Personnel

INNOVATION: An evidence-based review of Thames Valley Police’s deployment of its Tactical Cycle unit in public order operations is calling on the College of Policing to develop Authorised Professional Practice for the approach, in an effort to encourage other forces in England and Wales to adopt the agile and versatile resource that can also improve public engagement and build trust and confidence, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

FEATURE: In the latest in The Police Student series focusing on Community and Neighbourhood Policing, Policing Insight Academic Editor Dr Carina O’Reilly looks at the background to and emergence of neighbourhood policing, its role in supporting confidence and legitimacy, and why the approach is likely to continue to change in response to political, economic and social pressures.

OPINION: Canadian policing faces a challenging contradiction around its response to mental illness, according to new research by Brandon University’s Professor Christopher J. Schneider and Assistant Professor Ania Theuer, and Professor Stacey Hannem of Wilfrid Laurier University, who argue that law enforcement’s framing of officers’ mental health struggles as “occupational stress injuries” contrasts sharply with the stigmatizing approach to the risks posed by mentally ill members of the public.

REPORT LAUNCH: A new thematic report exploring how the issue of domestic abuse and family violence is being tackled across the world, how this has changed, and how it continues to evolve, has been launched by Policing Insight; the report examines the innovations, legal reforms and persistent challenges around the responses to domestic abuse and family violence, as agencies strive to protect victims, reduce demand and prevent further tragedy.

OPINION: While the recent Blue Lights TV drama set in Northern Ireland may have been pure fiction, former police superintendent Martin Gallagher, now an author and terrorism expert, believes that scenarios that played out in the latest series highlighted some of the key challenges facing policing today, and reinforced the need to “reconsider the figurative handcuffs” and allow officers to successfully undertake what is often “a hard, dirty and dangerous job”.

FEATURE: A recent independent review into structural racism within the Metropolitan Police has warned that the organisation’s systems and culture “align to maintain, rather than dismantle, the conditions that cause racial harm”, and that major structural change will be needed to remove the systemic racism that is “baked in” to the design of the institution if efforts to tackle the problem are to be successful in the long term, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

INNOVATION: A new film produced to help police and other professionals recognise cuckooing and understand the perspectives of ‘alpha victims’ – young victims who go on to become offenders themselves – is due to be trialled by police forces shortly, as the latest addition to a wider toolkit to help practitioners identify and act on the risks and vulnerabilities around the issue, as Dr Laura Bainbridge, Associate Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds, explained to Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons.

FEATURE: Speaking at a recent webinar hosted by the Canadian Association of Police Governance, Police Research Lab Director Professor Craig Bennell highlighted the importance of an “informed public” if policing leaders and policymakers are to base practice and decision-making on data drawn from public surveys; he also reiterated the need for “positive public contact”, the value of factual clarity, and the benefits of a calmer police communications response to major incidents, as Policing Insights Christine Townsend reports.

INTERVIEW: Following the Government’s announcement last month that the role of police and crime commissioner will be abolished in 2028, Emily Spurrell, Chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, spoke to Policing Insight’s Ian Weinfass about why she believes the Home Office is wrong to overhaul police governance in England and Wales, why it will not save the money cited, and how it could damage other areas of policing.

OPINION: Despite growing momentum across society for the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI), policing – like many other sectors – is proving to be big on ambition but slow on adoption of the new technology; Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO of Content Guru, explores the reasons behind the slow adoption, the challenges around public trust and confidence, and how the successful introduction of AI into critical healthcare communications could provide lessons for policing.

FEATURE: A new tutor constable training programme launched by the College of Policing for forces in England and Wales aims to professionalise a role that is often overlooked, while delivering public benefits by ensuring new recruits receive the right guidance, and improve retention and cut costs through reducing the number of early-in-service resignations, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: As the first digital natives of AI-fluent Generations Alpha and Beta come of age, law enforcement agencies and policymakers will face an unprecedented criminal landscape shaped by tech tools, hyper-personalized algorithms, and borderless digital worlds; Cognyte’s Yakir Bitterman, a Webint Product Owner and open-source intelligence specialist, explores the behavioral trends among digital natives, and looks ahead at the changing and challenging misinformation threat landscape that awaits them.

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: 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”.

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.

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.

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.