Women In Policing: the challenges facing equity and inclusion initiatives
Women In Policing: the challenges facing equity and inclusion initiatives
Host: Avery Moore Kloss
Guests: Tim Prenzler, Jennifer Brown, Jenny Fleming and Marisa Silvestri
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(‘CRSP Talk’ Theme Plays)
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AVERY: Welcome to CRSP Talk, a podcast from the Centre for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. I’m Avery Moore Kloss. On this podcast, we dive into the research being done by CRSP members and their colleagues around the world. And today we have really taken around the world to heart. Our guests for this episode come from the UK and Australia with CRSP executive producers Debra Langan and Carrie Sanders here in Canada. The reason we book guests from across the planet is because we are able to speak to some of the most foremost researchers on the topic of diversity in policing. Before we hop into this one, I want to get really clear about what we mean by diversity in policing. We focus this discussion largely on women in policing, or rather how police services are fairing when it comes to the number of male versus female officers at all ranks. While our guests do venture into discussion about racial and socioeconomic diversity, largely what we are talking about here is women in the ranks. Our guests today also wanted to be really clear about what they mean by diversity and for that I’m going to introduce you to our first guest, or you know what, I’m going to let her introduce herself
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MARISA: My name is Marisa Silvestri and I am a Reader in Criminology at the University of Kent. With regards to my research, I have had sort of the last 25-30 years I can never keep track of doing research around policing and gender issues. So my PhD, many many years ago was the first study that was undertaken on senior women in policing in the UK so that was lovely and I think that ever since then I have just built on my research but I do wear another hat which is a gender crime and criminal justice hat so I think I would say that gender are the lenses that I would wear but they really inform the whole criminal justice system with a particular interest in gender and policing. Both masculinities and femininities and how that plays out for both citizens and officers.
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AVERY: We are leading with Marisa today because she was really clear about what she means about diversity. So, here goes
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MARISA: I think it’s really really important that on the outset here that we don’t confuse and compound diversity with equality. Now, they are very very very different things. They are different beasts, and diversity is something that forces us to focus on counting things and counting them in numeric. So how many diverse people do we have in policing and whilst I completely call for this counting exercise, it is a really important way to map where we are. Honestly, it masks a whole host of inequalities within and between groups and if we keep focusing on simply numbers which diversity forces us to do, it enables police organizations and actually any organization to claim success.
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AVERY: And we’ll talk about those inequalities as we go along, but first I thought we could key into why diversity matters in policing. It’s a question we pose to all four of our guests today. But I’m going to have Marisa start us off. Marisa says diversity affects all organizations including higher education, it matters to us all. But when it comes to policing, she says, she thinks it's about state authority.
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MARISA: It’s about power, it about protection and I don’t really think we can underestimate that the power that the police have as gatekeepers. I sometimes think that because as sometimes as criminologists, and as observers of criminal justice, we tend to focus on the end point in terms of prison. But actually we forget the really powerful impact that police officers have in opening that gate either to protect potential victims or actually criminalize potential suspects who offend. So, they really have enormous power. So, I think diversity therefore really matters when it comes to thinking about ideas of legitimacy in policing. I mean often when we think about diversity, I think that the business cases what’s put forward and particularly by the private sectors if you read a lot of literature around qualities and organizations. They focus on the need for diversity because it brings different views to an organization, it brings different styles to the table, and it kind of helps to aid transformations. Particularly, for organizations that need to transform themselves.
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AVERY: We pose the same question to Tim Prenzler. We spoke to Tim from his home office in Australia.
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TIM: My name is Tim Prenzler. I’m a Professor of Criminology in the School of Law and Society at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. I’m interested in crime prevention and corruption prevention. There is very strong evidence, that particularly in terms of gender diversity, improving the percentage of female officers will greatly improve the quality of police services. We know that there is this very long history of corruption and abuse of power by police in basically every country in the world and that’s being closely associated with the male domination of police departments and so breaking that nicks us between macho culture, male domination and corruption and excessive force is a really key mechanism to improve police-community relations and generate more effective police forces around the world that are more responsive to the communities they serve. And so the evidence is pretty clear on this study. Women attract much lower rates of complaints than male officers.
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AVERY: For this episode, we also spoke to a pair of researchers with extensive experience in researching women in policing and since they do so much work together, we also interviewed them together.
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JENNIFER: I’m Jennifer Brown. I have been in the researching women in policing for more years than I care to say. It began when I actually worked for a police force in Hampshire. I am currently a visiting professor at the Manheim centre at the London School of Economics and I am continuing my collaboration with Jenny Fleming, and we hope well be able to tell you a little bit about our work in this podcast.
