London Police says that they use a “swoop in” approach, meaning they treat calls on a case-by-case basis. The new project wants officers to think about how calls could be related.
The London Police Service could be seeing some big changes in the way they handle crime.
Detective Andrew Whitford has been working with crime analytics for the past couple of years and presented a plan before the Police Services Board on how to modernize policing. He suggests using crime statistics based on locations and those committing crimes to better have a sense of what leads to crime, rather than taking a case-by-case approach.
“On the ground, what this looks like is they’re getting information back that links the calls together. So we can call a group of calls for service a ‘problem’ which may be linked by a location, by an offender. Once the street officers have that information… they can address the problems in a different way,” said Whitford after his presentation.
Whitford was adamant about changing the way that officers think about policing. During his presentation, he explained how officers often have the common goal of helping the public by arresting criminals. What he points out though, is that there should be more collaboration between police and social services so that repeat offenders aren’t continually arrested because of addiction or homelessness.
Whitford’s plan is ambitious, as he wants to educate every officer on critical thinking so they can adjust their problem-solving abilities while on patrol. “Long term, it’s not so difficult [to implement his plan]. We’re doing it slowly, it’s going to be a multi-year process. Training the officers, having the officers actually take the training and live it,” Whitford explained. “We don’t just swoop in, deal with something then swoop back out. We actually spend much more time dealing with the underlying causes.”
Whitford’s model is something that has been implemented in other systems around the world. “Great Britain is ahead of us in this,” he explains. “There’s an awful lot of research and an awful lot of implementation at the line level…of identifying the underlying problems and working towards and having dedicated units to spend the time on it.”
Whitford continues, “So, instead of a patrol officer having to respond to a call for service to be met but may not have the time, that can go to our specialty units and they can dig into the underlying issues and use our expertise, analytics and research to come up with novel solutions.
Whitford’s project comes as the London Police Services got their four-year budget approved, with significant increases coming to both equipment and personnel for London Police.
