The CopDoc Podcast: Aiming for Excellence in Leadership
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The CopDoc Podcast delves into police leadership and innovation. The focus is on aiming for excellence in the delivery of police services across the globe.
Dr. Steve Morreale is a retired law enforcement practitioner, a pracademic, turned academic, and scholar from Worcester State University. Steve is the Program Director for LIFTE, Command College - The Leadership Institute for Tomorrow's Executives at Liberty University.
Steve shares ideas and talks with thought leaders in policing, academia, community leaders, and other related government agencies. You'll find Interviews with thought leaders drive the discussion to improve police services and community relationships.
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The CopDoc Podcast: Aiming for Excellence in Leadership
Leadership and Reform: A Journey Through British Policing with Dr. Peter Neyroud
The CopDoc Podcast - Season 7 - Episode 146
Join us for an engaging conversation with Dr. Peter Neyroud, former Chief Constable and current professor at Cambridge University, as he recounts his fascinating journey from a history major at Oxford to a trailblazer in British policing. We discuss how a chance meeting led him into the police service in 1980 and explore his pivotal contributions, from pioneering community policing to implementing evidence-based practices. Dr. Neyroud's reflections on leadership, trust, and the challenges of organizational change provide invaluable insights for anyone interested in the dynamics of policing and reform.
This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom for those passionate about leadership. We delve into the art of identifying and nurturing innovative leaders within organizations, sharing personal stories and lessons learned from supportive mentors like John Hodnot. Discover strategies for cultivating talent, balancing autonomy with guidance, and adapting leadership styles to meet the unique needs of high-pressure environments. These insights, drawn from real-world experiences, highlight the critical role of mentorship and continuous learning in fostering a culture of innovation.
Lastly, we tackle the intricacies of driving change within entrenched systems, as seen through the lens of UK policing. From the creation of the National Policing Improvement Agency to the rapid adaptation required by the COVID-19 pandemic, we examine the complexities and successes of reform efforts. Through discussions on transparency, evidence-based policing, and maintaining public confidence, this episode underscores the importance of clear communication and strategic leadership in navigating the challenges of modern policing. Join us for a thought-provoking exploration of leadership and reform in the world of policing.
Contact us: copdoc.podcast@gmail.com
Website: www.copdocpodcast.com
If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at stephen.morreale@gmail.com
Hey everybody, Steve Morreale here. Welcome to The CopDoc podcast. We're about to listen to Peter Neyroud. Dr. Peter Neyroud, the former Chief Constable of Police Service in the UK. We split this into two because we were able to speak for so long, and this is session one. In the first segment, we explore Dr Neyrpoud's journey from Oxford, where he was a history major, and on to his unusual entry into policing. During our conversation, we'll hear about his early innovations in community policing, his experience managing major investigations and, more recently, his role in developing evidence-based practices in British policing. Peter shares his insights about the importance of trust in leadership and in implementing organizational change. With his experience and perspective as both first a frontline officer and then a senior leader, you'll find that Peter was responsible for a number of reforms and innovations, working for the government, on behalf of the government and ultimately creating the National College of Policing in the UK. So stay tuned. Here is Peter Neyroud and session one on The CopDoc Podcast.
Steve Morreale:This podcast explores police leadership issues and innovative ideas.
Steve Morreale:The CopDoc shares thoughts and ideas as he talks with leaders in policing communities, academia and other government agencies. And now please join Dr Steve Morreale and industry thought leaders as they share their insights and experience on the CopDoc Podcast.
Intro - Outro:Hello everybody, steve Morreale coming to you from Boston, massachusetts, and we head over the pond to talk to Peter Neyroud, Dr Peter Neyroud, who is with Cambridge University. He's a professor of evidence-based policing, a former big shot in policing over in Great Britain, a member of all kinds. Actually, there are things we're going to be talking about, Peter, that I'm reading about you, but hello there. I know it's morning here, afternoon there. How are you, sir?
Peter Neyroud:I'm very well. I'm very well Getting ready for Christmas.
Intro - Outro:Well, thank you and Merry Christmas to you. As I said before, as we started, we're fluctuating from 15 degrees to 50 degrees, which is crazy. Once in a while we get some snow and then it melts, but that's just the time of the year, so I'm so happy to have you on. I'd love you to start by telling us your history. How did you become involved in policing? What the hell were you thinking when you thought I'm going to go back for a doctorate? And now you're in academia, a pracademic like myself, with feet in both places, policing, indeed, in academia. So tell us about yourself.
