Police Now and police well

It’s not often you have an experience that completely changes your perspective on something (or at least, not that often for me). That’s what has happened for me over the past few months as I’ve had a tiny bit of involvement with Police Now, a new graduate scheme for entry into the Metropolitan Police. Its first ever cohort has just completed a six week Summer Academy, a fast-track introduction to policing, and are about to start on the beat as Dedicated Ward Officers in boroughs across London. Their training continues over a two year leadership development programme, and the new police officers are expected to transform the communities that they’re serving, reduce crime and increase public confidence in policing. High achievers, they’ve already succeeded with me in that last one. I’ve not always had the most positive impression of the police – having had very few interactions with them, and basing my views on what I read in the papers. But my experiences here, meeting such passionate, empathetic, dedicated members of the police force, so committed to social justice and safer communities, has transformed my views completely.

I was lucky enough to contribute in a tiny way to the planning stages of the Summer Academy, sharing my experiences of undertaking and then delivering a similar programme in teaching, and last week I went along to a couple of the sessions to see it in action. On my first day, we learnt about the importance of partnership working to achieve better, longer term solutions to community issues. An impressive range of guest speakers, from the mayor of one London Borough, some community leaders, to the former head of the Safer Communities task force for a London council, shared practical and positive examples of the way partnership working across a range of agencies (health, housing, work and pensions, roads and transport, schools) had helped the police to generate innovative and long-term solutions to persistent social issues such as gang-related violence, anti-social behaviour and prostitution. We also heard from the Chief Superintendent of West Midlands Police on their ambitious plans to improve policing across the West Midlands (you can follow her tweets about it @SalBWMP). What struck me from all of the speakers, police and non-police, was their commitment to understanding the community they’re serving, understanding the root causes of the problems they’re trying to solve, and developing solutions to fix them. It’s a bottom-up, people-first approach that I hadn’t expected based on my previously held assumptions. It was really inspiring to see these groups come together, and see the new Police Now-ers so excited about applying this to the problems they’ll encounter in their own communities.

On the second day I visited the academy, the topic was evidence-based policing. Evidence-based decision-making is a cause close to my heart, so I was really excited to see what this day had in store. Another cracking group of professionals, from the College of Policing and the Evidence & Impact team at MOPAC (the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime), came to talk to us. The speakers shared some of the wealth of data that is out there on both crime statistics and public attitude to policing surveys (much of it publicly available, like this London neighbourhood confidence tool and the MOPAC London Crime Dashboard), along with some tips on how our hardy Police Now-ers can use this to identify focus areas for their own interventions. The Director of Knowledge, Research and Evaluation at the College of Policing talked us through some of the processes and models available to support police officers in understanding ‘not just what works, but why it works’, so they can evaluate the impact of their initiatives to improve their communities. It was a great build on what I’d seen the previous day, and highlighted even further for me the commitment I’ve seen in this programme to developing sustainable, effective solutions that work for local communities.

It’s worth saying as well that after absorbing all of this, on both days, the Police Now cohort went out on shift patrol, putting into practice the knowledge and skills they had learnt earlier in the course – how to make arrests, correct procedures etc, and they’d also sat a series of exams on the law and police practices too. It’s a gruelling six week programme, that is only the start of their training. They’re currently enjoying a well-deserved week off, and will be starting the rest of their two year programme in their boroughs from Monday. I have such enormous respect and admiration for what they’re about to embark on. It matters massively. Good luck!

P.S. You can follow @Police_Now on twitter too.