Police Use of Research Evidence

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.

In many of our discussions with police officers from around the world, we acknowledge that policing as a public service is stuck in its fire brigade solutions to people’s needs. Pressures and demands—coupled with decreasing public resources—are funnelled through an old style of working. Answering call after call for help, with a mix of experienced people responding to those calls, does not always add up to a formula for sharing best practice. Working to promote a collective understanding of why there needs to be a way of consolidating best practice for common problems enables a shared approach to the logic of problem solving.

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.

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.

Rigorous delivery and implementation of policing tactics are essential—and these issues do not always go hand in hand with policing culture. Packaging a collection of policing tactics into a strategic programme to design in more sustainable improvement takes the use of tactics up to an organisational strategic level. To put it simply, how a bundle of tactics is translated into a strategic programme and ‘designed’ and ‘delivered’ as business as usual dictates the type of results obtained. Initiatives without integrity do substantially worse than those with strong integrity (See Coulter 2010; Grove et al. 2012). This is a logical follow from the previous discussions around theories of change. However, throughout this monograph we refer to the concept of ‘implementation’ as a catch-all term for issues such as programme integrity, theories of change and designing and delivering programmes well. This is a whole systems approach to better policing. Such a term is used because our practical experience demonstrated to us critiquing police colleagues for lacking ‘programme integrity’ was not well received. Staff tended not to hear the former and focused upon the latter word and the lack of ‘integrity’ was sometimes seen as a personal affront!

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.

In 2008/2009 there was a compelling case for developing a ‘Justice Reinvestment’ model of offender management within London. That is, shifting resources from universal financial budgets to needy geographic areas. Drawing on the ‘Million Dollar Blocks’ concept developed in the USA and Integrated Offender Management (IOM) principles, London launched the Diamond Initiative, which set out to manage non-statutory short-sentence prison release offenders in some of London’s most challenging areas. This was designed and launched deliberately as a landmark scheme and was supported by approximately 11 million pounds for its 2-year duration. It was conceptualised as London’s first IOM scheme and was the subject of high political and ministerial interest. We were asked to undertake an evaluation of the programme. Reflecting this importance the authors were determined to design an evaluation that would stand up to the firmest of academic and political critiques. The Initiative was explored through a variety of ‘theories of change’: (1) Staff matter for success; (2) offenders want to change and will accept offers of help; (3) offending declines if (1) and (2) work well and (4) the outcome costs the taxpayers less. These were tested through an evaluation that considered both the implementation and impact (on staff awareness, offending and economic cost benefit) of the Diamond Initiative using a variety of methodologies. These were the following:

It is difficult for readers to fully comprehend the internal and external stakes that were on the table with this evaluation, for the practitioners, the politicians, the programme and the researchers. Practitioners and politicians courted media coverage, and after our first-year report many expected to read about a successful solution to a worrying problem of high reconviction rates for a significant group of offenders. But the government changed (yes, politics does matter). Following this change of government, Diamond took on the additional political weight of proving IOM as a concept and that of the ‘rehabilitation revolution’. There was an additional national IOM (excluding London) external academic evaluation at the time but was only able to explore ‘process’ and not ‘impact’ (Senior et al. 2011). Because we had skillfully negotiated access to data from the inside (and knew the ins and outs, pitfalls and frustrations of managing such data sets), we had information about reconviction of the very sample population that was in the political debate about offending.

As described, the experience of evaluating Diamond was a rich and eventful one. Our roles as researchers working on the inside changed and broadened out as a result. To illustrate, within IOM we participate in various IOM board meetings (both inside the MPS and across London and national government) and seek to influence the development of policy and practice in offender management—far beyond what a traditional researcher or external academic contractor would. London’s IOM, in particular, is only now, many years on from the final Diamond evaluation attempting to take on board our results in terms of design, basing an approach in the use of evidence. However, much of this can be attributed to our personal influence and way of working. While a positive, this does demonstrate the requirement of internal champions (and personalities) with the courage and craft to insist upon the use of scientific evidence driving change from the inside. Working on the inside brings with it contact to the wider struggles of internal (police, local and national) politics, the ever-changing landscape of personnel and personality of those who occupy key roles in the advancement of knowledge, and the very real pressures of limited time in an atmosphere where crime performance dominates the culture.

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.

Nudge theory (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) has been embraced by a range of UK and US politicians and a plethora of other public and private organisations, drawing inspiration form the world of psychology, behavioural science, political theory and behavioural economics and in a gross simplification—can be described as the study of decision making and how these can be improved. In respect to the UK, the ‘Behavioural Insight Team’, (BIT) (aka the Nudge Unit) was formed in July 2010, with a main drive to test, learn and adapt—and to transform how government thinks about public policy and enable citizens to make better choices for themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In summary we have shared some of our ‘craft-based’ experience in this book in the hope that it will provide some inspiration that change is possible. We have since moved our team to the oversight body for policing in London—the Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime. Here the thirst for evidence-based thinking seems insatiable—a different experience that too has to be managed. We see a fertile ground for evidence based policing within the UK and elsewhere in 2015. We are confident that there is a growing (but slow!) receptivity amongst our former policing colleagues in London towards evidence based policing. The changing picture is no doubt complex and we worry that there is still confusion about exactly ‘how’ to be evidence led or which levels of evidence should be attributed most weight. But we are confident that the challenge is set—how can policing assimilate and embed a systematic approach to evidence-based policing into business as normal.