Paul Dawson

Devoting Time to Persuasion: Communication and Challenging Business as Usual

It was made clear in England and Wales by the Neyroud review (2011) that a path was being set with the explicit aim of shaping a future ‘professional’ vision of policing. On behalf of the new incoming Police Commissioner, we created a visionary project that went far beyond our previous isolated attempts to embed evidence in the MPS. Our programme had a number of broad strands (i.e. governance, locking together performance and research, training and organisational support), each focussing upon a separate issue with the totality of the programme being stronger than the sum of its parts.

A Demanding Job: Why Don’t We Have the Time to Read?

We would argue it is an uphill battle to embed scientific evidence within a police force for a variety of reasons that have already been documented. As if these were not enough, there are other far more simple challenges that can easily be overlooked—something as simple as the daily demands of a busy (and sometimes not so busy) policing shift. How prepared are officers to find and spend valuable available time to scan, read and think about research issues? It could be argued that the College of Policing’s knowledge portal POLKA was a step forward here as a repository and an attempt to being communities together, but as the results of our survey showed, few reported regular usage. While in the UK there is a growth of the Society of Evidence Based Policing attempting to skill-up police officers and generate research, the meetings draw relatively small numbers of motivated officers. To bring a cultural change new ingredients need to be introduced to the entire craft of policing, especially the profession’s own training capacity. The simplest enabler is to encourage officers and staff to find time within their busy routine to read about the latest research and evaluation findings. This could also be assisted by training, peer support (pressure), management systems and investments, integrating research into the assessment and promotion process. There are even online search engines (e.g. Google Scholar) that can provide automatic research updates around key topics.

Step Four: A Thinking Professional

To date, a few centers of excellence in universities have formed to coach policing into a new way of thinking and acting. This is alongside a ground swell of innovation in social science which explores ‘what works’, under what conditions and why. Thinking like a professional means you think about what you want to change (in a presenting problem), why and what (or who) you can harness to assist.

Training, Time and Technical Ability to Allow Breathing Space for Evidence-Based Policing

Throughout the chapter the concept of learning has been a common thread—as a sister piece to the survey documented earlier, we also sought to assess how much academic evidence the major MPS training providers used in the design, set-up, running and generation of feedback of the training they provide. We would suggest that there is a huge gulf between what policing as a profession has come to understand ‘training’ is for the craft of policing and what academics expect in terms of learning ‘what works’ and how to document systematically the impact of a tactic or approach. Our work in the Met showed us that the traditional approach to ‘training’ left training to the realm of moulding craft experience. We explored this by working with the Met’s training providers and each completed a self-assessment. The self-assessments showed three main challenges.

Step Three: Digging Down and Understanding the Problem and Its Context

This part of the book advocates that you understand the ‘theory of change’ behind the use of tactics compatible with the problems you are facing. Even when we think we know the link between the policing tactics we choose and the problem solved this is often translated into ‘improved performance’. Many of you will be working inside a police organisation or researching within one and have grown weary of performance regimes. For many reasons, the term ‘performance’ has become a dirty word in policing. There are many reasons why this may be so. There is great pressure on police managers to reduce crime (as measured by crime surveys and as measured by police’s own recorded crime figures), but with little understanding that the drivers of crime have been robustly addressed to lead to sustainable improvement. Reducing crime in number may also reduce the crime problem. But this is not always the case. Understanding the problem, and focusing on the drivers of the problem, can help you not only conceptualise how to reduce this presenting problem but make observations about how other collateral problems might be addressed. Performance, achieving best policing results such as reducing crime, increasing victim satisfaction or making a city safer by reducing violent crime, can be driven through a focus on tackling the drivers of the problem. Performance discussions are in our experience too often a blunt instrument worrying about numbers, fed by a wary and cynical internal working culture working to get those numbers to go in the right direction. As we have observed, the very way policing is organised day to day—short-term goals, short-term assignments, siloed working—is not conducive to understanding the root causes of people’s need for and use of the police, and such insight is critical for more defensible progress. To put it simply, insight is not (and should never be) limited to Chief Constable, Commissioner or Ministerial terms. Sustainable reduction is best and far more convincing to the public and any oversight board in a performance meeting. So while we advocate that you avail yourself of the best information available to manage a wide range of problems, what this book advocates is having a more viable and active process to make problem solving an integral part of your working life.

