Training

Degrees of difference

by Mark Rowe

Retired police can grumble as much as farmers, but on the police now demanding that new officers have or take a degree, the grumblers have a point, Mark Rowe writes.

How it’s relevant to private security we’ll come to, but for now the police side, which after all matters in that these are the police who’ll be responding to your break-in or demo outside your site because you’re a climate criminal.

You can understand why UK police have gone for degrees, though it’s a wrong turning, one of many in Britain turning the place into somewhere worse than it need be. Training is always the first to be cut in a budget, as it was in the public sector austerity of the 2010s when the police stopped recruiting. Now they have a surge in new recruits to take. Just as it’s unhealthy to starve your body then binge, so it will be for the police, yet such is the cynicism of the Boris Johnson Government that ‘20,000 extra police officers’ is one of their go-to boasts.

More precisely it’s understandable why the senior police signed off the effective outsourcing of police training. Those chief officers are mingling with the likes of judges, barristers, city mayors, bishops. It’s usual to have a first degree and then a MSc, MA or MBA. When the conversation at a garden party or at the theatre turns to your education, or that of your children, you wouldn’t want to be the odd one out with a diploma in policing. It would make you sound like a plumber.

There lies the great divide in Britain, between the vocationally (or not at all) and academically qualified. Police did need to do something about benchmarking what they do, so that the 48-year-olds who leave the police after 30 years and who have many working years ahead of them have qualifications to point to that employers can understand, beyond the mere years of service on a CV. Even more so now police typically leave after a few years, for private industry or for an enforcement role in an agency. A degree is easy non-police employers to grasp.

Typically a police force is partnering with a local university to take its new intakes. You only have to walk around campuses – in Huddersfield, Leeds, Leicester – to be impressed by the shining, new buildings, that reek of financial success.

Except that police forces will have to check what universities are providing – the lecturers and the course content. Is the knowledge equipping the trainees, or is it fine theoretical stuff they will jettison once they encounter reality of The Job? Are the lecturers clapped-out former cops who went into teaching because they weren’t that good or never had that much of a taste for the actual work of policing?

The front-line work of police, responding to a car crash, someone with a knife, is vocational. That’s not to say book-learning has no place in the police; only away from that front-line, whether as line managers or in crime prevention advice or 101 specialist fields. The difference is that faced with someone threatening to jump from a bridge you need to know the vocational how, to save a life, and not the academically-taught why (is the potential suicide mentally ill or from a disadvantaged background, in need of medication or a leg-up from society).

Where private security comes in is that so much of the first response to incidents or outright crimes is not by the police but by others in uniform – door staff with SIA badges, security officers on a university campus; dotted around some town centres, CSAS (community safety accreditation scheme) patrollers, maybe with PCSOs, maybe employed by business improvement districts, maybe by councils and more formally part of neighbourhood policing teams. In parts of London, the private company My Local Bobby with vehicles liveried quite like the police.

That there is no national consistency shows many things. There’s zero public debate about Britain’s rapidly changing landscape of first response policing, and that the public sees (or fails to) on dialling 999. The police have historically not been level with the public about the fact that there’s far more reports come into the police than they can possibly respond to, let alone promptly. That inconsistency may be a good thing if it’s responding to local geography and demographics.

If police can’t reach all the 999s they could, how many more incidents are out there, on the threshold of crime and disorder! That the police seemingly randomly attend or not. I think of an example the other Friday evening, in a square just south of St Pancras in London. A handful of bobbies were on the street. You could hear noise of a couple of dozen youths before you saw them in a corner of the square, blocking the traffic, playing with a basketball. Would you be alarmed, if your car were parked on that square? Yes; but if you were the one sat on the grass in the centre of the square, you evidently were at ease with the young people at leisure, and where else could they go, without spending money?

The handful of police deployed were stuck – they could not arrest their way out even if the youths became more of a problem. Besides, the situation might escalate if the police intervened tactlessly. (Teach that in a classroom!?) If police powers of arrest were useless in that case, why deploy police at all and not a cheaper force of PCSOs or CSAS? Whose remit would be to walk a beat, like old-fashioned police, and be recognisable to locals, not uniformed representatives of authority that only appeared when something was wrong?

The great difference between British people is no longer in terms of class or skin colour or creed, although they did matter and still do to some. The difference is whether you work on the front line or not, as was exposed by the covid pandemic lockdowns from spring 2020. The unfairness of it is revealed, tomorrow for example, on the eve of the first bank holiday weekend of the year. If your job is non-front-line, you may bugger off early to get a head start on the traffic for the seaside. Will your line manager mind? Not if he is doing the same thing. If you are working behind a counter at a motorway service station or working a pub door or a shift as a security officer at a London office block’s goods bay, you have to be there; unless you don’t want to get paid.

While the police have got their degree requirement the wrong way round – better to equip all coppers with a degree by the time they leave, rather than expect it from the start – at least arguably the security industry has got its ‘skills agenda’ right. That’s not to say the security industry has the agenda entirely worked out, or that all staff are trained as well as they should be. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are there – the SIA licence course, MSc degree courses in security and risk management for the aspirational, although rather a gap in between; or rather a lack of a map for industry starters, who have to plot for themselves how to progress from (say) corporate reception security to superviser to manager; or into hotels or stadium events. Two years after its launch – rather overshadowed by covid – the Government Security Profession career framework is still an impressive document, without equivalents in other fields.

How many times have I been told by heads of security that they look to recruit those not with security experience necessarily but with customer service or care skills, as the necessary security skills can be added? By embracing universities, the police, like nursing, and teaching, appear not to like their occupation’s actual tasks of being on the front line and facing the public.

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