Arrested Development: an exploration of training and culture within Greater Manchester Police

The question of standards within the branch, Greater Manchester Police, and policing as a whole was a strong theme from those who were interviewed. This included quality of training, uniform standards, behavioural standards, equipment standards, the standard of recruits, the standard of the trainers, and the standards of supervision.

One of the strongest themes was the question of ‘operational competence’. Indeed, it is a question that is difficult to answer. Should police trainers be operationally competent and what does operational competence look like?

Interviewee Seven was particularly passionate about this area. They believed it important to remain operationally competent and that officers coming to the training school to be taught from operational roles respected that. They stated:

“Me personally I like to go out and keep operational. When new legislation comes in I want to go out and see it applied and apply it myself. There are certain people around, and it is not for me to criticise, that are comfortable in reading legislation and imparting that knowledge… we need to make sure that we are also capable of doing what we are and that is being a cop…I cannot just read a cookery book and go and teach a chef. The person delivering needs to really understand it.”

Interviewee Five had a different view and did not believe that it was essential to have to go out and work on the street as a police officer in an operational capacity in order to be able to teach police officers and staff in the classroom. They also did not believe that operational competence gave respect from the learner. Instead, they were of the opinion that respect comes from being a good trainer and would rather see time invested in developing the training staff to become better trainers:

“Training is development and if you want to develop the force you need to develop training first…Officers want to come to Sedgley Park and it not be viewed as a chore because the last time they came to Sedgley Park they got some quality training off some quality trainers. That is where I would like us to be.”

Interviewee Five then said that up skilling trainers in policing systems would be of benefit and that there is a lack of investment in the training staff:

“How many trainers could do an ISIS file? You can train a monkey to walk around with a yellow jacket on! When they arrest someone they would look stupid as they wouldn’t know what to do after the law bit ended. We can teach people in house in systems, the job on the outside the good guy bad guy bit hasn’t changed since Robert Peel. It is the back office stuff we let ourselves down on… We should be current; in fact we should be ahead of the game and be able to say what is coming. That doesn’t happen because there is no investment in us.”

Interviewee Three was more balanced when it came to operational competence. They recognised the need for trainers to remain current and suggested a period of reviews for trainers to ensure this happens:

“I think trainers should be subject to six monthly reviews because we are in rapidly changing times, we struggle to keep up.”

Another theme within standards was that of uniform standards and the standards of supervision.

Interviewee Five remarked about the response Wednesday training:

“The sergeants come with their staff and often look as bad as them!”

Interviewee One offered a view on how the hierarchy of rank has softened over the years but concluded that it could be of benefit:

“There are now less bosses than what there was and presumably they have to do more work. The rank structure now is not as austere. Back in the day you know you had to call people ‘Sir’ and stand up when they walked in the room. That doesn’t happen now. There has been a softening of the rank structure and I’m not saying that is necessarily a bad thing.”

Interviewee Six spoke of the need for Sergeants and first line leaders to take a more active role in developing their staff whilst doing the roles they are in:

“First line leaders, Sergeants should be identifying development needs of their officers. Recognising what that officer needs and giving some help, support, and guidance and advising on a development programme. Sir Peter Fahy emphasises he wants natural born leaders, he wants people who can do what they say. Walk the walk, talk the talk and show leadership.”

Interviewee Seven saw it as their role to enforce and uphold uniform standards within the training environment but felt they did not have the support to do so:

“I think it impossible in training to uphold uniform standards when those above you don’t uphold them…We are the middle ground in training. We don’t have the support to discipline from command. I feel from the discipline side of things it is really substandard.”

There were also failings pointed out in officer standards in doing their core functions. Interviewee Six believes that this should be addressed via development reviews but under the current management and with the cuts in budget that Greater Manchester Police are currently only aiming for ‘minimum standards’:

“As development continues your appraisal should pick up on, have you developed in witness management? Have you improved in crime scene investigation? The minimum evidence will never change with uniform response until we implement change. If it is the minimum standard opposed to gold standard and the Chief (Chief Constable) wants minimum then that won’t change until he or she decides to change it. And the training school under our command now will follow the organisational requirement… We have leadership programmes and if we are managing people we should be managing them to achieve above minimum evidence.”

