Developing a copper's nose; The need to empower new officers

I recently moved back to the 'corporate' world in my force with a slight degree of trepidation. 

I'd really enjoyed my three years as a Chief Inspector on Division, and for those of you have read of my work with Grey Space, the NHS and Operation Winter Shield you will know that to accomplish these successes I've had a fair degree of autonomy, and space to try new things. Given my previous experiences in policing I was worried that this might be curtailed. Working at 'the centre' of any organisation is inevitably going to be more constrained than at the end of the 'delivery' chain. There are far more departments, agendas and governance issues to be dealt with, as one makes attempts to slightly alter the course of the metaphorical oil tanker. In my case, in respect of the second biggest force in the UK - an organisation of around 25k staff servicing a population approaching 6 million. 

Challenge assumptions 

However, so far I have been pretty pleasantly surprised. 

The void around change management, that was previously largely (although not exclusively) by eager but perhaps ill equipped police officers had been filled by professional project management staff, including bright and dedicated business analysts who have come to policing with a fresh set of eyes, untainted by years of institutionalisation. 

I am fully aware of the difficulties this can also present in terms of understanding policing culture and practice, but as someone (to a degree) fairly fresh back into this world it looks like the right balance is now being struck. 

What really seems to be the fore (and which I am really pleased to see) is a drive to challenge assumptions. I attended a very well run workshop last week, in which external consultants did well in engaging the staff and officers present to get to the heart of a particular operational 

process. 

A bit of me did think "Shouldn't we be doing this ourselves?", but I then had to ask 'could we?'. This isn't to say we don't have the ability to undertake such a task, but rather that given the last five years of our organisation would such an internally run process be able to get to 

the staff honesty that is required? I'm not sure. 

The key message from the workshop was the need for staff (re)empowerment, and a collective railing against the multiple layers of bureaucracy (with accompanying scrutiny) and data capture that have been imposed on what are ultimately fairly simple operational policing processes. 

Empowerment 

You might think this sounds like something from a management training book. In that case I 

think it is worthwhile that I give you a personal example of the amount of 'empowerment' our officers have lost during my service. 

As a young cop with two years' service I was out single-crewed when I saw a male I recognised from an incident a week previously, carrying a folding table up a hill. 

He had been fairly decent at the incident, so I decided to stop and give him a hand. He was fairly surprised at the offer, but he thanked me, threw the table in the back of the panda and off we went. 

By the end of that journey I had quality intelligence in respect of the biggest drug dealer in the housing scheme I policed, and their operating methodology. After speaking to my Sergeant, I took a deep breath and headed up to the DI's office (in those days not a journey to be taken lightly, and particularly not by someone as wet behind the ears as I was). After a brief chat (where I stood and erred and ummed my way through my activities, while he sat and scowled) I was congratulated on recruiting my first informant, and given a typed up A4 one pager to fill in with the details. 

After a further friendlier discussion, of no more than 10 minutes, I was off to the home of the Justice of the Peace, craved a warrant, assembled a team (no doubt rather sceptical of this callow youth and his 'plan') and had over a kilo of drugs in the bag by the end of my shift, along with an individual ultimately facing a healthy jail sentence. 

I then filled in a further one page form, popped to HQ, had the mickey taken out of me by the Detective Chief Super over how young I looked (he had the safe in his office, and decided how much my successful 'turn' was worth), then arranged to meet and pay my 'informant' (I had the sense not to be in my uniform, although no counselling on this, or really anything else....). 

Initiative 

This led to a productive relationship over the next few years, which was ultimately killed by the introduction of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act... And probably, with hindsight and a senior manager's eye, rightly so. 

When I think back on the approach I took I get a bit of a shiver (as many of my contemporaries and those retired reading this will too... accompanied no doubt by the odd wry smile). 

For any serving officers with less than 15 years' service my 'adventure' probably sounds like 

something from Life on Mars. However, that's the way it was. The checking measures that now apply to such a relationship are legion, the firewalls, training and demarcation needed 

being rightly so. 

I am not advocating for a return to the halcyon days of derring do, as we now have our affairs in order and, let's face it, such systems were open to obvious potential abuse. 

However, my contention is that we have moved far too far away from this type of 'policing entrepreneurial' behaviour being encouraged in officers (Jerry Ratcliffe's natural police, as 

discussed in his excellent recent book 'Reducing Crime'). 

Ultimately our Constables are the ones on the street, and they need to be empowered to make decisions based on the circumstances that present themselves, and where appropriate use their initiative. Attempting to codify all police and public interactions is a fool's errand. 

Operational 

The last five years saw this errand happen though, with the (re)introduction for many officers in Scotland of Standard Operating Procedures. 

My own legacy force had abandoned such an approach some time ago, with a force procedures manual providing the steer to officer's activities, but thereafter leaving the operational action to its operational staff. 

My impression is we are now moving back in this direction, with 'the centre' ultimately aiming to be providing advice and guidance, a set of general principles and core ethics to give officers enough of a base to work from without being overly constrained. 

I was at a recent corporate event on 'Agile' working hosted by Anderson, Anderson & Brown Consulting, where there was an excellent speaker from a rising food delivery company, Deliveroo, that has largely changed the market. He talked very eloquently about 3 C's, Communication, Creativity and Chaos. 

I think we are starting to get our Communications right, and the retreat from operational rigidity with careful messaging to our officers will accomplish this, along with allowing our officers to display judgement where we will get Creativity in their solutions, rather than an autonomous and slavish acceptance of 'rules', which actually cannot possibly cover all eventualities. 

Chaos? 

The word that might send police officers running for the hills though is Chaos. This brings about visions of burning panda cars and smashed up police stations. However, this isn't what is meant at all. 

Instead what this refers to is thinking of your hold over your staff as a form of a sliding scale. At one end you have complete control, where your staff stick to a set of rules and operating procedures where you have severe discipline implications if you stray, very tight governance and a complete lack of innovation. 

At the other end you let the staff do whatever they please. We will never have the latter (rightly so), but we need to move some way away from the former to allow our staff to do their jobs in the 21st century. 

Moises Naim, in his seminal book on modernity, "The End of Power" identified the contemporary More and Mobility revolutions at work in society, the effect of which has been to "vastly broaden the cognitive, even emotional impact of more access to resources and the ability to move, learn, connect and communicate more broadly and inexpensively than ever before." 

These factors apply to our officers. As the Peelian principles go, the people are the police and the police are the people. Our recruits today have these Naimian abilities, and asking them to 

wholly follow slavish (and often counter intuitive rules) is not only a bad idea, it also goes against the grain of the society they live in. 

We don't recruit the best and the brightest to this vocation to be automatons. Let's give them the room to develop a 'copper's nose', know when to rely on statistics and research but also lean on well-developed professional judgement. It's all about balance. 

We need to trust our cops. 

They'll never get the freedom I illustrated in my recruitment example above (for a host of good and sensible reasons) but we need to give them a framework to support them in similar forms of social/ policing entrepreneurship. If we don't we'll just get more of the same, and at the moment that isn't leaving us in a good place, is it?