International policing structures

Transcript of interview with Dr Peter Neyroud of Cambridge University, UK

SKN

Hello, everyone this is Susanne Knabe-Nicol from Police Science Dr and I'm here doing an interview with Dr Peter Neyroud from the University of Cambridge, a very, very impressive character with a lot of history that we're going to talk about. And the topic for today is about international policing setup, he's got some knowledge about how the different countries around the world handle their policing, how they set it up, there's so many different ways of doing that. We're going to talk about the pros and cons and also just about what's been happening in policing generally so please welcome, Peter Neyroud

PN

Hello, good morning

SKN

Thanks for taking the time to speak to us today and why don't we start out with you telling us who you are and why people might know you?

PN

These days I'm Associate Professor in evidence-based policing at the University of Cambridge, but I started my career 45 years ago or so as a police officer in Hampshire, and I did 30 or more years in policing, including after Hampshire, being the Assistant Chief and Deputy in West Mercia and then the Chief of Thames Valley for 5 years before I set up and then ran a thing called the National Policing Improvement Agency, which was designed basically, to be the agent of change in policing at the centre. And then the then-coalition government decided to abolish it and I decided I had better things to do so, I went and did a PhD at Cambridge and then found myself teaching and most recently directing the Master’s program for senior police leaders, and I've done that for the last eight years, either as the deputy or as the Director. I also do a lot of international work. I did more than a decade as the director or the deputy director of the Cambridge program at the National Police Academy in India, I've worked for the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, most recently in Bangladesh, and I've taught in about 15 / 20 countries across the world to senior police leaders at a variety of different venues and events, but mostly talking about evidence-based policing.

SKN

You talk about evidence-based policing, for those who don't know, can you give a quick definition of what that is?

PN

Well the short of it is: using the best available evidence to drive innovation, changes to drive day-to-day practice, to determine the kind of tactics you might use and in using that evidence, to have an effective tracking and implementation process that means you actually know whether it is achieving the ends you want or whether you're having a backfire effect. It's a process that runs right the way through from the strategic level right the way through to ground level tactics, but the core of it is having the curiosity to ask whether something actually works, and if it does, how well? And in what ways?

SKN

I don't know if my next question is a little bit obsolete now because of what you've already given in terms of your background, but can you extract maybe a few elements of your previous career that you would say might be the highlights of your career so far?

PN

I suppose some of the places that I felt most sense of achievement were firstly as a senior investigating officer, I had four years as a senior detective, and quite a large part of that was investigating homicide and serious crime. It's a difficult role but one that I enjoyed and found extremely challenging. Then, when I was in West Mercia, I was the National Police Lead on police use of firearms and the national firearms manual that we've still got in existence in the United Kingdom still is very much the manual that myself and a team developed back then, as well as the training programs that we put in place that have obviously been developed since, but we made a radical shift to the training in those at that point. And doing so also brought in less lethal options, such as the taser and the baton gun to be used in firearms cases, so it was quite a radical shift that has led to a significant reduction in the number of fatal shootings. And that's one thing I'm particularly proud of. And then my own research, for more than a decade I've been researching police-led diversion and I'm proud of the progress we've made in testing it in the field in the UK and the way in which that has started to really influence policy makers, not just here but globally as well.

SKN

I would like to get back to what you said about the firearms. I read somewhere recently and I was trying to contact the author because it was a newspaper article to see where the sources are, so I could say in my lectures for example when I teach, he was saying that police kill about two people per year in the UK which is about the same amount as people getting killed by lightning. Is that correct?

PN

I'm not sure about the comparison with lightning, I expected it might actually be lower than the number of deaths from lightning, but the key point is: if you look at comparative data across all of the major countries in the world and you look at the level of fatal police shootings, the UK has one of the lowest, if not the lowest, and you've really got to go to places like Iceland and Norway to get a comparative level of fatal shootings. There's just no comparison when you start comparing it to the United States, North America or indeed Australasia, New Zealand doesn't have a routinely armed police force and nor does the UK, but the UK has a significantly lower level of fatal shootings and it is one of the things despite recent controversies with the Chris Kaba case, it's one of the things, the context that people miss when they have those debates and that is that whatever we're doing we're doing something right in preventing a higher level of fatal shootings.