They also recognised a ‘diminishing skill set’ for frontline officers:

“There is a diminishing skill set of the uniformed officer because they are not being allowed to practice it.”

This was echoed by Interviewee Two:

“If there are people out there getting basics wrong like rubbish statements and rubbish files then maybe that should be getting identified and those individuals should be getting particular courses in line with an action plan done by their supervisor.”

Interviewee Four thinks that police training has become too easy and that this impacts on the quality of frontline officer:

“We don’t fail people in training, that’s the truth. You almost pass by attendance. That’s the problem.”

Interviewee Two recognised that standards have slipped and believed that training had a part to play in that but defended the trainers telling me that:

“Not all police training is fit for purpose but there is no value placed on training.”

The interviewees also spoke of the outdated facilities which trainers felt hindered by. Interviewee Five felt ‘embarrassed’ by the standards of equipment at the Sedgley Park site adding:

“We have educated people come from college where they have interactive whiteboards... we need to upgrade”

Interviewee Seven again felt ‘embarrassed’ by the equipment that they are expected to work with:

“I appreciate we have a money issue but the technology we are expected to use is embarrassing. Trainers are constantly contacting us to fix up projectors etc… in HYDRA we have an Apple TV box and stream everything wirelessly from the iPad through it. We need WiFi throughout the centre. We apparently pay an outside company a huge amount of money to come in daily and service our technology. We wouldn’t need to do that if we invested in better kit.”

Interviewee Six felt a pressure to ensure that all aspects of policing were covered in the initial period of training and believed that more could be done with regards to staged learning and ongoing continuous professional development. Although they recognise that there is not always an appetite from the learner for this:

“You can’t train everybody now to train every area and learn everything at the same time there is too much to know in policing. It is that diverse you can only do staged learning throughout your career… although there has to be thirst from the individuals to learn.”

When speaking to Interviewee Four they felt that there was not sufficient recognition for officers and staff attending courses that have been successful and that it impacts on the motivation and desire to learn:

“Certificates have stopped and that boosted personal motivation and gave recognition.”

Interviewee Four also commented on how training was not an enjoyable experience for the learners:

“Training needs to be sexy for want of a better word. As it is now it is dull and it is dire you would rather go sick than come to training class and that needs thinking about.”

Police training was recognised as changing by the trainers interviewed. Some spoke of how it had changed since they joined. This offered an interesting insight into their views of how police training had changed and their thoughts on that.

Interviewee One: “Basically, when I went to Bruche all you did was learn definitions there was no suggestion of any diversity. Diversity came to Greater Manchester Police in 1990 when we got Mr Wilmott, the old chief left and that is when we got diversity. So now we get other issues like diversity and vulnerability which in the past would have been unthinkable…We now recognise vulnerability and mental health back in the day we didn’t. Back in the day it was avoided because nobody recognised it.”

Interviewee One then added how not only training had changed but also the role of the officer:

“When I joined everybody was a thief taker and 99.9% of the cops were cops because they wanted to send people to prison. The major change is now you have a split in the job it might actually be 60/40 you now have people who say they do this job for the victims and I would put that as high as 60% now. 60% of the cops now see the victims as their first priority. Of course when I joined nobody ever admitted that, it was viewed as soft. If you were here to help victims you would have been told to join social services. So that’s been a total culture change it was about thief taking and sending people to prison and the victims were a secondary. Quite often they were badly treated because the system was set up that way. Policing has moved from right wing more to centre.”

