Features

FEATURE: A new report from the Scottish Institute for Policing Research has highlighted concerns that officers in public protection roles often mask their true feelings through ‘emotional labour’ – supressing their own personal emotions in order to display organisationally desired ones – and often won’t seek help because of the stigma surrounding mental health, leaving them at risk of long-term emotional and psychological damage, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: Police forces and departments across the United States and around the world are facing staffing challenges as well as a “rapidly shifting ecosystem of expectations, resources, and alternatives”, warns public safety consultant Tim Kucerovy; he argues that applying Porter’s Five Forces – a recognized tool for understanding the dynamics shaping an industry – to diagnose the external pressures facing law enforcement can help agencies to meet and overcome those challenges.

FEATURE: Cybercriminals are increasingly using stolen credentials and exploiting legitimate tools and native access to “log in, instead of breaking in”, blend into their target’s environment and carry out ‘living off the land’ (LOTL) attacks; Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth looks at the nature of LOTL attacks, and why all organisations – including police and law enforcement agencies – should remove all unnecessary files, applications and systems to reduce their attack surface to such threats.

INNOVATION: The College of Policing’s Chief Superintendent Jamie Daniels is calling on police forces across England and Wales to put forward investigations highlighting best practice and innovation as part of a College initiative to create a “national investigation bank” that will improve learning and outcomes while also recognising the stand-out work of officers, as he explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

OPINION: In the latest in a regular series of articles from the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), Avon and Somerset PCC Clare Moody, the APCC’s joint lead on victims and violence against women and girls (VAWG), sets out some of the latest developments in the continuing efforts to significantly reduce VAWG, support victims, and find solutions to a society-wide problem – while reiterating calls for stable, long-term funding to get the job done.

INTERVIEW: Craig Naylor tells Policing Insight’s Ian Weinfass about His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland’s plans for the next three years – including a focus on police-perpetrated domestic abuse and institutional discrimination – and how the inspectorate is bringing about change.

FEATURE: A report by the London Drugs Commission has called for the policing of cannabis to switch from the Misuse of Drugs Act to the newer Psychoactive Substances Act, enabling police to target production and supply of while not penalising its possession; but the report authors but the authors also argue that any immediate further liberalisation of the law would be “unjustifiable and irresponsible”, as it would carry too great a risk, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ANALYSIS: Bail reform was hotly debated topic during Canada’s recent federal election, and with several serious offences – including the murder of an Ontario police officer – committed by offenders who were on bail, it remains a talking point for many of those involved in the criminal justice system; Policing Insight’s Matthew Wood looks at the background to the debate, the views of various stakeholders, and the prospects of significant reform in the coming months.

FEATURE: A New South Wales (NSW) Police state-wide domestic violence (DV) operation, combining raids targeting high-risk DV offenders with education for youngsters and training for officers, has led to more than 10,000 charges against over 5,000 offenders; the operation looks set to maintain a continuing increase in charges and clear-up rates for DV in NSW – a success story that has also been repeated across a whole range of offences according to latest figures, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

ANALYSIS: Retention in policing organisations is a challenge for agencies in many countries, and is often closely associated with employees’ intrinsic motivation and need fulfilment, which in turn are influenced by leaders; Naomi Davis-Crane, a Senior Lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University specialising in police leadership, puts forward an alternative model – the SERVANT approach – which employs a values-based approach to address some of the existing challenges.

OPINION: Australia is losing the fight to disrupt illicit drug supply chains – not for lack of effort, but because it needs additional weapons and new approaches – warns Dr John Coyne, Director of National Security Programs at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who calls for a shift towards measuring law enforcement successes against disruption, deterrence and network degradation, rather than arrests, seizures and prosecutions.

FEATURE: A recent report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) following a series of hearings into the UK Government’s efforts tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG) has highlighted how government officials lack understanding of the scale of VAWG and have “starkly different” views on available support to those expressed by local agencies and victim-survivors, with one MP on the PAC warning that the Government “appears oblivious” to some levels of harm, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INNOVATION: To address key areas of crime and vulnerability, UK constabularies can use visual analysis software to pull together data from myriad sources for the prevention of harm, the detection of crime, and the identification of risk; Seth Cooke, a former Avon and Somerset Police intelligence analyst and now i2 Group technical and tradecraft specialist, explains how this technology powerfully supports approaches to knife crime, antisocial behaviour, and violence against women and girls.