SKN

Do you have a solution to the high level of police shootings in the US that you could propose?

PN

I'd start with reducing the omnipresence of handguns and of course as soon as you do that, you run into differing views of the American Constitution and the right to bear arms and a whole debate about whether the citizen has a right to bear arms, either overtly or covertly in order to protect themselves. I'm not sure I know how to make progress on that debate in a society which just has so many guns. In a sense that's why we talk about the problem of knife crime in the United Kingdom and not the problem of gun crime, because we don't have that presence particularly of handguns on the street.

SKN

So, no easy solution either, because I've been scratching my head about that,

PN

No, there is no easy solution and furthermore, the solutions aren't easy even in countries that don't have such a high level of individually-owned arms. Australia has a significantly higher level of fatal shootings, it has slightly more access to firearms and a pretty robust level of controls, but the figures are higher - getting to a lower level is tough to do because there are a whole range of contextual factors that make it difficult

SKN

I wouldn't even know what to start in the US because we can't really expect police officers to leave their guns in the police station when the whole population is armed. Apparently, one handgun per citizen on average, and if we try and disarm the population and make guns illegal, there’s going to be a black market and people are going to have it in secret because as you said they it's their constitutional right, they believe that it's right to have that and so I wouldn't even know where to start.

PN

Well I think you start with the data and that's the heart of a lot of this discussion really, which is you've got to be prepared to have really good data: where is it that these fatal shooting events are happening, in which police forces, which officers are actually firing the shots, in what circumstances? You will find very quickly that the shootings are concentrated in specific forces in particular contexts, it is not the case that high levels of fatal shootings run across the whole of the United States, and if that's the case then you start with the data and you work your way forward, and there are a lot of very good scholars in the States that have been doing just that over the last decade or so, but you've got to have good data and you've got to be prepared to be transparent with that data and look at the solutions.  A lot of that is the police service looking inside itself to its practices and the ways in which it trains officers and the ways in which it protects officers because ultimately, if you don't protect the officers effectively, they're far more likely to feel that they're exposed to a fatal threat.

SKN

This is a session I taught last week in the degree I teach, it was about international policing practices, and I found some information that the German police force is also armed but they spend I think 75% of their training about guns on how not to use them, and it's all about de-escalating so you don't have to use them. And I know firearms officers here in the UK who even though they have been firearms officers for years or even decades, maybe pulled their gun only a handful of times and maybe never fired it. And in the US, from what I found, most of their training’s about how to use their gun and not how not to use their gun, that might also be a starting point.

PN

I think a there's a whole piece that starts with the whole structure of how many firearms officers that you've got armed, what are they armed, with what are they trained to do, are they routinely armed, does that routine arming translate into the ability to self-deploy, is there a command and control structure, how is that process linked to the control room structure, are they properly protected from knives for example, do they feel the need to draw a weapon in order to confront a knife? There’s a whole range of those things before we ever get to the point of the officer having to make the judgment about whether it's absolutely necessary for them to draw or indeed fire.

SKN

Another thing I'd like to um to circle back to that you mentioned was the diversion. I know you did some work on a project called Turning Point, can you tell us more about that?

PN

This is more than a decade ago, we were looking for ways to handle lower-harm offenders in the criminal justice system, that's the vast majority of offenders, more than 60% of offenders have a low harm prediction that they're unlikely to commit any serious offence in the future or potentially any offence in the future. Yet they still get charged and processed through the courts, often ending up with a fine and a prolonged exposure to a criminal justice system that we know is not great for preventing reoffending. We were looking at ways to treat people effectively outside the criminal justice system, do it quickly and do it with a reasonably light touch, but nevertheless in a way that held them to account for their offending. So, we tested a model we called deferred prosecution and we tested it with a randomised controlled trial in Birmingham, where we, for the first time in the UK, compared prosecuting people with a diversion on a randomised basis, and then we've repeated it in Durham and then in London. And the London trial is just in the process of being evaluated, so we've done it three times, the results look pretty consistently in favour of deferred prosecution as a means of dealing with people and reducing and preventing crime.