They added an example of how this new ‘softer’ style of police training happens:

“On recent self-development days we got service users from a disability centre and I think them coming in was very impactive and that was top end training as people had a bit of empathy with them. Where we bring specialist people in and service users in that I think is the way it should go. We do it on PCSO course when the health service came in and did our mental health training, we also use ‘Choose Life’ who are ex-drug addicts who come in and talk to students about their chaotic lifestyles and offending and I think that is a superior level of training. PCSO’s, new recruits, and response officers get that training.”

Interviewee Three spoke of how the military feeling around policing was now gone:

“The training regime I was brought through was military based it was discipline first and learning second…the way you presented and spoke to people came first before learning the law. Training was done by didactic presentation at the front of the class and humiliation tactics. There was a great onus on passing exams and it was not done in a supportive way it was done in a disciplinarian way… Training changed in the early 90’s and it became more about self-assessment. The classrooms changed from desks to sitting in a horseshoe. Identifying your own learning style and working that into the lessons and things like non-verbal communications came in. That style has stood the test of time for the last 25 years or so.”

Interviewee Four offered a very different view. They believed that people are not getting as good a service from its police as they were previously. They spoke of how the budget cuts that have resulted in reduction in numbers and the police performance culture have diminished the personal touch that was once commonplace:

“Back in the day we used to do things to help people but in the last 10 years we have become a business…we ask ‘can we afford to do it before we help people’ 20 years ago we didn’t ask that.”

Interviewee Five insightfully explained how investigations have changed and now there is more demand on detectives than ever before. They also spoke of the changing ways in which we work and how they perceive that the implemented policing model has de-skilled frontline officers in certain disciplines:

“Detectives need multiple skills…policing is more complex now than it has ever been…Primary investigators a few years ago, primarily those in uniform, dealt with enquiries from cradle to grave. They responded, they took the report, they took witness statements, they processed the prisoner and they understood the outcome because they had to do the prosecution file. Now the model in this force is response do response, neighbourhoods deal with neighbourhood issues and de-skilling has occurred. Plus is the interest level of the response officer the same because they don’t have to investigate any further?”

It was evident through speaking to all of the interviewees that improvement is needed in how the branch works together. All interviewees spoke of how they felt isolated in their own area of business. However, this seemed to be more prominent when interviewing trainers within uniform training. This seemed to create an ‘us and them’ culture. There was an evident lack of knowledge as to what is being done by differing areas of the branch. This in turn created a feeling that each is working harder than the other as nobody seemed to understand each other’s workload.

Interviewee One stated:

“Interfacing with other areas of the branch such as OST and Crime Training is near non-existent. Why can’t crime training get involved with the specials training? You have to question that. We don’t have the right people in the right places when delivering training we could have more specialists you know like statement day get a crime specialist to do it. We have people in branch that we are not prepared to use.”

Interviewee One was asked what the perceived blockage was. Their reply was as follows:

“The blockage is I believe that the people in crime training think they have a higher status and they are here to train detectives and not to train specials and new recruits. I think that is what it is, a status block. It is the same with the other areas of the branch they see themselves as specialist and get status out of it.”

Again linking it to specials training, Interviewee Two asked the question as to why Crime training does not get involved?

“Because specials are uniformed officers it has been decided that uniform training will do all their training. They have lessons on statements…vulnerable people. Well we have a department called crime training why isn’t crime training teaching them? And why after teaching something like statements are they not assessing them on the e-portfolio?”

Interviewee Two speaks of the new E-Portfolio that IPLDP students now have to complete as part of their training and also asks why the Crime Training department do not get involved in training areas they are experts in with IPLDP student officers and Special’s :

“Why I am I training somebody how to navigate around a computerised e-portfolio when we’ve got an I.T. training department? Domestic violence: Why are crime training not training domestic violence to both IPLDP and specials? We can teach them domestic violence we can teach them DASH. However, they’re supposed to be the subject matter experts over in crime training for those particular subjects.”

