Features

FEATURE: An update on Police Scotland’s Policing Together programme, launched in 2021 to deliver “long-term tangible impact” on a wide variety of equality and diversity issues, reveals improvements on a range of inclusivity and community representation measures, higher levels of satisfaction with police-public interactions, and reduction in the use of force, officer injuries and complaints, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: A recent report by the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre which explores the responses to family violence and domestic abuse in Victoria Police and Greater Manchester Police has highlighted the continuing challenges around successfully implementing support and change programmes for perpetrators of domestic abuse when services for victim/survivors are still inadequate, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: Policing and artificial intelligence (AI) experts from the UK, Australia, US, Canada and the UAE came together recently to explore international insights into policing in the age of AI, highlighting the challenges around improving tech capability, overcoming fragmentation, the need to engage and explain to the public and police staff, and the dangers of eroding police discretion, as well as the increasing threats from the criminal use of AI, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ANALYSIS: In the first in a series of articles on male officer mental health in policing, accredited psychological therapist Dr Rachel Rogers looks at what happens when emotional responses to extraordinary events and stresses become regarded as “normal”, and how the gap between the reality of policing and the systems designed to support it result in a culture where “resilience is expected but rarely resourced”, while help often arrives late and can feel disciplinary.

FEATURE: Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth looks at the worrying rise of the 764 online network, which targets teenagers and promotes involvement in a range of damaging activities including abuse and exploitation, satanic and neo-Nazi extremism, and online and offline violence, and the efforts to tackle the growth of the network.

OPINION: This week saw the launch of the United Nation’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign, with a focus on tackling the digital and online abuse of women and girls; the University of Leicester’s Dr Sarah Jane Fox, Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Culture, explores the messages behind the UNiTE campaign, what it is hoping to achieve, and the parallels between offline and online misogyny and abuse.

INNOVATION: Earlier this year Police Now launched a new specialist economic crime programme, recruiting 12 graduates to join City of London Police and become detectives within two years; Policing Insight’s James Sweetland spoke with City of London Deputy Commissioner Nik Adams, Police Now CEO Kurtis Christoforides, and three graduates on the programme to learn more.

ANALYSIS: Following the announcement earlier this month that the role of police and crime commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales will be abolished in 2028, Policing Insight’s Ian Wiggett looks at the background to the decision, reaction to it, and the challenges that will arise – from potential force boundary changes to the likelihood of increased politicisation of governance – which mean that the end of the PCC experiment is going to be much more than just an administrative change.

INTERVIEW: Since Krissy Barrett’s appointment last month as Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), she has been setting out some of the challenges facing the organisation in the current policing landscape; she recently spoke to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons about her aims for leading the force to meet the evolving threats, the AFP’s unique technical and collaborative capabilities, and her ambition to ensure the AFP is “the best police agency in the world to work in”.

ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already starting to transform policing and other emergency services. Jamie Wilson of NiCE explains how the true benefits of AI lie in extracting valuable insights from data. A notable example of this is in emergency communications centres.

ANALYSIS: Attrition rates in UK rape cases have prompted considerable concerns, but data analysis led by Dr Fiona Vera-Gray and Jo Lovett of London Metropolitan University (as part of the Operation Soteria Data Pillar) has highlighted that significant numbers of police-recorded rapes originated through victim/survivors discussions with officers or the DASH assessment process, with victims having no intention to report the crime – a process described as ‘telling not reporting’ – and subsequently do not support the investigation.

INTERVIEW: Developed by an academic team at the University of Sheffield, the Sexual Trafficking Identification Matrix (STIM) assesses adverts on adult service websites and analyses factors such as the photographs, language and details used to help law enforcement identify victims and perpetrators of human trafficking or sexual exploitation, as Dr Xavier L’Hoiry explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

OPINION: Following months of headlines and community concerns around youth violence in Victoria and its capital Melbourne, the State Government recently announced plans to create a specialist team focused on early intervention and mentorship, similar to the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit; Senior Criminology Lecturer Dr Joel McGregor of Swinburne University of Technology believes a well-funded, multi-agency, public health approach such as this could deliver long-term change.