Peter Neyroud:So this is exactly what I'm doing at the moment. I'm sat and have been for the last month or so actually finally doing something I wanted to do for a long time, which is actually to write up that career. But I'm trying to do it in a way that makes the connection between what I've done across 45 years, which is a long old time, and the kind of big developments in policing across that period of time, many of which I've realized as I've gone through, I've been involved in. So I joined a police service in 1980. I came to it with a degree in modern history from the University of Oxford, which is a very fine degree, and I'm still a passionate historian, including of policing, which I think is quite often a major problem for police officers.
Intro - Outro:It's a deficit. We don't consider our history and then it repeats itself. Why? I hear you Correct.
Peter Neyroud:Or we keep muttering platitudes like Peel's principles, which, given that Peel was not actually responsible for them and they are largely an artifact of the 1930s, made up by a rather particularly good historian called Reith it's a bit like saying, well, we believe in a crime policy based about Robin Hood, but I joined and I joined. It was a sort of odd thing to do. You know, you go to Oxford, you read history in 1980, about the last place you go is policing, and it came about because, well, I'd kind of I didn't want to. There were various things I couldn't do, by the way, because I'm a Swiss citizen as well as British.
Peter Neyroud:I couldn't be in civil service or whatever, because at that stage you were barred. So I went casting about for things to do, got a job in the car industry, which looked quite interesting, until I discovered the way they treated their staff when I went around the factory, came back, had a drink with a fresher I was looking after, who turned out to be an inspector in Thames Valley Police, who said well, you could pick up a police officer. My response was what on earth would I want to do that for? So he took me down to a police station, to the police station.
Intro - Outro:Not in handcuffs. Not in handcuffs.
Peter Neyroud:No, no, no, no. It was a voluntary attempt, basically. He left me with a custody sergeant for the night. I was still there and when the dawn came up and I didn't look back, I was completely fascinated. I know I went and did a four-day sort of vacation course with the same force with Thames Valley, and then I applied and I joined Hampshire, which was my local police force. I got sent to a little place called Romsey, a young constable and, just as a sort of clue about beginning to get used to this organization, I arrived to find a cutter, to find my sergeant at the desk to greet me, who said thank God, we thought you were Indian Because with my surname they thought I was Indian. But I thought the thank God, we thought you were indian because with my surname they thought I was indian. But I thought the thank god, we thought you were indian was a pretty cool message. Yes, of course. Yeah, it was a first. What I got, you know I've got through.
Peter Neyroud:I did, you know, the standard thing that we, all of us do, that period of learning where you're trying to find your way but it didn't last very long because within nine months, I got asked to go and see the chief constable, which you know you don't get asked to see the chief constable. But I did no well, not without getting some very odd looks around you and I basically got asked to devise, design, improve and evaluate a community policing scheme. So yeah, well, obviously a degree in modern history prepared you for that actually what I did which I think is quite important as a conversation between the two of us is.
Peter Neyroud:I went and read everything I could find about the developments in community policing that were going on. I read Herman Goldstein's first contributions. I read a load of stuff out about Dallas and Houston and Chief Brown and the work that he was doing and a range of schemes and I thought there is something here. What we came up with in Hampshire was, I think, one of the earlier versions of the modern community policing approach. The problem was which I don't think I necessarily noticed to quite the extent I should have done at the time, because obviously you're a young constable and you don't know this stuff was that we never actually implemented it properly. We just didn't get it out on the ground and though I evaluated it, it was not. I wouldn't call that evaluation now. In fact I would have failed myself if I was doing that these days, because it wasn't robust enough and we rolled it out as we did in those days because the chief said it was a good idea. We rolled it out without that kind of robustness. It probably did make a difference. I mean, it was not without its merits and it was an attempt by the force to frame itself around trying to deal with with demand by getting becoming more product and we tried to accompany it.
Peter Neyroud:Because I then got a second job which was to effectively to create a kind of hotspot strategy by. But we were using pin maps and that was faintly that became faintly ridiculous because you know 1984 pin maps. I had boxes and boxes of these bloody pins. I was sticking them onto maps of uh of, in particular in the centre of Southampton, and there was a fair amount of that. The trouble was you created these like Krakatoa-like volcanoes of pins upon pins and, as I wrote in the report, that was the you know was endeavoured to try and direct the force. We could really do with a computer, but we had a computer. It had about, it had about 24K no, I know how it was.
Intro - Outro:All the floppy disks. You remember those, I know.
