Why police leadership needs more than tough talk

Policing does not have a standards problem because too many people are asking for compassion. It has a standards problem because, for too long, some organisations failed to listen, failed to supervise properly, failed to challenge harmful behaviour early and failed to understand the cultures growing beneath the surface.

There is no credible argument for keeping corrupt, abusive, racist, misogynistic or violent officers in policing. Those who abuse their office should be removed. Public confidence cannot be rebuilt if misconduct is hidden, excused or delayed into irrelevance. Police officers hold extraordinary powers. The public are entitled to expect integrity, restraint, fairness and decency.

But removal is not the same as reform. Punishment may be necessary, but it is not transformation.

Across policing nationally, there is a growing risk that leadership responds to cultural failure by reaching first for the language of toughness. More dismissals. Faster exits. Stronger discipline. Public declarations that the organisation is being cleaned up. These things may satisfy the immediate demand for action, especially after scandal. They may reassure the public that something is being done. They may also give senior leaders a visible metric to point towards.

Yet a dismissal figure tells us only that people have been removed. It does not tell us whether the culture has changed. It does not tell us whether officers feel safer to challenge misconduct. It does not tell us whether supervisors are better trained to intervene early. It does not tell us whether racism, misogyny or homophobia are being confronted in the informal spaces where culture actually lives. It does not tell us whether staff trust internal processes, whether grievance systems are believed, whether whistle-blowers feel protected, or whether minority officers feel heard.

A police organisation can become better at removing people after failure while remaining poor at preventing the conditions that allowed that failure to grow. That is the danger.

Culture is not a spreadsheet

Police culture is not a machine with faulty parts that can simply be removed and replaced. It is an accumulation of stories, loyalties, fears, habits, pressures, humour, silence, coping mechanisms and informal rules. It is carried in briefing rooms, response cars, canteens, WhatsApp groups, late turn conversations, CID offices, custody suites and the moments after traumatic jobs when officers try to make sense of what they have just seen.

The Casey Review into the Metropolitan Police was not just a story of individual wrongdoing. It identified institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia, alongside weak accountability, defensive leadership and a failure to police the organisation’s own internal culture. Although that review focused on the Met, the lessons are national. Similar issues of trust, misconduct, workforce morale, supervision, internal fairness and cultural defensiveness are not confined to one force.

Policing cannot afford to misread the diagnosis. If the problem is framed only as “bad people”, then the solution becomes finding and removing bad people. That is sometimes necessary. But it is not enough. If the problem is also cultural, organisational and relational, then leadership must ask harder questions.

Who allowed poor supervision to persist? Who ignored warning signs? Who promoted managers without testing their ability to lead people? Who tolerated workloads that made reflective supervision impossible? Who allowed informal learning spaces to disappear without replacing their positive function? Who designed systems that made officers afraid to admit mistakes? Who allowed staff to believe that speaking up would damage them more than staying silent?

These questions point upwards as well as downwards. That is why they are uncomfortable.

There is a crucial difference between a culture of standards and a culture of fear.

A culture of standards is clear, fair and values-led. It holds people accountable, but it also explains decisions, supports learning, protects those who speak up and treats the workforce as morally capable professionals.

A culture of fear is different. It is experienced as suspicion, exposure, humiliation and risk. People may comply, but they do not necessarily trust. They may avoid obvious misconduct, but they may also avoid difficult conversations. They become careful rather than courageous.

That is a serious problem for policing. Police officers work in uncertain, pressured and morally complex environments. They use discretion. They make decisions in imperfect circumstances.

They rely on colleagues. They need to be able to challenge, reflect, admit mistakes and raise concerns before problems harden into misconduct. If the internal climate teaches officers that honesty may destroy them, the organisation should not be surprised when silence becomes safer than truth.

Research has repeatedly linked fair internal treatment with ethical attitudes, organisational commitment and officers’ willingness to support proper standards. More recent work also shows the importance of workplace climate and social networks in shaping attitudes towards misconduct and reporting. In plain terms: officers are more likely to internalise ethical standards when they believe the organisation itself is fair.

That does not mean discipline should be weak. It means discipline must be legitimate. It must be consistent, evidence-based and free from political theatre. It must be accompanied by a serious commitment to learning. Otherwise, accountability becomes something done to the workforce rather than something built with them.

The wellbeing evidence points the same way. Studies of policing in England and Wales have identified a gap between formal wellbeing provision and officers’ lived experience. Research on frontline officers has found that organisational stress — fear of repercussions, stigma, mistrust, performative wellbeing support — is often experienced as more damaging than operational trauma. That should concern every police leader.

