Divided opinion

It feels like the word ‘culture’ has become a convenient label for everything that is hard to explain or difficult to fix in today’s policing organisations. Professor Rob Briner has been writing and talking openly about this for some time and the challenge he makes is very bracing: perhaps we should stop talking about culture and deal with behaviours instead.

His point is not that norms, expectations or shared meanings are irrelevant. It’s that culture-talk often gives practitioners a false sense of insight. Saying “the culture is the problem” can sound sophisticated but tell us very little about what needs to change on Monday morning. A more useful starting point is to ask: what are people doing, what happens when they do it, and what conditions make that behaviour sensible?

There is, however, a risk in taking the behavioural argument too far. Organisations are not machines in which one lever produces one predictable result. They are complex social systems made up of people who notice, interpret, adapt and respond to one another. A small shift in a senior leader’s reaction to bad news can ripple through a team. A repeated pattern in meetings can become the unwritten rule. A story about what happened to the last person who challenged a decision can shape behaviour long after the event itself.

My interpretation of Professor Briner’s challenge is that we need to use more precise language when talking about culture. If you lead, supervise or practise in UK policing today and you keep saying “we need to change the culture”, there is a harder sentence waiting behind it: “We need to change what we repeatedly reward, tolerate, ignore and punish.”

After years of intense scrutiny, misconduct cases, falling public confidence and painful evidence of discrimination and failure, nobody in policing can afford to use culture as a comfortable abstraction. Policing by consent depends on legitimacy. Legitimacy depends not only on what forces promise, but on what officers, staff, volunteers and leaders make normal in the everyday moments where standards are either upheld or quietly negotiated.

In this article I therefore move through three connected ideas: why vague culture-talk is not enough, how behaviour and culture form a reinforcing loop, and why changing that loop requires attention to both visible conduct and the shared meanings that sit behind it.

It’s not simple, it’s complex

Police culture is not imaginary. It is very real. But it is real in the way a route through a busy custody suite, a response shift or a specialist unit becomes real. People take the same path often enough that it becomes the expected path. Then the path shapes the next decision, the next conversation and the next recruit.

Repeated behaviour creates a pattern, that pattern then shapes future behaviour, people notice what is safe, what is risky, what wins approval and what creates trouble. New officers and staff learn quickly, not from the Code of Ethics alone on a poster on the wall, but from the raised eyebrow, the private warning, the supervisor who looks away. The team that treats challenge as disloyal or the senior leader who calls for openness, then reacts badly to uncomfortable truth.

So yes, repeated behaviour constructs culture. But once culture has formed, it starts shaping behaviour back. That is why this is harder than telling people to “live the values”.

Policing is a complex, high-pressure, high-discretion system. People adapt to signals, stories, risk, demand, supervision, peer approval and consequence. Leaders are not operating a machine; they are shaping the conditions in which professional judgement is formed.

While it is complex, the question that needs to be asked is brutally simple – what are you making normal and why? Not what you announce, not what appears in the values statement, not what is said at force headquarters, a leadership event or a public confidence meeting. What are you making normal through deployment choices, supervision, misconduct decisions, promotion, performance pressure, silence, humour, informal loyalty and everyday reaction?

If a supervisor reacts defensively to challenge, the team learns never to question. If an officer with repeated concerns is excused because they are “good operationally”, the team learns there are no consequences. If body-worn video is reviewed only after a complaint, the team learns process is meaningless. If the person who raises a standards issue becomes the problem, the organisation learns not to listen to that person any more. Police culture is not mainly what leaders say, it is what the system teaches people to expect.

If you want to change the culture, identify the loop and change it

Before we look at the loop of consequence, consider this question I read recently in a book about thinking deliberately: the author is a university lecturer and he asks every Master’s cohort this question when teaching culture: can you step out of your culture so it does not impact your thinking?

If we were simply talking about behaviours, they could answer yes, by not doing those behaviours. However, most students say no. Why is this?

1. Name the pattern, not the aspiration. “We need a better culture” is too vague. “Supervisors are not consistently challenging inappropriate language on shift” is useful. “We need more trust” is too broad. “People from this community experience our encounters as rushed, unexplained and disrespectful” is useful.
2. Follow the consequences. Behaviour continues because the system makes it make sense. What do people gain, avoid, protect or prove by behaving as they do? Stories are being told about a pattern whose consequences have become too normal to question.
3. Explore the thinking behind the behaviours. Culture is built in real time through how people interpret events, make meaning, choose priorities and respond to one another. In practical terms, this means that if we want to change culture, we must work not only on what people do, but on how teams think together. In the example above of a pattern defined as “Supervisors are not consistently challenging inappropriate language on shift”, we need to understand how supervisors construct the meaning of “inappropriate” in their social setting as it may differ from those who are not in that setting. We need to work with supervisors to help them make their construction conscious so they can explore it.
4. Run operational probes, not campaigns. Try small changes in live practice. Change one briefing format. Review one category of encounter differently. Test one new supervisory rhythm. Introduce levels of complex thinking rather than rank-based mentoring. Watch how the system responds. Keep what shifts the pattern and drop what only creates noise or no change.
5. Measure movement in the pattern. Are poor behaviours identified and challenged closer to the moment? Are public encounters better explained? Are misconduct risks identified before they become scandals? Are officers and staff confident that high standards apply to everyone? If the answer is no, your culture has not changed, whatever the strategy says.

The same loop can be seen in personal experience: people do not only copy behaviours; they inherit stories, assumptions and informal explanations that make certain behaviours feel normal.

One last message

Looking back on my policing career, I can see how these loops operated in practice. For the most part, it was a career I thoroughly enjoyed, but I also remember moments when stories, assumptions and informal credibility shaped whether learning translated into behaviour.

As a police constable, I remember attending courses and thinking: “here we go, you’ve never done the job, but you’re going to tell me how I should do it”. You can imagine how much of the content was transferred into practice!

Later in my career I was a training sergeant, and part of my role was to meet recruit courses and set expectations for behaviour. I was always impressed by their enthusiasm and motivation. On one occasion, a class trainer asked me to speak to a group who were now 18 months into their career because their attitude to an input in class was not “as it should have been”. They had expressed very negative views of a particular community. I decided to ask where those views had developed.

They offered lots of stories and anecdotes, but when I asked about direct experience, there was very little. What became apparent was that their construction of this community had not come mainly from direct contact, but from the anecdotes and stories told by others. Those stories had become shared meaning, and that shared meaning had started to shape attitude and behaviour as if it were fact.

That is why culture without behaviour is rhetoric, and behaviour without culture is only compliance.

The recruit example stayed with me because it showed how quickly stories can become shared meaning, and how easily shared meaning can become practice. Sustainable change needs both attention to what people repeatedly do, and attention to the interpretations that make those behaviours feel normal.

If organisations are complex adaptive systems, then the real task is not to choose between culture and behaviour, but to understand how each continually shapes the other.

Dave Hill is a Senior Research Fellow at the East Midlands Policing Academic Collaboration (EMPAC).