Peter Neyroud:Yeah, yeah. Well, I think we were still putting telephones into cups and listening to that awful squeaking noise. But the main point about it was, just as a lesson, that hotspot policing has come of age because of the power of computing. We just couldn't do it in that way. We could do something approximating, but we couldn't do that kind of computing. We just couldn't do it in that way.
Intro - Outro:We could do something approximating, but we couldn't do that kind of thing. You know, I want to say it strikes me, when you're talking about pin maps and Bill Bratton talks about that and the genesis of CompStat and all of those kinds of things, that it's pretty soon. When you're doing that, what you're defining is hotspots, policing and, as you said, it just gets bigger and bigger and you're running out of spaces to put pins. But that certainly did tell you like maybe we should be paying attention to that spot.
Peter Neyroud:What it definitely did was it started to get us into the territory that is now commonplace, which is that it's not just the fact that there's a lot of activity going on in that place, that it is what is under that activity, what's the what is physically going on. And I did spend quite a lot of time physically walking the ground where the pins were clustered and you know the ground where the pins were clustered and you know again, I'd read the early Goldstein work and problem-oriented policing was not a fully formed and functioning approach in 1984, but we were heading in that broad, general direction of thinking about, and most of it was unsurprisingly to do with licensed premises liquor licensed premises where the failure to manage the clientele effectively and also the places where people were coming on to after they'd drunken, the early evening premises and were heading to the late night ones, the failure to manage it properly and for failure, frankly, by the police and the local authority to manage it properly, were the key issues. And to some extent I think the project did help us to get a little bit ahead of that. And then I got a job.
Peter Neyroud:As I got promoted, I got through the Accelerated Promotion Scheme, so I became a very young sergeant and I got given the job of sorting out the unlicensed drinking establishments and the drug dealing. So I then spent a merry 18 months doing what Larry Sherman would call crackdowns on a big scale, including one glorious evening where I worked out how to get into the Hell's Angels house, they being one of the big drug dealing gangs at the time. Same here, yeah, they had a fortified house which nobody actually dared to get into. I went and borrowed a telegraph pole from British Telecom which had the ability of basically acting like a medieval ram, and we blew the back door off with such vigor that it took the front door out as well. And you know, that was it.
Intro - Outro:I've been to one of those places. They are fortified for sure.
Peter Neyroud:Yes, I've been to one of those places. They are fortified for sure. I still remember to this day the then leader of that particular gang. He was stood in the kitchen. He hadn't spotted us creeping up with this bloody great thing. We hit the back door with such force and it vanished down the corridor. And he was still stood there as we came in with a piece of toast moving towards his mouth that never quite got there, just as we nicked him so it was.
Peter Neyroud:That was a, but the key part of that actually was a strategy of crackdown and and with some great support and leadership, and that was a big part of it is that I got caught. I got, you know, I had a superintendent he was actually a hong kong superintendent who was on attachment, because we we had a lot of Hong Kong staff and his whole approach was to give you a clear, brief um, give you support, and when it got sticky, he was there at my shoulder and and he was, he was, and I felt very, very supportive. I felt I had a a clear, a clear mission, um, and boy did I carry it out, um, and we did. You know, I can't say that we cleared everything out, but we certainly, certainly suppressed a great deal of the illegal activity.
Intro - Outro:When you do those things, you get your attention. But there's a couple of things I've written down, because Trojanowitz work and I had the the honor of being with Bob and I thought he was going to chair my dissertation and he passed, unfortunately. But way back into the 90s for us, I was starting to pay attention to community policing and of course, in the 2000s what happened was we stopped paying attention to community policing because we have to worry about terrorism. The problem was that community policing did great stuff for terrorism because it helped to know who's not supposed to be there. But I think about this as you're talking. By the way, we're talking to Peter Nehru. He is a former chief constable of Thames Valley. Say that for me Thames, Is it Thames, Thames?
Peter Neyroud:You don't need a T Well yeah like the Nehru, without the D.
Intro - Outro:So Thames Valley and now at Cambridge, but I think about broken windows, the work that was done, I think about quality of life, crimes and dealing with those, and it sounds like you were at the infancy of these approaches, as you were trial and error, without evidence, necessarily. And of course, now that brings you to the work that you're talking about and you're a proponent for evidence-based policing. How did that begin, the work that you were doing, the trust they were giving you to go and give this a shot, peter, as a young buck, and how it evolved, and how it has not yet evolved, because we resist the idea of evidence-based, but there's evidence-based medicine. I think we could learn a lot. So so tell me about that. How did you end up sort of morphing or helping organizations morph?
