I know this is a favourite topic of mine, but I do despair about how police assessment centre candidates answer questions or deal with role play situations involving inappropriate behaviour. We check literally dozens of forms that describe how the candidate has overheard inappropriate remarks made in public over a period of a few days or weeks, so they wait until they can speak to the victim to see what they want to happen. Having done so, they then have a word with the offender to tell them to stop it, as it is not very nice. This is completely wrong. Think about it. To begin with, why wait? Inappropriate behaviour MUST be challenged there and then. If you wait, you are effectively condoning it, and the victim probably has to put up with more of the same treatment. This is YOUR fault, as you could have stopped it had you acted earlier. Then speaking to the victim. Why do this? If the victim says they want no action taking, would you leave the matter there? Hopefully not, so why speak to them (other than afterwards to explain why you did what you did and offer support). Finally, why speak to the offender in private? You should challenge them in public at once, so that they know immediately their behaviour is unacceptable. The victim knows you are supporting them. Any witnesses will know that if they use the same kind of behaviour you will challenge them. You are also setting an example. Speaking to the offender in private does away with all these advantages. If they get embarrassed because they are challenged over a sexist remark, that is more incentive not to make such a remark again.

Taking any other form of action is soft soaping things, and shows us that you probably have little moral courage. We are looking for people at assessment who would challenge at once, so you need to show us you can play the game. If you do not understand this, you will fail. Police interviews and assessments are designed to test your moral courage, and your ability to behave ethically, and you must understand this.

Had a busy week this week, as we ran large courses in both Southampton and Hatfield. However, when I logge donto my email this morning, I fund the below comment one delegate had obvioulsy shot home and done. We are all very proud of Talking Blues and the success our people have, but the below does make us all feel that we are very god at what we do: Forgive me for blowing our own trumpet, but this comment sums up the company ethos for me. yes, we all go to work to get paid (including you dear reader and me), but we try to get across our passion as well, and clearly here we have. This is why we are so successful in the police recruitment field.

John,

I would like to send you both my utmost gratitude, for the wonderful course you provided yesterday 03/05/09 in Hatfield. I have to be honest your course was fantastic, informative, humorous, a real eye opener. It has been without a shadow of a doubt a) The best £145 I have ever spent and b) The best 10hrs I have ever given time to. The day went really quick and I could have stayed on listening to the wise words. I have to admit I am now quietly confident I will do well on my assessment day, I say quietly because I don’t want to assume. In the weeks leading to my assessment I will be working hard to dissect all the information provided by yourselves and within your guide all the while remembering ‘’Piss poor preparation leads to piss poor performance” Again thank you, and I will keep you guys updated on my progression.

Warm Regards
XX

That kind of comment works for me!
We actually get loads of stuff like that on our feedback sheets, just maybe not quite as eloquent.
Made my day anyway
John

News hot off the press from my buddy in Cheshire is that their police assessment centre dates will be the last two weekends in June. BUT they are only giving people two weeks notice. So, if you are waiting for your assessment date, that is when it will be. I have no idea what justification forces have for not giving people more notice. It takes a lot of organisation to sort out rooms and staff, especially over a weekend as these dates are, so the force knows well in advance when these dates will be. Why they cannot have the common courtesy to notify people earlier is beyond me. To make their own staff work weekends, they will need to give weeks and weeks of notice. They seem to forget that the candidates also have lives, and will have to book time off work (not always easy to do), or make travel arrangements, or arrange childcare or whatever.  In fact, on this subject of preparation for police interviews and recruitment, I could imagine that the lack of notice is a deliberate ploy to limit peoples chances to prepare. Candidates (usually poor candidates) tend not to start preparing until they get an assessment date. So, giving them two weeks notice limits how much advance prep many candidates will do. This of course works in the favour of our students, who we prep up mercilessly, and so perform even beter in comparison to candidates who only started working 2 weeks before the assessment date. That is probably a factor as to why we do so well in getting people into Cheshire.

In any event, the moral of the story is that you need to be aware of the act that a lot of forces whether through inefficiency, incompetence or malice, do not give much notice of assessment centre dates. So, my advice is to work on the basis that you may only ever be a few weeks away from your assessment, and prepare on that presumption.

