Police Assessment and integrity

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.

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