As I transition to a new job after 15 years in the same organisation, it's good to reflect on key moments. One such moment was a cup of coffee with a police officer. It was a very long cuppa.
I had been presenting on soft systems methodology to a group of local authority and health staff. Their job was to establish the health needs of the communities around Northampton in a Joint Needs evaluation. They were animatedly discussing the implications of the data that they had to hand. My presentation was, in essence, that the data was potentially junk, out of date and inaccurate, and to gain a real understanding of the needs of the population, one needed to 'ground truth' the data, by checking that the data matched the reality on the ground. Let's say, my message didn't go down well, and I wasn't invited back to do more work. But, in the room was a senior police officer, and after the meeting he asked to have a cup of coffee with me. I was more than happy, and it was amusing to meet him a few days later on campus and accompany him to the restaurant which all the students side-eying a police officer in full fig. He was Superintendent Richard James, it was sometime in 2010, and what I relay now is my recollection of how things panned out. I am sure he will be graceful if I have missed out vital elements in my story. Richard was a senior police officer with command of a substantial patch of Northamptonshire Police's territory. It was a couple of years after the major economic crash and austerity economics was trashing the public sector. Richard was being tasked to reduce his workforce by 20% whilst improving his performance outcomes. He also had a few community issues on his hands, and his initial ask was simple 'how do we do community engagement better'? We agreed to collaborate for a bit, and I conducted a rapid evaluation of one neighbourhood team. I interviewed a slice of the team, from the Inspector down through sergeants, to police officers, to Police and Community Support Officers (PCSOs) and members of the neighbourhood. It was very clear that what Inspectors understood to be the case was very different from what PCSOs and community members experienced. It was the difference between statistics and the lived experience. Across the whole force, resourcing and strategic decisions were being made on the basis of very sparse and biased data sets, and did not match up with the operating conditions on the street. This is very common, and reminds me of my environmental management consulting days where pollution was occurring because management thought one thing was happening and operators knew that what they were doing was the wrong thing. In a 'one, two, skip a few' style, I have to miss out tonnes of detail, but 13 years later, one Masters degree, a PhD and over 14 projects together, Richard and I are still offering each other cups of coffee, and are good friends, despite his love of 80s hair rock. I was teaching on the BA in Social & Community Development, and one of my students joined me on the project for work experience. We worked with PCSOs and police officers to explore what PCSOs were doing really well in reducing crime in their neighbourhoods, what went wrong, and what was preventing them doing their jobs. We didn't use any management consulting tools, we just worked with them to help them explain what their lived experience was like. We then devised a training programme with them, and wrote a little handbook called Locally Identified Solutions and Practices (LISP), which was then rolled out to all the neighbourhood teams. They were just told, here's a process, find something to practice on, a problem that you have found challenging, and use this book, Richard and myself, to try and do something different. Amy, the student, went on after graduation to a high powered fast track NHS career). We let the PCSOs get on with their day job, and then researched with them how the implementation went. We didn't interfere or create the usual implementation communication fuss. We were just interested in how they would cope with the new way of doing part of their day job. They did marvellously, and where appropriate found some interesting situations in which a new way of doing neighbourhood policing could be done. Their biggest problem was not being allowed to stick with an engagement long enough. The short-term policing time frame meant that if crime figures dipped very slightly, it was deemed a success, and they were abstracted to another locality. Soon enough, the crime reports bounced back. The whole initiative got snarled up in a major centrally funded transformation project that was focused on big structural changes, so it didn’t really gain momentum. I met a PCSO from that time the other day and she said that she is still using the techniques we developed, but just doesn’t call it LISP. Richard left that force, and we did a number of projects as pilots in that other force, bruising our knees on the pavement, and getting frustrated at the challenges of small scale organisational change. The whole infrastructure and culture of policing was not really fit for nuanced and detailed work at the street level, and progress founder every time there was a change of personnel. In all of the projects we did at that time, we did not complete a 40 week cycle with the same people that we started a project with. Nevertheless, we, and our implementation coaches (including Brendan O’Brien, Dave Spencer, Paul Halstead and Steve Carr) achieved some amazing work, helping the police force to really embed the needs, aspirations and energy of the community into neighbourhood policing. Incidentally, Steve travelled from Cardiff to west Yorkshire to join in with one of our projects. He loved it so much, he brought his police transformation expertise to the team!). Richard and I have both completed high level research degrees with this work, and we are pretty certain that we know what works and why. Richard runs his own business on the back of that experience, and I have moved out of the teaching side of academia into a social enterprise that does management consulting. It’s been huge fun, we have met some mazing people, we have moaned at each other over cups of coffee in random places around the UK. Above all, we have done a good thing.
2 Comments
Dave Spencer
10/20/2023 07:27:49 pm
A great story and one that remains unfinished. The work doesn’t stop here and there’s many more chapters to write 👍
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Leanne Vickers
10/25/2023 05:00:02 pm
I remember you both fondly and Brendan when you came to WYP. I think we even talked you all into being our peer advisors on a couple of EU Research projects ;-) Great to see you are still working together, you brought a refreshing perspective to Community Policing and research.
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