Peter Neyroud:Well, I'd always read the literature. I'd always read it and, and you know, shortly after this point, when I, you know, I become an inspector and I did my first master's degree. And I did a master's degree at the local, at the local university, portsmouth, and that was a kind of opportunity for me. That's another big lesson here. You, you know, in any profession, you need a regular drink at the fountain, you need to know what's going on beyond your remit. And that was an important moment of refresh. And it curiously because partly because I think that the first chief I had and my, the second one, who was definitely my great mentor, a guy called john hodnot um, both of them did give.
Peter Neyroud:If you were good, you got a bit of license and you, you got the ability to, you know, to, to try something. And I think that ability to let people try things and to give them a bit of give, them a bit of latitude and as well as support, is incredibly important. If you want to create innovation and you want to create an organization with a with, with a bit of life, to solve problems, you have to give people, you have to give people, you have to give the, you have to find the talented people and give them scope. I definitely got a lot of scope, I suppose, as I got. You know, as you get more senior in the organization and I did very, very rapidly then of course you've also got more responsibility and it becomes a little bit more difficult to give you quite the latitude that you had in the past.
Intro - Outro:I'm going to say it's probably at that point in time where you have to focus on the macro, the big picture, and allow others to be your innovators. But, Peter, I want to ask this question, as you moved up quite rapidly from inspector to superintendent, to assistant chief constable unless you were chief constable right away but how and what did you do to discern?
Peter Neyroud:who those innovative players were identifying them early, to give them the latitude to allow them to go and try something new, to fail and learn from their failure well, I think that for those that actually work directly for me it was it was about, you know, giving them something that gave a bit of latitude and seeing whether they did anything with it. Um, if, if, if they simply came back and told you all the difficulties, then you probably give them a slightly less in a limited brief. If they came back with solutions, or they've just done something and got on with it and you could see the solutions, then you give them a little bit more as well as support. I mean, you again, it's about this balance, about not overdoing it. But you, you're, you know, one of the one of the key skills in middle and senior leadership is is allowing just giving people enough scope as well as support to be able to realize you know difficult things. Um, actually, as well as watching to make sure they don't overstretch themselves, so actually understanding enough about their personal circumstances so that you, you know you take care of the fact that they've just got a young child or the all of the sort of things that they're going to put extra pressure on. Um, and, yeah, I mean, sometimes it's difficult to do that because you're so hectically busy.
Peter Neyroud:I mean, I had a period of time I was, as a, again a very young superintendent. I became a detective superintendent, so I'm investigating homicide, and it was a. You know, there was a plan a, which was that I was going to get mentored into this role by another colleague, and then that colleague became very ill. Uh, another superintendent had a heart attack, another one came out of a caravan, broke his knee and was out of commission. So by the time we got to christmas there were only the two of us and we had an incredible run. We had a serial, we had a serial killer, we had a, we had a um, a really complex missing person that turned out to be not what. He would have been a serial killer if we hadn't caught him. And then, and then I had a terrible case where four children were murdered by the uncle in the fire and it just went on for six months. It was just.
Peter Neyroud:You know, it's just like a blizzard, um, and you get in, you can get into that space where it's quite you know, it's quite difficult to be reflective. You are just doing um, and there I think really I mean now having you know, having then, of course, been in the chief officer position in that is the noticing that and noticing it quickly enough to realise just how much pressure is on. I mean, we've all watched these, you know the various detective movies, where it's always the case they invent these senior officers who are constantly pestering or expecting unreasonable things from people. And that's not been my experience at all. My experience has been, I mean, notably, my greatest mentor, john, I don't know. I mean, this is christmas eve and I'm on.
Peter Neyroud:I'm on call and I've had a hell of a bloody week I mean, we really have had a hell of a week and he just sat down alongside me, he didn't say anything, he just he went. He actually brought a cup of coffee with him, so he put the coffee down beside me and he just sat there and waited for the moment to speak. And then he looked at the screen and he said so what are you looking at? And actually, as it happened, I was looking at a case on the screen with a young woman who hadn't arrived in Fordingbridge in Hampshire. She'd come for Christmas. She was coming from a family in Burgundy and she'd come for Christmas. And I was looking at this thinking I'm tired and I'm just. My anxiety about this case is beginning to grow as I read down it. And so John read it and he turned to me and he said she's dead, isn't she?