An organisation cannot say it wants openness while making people frightened to speak. It cannot say it wants learning while punishing every admission as failure. It cannot say it wants cultural change while ignoring the internal conditions that make ethical behaviour more or less likely.

From canteens to keyboards

Police culture has also changed shape.

The old informal spaces of policing were never perfect. Canteens, station bars, parade rooms and car journeys could reinforce exclusion, cynicism and unhealthy loyalty. They could also provide mentoring, humour, emotional repair and informal ethical learning. As estates have been rationalised, workloads intensified and digital communication expanded, much of that culture has moved elsewhere. And much of it has moved online.

WhatsApp groups and private messages can expose harmful behaviour because digital communication leaves a record. High-profile misconduct cases have shown how online spaces reveal racism, misogyny, bullying and dehumanising humour. But exposure is not the same as transformation, and the fact that misconduct becomes visible online does not mean the underlying culture has been dealt with.

A punitive response may even push culture further underground. If officers believe the organisation is mainly looking for evidence to remove people, they may become more guarded, more coded and more defensive. They may stop having difficult conversations in places where leaders can hear them, retreating into trusted private networks. That does not end culture. It simply makes it less visible — and harder to address.

The stronger response is not to romanticise the past. It is to rebuild legitimate spaces for ethical discussion, peer challenge and reflective learning.

Police officers need places where they can talk honestly about trauma, frustration, fear, prejudice, mistakes, moral uncertainty and resentment before those issues become misconduct, burnout or cynicism. That requires skilled supervision, time, trust, and leaders who understand that culture cannot be commanded into health.

The national leadership challenge is therefore not simply how to remove those who fall below the standard. It is how to create organisations where harmful behaviour is less likely to grow, less likely to be ignored and more likely to be challenged early.

That requires a different leadership model. Effective leadership in complex organisations distinguishes between administrative, enabling and adaptive functions. Policing clearly needs administrative leadership — rules, governance, consequences and clear standards. But culture change also needs enabling leadership: the creation of conditions where people can learn, speak, adapt and solve problems. And it needs adaptive leadership from the frontline, where officers and staff closest to operational realities help shape practical reform.

Too much police reform still feels command-led. It assumes that senior leaders diagnose the problem, issue the plan, tighten the process and measure compliance. That may change behaviour on the surface, but it rarely reaches the informal culture beneath.

Fear damages learning. It makes people hide problems. It encourages compliance theatre. It protects reputations in the short term while weakening the organisation in the long term. A force that wants to prevent misconduct needs early warning — which means informal challenge, honest escalation, and officers who trust that raising concern will be treated as professional courage rather than organisational betrayal.

Whenever this argument is made, the predictable response is that policing cannot afford softness. That misses the point.

The alternative to punitive leadership is not weak leadership. It is fair, courageous and relational leadership. It is entirely possible to remove corrupt officers while rejecting fear as the main instrument of change. It is possible to be uncompromising about racism, misogyny, corruption and abuse while still building psychological safety for those trying to challenge those cultures. It is possible to hold people accountable while recognising that culture is produced systemically.

In fact, that is the harder form of leadership. Punishment after exposure is often simpler than prevention before scandal. Condemnation is easier than reflection. Removal is easier than rebuilding trust. Public toughness is easier than institutional humility.

But policing needs more than toughness. It needs leaders who are prepared to ask whether their own systems, decisions and behaviours have contributed to the culture they now condemn. It needs leaders who understand that officers are not merely risks to be managed, but professionals whose voice, judgement and legitimacy are essential to reform.

It needs supervisors with the time and skill to lead difficult conversations. It needs workloads that allow reflection rather than constant survival. It needs staff networks, whistle-blowers and minority officers to be believed before crisis forces the organisation to listen.

Above all, policing needs cultural leadership — not to protect poor behaviour, but to understand how behaviour is formed, reinforced, excused or challenged. That insists on high standards while building the ethical conditions in which those standards become lived values rather than imposed rules.

That is the shift policing now needs: from fear to fairness, from blame to learning, from public toughness to internal legitimacy, from punishment after failure to prevention before harm.

The public do not need a police service that simply becomes better at removing scandal after it has been exposed. They need one that becomes better at preventing harm in the first place.

That will not happen through punishment alone. It will happen when police leadership accepts that culture changes not through fear or slogans, but when people believe the organisation is fair enough to trust, honest enough to listen and courageous enough to learn.

Paul Matthews is studying for a PhD in police leadership at De Montfort University