SKN

How does it work and what does it entail for those not familiar with the project?

PN

The process is quite simple, the offender, having been identified, is offered the opportunity to undertake a contract, and the contract will be not to reoffend in particular, and to complete a series of agreed actions which could be for example doing restorative justice with their victim, could be about tackling their anger, so anger management, cognitive behavioural therapy, motivational interviewing, there's a range of treatment options, tackling their alcohol problems, tackling their drugs problems, etc. They have about four months to do that in and if they comply with the conditions, there's no further action. If they don't, they'll get prosecuted for the original offence as well as the one that they've subsequently committed. So, it's a form of focused deterrence in the sense of - you're giving people the opportunity for something, but holding the threat of a deterrent penalty over them.

SKN

What kind of results have you've been getting with those three studies or the two that you already have the results for?

PN

Turning Point saw a significant reduction in harm from the offenders that have gone through Turning Point compared to the court prosecution, at a reduced cost, and actually with elevated confidence from victims as well, so pretty much the full Trifecta. The other two trials that we know, the Durham trial, was definitely positive in terms of its very detailed cost-benefit done by the PHD student who's just completed his PhD, John Cooper. In London, it looks like the results are going to be positive but I I'm not going to prejudge them until my PhD student, Superintendent Katie Harber has actually got them out of the door because it's important that we get the results precise and accurate.

SKN

So, if we've already seen twice that this is working and that's a question that's always in my mind - why are we not rolling it out already, or how many more trials do we need to have before the decision-makers actually implement that?

PN

Well, I think we might be about to do that, we're waiting for the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office to announce the implementation of some changes that the previous government had started on conditional cautioning, but at the same time they also accepted the need to have a proper set of guidance on deferred prosecution, and if they do that and that is rolled out, then we will be testing that on a much broader basis, so I'm hopeful that over the next few months we might see some significant moves forward in actually implementing the lessons.

SKN

Okay, I'll be watching that because I think that's that is very, very necessary, I mean in the last few weeks we've had lots of offenders released a little bit early after serving 40% of the sentence rather than 50% because prisons are overcrowded and as you say, 60% of those prisoners could maybe be dealt with in a different way and you guys have already shown that twice that there's a better way that reduces the harm they cause if and when they reoffend, but also reduces their reoffending and it's much more cost- effective for the taxpayers, so it’s definitely high time that we get that rolled out. I'd now like to ask you about policing structures in the UK and other countries. Did you say you had taught in 15 different countries?

PN

At least. It's probably more than that. I've just had to fill out a visa application in which I had to list all the countries I've been to in the last decade and it took me quite a long time and it was a long list, it must be it must be 20 or more but anyway that matters not. In terms of nationalities it'd be a lot more than that actually, but a significant number of countries, and not just in Europe, North America, India, China, etc., so I've been all over, actually.

SKN

What I'd be interested in, because the Magazine is international and I want to cover all the countries, not just the English-speaking international countries, could you give us, from what you know because obviously you're not going to be familiar with each country's setup of how they do policing, but could you talk us through a few of the countries’ policing structures and maybe what the pros and cons are so we've got a good overview?