OPINION: Despite an estimated 4.8 million people being forced into the sex trade each year, surveys indicate just 4% of law enforcement personnel believe human trafficking is a problem in their community; research by Dr Dara Mojtahedi, University of Huddersfield Associate Professor in Forensic and Investigative Psychology, found that myths around the scale of the issue and perceptions of victims are damaging those victims and creating barriers to tackling the problem, and suggests steps to dispel those myths.

FEATURE: A recent report into the UK Government’s Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee has warned that for the Guarantee to succeed, there will need to be better training for neighbourhood policing recruits, a reduction in officer abstractions from neighbourhood policing teams, and change in the perception of the neighbourhood role to recognise it as a specialism, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: The latest review from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warns that the “opaque” nature of computer technology is leaving both state and organisational systems vulnerable to cyber-attack; the review also set out the steps that organisations can take to increase system transparency and reduce risks, as well as highlighting the range of initiatives the NCSC is currently delivering to improve resilience and target cybercriminals, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ANALYSIS: Policing is looking to technology to establish new channels for public contact, but the impact on public-police encounters has until now been little studied; a three-year research project by SIPR Director Professor Liz Aston, Senior Criminology Lecturer Dr Helen Wells, Criminology Lecturer Dr Estelle Clayton, UCL Professor Ben Bradford, and Criminology Professor Megan O’Neill, has highlighted valuable learning on a range of issues including accessibility, the importance of human interaction, and confidence in policing.

OPINION: Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasing role in policing – both in tackling crime and improving efficiency – with suggestions that it could also be key to improving public trust and confidence; but Leeds Trinity University Associate Professor Jonathan Jackson and PCDA Programme Lead Katie Oxley argue that while AI may offer valuable advantages, public trust and confidence also depend on the quality of interaction with individual officers, so ‘street craft’ and communication skills remain crucial.

FEATURE: Following this month’s EMPACT day of action across Europe to tackle human trafficking, co-ordinated by Europol, Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth explores the scale of the problem as well as the efforts of EU members to combat labour exploitation, and takes a closer look at the background and vital role that Europol now plays in leading and supporting operations to target and investigate transnational European crime.

INTERVIEW: With retail crime reaching “unprecedented levels”, Superintendent Lisa Maslen, the lead of the National Business Crime Centre, is looking to build a repository of best practice and urging forces to “borrow with pride” in an effort to tackle offending that is “organised, prolific and impactive on us all”, as she explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

OPINION: Despite a continuing focus on diversity and inclusion across policing, specialist units in particular remain stubbornly homogeneous; new research within tactical and firearms teams by Dr Ashleigh Bennett, an occupational psychologist with extensive experience in policing and the public sector, highlights the significant cultural barriers officers encounter within these teams, and suggests steps forces should be taking to ensure inclusion becomes simply a matter of how policing operates.

INTERVIEW: Essex Chief Constable BJ Harrington, one of the longer-serving chief constables in England and Wales, spoke recently to Policing Insight’s James Sweetland about avoiding “distractions” in delivering policing to the public, facing down criticism in relation to controversial issues such as the Epping asylum protests, and why local control and connections are still more effective in service delivery than “big is beautiful” centralisation.

OPINION: Following the announcement by UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood last week of the abolition of police and crime commissioners as a “failed experiment”, Ron Winch, Associate Professor in Policing at Birmingham City University, considers whether this current decision could indicate a more radical reform agenda to be unveiled in the forthcoming policing white paper, including the replacement of the 43-force model with the introduction of ‘mega-forces’.

ANALYSIS: Following last month’s announcement by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood of a review of the UK legislation around demonstrations and assemblies, Policing Insight’s Graham Wettone, a former Metropolitan Police officer and public order specialist, looks at the background to the current Public Order Act 1986, the finer details of the legislation, and the challenges it presents for the policing of protests that the review will hopefully address.