Intro - Outro:Peter, I'm going to say something right now. What just happened to you happens to so many police that we become invested in cases, and when we lock them in a box and it just leaked out of you as it does for so many, I can see that. So thank you for sharing. That's a pretty vulnerable moment.
Peter Neyroud:Yeah, I've got a few of those. That was a hell of a year and that particular, uh, that particular moment, that is a moment of support. You just know that your colleague, he might be the chief constable, but you know that you, you know you're gonna, because, of course, now I'm, I'm sat there, tired thinking how am I going to call what? Am I there, tired thinking how am I going to call, what am I going to call here, what am I going to do? And you know, within 10 minutes we've resolved. This was, you know, we set a major incident room up. We are now into full you know, this is a full homicide inquiry. And I know I've got his backing and indeed, in the following few days, he and the deputy chief constable so these are the two most senior people in a large police agency have pitched up at the major instrument room on our helping taking the calls. That's great leadership and it's so unusual, isn't?
Intro - Outro:it. That's great leadership, and it's so unusual, isn't it?
Peter Neyroud:Yeah, yeah. I mean it was a fantastic lesson to me because, you know, within months I'm an assistant chief and I'm trying to do the same thing in another place and you don't forget those lessons. You really don't.
Intro - Outro:And they're not forced upon you, right? They just happen. They're organic. I want to interrupt you. I hearken back to a couple of things. I've been writing so many things down, so let's go back for a moment. In a lot of ways, I think some of the work that we do as leaders is similar to being parents, and that is. At some point in time, you've got to let your kids go.
Intro - Outro:You've got to trust them right, you've got to let them go. You've got to check in on them, watch them and guide them, but let them make some mistakes on their own, as long as they're not fatal and most of them aren't. And that's the same with people. I think policing in a lot of ways is fearful of failure, and yet failure is a human condition. We go through that. That's how we learn. I see your head shaking. Talk about that.
Peter Neyroud:Well, I mean it's failure in two ways that are important. I mean, you know, you are only going to learn whether something's going to work by testing it. I mean, in my term, scientifically now testing it. And the expectation every time you test something it's actually going to work is is purer because and in fact in many ways you, you want to know the things that don't work, and that same applies to you know some of the big, some of the big projects, which is why the wise do not do big bang. They test a bit and you know and feel the failure a bit, feel the place, places where things are not working effectively. I mean not the least of which, if I'm just trying to think of some of the sort of bigger changes that I've introduced.
Intro - Outro:Well, how about the national police college? I mean, I I want to talk to you.
Peter Neyroud:That's a big one, right yeah, well, I mean, first off that. So right, so let's let's just wind the clock back a bit and explain. Explain what we were trying to do at that stage. So I'm a chief in Thames Valley and the government is looking to make to make some really quite significant reforms of policing in the UK, and my arguments to them was that they had no mechanism to do that. There was nothing.
Peter Neyroud:I mean, we had a not very good leadership agency called Centrex and a pretty appalling technology organisation called PETO.
Peter Neyroud:Its initials were supposed to be Police Information Technology Organisation, but all of us knew it as Poor Implementation, terrible Operation, and actually what we needed was an organization that could could drive change across, or support change across the whole country when and you need three things to do that you need people, processes and technology to make big change. And what I proposed to the government was that we created an agency to do that. And then, uh, eventually I think at the last I was in the last hour of the closer of the applications that the home secretary rang me and said we were rather expecting you would apply to do that. So I did, and I, what I created was an agency called the national policing improvement agency, which was the uk's first. You know effectively national police headquarters, and we tried to bring together all of those people, processes and technology into a single agency. It was an extremely hard thing to do. Working in central government is many times more difficult than working in local government.
Intro - Outro:There are so many stakeholders and so many people who want to want to, you know, take a piece of you. Um, that it is. It's extremely thirsty work from that point of view. May I ask this what may I? And I want to interrupt by saying we're talking to peter peter nero. He is sitting at his home in near cambridge university in the uk. But was it in your mind as you were watching this pushback, the resistance to change what's wrong with the way we're doing things? Why is Nehru trying to make these changes?
Peter Neyroud:Oddly enough no it wasn't.
Peter Neyroud:I mean, there are a whole series of things because we're trying to make change in 43, well, nearer 50 policing agencies actually, but 43 particularly local agencies there are. You know, an average agencies about is between two and a half and 3,000 sworn officers and about 1,500 to 1,800 civilian or support staff. So you know, organisations of about 5, 5000 with a budget of about, at that stage, about 300 million, and you're each one of them, of course, have got their own ambitions and their own relationships and I'm trying to create a consistent approach to things like neighborhood policing, to what we call workforce modernization, which was effectively efficiency in the workforce, and to technology and in a range of other there were a whole range of other things, but those were the three.