PN

They'll basically break down into three different types because there are just three different types of policing structure globally, there'll either be state-military and some obvious examples of that well it used to be the Gendarmerie in France, i.e., a very military approach structure heritage and in fact the gendarmerie used to be connected with the Ministry of Defence, they now come under the Ministry of the Interior because that's a really big cultural shift. But you'll see the same state-military structure in a lot of postcolonial police forces like Nigeria, for example. That has significant implications in the sense that the organisation is very much focused on taking and holding the ground and keeping order as their first order approach. Then you've got the second group, which is state-civilian and I'm about to teach in India where I think the transition has been made from state-military to state-civilian, so it's a partially national as in federal, in Indian terms police force, so policing is primarily the responsibility of the 27 states and they’re big police forces as well because it's a huge country. But there is actually a national federal overview as well, so what's called the Indian Police Service, which is a relatively small cadre of the most senior people, are actually appointed and employed by the centre in India and then distributed out as the senior leaders, out to the states, so it's a bit of a hybrid model. But it used to be very much state-military when I first went to India in the early 1990s, it had a very strong state-military feel to it and very military-type structures, it's evolved quite dramatically over the last 30-odd years and I think now would be described more accurately as state-civilian. It's put much more emphasis on its civilian roots, much less emphasis on the military roots but it's still nevertheless state-run at a big level, and you'll find that same model in Bangladesh and that same model in quite a number of African countries as well. And then you've got municipal- civilian, which is the primary model in the United States, because the responsibility for policing is that set at the lowest level of government, so the municipality, the county, the local town and there, the governance and the focus of the police service is on maintaining local order and preventing local crimes. In order to be able to run that system across the whole of a country the size of the United States, you then of course have a whole series of state-based police forces to provide specialist resources as well as federal to deal with things that run across the boundaries between them, so inevitably, in the largest countries you end up with a crisscross between municipal civilian and state-civilian functions and state security and law enforcement functions, and that's when things start to get complicated with jurisdictional issues, and complicated in terms of different cultures and different approaches. And the United States probably has one of the most complicated law enforcement arrangements in the world. But there's also a lot of them. In places like India it's a little bit simpler, United Kingdom is somewhere in-between those in terms of it's a move towards a municipal civilian police force with the appointment of Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales. Scotland on the other hand has a national police force in the state-civilian model where it's governed from the centre, and it's a remarkable contrast within one United Kingdom.

SKN

From my knowledge for example in the UK we've got 43 geographical forces, they may or may not have different IT systems, some of them are now regionally the same, when I was in Germany, I'm from Germany but I came here after my A-levels, so my entire adult life was outside of Germany, but when I went back to do some research for my PhD, I learned that the 16 counties have their own police forces but they all use the same computer system, which sounded so nice and smooth and easy because they could easily share files. And Norway for example has a different way of dealing with their offenders as well, so what are your observations and your views about what actually works best and is there something you would recommend for everyone?

PN

No, there is no one model that's going to fit precisely, and the variables that need to be taken into account, number one is the size of the state / of the nation state you're dealing with, so for example a solution that would work for Norway, which is a population of less than five million, is probably not going to work for the United Kingdom with a population of 70 million plus. And also with the sheer scale of the population and the challenges, the Baltic and North Sea countries, so Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands have tended to move away from small county-based units of policing towards national police forces, certainly Sweden, Norway, Denmark have all moved in that direction in the last 20 years and Scotland is frankly an example of that, it's operating more like Scandinavia than it is South of the border, that sort of feels slightly deliberate in that sense. You can run a national police force in a country of like in Sweden of 8 million, I'm not sure you can do it on a country like England with 60 million. I think it's challenging to do and it's concentrating an awful lot of power in the centre. Even the French have two police forces, the Gendarmerie and the Police Nationale, and you've described Germany. I'm a dual national as you know and my other country is Switzerland and we've got a hundred and something-odd police forces at both cantonal and also city level as well. So, countries tend to want to separate the powers of policing unless they're small enough to be able to have a single police force, or in the case of India, your unit of government is the state and those states are part of a federation and those states are basically the unit of policing and that's the way it's done, but it does lead to enormous police forces, I mean go across the state with the largest population which is Uttar Pradesh in Northern India, you're talking about an enormous police force of hundreds of thousands of police officers. Each one of those solutions comes with a challenge and you have to make choices, do you want a single police force to police that state or do you want to have some mechanism in which you're able to break it down and have more local accountability? And that challenge of getting the balance between local accountability and national capability is the perpetual challenge for policy makers and those responsible for running policing.

PN

You've mentioned that some forces and some police departments, whatever they may be called around the world, are moving from a more militarised structure to a more civilian structure, is that something you think is generally the right way, or do we still need military police forces in some countries?