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JENNY: Okay, my name is Jenny Fleming. I am a professor of Criminology at the University of South Hampton. I would probably describe myself as a policing scholar more generally. So, yes, I do, policewomen linking quite strongly with professionalism and leadership. I think in public service generally, diversity matters. And we talk about, on that first broader sense, we talk about reflecting the community you serve. So, I think that is the first broad answer. We know, criminologists and psychologists, we talk about legitimacy and the theory of that is essentially we are more likely to comply, we are more likely to cooperate, we are more likely to obey, if we feel that those people who are asking us to comply and obey can be trusted and we have confidence in them. I think if those authorities when they reflect your community in very strong ways whether it be gender whether it be ethnic, disability, whatever, that’s really important. So, I think diversity matters because when you have got stronger representation of differences or different communities or different peoples in any organization, it brings greater knowledge of all things different. In policing when you are connecting all the time to different people, and different situations, that knowledge is absolutely important for successful connections and understandings, I think.
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AVERY: What Jenny says here directly connects with something that Marisa Silvestri thinks a lot about. She says diversity is about social justice.
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MARISA: It's absolutely consistent with the principles of the democratic society. Those who are in power should actually represent the communities that they police. I think we all know it’s a truth, that you know, some groups, particularly non-white groups are disproportionately policed. And we also know there is a lack of protection afforded to women and those who experience gendered forms of victimization. Now, if the reality is that our police workforce is in the hands, hearts, and minds of a predominately white male workforce, that will have implications on how they undertake there role undeniably. For me, I think in order to give legitimacy a chance we need to have diversity from the outset. So, those in power need to share power with all of us in order for us to have confidence in that state authority. Whereas before we had some external changes by law so policing were forced to respond to those, I think now we have changes coming from within the police service themselves. So, the last particularly ten years, and the kind of rapid development of diversity within policing and diversity discourses has come from within the police in an attempt to really diversify to change its role and to rethink its positioning. And again, they’re just incredibly poor behaviour, and ongoing kind of high-profile scandals of corruption and poor behaviour and cultures of misogyny. So those changes now are coming from within, rather than outside. And instead of some ways that might create greater success in the future
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AVERY: It's no secret that police services across the planet struggle with achieving meaningful diversity. There are many challenges to both recruiting diverse applicants and seeing those successful applicants rise in ranks to leadership positions. Tim Prenzler from the University of Gold Coast says that the rate at which women apply to police jobs is traditionally very low. Even if you remove structural discrimination like inappropriate physical tests for entry, gendered language in recruitment processes, and all-male selection panels.
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TIM: There is still often a problem with just proportionately low application rates. So, it would seem that if you remove all those barriers and you open up policing to women, for example, probably about one-third of applicants will be female. And they will be recruited based on merit. If you have policies where you strongly encourage women to apply such as recruitment strategies, like targeted advertising, when you use social media or go to schools that kind of thing and say we want women, we are encouraging women, and where you perhaps profile female officers, you might get an increase in applications and it still is a long way from 50%. So, I think that the main obstacle seems to be getting application rates up when the system itself is supportive and non-discriminatory.
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AVERY: So why are women not applying? Largely Tim says, it's an internal culture problem or a perceived internal culture problem.
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TIM: One of the big obstacles is changing the informal culture. Uhm so, sexist jokes and sexist language and informal discrimination, particularly by supervisors, in rostering and training and opportunities to work at a higher level or move into specialized areas. So there needs to be a lot of training of supervisors, particularly when it comes to things like rosters and general management of staff aspirations. There are negatives like lack of encouragement, lack of role models, women feeling isolated. There is some research that shows that women possibly contemplating joining the police feel that they won’t be welcome. There are also persistent stereotypes that policing is a dangerous and a physically demanding job. There are also persistent stereotypes that males are more genetically suited to do police work than females. So, there are these inhibiting factors, out there in the community that stop women applying to join the police force for sure.
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AVERY: Marisa Silvestri says beyond women feeling not welcome women and minorities are also very aware of very public cases of police misconduct in the news.
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MARISA: Why would anyone want to join the police given the ongoing hideous and scandalous high-profile cases of their poor practice? So, it will always be an impediment to recruitment. So, you know they often talk about why being a rebel of these recruitment strategies, why can’t we get the numbers of black and minority groups up, why can’t we get women to stay? When it’s pretty obvious, I mean lots of people simply do not want to join the police anymore. I mean, these heinous cases that I talk about might galvanize some to join and make a difference but generally, it will deter a lot of people from joining. I mean, who wants to be part of this kind of failing organization with such shameful behaviour?
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AVERY: Jennifer Brown from the London School of Economics says at the same time in the UK at least, the drive for attracting more female officers has actually waned in recent years.