Peter Neyroud:Those were the three big ones. The neighbor policing was tough but achievable because we had a, we had a pretty clear idea of what we were trying to do and we had good evidence. We'd actually evaluated the the pilots in that case and I guess that the pushback was the level of detail that we wanted them to respond to. So we you know they were getting money for this by the way, they're getting, you know, a significant amount of money but so we had at least got a a little bit of a lever support. That Workforce modernisation was a bit more difficult because it was a little bit woolier as to exactly what we were trying to do. But what we were effectively trying to do was to encourage them to put out into the field as many of their sworn officers as possible and to get the back office and support functions either civilianized or outsourced, as in. We're trying to focus as much of the sworn effort into operational policing as we could.
Intro - Outro:So at that point in time, was it as it is in the United States, that many of the ancillary jobs were handled by sworn officers and, in your mind, not always necessary? Get some specialists in there to do it.
Peter Neyroud:Yeah, it was the first thing I did in Thames Valley. I knew I didn't have enough of a workforce out in the field, so I redeployed 440 jobs, from being sworn officers to being civilian.
Intro - Outro:That must have pissed a few people off at first. Huh Like, what do you mean? I'm going back in the field.
Peter Neyroud:Being a chief is not a popularity contest. Yes, sometimes you have to do things that people don't want. I mean, the most important thing to do, in my view, with that sort of thing is to be clear what it is that you're doing and communicate why you're doing it and why it's important to do it. Yes, you're doing it and why it's important to do it. Yes, and also, whatever promises you give to the members, if you say to members of staff, you know we will support you, then you absolutely have to follow through on each one of those, because everyone that you don't do that for becomes a narrative that undermines your personal legitimacy and the people's trust in you. So you have to follow through and therefore you have to be you know, have to pay attention to that.
Peter Neyroud:Um, I think we did it reasonably well. I can't guarantee that it was perfect, but we did manage to get the. You know the nature and the shape of the force change and what I was trying to do with the national policing improvement agency on the workforce modernizations, to replicate that and a bit more, and to also to look at big processes. I mean, essentially all police forces do similar things, from handing people in custody to call management to um, to prosecuting people. They all do similar, all similar processes and trying to get them to be done in a in as efficient a way as possible, because, at the end of the day, money is never plentiful in policing, wherever you are, at whatever time, and indeed, if it were, when we'd probably waste it. So you need to be, you know, you need to be careful and cautious was?
Intro - Outro:was some? I don't mean to interrupt you, but was some of the? Was some of the resistance, uh, that you know? Don't tell me what to do. Give me some guidance and let me customize it for my organization. I'm sure that was your intention, but was it read differently?
Peter Neyroud:Yeah, that was. I mean, it was the. Yeah, some of it was, that was the. You know, this is my, this is my fiefdom and you know, don't tell me how to run it. And I was always, I think, a bit of an outsider in rather than an insider. I was always, I think, a bit of an outsider rather than an insider, if you know what I mean. I always felt that I was looking from the outside into my organization, and that's probably quite an important thing to be able to do if you're an innovator is to get that outside perspective, and that probably meant for some that I was a bit more threatening than I might have been otherwise.
Intro - Outro:Well. So I want to ask this because I think this is important. I love where you're going with this and it sounds to me like we're walking down history lane. You know, part of the things that you would write in your book would be some of the resistance or some of the reluctance maybe not resistance but reluctance that you had to overcome over time, but it sounds to me like you were. So I think this is an important question when did you look outside of policing to find inspiration for ideas that might transfer into policing? Because it seems to me that business, healthcare, government in some cases, are trying new things that are resisted at first by policing. Look, we're a very reluctant and resistant organization and yet we change on a dime if we have to right, if the law changes, we change right. So we say we're resistant, but we're really not Fair statement.
Peter Neyroud:Yeah and yeah, I think it's a very fair statement. I mean I'm thinking Fair statement, yeah and yeah, I think it's a very fair statement. I mean I think we take the. You know, how quickly did policing move and adapt to the challenges of COVID? It was extremely fast. I mean we can come back to that. But there was some shortfalls, considerable shortfalls in terms of some of the protection that was applied, but in terms of the ability to completely reconfigure the business very rapidly, it was done. I. I would say I.