SKN

It's going in the opposite direction in Latin America because you've got the military being substituted for policing, so-called mana dure policing in a number of central-American countries, and generally speaking, that goes badly, because what you have in those cases tends to be a conscripted army with young recruits being tasked to do policing functions they never develop any great skills in and therefore they operate in a very rigid fashion. The policing is pretty poor and pretty aggressive and it doesn't create a great sense of state legitimacy in the process and it comes with a huge number of human rights abuses because you've just not got accountable police officers performing functions like you know taking people's liberty away or indeed shooting people who seem to present a risk. So, it's a bad way of making things worse. For most countries, moving towards more of a state-civilian model is definitely the right direction to go, because you're creating more space for the development of a professional culture, more focus on the rule of law, more focus on integrating the police with other civilian government functions and a lot of the problems that policing needs to tackle it can't tackle successfully on its own. It needs partners and it needs the ability to work with those partners as part of the civilian state, not as a military function.

SKN

Would you also say that it's important to have some kind of national oversight, so for example here in the UK we've got the Home Office, we've got the National Crime Agency which is a descendant of the National Policing Improvement Agency you set up while ago, and I know in Germany whilst you've got the Landeskriminalamt for each county you've also got the Bundeskriminalamt, which is federal, and that's perhaps something that's missing for example in America, where they've got over 18,000 law enforcement organisations and no national body that sets the standards for training or recruitment, that checks if any officer has been barred somewhere else and should not be recruited, is that something you think every country should have?

PN

The States isn't quite as disaggregated as that, there are thousands of small police departments, but the reality is most people are policed by a much smaller group of departments and most of the individual states have a structure that tries to cater for the qualification and training of police officers. The states that have had serious problems have been the ones that haven't invested in that kind of structure, so there is a bit there is a bit more structure to the states than that suggests but I agree with you in on the whole it's a pretty separated system, and I think on the whole if you're trying to develop effective policing, there are some core things that need to go with that, one of which actually is a clear and effective corpus of law about what the police do and how they should do it, and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in England and Wales is a pretty good model actually for that. It clearly sets out what the role of the police are in investigation and detention of suspects, in identification, etc., it is pretty comprehensive. And it's evolved carefully over the last 30 years. And then you need an effective training function in which you're clear about what it is that you're trying to prepare people for and you need effective accountability of the organisation and transparent publication of data and results and outcomes, so that the public and the media can actually see what's going on and understand that picture as it goes forward.

SKN

What would you say have been the biggest changes in policing in the last few years or in the last few decades?

PN

I think some of the biggest changes have happen quite slowly but when you look back across as I can now 45 years, you can see it in pretty stark clarity, and that's the shrinking of the social state. Particularly as more and more of that social state is gone into health care and the care of the of the elderly and care of children. A lot of functions have retreated, the police have ended up picking up that tab and if you look at the demand on police, some of the fastest-rising demands are around areas like dealing with missing people and dealing with the mental ill in public spaces. And part of the reasons for that are that alternatives have just retreated or simply haven't emerged to those challenges. And it's really difficult for the police to draw back from some of those functions and if you look at call logs of major police forces, those type of calls, non-crime calls about risk and vulnerability are a pretty substantial proportion of the police service’s role. The second issue is that that just about everything the police service does compared to 45 years ago, has been dramatically increased in terms of the amount of bureaucracy and time it takes to deal with them. There's been a number of studies that have tried to document this, but I think the easiest one I can lay my hands on was a Canadian one which looked back 20 years, this was about 10 years ago, and said that dealing with a basic thing 20 years before compared to dealing with it around the turn of the millennium, the amount of paperwork has gone up three-fold. My guess is that has continued to increase. So, the amount of time taken to deal with every individual incident has enormously increased and I don't think that is confined to the United Kingdom, I don't think it's confined to jurisdictions I think that is a global phenomenon in terms of the amount of paperwork, electronic or otherwise that police services do for everything that comes before them. And then there has been the changing shift in the public demand about what types of crime the police need to pay attention to with the increased emphasis on dealing with crimes inside, as opposed to crimes in public space. And as soon as you start dealing with crimes inside, so domestic abuse in particular you end up with a very different and much more challenging role for the police and one that the police have got better at, it's not right to say the police have not made progress, they made progress but they're tougher crimes to make progress with than dealing with an assault in a public space, although even there, with the amount of material, particularly CCTV and electronic material that every investigation now involves, even there investigations have become profoundly more complicated than they were a decade ago. And it's that sense that demand has risen inexorably, things have got more complicated to deal with and that the capacity of the service is being stretched in every direction that I would say typifies not just UK policing, but policing across the globe.

