Policy and practice

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: 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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

FEATURE: Criminal justice campaign group Revolving Doors is calling for a new cross-departmental government diversion framework across the UK to tackle the “revolving door cohort” – low-level offenders who repeatedly come into contact with the justice system because of unmet health and social needs, generating a total socio-economic cost of more than £5bn each year, as Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons reports.

OPINION: In the latest in a regular series of articles from the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), Bedfordshire PCC John Tizard, the APCC’s Joint Lead on Performance, Data and New Tech Ethics, looks at the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence and technology in policing, and highlights the steps he has taken in his own force around accountability and governance, which could help achieve the APCC’s aim of a roadmap towards a strong ethical governance framework with PCCs at the centre.

FEATURE: The recent Building Bridges evidence-based policing conference in Ontario showcased efforts by policing to correct the mismatch between how crime is experienced and how it is measured, with a harm-focused framework pioneered by Barrie Police Service and London Police Service’s new gamification approach to hot-sport policing leading the way, as Policing Insight’s Matthew Wood reports.

OPINION: While gender inequality in policing and the damage caused by a misogynistic culture have featured regularly in reports, research and media discourse, attempts to tackle the problem appear to have had little success; Nicola Harrison, a former police officer and Senior lecturer in Policing and Criminology at Sheffield Hallam University, argues that to address these issues, culture change cannot be mandated but must be cultivated from the ground up.

OPINION: Developing an effective response to modern slavery requires an understanding of the extent of the issue, but estimates for the number of UK victims vary considerably; Professor Todd Landman and policy engagement and impact lead Vicky Brotherton of the University of Nottingham-based Rights Lab believe a change to the way data is recorded would provide a more accurate estimate that is likely to be much higher than current figures.

OPINION: Former West Midlands Sergeant Phil Cleary, co-founder of SmartWater and now a published novelist, shares one officer’s account of how underfunded services, not indifference, may have shaped the failures around the UK child grooming scandal that are now widely condemned, explores what could have been done differently, and suggests steps the current Government could take to reset the child protection and safeguarding response.

OPINION: Previous surveys by the Police Federation of England and Wales revealed the impact on female officers of experiencing the menopause while working in policing, and the scale of the problem; now new research by PC Beverley Beck of Dorset Police has highlighted how the institutional neglect of menopause contributes to the early exit of talented and experienced female officers, as well as the good practice underway in some forces to address the issues and support officers.

INTERVIEW: This week’s National Audit Office (NAO) report into police productivity in England and Wales highlights a range of barriers to forces improving productivity, the dangers of the current fragmented policing structure, and the risks of a short-term funding approach to long-term service delivery; Policing Insight’s Sarah Gibbons spoke to NAO Report Director Oliver Lodge about the implications of the findings, and what forces and the Home Office can do to improve productivity and efficiency.