Interviewee Two was asked what the perceived blockage was and got a similar response:

“They think it is beneath them. They are specialists in their area and they only want to teach specialists. Also, the blockage is it happens on a weekend. If we had specials lessons in the week they would do them.”

Interviewee Six who works in the Crime Training department acknowledged the divide by saying:

“One side does one set of training and the other do the other and never the twain shall meet.”

They then offered an explanation as to why this divide exists:

“Irrespective of specialism we are all police officers there is no barrier in that respect. We are all skilled in the world of training. The barrier is resourcing. To free someone up from our area to move across would be problematic due to the volume of our courses.”

Interviewee Six then dispels any suggestion of elitism and offers a solution. They clearly believe that the matter is one of resourcing and lack of inter branch communication:

“What does this branch need? What can we do to help each other? This is the meeting that needs to happen. To work with purpose. We all see each other on site and get on with each other. We all respect what each other trains but do we really understand what each area does and how that benefits the organisational learning? This is organisational learning and workforce development not uniform training or crime training.”

They then go on to speak about planning and how better forward planning would create a more inclusive working environment:

“If we had a better training plan, classroom planning, forward planning with regards to the force training requirement then we would work better together.”

Interviewee Six acknowledges the need for closer working with their uniformed neighbours and states they would be quite happy to work alongside them:

“I’m quite comfortable to sit over with uniform staff and I know some of my colleagues would be. I think that the culture issue is not us and them. The culture is the training. The fact that uniform train uniform and we train C.I.D. nobody dislikes each other.”

Interviewee Seven who works in a separate area of business to both uniform and crime training felt the ‘tensions’:

“There is a tension between certain units, I can’t put my finger on it and I don’t know why it is there.”

Interviewee Five (a uniformed trainer) told of how they did not know people who work on site that have been here for years. They see the benefits of working together with other areas of the branch and offer a solution in creating opportunities to work together:

“The community of OLWD is segregated… I don’t know people from other training arms, such as crime training or computer training. It is the way the site is laid out. We don’t mix or see each other. We should have cross skilling and have crime training mixing in with uniform training… We could mix the trainers around. I would love to go to public order for a bit. That would be good CPD for me.”

It would appear that some arms of the branch do work well together. That is predominantly down to the type of training that they deliver and that the curriculum or course dictates that they do work together. Interviewee Eight who works in computer training said:

“I’ve worked on quite a lot of projects and train in ICIS (a GMP computer system for file build) and work closely with crime training…We do talk to each other a lot (Uniform Training). We train OPUS (GMP computer system) for example and fit into their timetable.”

Interviewee Two’s earlier question about why computer training did not get involved with the student officers’ e-portfolios was put to Interviewee Eight:

“We were never approached to look at that.”

Interviewee Eight then articulates the benefits of more integrated working and the need for changing the ‘this is my bit’ culture and how this will improve the trainers:

“We could link up a lot of the courses together…work together and have less ‘this is your bit this is my bit’…No disrespect to them but people (trainers) are not using the computers so they are not up to date. There is still a lot of learning to be had… Some people strangely enough are still ‘computer-phobic’.”

Interviewee Four had a more cynical outlook and believed management was the barrier:

“I think we have too many leaders looking after number one. You have the arm benders (officer safety trainers) led by their leadership, computers, crime all led by different leaders. We need to roll together… I see six little units all doing their own thing and that’s not good.”

Interviewee Six shows the need for greater inter-departmental communication and acknowledges that training in different areas would be of benefit to the learner. They particularly see that this would improve Greater Manchester Police’s quality of primary investigation and ask the question as to whether detectives’ working with uniformed officers in the operational setting actually has created this cross pollination of skills that was hoped for:

“There needs to be more input on primary level with new recruits and ongoing learning for our officers. Whether there should be a detective input, I think it would be a positive…What could we (Crime Training) offer? It is quite difficult to understand what uniformed training would want from us? If you have various roles of uniform response, we did have Priority Crime Investigators (PCI), Volume Crime Teams (VCT) for instance. We did train uniformed officers in these roles in primary and secondary investigation. That got stopped when the new policing model came in and that meant that the PCI role and VCT’s went and detectives were integrated into the neighbourhoods. They said that there would be shared learning between investigators and uniform and that would develop in the workplace. Now whether that has ever been measured I am not sure but that was the theory behind it.”