SKN

Speaking of challenges what would you say have been some of the biggest challenges in recent years as well?

PN

It's difficult not to talk about the fact that we had a pandemic and one of the things that happened with the pandemic was that almost everybody else was confined to their homes and the police service found itself doing enforcement, and not just in not just in the UK, every single country. And that was one of my other pieces of research, on day one of the lockdown in the UK, Cambridge held a virtual conference, we had an astonishing number of different countries, it was something like 70 different countries’ representatives attended this event, we had a significant number of people interested in how to do research on this. And the result of it was that I and two colleagues from the States started down a track working with the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime in terms of what's the impact on policing? And what became apparent as we went forward is that it's a much deeper and darker impact than most people considered. Firstly, the Police Service found itself very obviously exposed, trying to wrestle with compliance in public space on progressively more unpopular regulations, but I think more importantly, the police service found itself doing that without a lot of support from government, but also in a context in which police officers found themselves and their families personally very exposed to a potentially fatal disease and that has had really significant and continuing implications for the police service, the issue of wellbeing in policing, not just in the UK, is a massive issue and one that has be become accentuated by the pandemic. Alongside that, whilst we were locked in of course, we also had the death of George Floyd, murdered by a police officer, and the impact on Global North police forces in particular across North America and the UK in terms of the perception of the need to tackle issues to do with race and use of force and the Black Lives Matter movement went with that, alongside the fact that a lot of legislators in North America were influenced by the movement to “defund the police” and to try and move the police out of dealing with various forms of confrontation, which I have to say has pretty much waned. It may well have been one of the factors in this week's American election and that the black voters were perceived as having asked for less policing, but in fact um it's quite clear from some of the feedback on some of the voting that they didn't actually ask for that at all, what they wanted was better and more accountable policing, they didn't want less policing, they wanted their communities kept safe. But the impact of the George Floyd / Black Lives Matter movement and the “defund” movement was less policing in in some of the most exposed parts of the States. And that movement has had an impact much more widely and it's certainly together with the murder of Sarah Everard in the UK, has had a delegitimizing effect on policing, that policing is struggling to cope with in the UK.

SKN

And another thing that we have in the UK as a fallout from all of that is the increased mental ill health rates within policing and that police officers have been leaving at increased rates, have been leaving their roles. So when we recruit, we recruit very young people without life experience, so the average age of police officers here has dropped dramatically and they're lacking some of the life experience that maybe we would like them to have, and the rates of disease and absences due to health issues are quite phenomenal aren't they?

PN

I'm not sure that I can document the age at joining as having dropped I think it's still above 22, it may have edged down a bit, but I mean either way, the policing is also facing a pretty significant challenge with the demography. We've just had data in the UK that the population is potentially going to reduce because the birth rate has plummeted. And if that is the case, where is policing, which is absolutely a people business, going to continue to recruit effectively at a time when its pay has fallen in real terms, not just in the UK, but in other Western democracies, its pay has fallen relative to other occupations. And it's also in a crisis of legitimacy as well which makes it not that attractive respected employer to join.  And if you look at incidents like the trial of an officer for murder in the Chris Kaba case, potential recruits might well be thinking - is this the right moment to be joining this organisation, the amount of focus and pressure on the organisation is enormous, and the retention rates are appalling, we we never had a problem with retention of this scale, not in my 45 years, we did in the 1970s by the way, just before I joined and the reason for that was plain and simple and directly relevant, and that was pay - the pay of police officers in England and Wales in the 1970s was pitiful and almost all frontline officers were on benefits and receiving free school meals, etc. It wasn't until the Edmund Davis enquiry into the rewards of police officers in 1979 that we actually saw an uplift in pay, which transformed the position on retention and I suspect we may be heading for something not dissimilar in the near future, because the retention position is appalling. There is a global issue with recruitment and retention that's certainly impacting in the States and in Canada and it's going to be a really, really significant problem for all police Chiefs over the next 20 years or so.

