Time for Change? Reflections on the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales: Day 1
Time for Change? Reflections on the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales is the title of our 2022 conference, taking place across two days between Tuesday 13th and Wednesday 14th September at the Verena Holmes Building. You can find our more information on our talks and speakers for Day 1 below, or take a look at the full agenda in the downloads section. Click here for more information on Day 2.
Agenda
12:30 - 12:45 Main conference
12:45 - 13:15 Keynote
13:20 - 15:00 Overview and Context
15:00 - 15:30 Legitimacy
15:00 - 16:00 Neighbourhood
16:00 - 16:30 Organised Crime
16:30 – 20:00 Mental Health and Wellbeing
Dr Dominic Wood, Canterbury Christ Church University
Professor Tim Newburn, London School of Economics and Political Science
Tim Newburn has been Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the LSE since 2002. He was Head of Department of Social Policy from 2010-13 and Director of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology from 2003-2009. Prior to joining LSE he was Joseph Rowntree Professor of Urban Social Policy at Goldsmiths, University of London and Director of the Public Policy Research Unit (1997-2002). He has also worked at the University of Leicester (1982-85), the Home Office Research & Planning Unit (1985-90), the National Institute for Social Work (1990-92) and the Policy Studies Institute (1992-97).
He is the author of over 40 books, including: The Future of Policing (with Morgan, Oxford University Press, 1997); Private Security and Public Policing (with Jones, Clarendon Press, 1998); Policy Transfer and Criminal Justice (with Jones, Open University Press, 2007); Criminology (3rd edition, Routledge, 2017) and Criminology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018). His latest books are Orderly Britain: How Britain resolved its everyday problems: from dog mess to double-parking (with Ward, Little Brown, 2022), and The Official History of Criminal Justice, vol. IV: Politics of Law and Order (Routledge, November 2022, with David Downes).
Tim was editor of the journal Policy Studies (1995-2001), the founding editor of Criminology and Criminal Justice (2001-2006) and is General Editor of Routledge’s Key Ideas in Criminology series, and a series editor of Key Thinkers in Criminology. He was elected to the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences in 2005, and was President of the British Society of Criminology from 2005-2008.
Tim’s research has spanned a number of areas including policing, restorative justice, youth justice, drugs and alcohol, comparative policy making and urban violence. He was the LSE’s lead on Reading the Riots, their prize-winning research with the Guardian on the 2011 disorder, and with Professors David Downes and Paul Rock is currently working on an Official History of Criminal Justice.
A New Mode of Protection: Redesigning Policing and Public Safety for the 21st Century
Andy Higgins, Police Foundation
The world around policing is changing as radically as it was in 1828 when Sir Robert Peel told parliament that England had outgrown her policing institutions and required a fundamentally “new mode of protection”. Today the digital revolution, environmental crisis, and complex social shifts are transforming society, generating threats to public safety, and posing challenges for governments and police agencies, that are just as profound.
In March this year the Police Foundation – the UK’s leading, independent, policing think tank – published the final report of its Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales, a two-year inquiry into the policing arrangements needed to meet the challenges of the mid-21st century. We are delighted that Canterbury Centre for Policing Research has decided to use the Review as the running thread through this year’s conference.
In this session Police Foundation Research Director, Andy Higgins, will summarise the Review’s main narrative and core recommendations, which include: a radical ‘whole-society’ shift toward prevention; a more clearly defined police role; developing a set of core strategic policing capabilities, including legitimacy and a learning culture; and reform to the service’s organisational platform. He will also outline the Review’s thinking on the conference themes for the day one: community policing, mental health, and police well-being.
Take a look at Andy Higgins presentation.
Rachel Tuffin, College of Policing
The Police Foundation Strategic Review of sets out a number of ways for the policing system to transform, to meet future demands. This presentation will explore the themes of the review in line with the College’s role, with a particular focus on what works, leadership and standards.
Police Federation of England and Wales
Steve Hartshorn, Police Federation Chair
Since 1999, the Police Federation of England and Wales has been calling for an holistic review of policing – what the public want and expect from their police service and what the role and function of the police is. Successive governments have said such a review would take too long and cost too much. The Police Foundation strategic review of policing forms part of that important and ongoing discussion. In this session, Steve Hartshorn, National Chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales, will discuss the challenges facing policing and highlight a number of areas raised in the Police Foundation strategic review, offering practical views from the frontline about what might work and be well received, and what may not.
