Warning signs

On June 24, 1994, a US Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bomber, one of the largest and most powerful aircraft ever built, crashed into the ground near Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State, killing the pilot and three other crew members.

During his talk at the 20th Professional Standards and Ethics National Conference last year, Dyfed-Powys Police Chief Constable Dr Richard Lewis used the story of this particular crash to illustrate the importance of engaging in difficult conversations, especially when it comes to confronting those behaving in an unacceptable manner.

The B-52, which had been undergoing practise manoeuvres for a forthcoming air show, was being piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Arthur ‘Bud’ Holland, a 22-year veteran of the air force with more than 5,000 hours of flying time under his belt.

While making a steep banking turn at low altitude, the aircraft had stalled and plummeted to the ground, exploding in a fireball.

The subsequent investigation found the crash was chiefly the result of Lt Col Holland’s personality and behaviour,  the inadequate way his colleagues and superiors had reacted to a series of earlier incidents and the sequence of events and aircrew response during the final flight of the aircraft. My focus is on the first two elements.

On one occasion, Lt Col Holland had put his B-52 into a ‘death spiral’ over the ground where his daughter was playing a game of softball to impress her and her friends.

On another, he performed a ‘hammerhead’ manoeuvre in front of a crowd of spectators to make it appear the aircraft was flying on its side. The stunt put so much stress on the airframe that more than 500 rivets popped out.

Several other incidents followed, including one in which Lt Col Holland asked one of his crew members to video the bombs they were dropping during a training exercise. No sanctions were ever applied.

But in the months leading up to the fatal crash his growing reputation was enough of a cause of concern for some crew members to flat out refuse to fly with him.

“Bud works for you,” Dr Lewis told the conference delegates. “He isn’t flying a B-52 bomber. He or she isn’t always breaking a specific rule that is prohibited by the standards of professional behaviour or a policy that you have, but Bud works for you.

“Bud’s behaviour did not start with manoeuvres in the air which were not always prohibited but dangerous nonetheless. I wonder what sort of character Bud was on the ground. Did he break rules there too? Do you have staff that break rules consistently but aren’t tackled? Perhaps little rule breaks that aren’t addressed that begin to become bigger ones?

“If somebody had pulled Bud aside and said: ‘Oi! What are you doing? Stop it!’ then maybe, just maybe, the accident in 1994 would not have happened.”

Dr Lewis contends that conversations around ethical matters are far more difficult than those relating to professional standards of behaviour: “We kid ourselves that the standards are hard to talk about. It’s not. That’s easy. There is a list of rules that you follow to ensure that we keep our jobs and that we keep the people that work and live in our communities safe.

“Ethics is where the hard conversations happen. It is where there isn’t a rule that’s necessarily been breached, but somebody does need to be picked up.”

Dr Lewis explained that, many years ago, he witnessed one such “hard” conversation first-hand while at a public meeting where a senior police leader had made a number of declarations about what they were going to do for the community. What the leader had failed to mention was that they were planning to close down one of the local police stations just a few days later.

“After the meeting I saw a police constable called Vanessa pull that leader up and say: ‘Oi, I need a word with you’. She then, in a very non-emotional and sober way, began to tear a strip off this leader explaining that what they had done was unethical. And as that person tried to walk away, Vanessa grabbed them by the arm and said, ‘I haven’t finished yet’. She then continued to tell this leader why what they did was wrong.

“Vanessa is still a serving police officer and an outstanding one at that. I want to work with Vanessa. If we have more officers like Vanessa, we would have fewer Buds, I can guarantee you.

“When it comes to asking what is it that we can and can’t do, should or shouldn’t do, that is a much harder conversation, I think, than the one on the professional behaviour, or perhaps hard in a different way.”

He added: “I’ve been the head of a professional standards department and for some people who were dismissed when I was in that role, there was a sadness. A sadness for the person who was wronged but a tiny element for some of those officers on themselves because nobody during the course of their career had said: ‘Oi! Stop it’.

“And several of those cases that crossed my desk would never have occurred if someone like Vanessa had spoken to them in the years before they committed that egregious breach of the rules.