SKN

Have you got any proposed solutions you would like to mention about in in response to some of the challenges we've discussed?

PN

I have some, they're not easy to do though, but they are also related to another factor and that is the changing nature of the challenges confronting policing. So, for example, a huge part, nearly 50% of recorded crime these days is fraud, much of which is committed online and not all of it within the UK jurisdiction. Yet, the police service puts about 1% of its budget and its people into dealing with fraud and that is a completely unsustainable equation. But in order to be able to tackle fraud, the kind of individuals that you bring into the organisation [aged] say 21, 22 with maybe A-level education but no particular background for example in cyber, may well not be the right people to be recruiting to tackle. We've seen some movement in the sense of direct recruitment of detectives, but I suspect that the police service is going to have to accelerate that shift towards a different looking workforce, some of whom are recruited directly in with specific skills. Because I can't see how you can tackle some of these problems without that and that might well apply to a whole range of other parts of the profession. And it might well also mean that a move away from people who join and serve for 35 years as being the the principal source of employment. has got to be confronted, and therefore bring people in on a contract for 10 years as a directly recruited cyber detective might be a particularly attractive model, if you can retain them for longer then fine, but I think in terms of having people who've got very specific skill sets being brought into teams in a different way to the current model is probably overdue in order to tackle some of the issues that the service is finding itself meeting.

SKN

That might bring with it a greater civilianization then perhaps of the workforce?

PN

Not necessarily it might be the reverse, this might be overcoming the reluctance to give a warrant card to somebody who hasn't done 10 years as a beat officer, overcoming that culture where you have to do patrol for a period of time, it's beginning to be there. The directly recruited detective role has become a thing in British policing but I'm not sure it's gone anything like far enough. The trouble about the civilianization model is that you end up with people who don't have powers on the whole and what you need when you're dealing with the investigation of crimes is you need people with powers that can go and make arrests, serve a warrant, etc.  and if you're always constantly referring back to you know the people that joined at 20 and they're the ones who will go out and do the warrants, you've got a slightly bizarre model of a workforce. I think that workforce model has to shift. Back in when I was running the National Policing Improvement Agency, one of the big strands of our model was called workforce modernisation, but I was never really given the brief to do what I wanted to do, which was genuinely to modernise the workforce. And I think that moment has arrived, it has got to be changed and we've got to start thinking about the group that are working for policing in a very different way.

SKN

Finally, a question I ask everyone I interview without telling them - if you had a magic want and you could wave to make one change in policing, what would it be?

PN

The trouble is, I’d want to do so many things - if you only giving me one wish, if you rub the lamp in Aladdin, you get three. I think I'll take two or three actually in order to make sufficient change. The first one of which actually is the one I've just talked about and that is really quite a dramatic rethinking of the workforce, I just don't see how you can carry on with it the same way. The second one if I'm talking about the UK model, I think it is time to do something quite serious about a reliance on 43 different entities. You're right about some of the lessons of other places that have managed to get common tech and common approaches, you're not going to achieve that with the 43 separate entities all run by their own CEO and their own PCC [Police & Crime Commissioner], it just is too many decision-makers to do big things. But I suppose the big one would be actually, if I could find a way to engender a greater sense of hope in policing that things will actually get better. Because at the moment I don't think the criminal justice system in the UK has ever been in quite such a bad state and I'm about to go and lecture in India and I see not dissimilar figures, you know 20 million people awaiting trial in India and some of them for the same lengths of time that the UK. So I'd like to have a one that could engender hope that those things could get better within a reasonable time scale within the next decade or so and that we could get to a situation where the police service could feel that it was making significant progress and that for me is the fastest way to be able to attract and hold recruits, that they feel proud that they're making a difference and which I certainly did in my career.

SKN

Dr Peter Neyroud, thank you very much for your time today