Professor Jonathan Jackson, London School of Economics and Political Science
The final report of the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales stresses, among other things, the importance of (a) trust, confidence and legitimacy and (b) a Peelian notion of consent rooted in the idea that the ‘police are people and people are police’. It also highlights some key behavioural and attitudinal outcomes of legitimacy, and calls for the development of an ‘index of legitimacy’ to monitor levels of popular assent (right to power) and consent (authority to govern). On occasion, the report uses the terms ‘trust’, ‘confidence’ and ‘legitimacy’ interchangeably. In this presentation, I revisit some studies to (i) focus on some of those behavioural and attitudinal outcomes, (ii) show that trust (shared values and taking the interests of communities into account) and legitimacy (normative alignment and duty to obey) predict those outcomes more strongly than confidence, and (iii) demonstrate some of different measurement sets that could be included in an ‘index of legitimacy’. Overall, I argue that we should focus on a conception of trust and/or legitimacy that is based on relational, identity-relevant connections between police and public (echoing Peel’s in-group characterisation of public consent), rather than more performance-rating notions of confidence (e.g. the public belief that the police are doing a good job).
Take a look at Jonathan Jackson's presentation.
Neighbourhood Policing: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again?
Trudy Lowe, Research Fellow. Universities’ Police Science Institute, Cardiff University
Neighbourhood Policing is arguably one of the most significant and high-profile innovations in UK Policing in recent times. And yet, as forces throughout England and Wales grappled with public sector austerity, dedicated Neighbourhood Officer numbers dwindled, and their role and function has increasingly diverged from that envisaged twenty years ago. This talk will briefly chart the development of the Neighbourhood Policing Model, re-examining some of the evidence underpinning it and suggest how we might learn from history to re-establish, and perhaps re-define how to better police our communities.
Take a look at Trudy Lowe's presentation.
The Strategic Review of Policing on Organised Crime.
Mr Keith Ditcham, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)
The Strategic Review aims to set the long-term strategic direction for the police in England and Wales. It is the first such review for many years. It highlights that the impact of technology and wider social change mean that current policing practices and structures are out of date and in need of revision. It makes recommendations for the police to be part of a public protection system rather than THE public protection system. It argues that local public services should be better integrated, so that the police and their partners can design preventative services that take a holistic approach to complex needs. Whilst the review covers crime, the fear of crime and other threats to public safety it does not delve too far into organised crime, not does it link the global to the local in any detail. By reviewing the police rather than the collective law enforcement response to the issues of the 21st century it represents a missed opportunity to provide a coherent, holistic response to all forms of crime including organised crime, the impacts of which are felt on the streets of England and Wales daily.
Take a look at Kieth Ditcham's presentation.
Mental health training for police officers
Professor Martin Webber, University of York (CHAIR)
Police officers routinely meet people with mental health problems in the course of their work. This includes responding to people, or calls about missing people, who are at risk of suicide or experiencing mental distress; conducting welfare checks on people with mental health problems not engaging with services; or managing people arrested for a crime or who are victims of a crime who have mental health problems, for example. Estimates of the police resources involved vary from as little as 8% of incidents involving someone with a mental health problem in peer-reviewed studies to officers reporting that up to 80% of their time is spent in mental health-related work. A variety of co-responder models of police and mental health workers have been developed and are now in operation in the UK, but the need for police officers to receive mental health training is inescapable. The amount, type and purpose of the training is a source of some contention, as police officers maintain that they should not become quasi-mental health professionals. Mental health training varies between forces – ranging from online training to face to face training with mental health professionals or people with lived experience of mental health problems – though there is limited evidence about its effectiveness. This presentation will discuss a training programme that was co-developed with, and provided to police officers by, mental health professionals. It was evaluated in a randomised controlled trial which found an increase in the number of mental health tags being applied to incidents in police stations where officers had received the training. It was also positively evaluated by police officers whose confidence increased following the training. The presentation will conclude with some thoughts about future directions for mental health training for police officers.
Take a look at Martin Webber's presentation.
History of policing and mental health: Where are we now?
