for Policing Insight, Dr Aksar Bashir of the West Midlands Police Force Contact Training Academy explores the SHIELD (support, health, inspiration, ethics, listening, development) leadership concept and how it could be a step towards “a more engaged workforce, an ethical service, and renewed public confidence”.

FEATURE: A new report by Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland into how the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the wider criminal justice system recognises, assesses and responds to child criminal exploitation highlights the “inconsistent and, in many respects, inadequate” responses, and urges the PSNI to improve its delivery model as well as recoding and monitoring systems to better protect children targeted by paramilitary groups and criminals, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: Police forces and other agencies in Australia are increasing their efforts to tackle ‘crimefluencers’, members of decentralised online crime networks who build their own status through ‘posting and boasting’ about criminal activities, and encourage and coerce others to do the same; Dr Xanthe Weston and Dr Raquel Peel of Central Queensland University, and Dr Joel Robert McGregor of Swinburne University, explore the issue of crimefluencers, and suggest steps that can be taken to tackle the problem.

FEATURE: While the ‘Run, Hide, Tell’ guidance remains necessary life-saving advice for the public in the event of a terrorist attack, it was never designed to be adopted by businesses, who have a direct duty of care to staff and customers; Policing insight’s Andrew Staniforth looks at the ‘Guide Shelter Report’ model, launched recently by ProtectUK, aimed at ensuring businesses and organisations have a good security culture in place in response to such scenarios.

INTERVIEW: Deanna Cantrell, a former chief of police and now Director of Law Enforcement Partnerships for Axon, believes leaders need to adopt a “policing inside out” approach by applying the lessons learned from community engagement to leading their own teams – especially those young-in-service officers whose input is often overlooked when it comes to decision-making – as she explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

OPINION: Victoria Police is making more arrests than at any point in its recorded history; but strategy and reform consultant Kavitha Vipulananda argues that, as the force is also experiencing record rates of officer burnout, a documented accountability deficit at command level, and a systematic misidentification problem in family violence proceedings, all the evidence points toward the need for a comprehensive reform agenda spanning all three of these interconnected issues.