Technical Ability of More than Police Officers

Abstract

This final aspect, and again one that we feel has been overlooked previously, is the awareness that evidence-based policing goes beyond that of only police officers. Specifically, here we highlight civilian staff such as performance and intelligence analyst (or comparable) functions that many police services have. These are disciplines that in our experience are not under the professional umbrella of social research and are perceived as being separate to evidence based policing. We would argue they should not be. Our work in this area demonstrated to us that many performance/intelligence analysts are not comfortable within social research methodologies. Equally, not all (police) researchers see performance as something they ought to do. This is unfortunate as police services are a goldmine of data that should be routinely mined in more creative/innovative ways generating learning to benefit decision-making. The argument we propose, and the one we have done so throughout the chapter, is to move us away from the craving of achieving only ‘gold standard’ evidence—which of course can play an important role, but cannot routinely answer and arm officers within their daily work. Translating good research into the performance expectations of officers is a skill, and analysts can certainly merge best practice knowledge into crime analysis products.