“The work we are trying to do at the National Police Ethics Committee is to engage people in those difficult-to-have conversations.

“I think we can all agree that the organisation within which Bud worked, or the area that he worked within that organisation, had issues around culture and ethical behaviours.

“What are the signs? When people park where they should not, the things that they say which aren’t in breach of the rules but nonetheless make you uncomfortable.

“Some of the influences around that culture are ethical leadership, decision-making, standards and behaviours. Ethics isn’t the soft, easy-going end of the spectrum, it is the difficult end. We have probably all been involved in conversations where somebody somewhere has said, ‘that’s unethical’.

“What we’re trying to do at the National Police Ethics Committee is develop the language and the vocabulary of the police service to actually articulate what we mean when we say ‘unethical’, because it is sometimes a term thrown out there to stop things happening, as a blocker to scare us into not doing something. It doesn’t always have to be that way.

“Articulate what you mean when you say something is unethical because we’re not always able to do that. Instead we point at policies. Bud followed many of the policies of the US Air Force and there wasn’t always a rule that he necessarily breached.

“And that’s a call to arms for all of you not to rely on a policy development to stop that behaviour, which continues in any case. It is not the policy that matters, it is the behaviours as a result of the policy that we have enacted.

Conversations around ethical matters are far more difficult than those relating to professional standards of behaviour

“Policies are nothing more than a pretention, as is the code of ethics, if we don’t live by their values and deliver what it actually means to be an ethical police officer or police staff member or volunteer.

“What are the ethical and cultural challenges in your organisation? Often it is the inability to talk to each other and say ‘Oi! Stop it!’. And explain when it needs to be stopped, not because a policy has been breached but because I think that is wrong.

“That’s a harder conversation to have. I find that conversation hard and if you don’t, you’re a liar. It is hard to tell somebody to stop doing something and to articulate to them why you think they shouldn’t.

“It’s hard for a chief constable to do so we can all recognise how hard that must be for a police constable or police community support officer (PCSO) tacking behaviour which they think is unethical when they are in a building far away from the professional standards department.”

National Police Ethics Committee

Previously known as the UK Police Ethics Guidance Group, a lack knowledge about its existence and function led to a rebranding as the National Police Ethics Committee. A new website, set to be attached to the Dyfed-Powys Police website, is also in development to ensure greater accessibility of the key discussions and decisions that are taking place in the arena.

The committee itself sits every quarter to discuss a host of issues for the police service. It is composed of both police officers and staff members with representatives from the College of Policing, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services and the Home office.

“We also have academics who work in ethics nationally,” said Dr Lewis, “and bishops and a whole host of other people that join us every quarter where we discussed how we’re furthering the ethics conversation in the police service, but crucially to discuss the ethical dilemmas the police service faces.

“We are not on a committee that will say ‘go’ or ‘no go’ for the thing that you are considering. That is not what we do.

“You can’t bring your ethical dilemma and almost being absolved of your responsibility to make the decision for yourself.

“What we are trying to do is to stimulate a debate and to give the decision back to you. What we will do is provide you with a set of questions to consider or people you might want to consult with before you make your decision. That provides you with the reassurance that the decision is still yours to make.

“There are local considerations in your police force which we are unaware of; context which we can’t possibly understand, which is why the decision needs to be locally contextualised. But we can provide you with the support on how you can articulate a decision or what questions you need to ask yourself.

“Another myth: we are not co-conspirators to your decision. If you are looking for somebody to rubber stamp a decision that you have made or think you can say: ‘well I did ask the National Police Ethics Committee and they said yes, so it must be okay’ – that’s not what we do.

“It is about asking questions, holding a mirror up to the decision that you are proposing. But it will be a rich conversation and you will be better for it. And I promise you the decision you make will be better for having discussed it.”

Alongside key responsibilities, such as working closely with the College of Policing to develop the new version of the Code of Ethics, Dr Lewis also plans to raise the profile of the committee itself.

“There are really vibrant conversations happening in ethics committees in local areas that are not percolating up to the national level as often as we like,” he explained. “We need to develop sharper elbows so that people know we exist and that we have those conversations on your behalf and in conjunction with you.