Peter Neyroud:It wasn't so much that I encountered, uh, it wasn't resistance in the, in a you know, we're not going to do that in etc. It wasn't. That wasn't the issue. It was more a sort of well, it varied. I mean, obviously there were some, but it was more the um. You know, can you help me as to how to you? You know how do I put this into place? You know, can you, can you, can you find a way for me to succeed in doing this?
Peter Neyroud:And it was more trying to find a style of business for the, for the set, for the national agency, that was supportive and encouraging, but and also trying to find as many um wins so that police forces could be seen as winning.
Peter Neyroud:Uh, if you know, if they think they are and can demonstrate that they are one of the you know the leaders of a particular area, that's good for the brand, it's good for the you know, for the internal sense of purpose, uh, and you know, managing to make as many of them as winners and create coalitions of winners, I think is the way to get these things moving. It is quite challenging to do, but you know you will get. I mean, certainly with neighbourhood policing we definitely managed to create that sense of collective and we saw phenomenal changes in public confidence and perceptions of visibility for the first time. The figures but those figures were going in the right direction after you know, you know generation, almost where they've been heading, heading south rather than north. So it was a. You know you can make a, make a major, major difference if you that had to be valid, that had to be validating for you, though, to see those things that were happening over time.
Peter Neyroud:Yeah, yeah, I mean I've got one of my pictures. On the wall is a thing you know is a chart that Tony Blair sent to me, signed with best wishes, and it basically is showing the figures, going in the right direction, saying you know, basically you did this. That is a yeah, yes, of course it is. I mean, it's a major, it was a major part of what we were trying to do.
Intro - Outro:But I mean, I know you, we wanted to start down technology, but I want to ask you this and, by the way, we're talking to Peter Nehru, he is in Cambridge, at Cambridge university and a former chief constable at a major police service in the UK and very, very interesting. I have a couple of questions. But at what point in time? As you were making the move and the moves and, by the way, I know these weren't unilateral and they weren't done by yourself you had to have plenty of people to jump on board with you. I understand all of that, but at what point in time did you step back? Because I think this is it.
Intro - Outro:Let's go back to what you said when you were in the middle of homicide investigations. You become consumed by that that you have a. What are we missing? What do we have to do to re, almost refocus the organization? To make sure? I'll say this about COVID here. I was an academic chair. You know what that is like, and we became again consumed with what are we going to do? We have to put people online. How are we going to modify this? What are we can't be in class anymore. How are we going to change the modality? Are we can't be in class anymore. How are we going to change the modality?
Intro - Outro:And at one point in time, seven or eight months down the road, I'm thinking we have lost our way. We're not focused on the future, we're focusing on today. How do we get back to future? Focus, right. I see you shake your head, but I but I also wonder I know I'm throwing a lot, lot at you, peter, but you're making me think and I appreciate that ultimately, your both concern and belief in evidence-based policing. At what point in time did you say how do we see if that's working? The neighborhood policing? How do we, how do we create opportunities to show? Here's what we did. Here are the outcomes, here's the evidence.
Peter Neyroud:Well, in a sense I'd always, all the way through my career, believed in evidence. I obviously got more technically expert at knowing, you know, good evidence from bad evidence, but I'd always been interested. I mean, even when I joke about, you know, a history degree being the perfect preparation for designing a policing scheme. But oddly enough, you know, the degree did discipline me to look for the best sources and the best evidence and that had always been my framework right the way through my career. I mean, these days it's informed by a substantial understanding of social science, research et cetera. But that had always been my approach and it was my framing for the National Policing Improvement Agency that we would be driven by the best evidence available, as Larry put it in his Police Foundation paper, and quite often, of course, that evidence when we start talking about some of the big changes that you make in policing. The evidence isn't always easy to find. So you know you're trying to make sure that you've incorporated, you know, as many from many different sources as possible. So you're right about having a look at what's going on in other sectors, about finding people that you can reasonably trust to give an informed view and also to test them. So why do you think that? Where do you get that from? And also within the police service as well, to have, um, really good informed sources, because evidence-based policing is not just about the scientific evidence for a particular tactic.