Introduction: Starting the Conversation

This monograph starts from the perspective that may be different than many books and articles about evidence-based policing. Evidence-based policing is defined as ‘using research and scientific processes to inform police decisions’ (Lum et al. 2012). Lum and her colleagues (2012) have led a conversation about the disconnect between what is known from research what ‘works better’ when applied to policing, and the lamentable state of its limited use in the situations where police make decisions and plan action to tackle crime, to protect victims and to prevent offending. She and her colleagues are not alone to feel impatient about the slow uptake of systematic studies improving routine policing practices. Nearly every treatise these days discussing evidence-based practices in policing and the wider criminal justice system reminds the reader that we are at the beginning of this journey. Sitting aside this is a healthy amount of academic discourse on the challenges of working alongside policing culture from a scientific backdrop—illustrating issues such as police machismo, lack of receptivity and uncertainty as to the quality of evidence necessary to base operational decisions (Laycock 2012; Reiner 1992; Cope 2004; Chan 1997). Indeed, one aspect that shines through here is the lack of an agreed consensus in how to embed evidence-based policing, something in itself that could be hampering uptake. There is no consistent voice for police practitioners to fall back upon to help them be evidence based and act as evidence based professionals. The purpose of this book is to help fill this gap and to share our varied experiences on the use of evidence-based research inside a police service today.

Technical Ability of More than Police Officers

This final aspect, and again one that we feel has been overlooked previously, is the awareness that evidence-based policing goes beyond that of only police officers. Specifically, here we highlight civilian staff such as performance and intelligence analyst (or comparable) functions that many police services have. These are disciplines that in our experience are not under the professional umbrella of social research and are perceived as being separate to evidence based policing. We would argue they should not be. Our work in this area demonstrated to us that many performance/intelligence analysts are not comfortable within social research methodologies. Equally, not all (police) researchers see performance as something they ought to do. This is unfortunate as police services are a goldmine of data that should be routinely mined in more creative/innovative ways generating learning to benefit decision-making. The argument we propose, and the one we have done so throughout the chapter, is to move us away from the craving of achieving only ‘gold standard’ evidence—which of course can play an important role, but cannot routinely answer and arm officers within their daily work. Translating good research into the performance expectations of officers is a skill, and analysts can certainly merge best practice knowledge into crime analysis products.

The Challenge in Making Effective Research Influence Policing

The research into public confidence in policing was driven by the fact that we were keen to move beyond crude ‘tick-box’ notions of citizen satisfaction, which offer ways of thinking about the direct contact between citizens, policing and their police. The work on confidence asks ‘why’ police are important in democratic relationship between citizen and state. For many police officers, trying to enhance the legitimacy of their organisation can often seem an abstract or over-complicated endeavour, especially if they believe their core concern should be around improving tactics to fight crime. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive aims. The research on public confidence is trying to influence the way police interact with citizens. There is considerable evidence that trust in the police is important for the rule of law in itself. Trust in policing is linked to concrete citizen behaviours—cooperation with officers, compliance with the law and engagement in informal social control—that would help police to achieve their crime fighting goals and benefit officers by helping them doing their own jobs better (Tyler 1990; 2007; 2011; Tyler and Fagan 2008; Tyler and Huo 2002; Sunshine and Tyler 2003). Tyler’s procedural justice model (Tyler 1990) is now being discussed in a number of countries for its link to improved policing. He firmly links the fairness with which police officers exercise their authority to public trust, police legitimacy, and the types of behaviour listed above. Interpreted in its broadest (and perhaps most optimistic) light, procedural justice theory holds out the promise of a criminal justice system predicated on a more cooperative and less coercive relationship between police and public than it often seems to be the case (Hough et al. 2010). And it does so by placing the relationship between police and public centre stage. Perhaps we in Western democracies have underestimated the damage distrust does to public cooperation with public institutions. But following the disorders in London in 2011 and in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 we are less dismissive of its critical requirement.

Step One: Appreciation of Evidence in the Business of Policing

The growing discussion and popularity of the term evidence-based policing presumes there is a ground swell for its use across the policing world. But this is a new arena for many, and like many new other developments, it will take time for the transformation of the use of science evidence to filter into everyday policing. So for you—the interested reader—there is the opportunity to situate yourself, and your colleagues around you in this development.

Example 1: An Evaluation of a Reducing Gang Violence Project—The ‘Pathways Initiative’

The London Pathways Initiative was a 2-year community-based, multi-agency pilot which aimed to reduce gang-related violence on three London boroughs. It was grounded in the well-evidenced Boston Ceasefire approach (Braga and Weisburd 2012). The approach (and theory of change) includes three interlocked elements: firm law enforcement, expressed community disapproval of gang-related violence (termed ‘voice’) and offering help to those involved in gang related activity a way out (an exit). The approach of Pathways was agreed in late 2007, followed by an overextended period of planning and consultation (see Fig. 1). There was instability in the participation of the local areas. During the project, one of the original three boroughs pulled out to be replaced by another. The initiative requires explicit messages to gang related individuals to be delivered in particular ways. This means that the consequences of committing violence are stated explicitly by a number of criminal justice personnel and members of the community. The first ‘call-ins’ were held in June 2009 and the final ‘call-ins’ in April 2010. We were asked to evaluate the initiative—and encountered many difficulties.