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

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 police
WhatsApp groups filled with misogynistic, racist and homophobic content, have all crystallised the
sense of crisis. Recent reviews by Baroness Casey into the standards of behaviour and internal
culture 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 examine
officer 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 they
hear or witness unacceptable behaviour by colleagues. The aim is also that they will model the
right 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 deliver
behaviour change in practice (Levine, Philpot & Kovalenko, 2020). This is partly to do with the
difficulty of establishing causal links between the training and actual behaviour that happens at
some much later date. But it may also be explained by the theoretical assumptions built into the
training. 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) shows
that there is plenty of evidence that people will intervene - but that intervention is not always
successful. For example, reports into child sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, or the
Smith Review of the paedophile Jimmy Saville at the BBC, show repeatedly that people did speak
up at the time, but that these interventions were not successful. It seems as though getting
individuals to speak up is not enough. In order for intervention to become successful we need to
stop seeing the power of the group as a problem (which is a key message of much 'Bystander
Intervention' and 'Moral Courage' training - see Levine et al., 2020; Staub, 2019) and try to find
ways to use the power of the group as a solution. For example, the #Metoo movement only began
to have success when they were able to harness the power of the group to break through the
barriers that kept sexual exploitation hidden.