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JENNIFER: In 2010, there were 25% women, now there are 32%. In terms of ethnic minority officers, in 2010 there were 4.5% and there are now 9.5%. although I would say these still aren’t reflective of the proportions in the populations. We have 14 % BAME population in England and Wales, and 51% women. Although the numbers are improving, we are at a disparity. The second probably big development what we’ve seen is an oscillation in the energy of promoting equal opportunities policies. I think in the preceding decade, there was some energy in developing policies and trying to implement them. In 2010, we had the introduction of a huge austerity-measured government where by numbers in policing were dramatically reduced and were under huge pressure and our colleague Wendy Laverik has been looking at this in particular and actually shown some pushback in terms of the way in which equality policies, especially in respect to gender issues has actually taken a back seat. So, where progress was being made in terms of getting women into a wider range of policing specialists and into rank, we’ve seen a bit of a retrograde commitment really and certainly with gender issues that have very much taken a back seat.
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AVERY: Jennifer says that one of the problems here is that with austerity measures also comes a loss of space and interest in creative solutions to solve diversity issues.
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JENNIFER: Because they were so charged to deliver policing service with reduced numbers and that really concentrated the mind and narrowed their focus. So that things that they may have tried experimentally or innovatively really got sidelined by this pressure to manage under these conditions of austerity.
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AVERY: Now, Jennifer says it has been left to interest groups like the Black Police Association, the British Association of Women Police and Senior Women in Policing to keep diversity issues on the agenda. And well, present governments have promised to restore the number of officers lost during the austerity years, it’s still unclear how that will play out in actually rejuvenating a renewed interest in recruiting in a diverse way. But there’s a complication to the conversation of recruiting when it comes to women. Research in this area shows that police services have been getting better at recruiting women, the bigger problem now is keeping women on the force
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JENNIFER: Thinking about what these impediments are, I think the first thing to say is in the British Policing Model, you enter as a constable, and you work your way through the rank structure and if you’re successful you will succeed in getting senior rank. And we call this the traditional career pathway, but it assumes full-time work and no breaks in employment.
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AVERY: I think it's important to stop here and get really clear and think about how this path to constable to leader position works in police models and Jennifer has a brilliant way to illustrate this. We’ll call it the Policing Christmas Tree.
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JENNIFER: If you imagine a Christmas tree which is a rather elongated triangle, the base of our Christmas tree is the comfortable rank which is 70% of the officer establishment. As you progress up the Christmas tree, your sergeant rank, your inspector level rank, your superintendent level rank, your chief officer rank, so the star at the top of the tree is the Chief Constable, and we have one. The bottom of the tree is our constables which is 70%. Those 70 % are not going to be able to progress all the way up to the top because the slots are limited and are more limited the higher up you go. In fact, they have stripped out a good portion of the superintending ranks and their span of control has become much larger than the number of peopleoccupying those ranks smaller. The opportunities to progress through the rank structure is really limited.
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AVERY: One of the major problems women have in progressing up the Christmas tree towards that star is something Jennifer hinted at before. Time.
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JENNIFER: If you're going to make those transitions, and of course for women who wish to have families, and they take career breaks, maternity breaks, and that breaks the traditional trajectory. That holds them back in two different ways. One, because they don’t get the experience in the ranks sufficiently, and they’re always playing catchup. And two, they may not get the opportunity to have the diversity of portfolio of those experiences. So, when you go for your promotion, you’re finding yourself at a disadvantage because you haven’t got an unbroken career pathway, and you haven’t had the same opportunity to diversify your portfolio so that you're offering a more limited range of experiences.
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AVERY: Tim Prenzler says often this is where police forces also lose the women officers, they have spent so much time trying to recruit.
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TIM: This is a simplification, but I think often what happens is women come into policing in their early 20s and then, by their mid to late 20s they start having children and then after they have their first child they might get back to work and then they think they might want to have their second child and then they think oh it’s too difficult to go back to work, so they resign and take on full time caring, or they try to juggle part-time work.
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AVERY: What Tim and Jennifer are saying is that women get stuck at those bottom branches of the Christmas tree because they want to start families and raising that family means they can’t put in as much time as their male counterparts who are climbing the Christmas tree in their absence. With a lack of part-time and flexible option in police work, it becomes an untenable career path for many women. But still, at all levels of the Christmas tree women have a harder time climbing towards that start at the top. And Jenny Fleming says there’s more research to be done about why that is and why there is such a lack of female leaders rising to top levels.
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JENNY: By the time women are sort of coming up the ranks if you’re lucky, very few of them are getting past the chief inspector role forward to superintendent then forward to ACC. Increasingly, that is the case. So I think a lot of research needs to be done now, particularly in the UK where there’s an awful lot of chief constable vacancies and they're being left vacant for a very long time and I suspect research would give us some indication that women are getting more opportunities now to get into those but there is still not a pool of people to choose from. I suspect and that’s one of the issues. And again, straight back to what we were just saying before those whole organizational traditions about working, recruitment practices, you know what you need to be a leader
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AVERY: Jenny says that in the UK there has been a very recent example about what she is talking about here.