“Please do engage with us on those conversations that you’re having, because they’re far too important to keep to yourself. The discussions you’re having at local ethics committees are going to be of interest to the national committee

“We have developed a number of themes that we will look at over the course of the next two years, but just because we say these things are important to us, it doesn’t mean we aren’t interested in all of your ethical dilemmas.

“We are interested no matter what it is that you’re discussing.

“But in the absence of things coming proactively to us, the committee, in consultation with others, has decided the things that we are interested in discussing so we can provide some guidance and assistance where it is required.

“The first is around digital and data ethics. This world is moving quicker than the law is, so the discussion around the ethical use of digital and data is of broad interest to the police service. We recognised early when this became a priority for us that we didn’t have the vocabulary as a committee and we didn’t have the expertise when people did start coming to us with their ethical dilemmas on matters of digital and data.

“So we now have a subcommittee, which is chaired by the National Crime Agency, has an academic from Oxford University sat on it and a whole host of other genuine experts who are again, by the same ethos, able to pose a number of questions to the person who has the dilemma.

“The fact that a subcommittee has been set up means that both the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and you have a voice in the way we use data for or against particular members of the public.

“The second theme is the policing of mental health issues. There are so many ethical dilemmas that all of you have either faced as police officers or police staff members or as investigators in PSD departments where the way that we police those in mental health crisis are engaged.

“This is an area of policing where we will actively go out and prod our noses as to how we can help you develop practices around ethical policing among those in greatest need that we police on a regular basis.

“The third area is of particular importance and that is ethical leadership. What does it mean to be an ethical leader? It does not mean to be perfect. We may strive to be, but none of us are. How can we be more ethical today than we were yesterday and how can tomorrow be even better than today?

“It’s about setting standards to ensure that people like Bud don’t work for us anymore, or that if they do work for us that they have stopped at the point where they are parking in that place where they are not supposed to park, as opposed to crashing your version of a B-52 bomber.

“Ethical leadership is a theme which has consistently come up as something that needs discussion. That is not solely about the ethics of chief constables, although that is important – we often hear that fish rot from the head.

“As counter-intuitive as this may sound, leaders exist across the police service and they include PCSOs and constables working on neighbourhood teams. We are all leaders in some circumstances within the police service.

“The last of the four themes is the uplift programme. Are there any ethical dilemmas in some of the decision that we are making around the uplift programme? The diversity of the cohort we are taking on board; how quickly we are doing it; the skills and qualifications now required to be a police officer. We think there are a whole host of potential ethical dilemmas that we can help with.”

“We are there to help, we are not there to hinder your work and I would encourage all of you, whenever you get the opportunity, to engage with the work that we do.

“We can help you with those small-scale matters, which are infinitely difficult discussion with your staff members and you can’t point to a policy that has been breached.

“It is the conversations beyond that which we are interested in, the ones that are harder but much more important ones to have.”

Police tech needs better ethical scrutiny

The UK’s “largely analogue police service” needs a major technology update to deal with proliferation of digitally-enabled crime, but new technologies also need much better scrutiny, according to the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales.

According to the 192-page review, while the internet has created new opportunities for crime and harm to take place – particularly with regards to computer misuse offences, fraud and child sexual abuse – police in the UK lack the modern technology needed to deal with this “explosive” shift.

Launched by the Police Foundation think-tank in September 2019 and chaired by Michael Barber, the Strategic Review set out to examine how crime and other threats to public safety are changing, as well as assess the ability of police to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Although the review clearly outlines the need for greater investment in new technologies, it added that police will also need to be mindful of legitimacy as they operate artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems, paying particular attention to striking the correct balance between people’s safety and privacy.

To achieve better tech scrutiny, the review recommended that the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and the National Police Chiefs’ Council should establish an independent National Commission for Police Technology Ethics to consider and advise on new technologies being introduced to policing.

“Police forces and law enforcement agencies should work with the centre on a voluntary basis, but a public register of all police technology projects should be kept, indicating each project’s referral/approval status,” it added.

“We believe a commitment to this kind of rigorous external, expert scrutiny and challenge by non-partisan bodies, representing the public interest, can go some way to establishing police trustworthiness in this fast-developing field.”