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

人们普遍认为，英国警察与社区的关系处于历史最低点（Brown 2021）。萨拉·埃弗拉德（Sarah Everard）被一名在职警察谋杀，以及发现警察whatsapp群中充斥着厌恶女性、种族主义和同性恋的内容，这些都使危危感具体化。凯西男爵夫人最近对伦敦警察厅的行为标准和内部文化的审查（2022年10月）和霍顿行动报告（2022年2月）表明了需要面对的挑战。考虑到这一点，西米德兰兹郡警方（WMP）已经建立了“桑托斯行动”来检查警官的标准和行为。其中一个结果是对一线领导进行强制性的“道德勇气”培训（Staub,2019），以增加他们在听到或目睹同事不可接受的行为时直言不讳的可能性。其目的还在于，它们将为正确的行为树立榜样，从而促进更广泛的行为改变。虽然这类培训项目非常流行，但很少有强有力的证据表明它们实际上在实践中带来了行为改变（Levine, Philpot & Kovalenko, 2020）。这在一定程度上是因为很难在训练和以后发生的实际行为之间建立因果关系。但这也可以用训练中的理论假设来解释。道德勇气训练的假设是，让个人有能力畅所欲言是解决问题的办法，而群体的负面影响才是问题所在。然而，最近的研究（Philpot et al., 2019; Philpot et al., 2020; Levine et al., 2020）表明，有大量证据表明人们会干预——但干预并不总是成功的。例如，对天主教会儿童性侵丑闻的报道，或对BBC恋童癖者吉米·萨维尔（Jimmy Saville）的史密斯评论（smith Review），都反复表明，当时人们确实在大声疾呼，但这些干预并不成功。似乎让个人发声是不够的。为了使干预取得成功，我们需要停止将群体的权力视为一个问题（这是许多“旁观者干预”和“道德勇气”培训的一个关键信息——参见Levine等人，2020;Staub, 2019），并试图找到利用群体权力作为解决方案的方法。例如，#Metoo运动只有在他们能够利用群体的力量突破隐藏性剥削的障碍时才开始取得成功。

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.