Peter Neyroud:That's important, but it's not, it's not the only thing. You you have to have a a really deep, you have to have decent leadership management experience to be able to contextualize that. But in terms of the time and the place, the type of organisation that you're trying to put it in, you have to have really good data on the organisation. So that's often lacking in policing. And you also have to know the stakeholders, whether it be, if it's national, the national politicians involved, and preferably, by the way, not just the ones that you happen to be working with because they're in power, because if you want to sustain something, you have to have explained it to the others. You don't want something that is you know is here today and gone tomorrow because there's been an election and it's changed. You want things that have got some chance of actually lasting and it get. Building a consensus is a tricky thing to do, but evidence-based policing depends on that type of approach. I mean, I suppose you could describe it like climbing Everest, that each stage you have a base camp and you have to establish it and make sure that it's firmly there. I'm not a climber, by the way, even though I'm Swiss, but you have to be careful and proceed by steps and you have to take the people with you along that way. And back to your point about where do you go for points of reflection.
Peter Neyroud:I had two or three very close friends in policing. They'd either work for me or with me. One in particular, my colleague who was then the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, sir Dennis Sokono, a very, very close friend from that point of view. Dennis was one of the few people who could tell me the things that I needed to know at the right moment, including the spectacular moment where he was trying to tell me that we were producing far too much guidance, far too many written manuals, etc. And his approach to that was wicked but actually very impacted. So I came back to my office one evening to find that Dennis had got his staff to trolley over to my office all of the guidance that my agency had produced in the first three years and basically it went from floor to ceiling so that I couldn't actually get into the office and there was a little note, little note that said from Dennis with love or words to that effect, um, and after I'd phoned him and said you know what the? Uh? Yeah, he explained you know this is this is. You know it's getting out of control. You need to find a way to rein this back, because I don't think people are reading this stuff. And he and he was fundamentally right, because actually we then went and tested and it was a good prompt. We went and tested Do police officers read manuals?
Peter Neyroud:Is this stuff useful? And the answer, of course, is no. There are a few. If you're a firearms officer, you've read the firearms manual, because that's what you're going to be held to account of if you've discharged your weapon in a coroner's court. But apart from that, these things are there for. They sit on shelves and if you can see them as they sit on shelves behind colleagues, they tend to be the ones that have sat on that same shelf for months, if not years. They're quite dusty.
Intro - Outro:Well, you know, that's interesting because it also makes me wonder. I understand where we in policing, or those who have been in policing, want answers as quick as possible. Right, tell me what I need to know today so I can put it in practice today, and don't make me read through dense material. And that goes to talking about action, research and translational research and creation of checklists, because, look, we're in a bullet society, right, you know that you, I'm sure in your teaching or your reading, I say stop giving me bullets. Maybe create some bullets so I understand what I'm about to read, but make, break it down for me and now give me some support in text. So I'm sure that's what he was saying and being very blunt about it and very and very honest and forthright to say look at all the shit you have created. Do you know how much? Here's the thing, do you know how much it cost us to print this Peter?
Peter Neyroud:this peter. Well yeah, let alone to read it. I mean the the. I mean I suppose that it had come to a bit of a culmination, because the way that this guidance was produced in british policing at that stage was discrete committees of the association of chief police officers and that they've just been this. They found they've got my agency and we were the sort of the reproducer of all of this stuff and the result of that was we got a 300 page manual on mounted police which included pictures of horseshoes, which I thought was great. I mean really.
Peter Neyroud:These are the kinds of horseshoes that will work right, yeah, but the final thing that made me think what on earth are we doing here was to receive more than 100 pages of the police cycling manual. You know it almost included the. You know, how do you get on a police on a cycle? I mean you thought, I mean, really, do we need a manual on cycling? No, you just, if you want to issue a cycle to officers, then issue a cycle. That really isn't, they'll figure it out.
Steve Morreale:they'll figure it out. Trial and error I fell down. Trial and error I fell down. I can't do that Right.
Peter Neyroud:You know it had become. It had you laugh about it. It had become faintly ridiculous and actually what it missed was that there were a few that were absolutely fundamental. I was responsible, by the way, for the police firearms manual for the UK, along with the team that was working to me when I was a deputy chief constable in West Mercia, and it's still pretty much the manual and it was a really quite short I mean there is not. There's, you know, there's basically six chapters to it. They're all in the public domain. What sort of decision we made at the at the time was to publish it, which I'd say my colleagues were not happy with, but I thought it was important. It was transparently out there and that one is read, and it's because that one is essential. You do do actually have to have guidance to do that, yeah, I understand, but riding a cycle probably not.
Peter Neyroud:I think we can cope with that without a manual.
Steve Morreale:Thanks for listening to The Cop Doc Podcast with Dr Steve Morreale. Steve is a retired law enforcement practitioner and manager, turned academic and scholar from Worcester State University. Please tune into Te Cop Doc Podcast for regular episodes of interviews with thought leaders in policing.
