'Self-Policing': changing culture and tackling harm in police-community relations

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There is widespread recognition that police-community relations in the UK are at an all-time low(Brown 2021). The murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer and the discovery of policeWhatsApp groups filled with misogynistic, racist and homophobic content, have all crystallised thesense of crisis. Recent reviews by Baroness Casey into the standards of behaviour and internalculture of the Metropolitan Police (October 2022) and the Operation Hotton report (Feb 2022)shows the challenges that need to be faced.With this in mind, West Midlands Police (WMP) have established 'Operation Santos' to examineofficer standards and conduct. One outcome has been mandatory 'Moral Courage' training (Staub,2019) for First Line Leaders in order to increase the likelihood that they will speak up when theyhear or witness unacceptable behaviour by colleagues. The aim is also that they will model theright kinds of behaviour thus promoting wider behaviour change. While these kinds of training programs are very much in fashion, there is very little robust evidence that they actually deliverbehaviour change in practice (Levine, Philpot & Kovalenko, 2020). This is partly to do with thedifficulty of establishing causal links between the training and actual behaviour that happens atsome much later date. But it may also be explained by the theoretical assumptions built into thetraining. Moral courage training assumes that empowering individuals to speak up is the solution- and that the negative influence of the group is the problem.However, more recent work (Philpot et al., 2019; Philpot et al., 2020, Levine et al., 2020) showsthat there is plenty of evidence that people will intervene - but that intervention is not alwayssuccessful. For example, reports into child sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, or theSmith Review of the paedophile Jimmy Saville at the BBC, show repeatedly that people did speakup at the time, but that these interventions were not successful. It seems as though gettingindividuals to speak up is not enough. In order for intervention to become successful we need tostop seeing the power of the group as a problem (which is a key message of much 'BystanderIntervention' and 'Moral Courage' training - see Levine et al., 2020; Staub, 2019) and try to findways to use the power of the group as a solution. For example, the #Metoo movement only beganto have success when they were able to harness the power of the group to break through thebarriers that kept sexual exploitation hidden.