The same of course goes for the fitness test and final interview (if your force has one. Not all police forces do). I am always amazed when people say to me on courses” I have just been told I have my fitness test, and I only have a week to prepare.” Well, actually , no you haven’t, you lazy bastard, you have had since the day you decided to join the police to prepare, as you always knew you would have to do a fitness test! Same goes for final interview as well. Some forces will call you for final interview within ten days of telling you that you have passed your assessment day. It is no good crying about this, as you should be working on the basis that you may get called at any time anyway. Such is police recruitment, but if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined!!

Following on from the last blog entry, many of you have emailed me saying you are not entirely convinced by the story about integrity. That’s okay, it is good to be a cynic, but ask most operational officers and they will be aware of similar stories. I had one officer on my shift in Cheshire Police who moved to another shift for career development. Within a week, he and a “colleague” locked up a drunk in the town. In the cells, something happened, and the drunk received a facial injury. The result of this was that the officer (who had an outstanding arrest record, and was a person you wanted next to you in a disorder environment) ended up in crown court on a very serious assault charge. He was cleared. Cheshire however then put him in front of a discipline panel, and sacked him on the basis that he had asked other officers to lie for him. As a crown court jury had found him not guilty of the crime to begin with, I am uncertain how he could have asked others to lie (as he had not done anything wrong to begin with), but such is life at police discipline panels!

This same double think is carried on in police recruitment. Using Cheshire as an example again, a few months ago one candidate got fed up (not unreasonably) with waiting for an assessment date and being fobbed off by recruiting. He expressed this frustration on one of the unofficial police forums, such as www.police-information.co.uk, calling Cheshire recruitment arrogant and unhelpful. When he phoned again a few weeks later to see if there was any update, they informed him that his application had been terminated. When he asked why, it was because of his comment on the forum! Naturally, no one in Cheshire recruiting had the courage or decency to call him and tell him this! Personally, whilst he was unwise to put enough information in his forum entry to identify himself, I think he was another victim of high handed bullying. This is why the same force lost 11 recruits a while back, ten of whom were female. This caused such concern that the Police Federation actually highlighted the issue in their magazine. It is a problem in some small forces, the bigger ones tend to be fairer and even handed. Cheshire never saw the link to this, which is probably why in my time with Cheshire I only ever saw two black officers. A staff survey the same year in Cheshire showed 75% of staff felt they were not valued (this was quietly buried after a big fanfare about how important it was to take part and have a say in the future of the force.)

In my time in the job, I cannot ever recall officers coming in and complaining about the residents in such a place, or the attitude of the criminals. No one minded agro from them, it is after all part of the job. What everyone complains about however is the attitude of bosses sometimes, especially those who have never spent any time on the streets.

Still, one can only be thankful that there are still people willing to do the job, not because of the leadership, but in spite of it!

Integrity is an issue that crops up all the time in the police recruitment process (and indeed the police). Whether at the police national assessment process, or at a final police interview, the issue is constantly being monitored. The theory is that any behaviour that is unethical is completely unacceptable, and that is what you must strive for. The reality in many forces is a bit more flexible. In Cheshire police, a little while back, images from the LAPD were circulated around the force by a control room operator. The images were LAPD crime scene photos of an incident where someone was being chased by the police, and had jumped off an elevated freeway to try and escape. Regrettably, they had missed the other freeway they were trying to jump onto, and fallen. In doing so, they had fallen onto a metal spiked fence, like that outside a park or church. The photos showed the persons head actually mounted in effect on the spike from the fall. The body was sitting at the base of the fence. The guy didn’t have a long neck, the fall had detached his head from his body. To make matters worse, he happened to be black. Another force had quickly taken action against everyone who had received this email. Cheshire however in the main had quiet words with people (the original source in the control room resigned). The point is that Cheshire Police took a very softly, softly approach to this, presumably hoping that they would get away without any adverse publicity (which they did). Other forces who were more honest about what had happened caught a lot of publicity. There was a rumour going about at the time that the main reason for this was that one of the control room operators involved was the daughter of a very senior officer (hence informal and non career damaging advice), but even I am not convinced that the force would be this blatant!

My point is that in police role plays and in interview, you need to be seen to be actively challenging inappropriate behaviour of any kind. If you do not (unless your dad is a senior officer), then you will be on your way to failing.