FEATURE: The latest Europol Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) highlights the growing threat of cyber criminals – many of them inexperienced – using ‘cybercrime-as-a-service’ platforms to steal and trade data and digital information, and attempt to hold large commercial organisations as well as individuals to ransom, as Policing Insight’s Chris Allen reports.

FEATURE: The Right Care, Right Person (RCRP) approach to responding to those in mental health crisis was adopted by policing across the UK in 2023, and an initial evaluation last year found that forces already perceived a drop in the number of unnecessary call outs; but pioneers of the approach have warned that failing to implement RCRP in line with the developed model “dilutes” the success of the response, as Policing Insight’s Tina Orr Munro reports.

ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE: Extraordinary work, extraordinary challenges: that's life in the police control room. Becky Tipper explains how Salesforce's partnership with forces tackles these challenges head-on, reimagining citizen engagement and building stronger connections with the public.

INTERVIEW: Essex Police’s Commercial Vehicle Unit (CVU) is staffed by officers who have completed specialist training to qualify as transport managers and HGV drivers, enabling the team to engage more effectively with the industry – which has helped to significantly reduce the number of killed and seriously injured collisions involving lorries, as CVU Sergeant Dearsley told Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

INTERVIEW: Ahead of next month’s 4th World LGBTQI+ Criminal Justice Conference in Austin, Texas, Policing Insight’s Christine Townsend spoke to Austin Police Department’s Sergeant Mike Wilmore-Crumrine, Conference Executive Director, about his own experiences as an officer who is gay, the work being done to improve internal workplace cultures for queer-identifying officers as well as the communities policing serves, and why the conference theme of ‘Bridging the Gap’ is also crucial part of moving forwards.

OPINION: With the UK spotlight on tackling violence against women and girls and a strong focus on domestic violence and abuse, Noor Da Silva, a Sexual and Domestic Abuse Service Manager in the UK’s East Midlands and one of the country’s 15 specialist Harmful Cultural Practice IDVAs, argues that it’s also time to address the gaps in current domestic abuse risk assessment tools which disproportionately endanger minoritised women.

INTERVIEW: Ahead of this month’s Global Societies of Evidence-Based Policing Conference, Policing Insight’s Keith Potter talked to conference speaker Prof Ben Bradford, Director of UCL’s Centre for Global City Policing, about the findings from recent research into the UK public’s trust and confidence in policing, why the decline shouldn’t be seen as catastrophic – yet – and what forces and policing more widely can do to reverse some of that decline.

INNOVATION: An updated National Policing Digital Strategy for forces across the UK has called for greater government investment in new policing technology, a commitment from forces to modernise “local ways of working” and follow the blueprints set out nationally, and a push for “capturing, cleaning, managing, using, and sharing data at all levels” if the service is to grasp the “once-in-a generation opportunity to deliver significant, tangible change” offered by technology advances, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INNOVATION: A new digital ‘data-rich’ form introduced by the Metropolitan Police Service to improve the effectiveness of processing people detained under s136 of the Mental Health Act is also helping to reduce detentions, free up officer time, and gather valuable information about the barriers and pinchpoints relating to finding suitable health-based places of safety for those in mental health crisis, as Policing Insight’s Tina Orr Munro reports.

OPINION: The wellbeing of police officers and staff has become increasingly important for policing organisations; but Graham Goulden, a former officer with a 30-year career and now a strong advocate for safe and supportive workplaces, believes the policing approach to wellbeing needs a major rethink, with leaders, supervisors, and officers and staff all having vital roles to play in building a truly supportive workplace culture.

FEATURE: The work of the European PACTESUR2 project to improve the protection of public spaces has led to the creation of a new EU-POLNET, a European network of more than 20 local police forces that aims to develop local forces’ expertise and promising practices through peer-to-peer exchanges, as Policing Insight’s Andrew Staniforth reports.