Dr Ian Cummins, University of Salford
Modern policing role has seen officers become involved in an increasingly diverse range of tasks. These tasks are additional to the traditional function of the maintenance of law and order and the apprehension of offenders. The period of austerity in the UK has seen police forces struggling to meet demand. Reduced police numbers have been a key factor here. However, there are other challenges including police changes in the nature of offences, such as the rise in digital crime, the increase in sexual offences and population changes. These combine to impact on the police role and demand on resources in complex ways. One of the most complex and challenging areas is police involvement in mental health work. There has been an increased policy focus on the role of police officers in responding to citizens who are experiencing a mental health crisis. Since the Bradley Review 2009, there has been a series of formal considerations of policing and mental health work. The most recent report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) (2018) ‘Policing and Mental Health; Picking up the pieces’ captures the frustration that senior police managers and individual officer feel. This session will explore the main themes in the ongoing debates about the police role in mental health work
Take a look at Ian Cummin's presentation.
The Need for Psychological Understanding in Rape Investigations
Kristina Massey, Canterbury Christ Church University
Since Yerkes and Dobson empirically established the relationship between pressure and performance in 1908, psychologists have had an understanding of the detrimental impact of stress on memory. Stress affects all 3 elements of memory: encoding, storage and retrieval. Since the 1700’s there has been an understanding of ‘state dependant memory’ – the idea that the state you are in at the time you are exposed to something will be pivotal in how and when you can best remember it. The importance of understanding the relationship between trauma and memory has never been greater than at a time when the police are under great pressure, have burgeoning work loads and increased media scrutiny. This presentation will focus on the erroneousness of victim consistency as a measure of veracity. The impact of stress and distress on memory, reporting and articulation will be explored, as will explanations of why a victim’s account is likely to vary from eyewitnesses and other bystanders.
Take a look at Kristina Massey's presentation
Wellbeing: A New Mode of Protection
Prof. John Harrison – Interim National Police Chief Medical Officer
Mrs Julie Feechan – Occupational Health specialist, NPWS.
The Police Foundation strategic review of policing1 identified three challenges for the future: capacity, capability and organisational. Wellbeing is seen as a core strategic capability that must be addressed. Leadership of change to integrate wellbeing into the policing culture requires a whole organisational approach to meet these challenges.
This talk will review current approaches to wellbeing in UK policing and will highlight the work of the National Police Wellbeing Service. The ascent into law of the police covenant represents a key driver for improved occupational health services to support wellbeing at work and the wellbeing of police families and others who have served. The wellbeing recommendations of the strategic review will be discussed.
Take a look at Harrison and Feechan's presentation.
Prevalence and predictors of mental health in police officers that investigate child abuse and sexual offences.
Jim Foley, Metropolitan Police 
Policing by its very nature has been widely recognised as being inherently stressful with little that can be done to prevent police officers’ exposure to both primary and secondary trauma. Officers involved in the investigation of child abuse and sexual offences have been further recognised as working in some of the most stressful and demanding roles in policing, however, there has been limited research within this high-risk group of officers within the UK.
This presentation will give an overview of both quantitative and qualitative PhD research by the author conducted on officers who investigate child abuse and sexual offences. This research seeks to understand both the prevalence and predictors of mental health issues within this group of officers as well as how they cope with the nature of the work that they undertake.
The quantitative study will provide data regarding the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression, as well as the potentially supportive effects of social support. The qualitative study uses Grounded Theory to explore potential coping strategies employed by officers and highlight both risk and protective factors.
The presentation will conclude with recommendations to improve the mental health and wellbeing within this particular group of officers.
Complex PTSD: Risk Factors, Incidence and Treatment in Policing
Dr Noreen Tehrani, Noreen Tehrani Associates
Noreen has had a varied career working as a medical researcher, retail operations director and as a senior manager for a public organisation managing a team of 100 professional staff to provide psycho-social support for 200,000 employees.
She formed her own organisation in 1997 to assist organisations and employees to maximise their effectiveness and efficiency.
Noreen has combined her commercial, psychological and counselling knowledge and experience to develop an approach to supporting employees, which meets the needs of both the organisation and the employees.
Noreen understands organisations and business and uses this commercial approach to develop ethical products and services which meet the needs of the organisation for which she works. She is passionate about her work and constantly looks for ways to improve what she does.
Noreen has written many articles, papers and book chapters including two books on trauma, Workplace Trauma- concepts, assessments and interventions and Managing Trauma in the Workplace. She has also written two books on Workplace Bullying.
Noreen is the Deputy Chair of the Division of Occupational Psychology and past Chair of the Crisis, Disaster and Trauma Section of the BPS.
Take a look at Noreen's presentation.