Interviewees spoke about the branch and indeed the forces drive to improve and ensure the well-being of its staff. Whilst speaking on the subject of well-being they spoke of how the government cuts had impacted on them.

Interviewee One said that they did not feel the effects of the cuts in training but warned that they did not expect this to last much longer:

“We are not over worked. There is more work than what we have done in the past but we are not overworked. I can see single training coming in and that would be disastrous when running a course it would start off fine but after a few weeks you would be stressed and exhausted and the quality of the lessons would be affected.”

By single training they mean one trainer in class (at present it is usually two trainers to each class). Interviewee One then speaks of how the cuts to staff have been manageable for trainers but insists that if single training came in it would not be:

“Under Redland they stripped out the admin people and we do our own photocopying and materials and that is manageable but if we went to single training it wouldn’t be.”

Interviewee Two feels the strain of the cuts more than Interviewee one:

“We have lost a lot of personnel in relation to back office work so SDE days, exams and getting lessons done. Now we environment scan ourselves but we used to have a whole team doing it. Keeping up is a struggle… Personally, I think we are in danger of becoming too many things to too many people.”

Interviewee Four speaks about the imbalance that there is in how workload is allocated and how this has a very negative impact on well-being:

“You have officers who will go on the sick with exhaustion quite genuinely and some others who are still sat in the sun.”

Interviewee Five puts a positive slant on the cuts and believes it has identified and eradicated previously unseen wastage:

“Austerity drove justification of everything we do and in some places that was a good thing as it stopped the obscene wastage that was commonplace and is now no longer there.”

Interviewee Six was keen to speak about how mundane routines in training driven by supervision can have an adverse effect on well-being:

“Routines can impact on well-being if you don’t get a break, if you don’t get time for self-development (and you are) constantly training the same course. Finishing a course and starting again with the same course. We will actively be involved in other areas of crime training. It becomes mundane if you keep doing the same. We go out and do interviews, speak with officers about problem areas of crime, work closely with divisional detectives and go to scenes and major incident rooms. This keeps you operationally competent which keeps your work life balance and interest in place. I think it is a good thing but not everybody wants to do it as they are comfortable coming to work and doing 8 until 4 or 9 until 5. There is a need for it.”

Interviewee Six then speaks of how the new agile working system (which allows staff to work from home or a station closer to home when not involved in classroom activities) and also flexible working patterns has had a positive effect:

“We have the benefit of a work-life balance in that the organisation has supported agile processes. They have supported working patterns to ease issues of overtime and we have more flexibility over when courses can be run whether that be an early start or a later finish.”

Interviewee Six had seen a difference within their training area since the cuts and describes how they deliver fewer courses due to the decreasing numbers of trainers. They also point out the importance of identifying the right trainers to deliver the training at the training design phase:

“We used to have 36 detectives in role (crime training) now we only have 20-22 yet we are maintaining the same output. We don’t do financial training, analytical training is reduced, surveillance training, we have had to increase the size of our ICIDP because of reduction in staff. It is all down to capacity but seeking out the right people to do the right training should be identified at the training design phase.”

Interviewee Five told of how a personal investment by the branch in terms of continuous professional development would improve their well-being and would improve their performance within the working environment. They also acknowledged that should such an investment be forthcoming that it is right to stay within training to give back to the branch value for money:

“If you gave me qualifications to help me do my job better I would move mountains for you. You would get me working evenings and weekends in my own time to achieve it. My motivation would go through the roof. And you would get a return from me I wouldn’t expect it for free I would sign on the dotted line and commit to staying in training.”