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JENNY: I was on the panel for a chief constable for Hampshire a few years ago and in fact in the end there was only 2 applicants. The existing deputy chief constable who was a man and a female officer who was then a deputy chief constable, assistant chief constable from another force. And you know they were both very good, but she was in my mind, perhaps you know bias, better, and I was surrounded by men mainly, and the resistance to appointing her was really interesting. Around wow, she doesn’t even live here, well neither does your existing DCC. “oh yes but she’s got a family.” All the things that you can't believe still come up in conversation absolutely did. And that's why, we’re talking a few years ago. Fortunately, she got the job. But you know, not without some resistance. I expect it was almost subconscious resistance. So that whole organizational or traditional culture about who should be leading. I think, it is relevant for the leadership as well.
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AVERY: Marisa Silvestri agrees, she says if it doesn’t stop women from applying in the first place, it affects their growth in the organization later.
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MARISA: The fact that it's just a really difficult career to have particularly as a woman if you want to have a life outside of work. For example, you know that you’d like to have children or a family, but it’s a very very difficult occupation to manage that. I mean, most occupations are very difficult for women who want to have family and work-life balance. Particularly policing given its shift nature, work of patterns, the demands, so you know that kind of rigid kind of career structure that exists in policing. I think this also is a leading impediment to why we can’t simply diversify policing.
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AVERY: For Marisa, there is something else at play here too. What she calls the “masculinized culture of leadership” that’s seen in many police services across the planet
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MARISA: So they often do this work, it's very clever qualities work from the background. But they’ve also, from the women I’ve spoken to in the past, a lot of them do subscribe to the cultures of leadership that’s very masculinized cultures of leadership because they argue that the game is worth playing for, without changing the parameters actually. So, this hyper-masculinized police role that I try to dismantle in my work caused something else. Actually, lots of the women I speak to are actively involved in engaging and reinforcing because they wish to be part of that game, it still is really a terrific job to be involved in even though they experience often, some great discrimination over the course of their careers. Of course, it’s sometimes through interviewing these women that you get a sense in which they can take the time to reflect over their lives and recognize things for what they really were. So, to see the missed promotions actually as a culture of discrimination.
Often you accept lots of things that happen to you on the way and you don’t realize what’s going on here. And I think the senior women are very clued up on this. I just get this feeling that they underdo quality work, very quietly and in the background and kind of very chipping away while also simultaneously taking part in what they believe to be a rewarding career if not very difficult. I realize that masculinity at the top of policing is really multifaceted. So masculinity, sort of within the police is really multifaceted, and managerial masculinity is very different to that form of masculinity that is expressed at lower ranks. But it’s there, and there’s no doubt that women experience this, but it’s a different form its more a competitive form of masculinity, a culture of presentee, for example, she’s always talking about how time is expressed in different ways, to be tough and forceful and decisive, and different forms of culture different forms of masculinity although equally gendered. So, culture for me I think remains really powerful, remains a really powerful way to subvert policy, really powerful way to maintain, I think inequality. When I think about occupational culture, as I mentioned earlier but I do think there is an increasing culture in policing of increasing diversity fatigue. I think that’s increased at all levels of being sort of fed up of sort of talking about difference and diversity.
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AVERY: And so that sparks a different conversation. If women can successfully take that top spot, the star on the Christmas tree, how are they treated and perceived in an occupation led by, as Marisa Silveresti said, led by masculinized culture of leadership? Jennifer Brown says one of the challenges is that much of police leadership is still transactional.
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JENNIFER: Still very can-do rather than transformational leadership which traditionally we find are women’s styles of leadership. So, when you're going for promotion, the idea that the promotion, that are stacked usually with male officers I have to say, who are going to promote in their own image and their likeness and are going to respond more positively than to some who has this can-do approach rather than what they see as a weaker leadership style. There are still sidelines of very male-dominated areas of policing and those are things like firearms, dog handling, road policing, public order policing, where there is again highly focused can-do, macho element to it that women do find very difficult to break into often because they may well be the first or one of very few and they are trying to make their way, and Francis Heidencin has a nice phrase for this, which is they are seen, if successful, as a case of exceptionalism, in other words “oh well, we are very surprised that you as a woman, can do well, but we don’t assume all women can do this” if the woman doesn’t do so well, it’s a class action.
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AVERY: Jennifer says beyond that, even to keep those “cases of exceptionalism” holding onto that top role is difficult because of a culture of bullying.
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JENNIFER: We still have examples from our own research of bullying and coercive controlling behaviour of senior women who find themselves, often in a singular minority at very senior level. And we also have a relatively new governance arrangement whereby there is an elected police and crime commissioner, and we’ve had several examples. Two particularly that I can call to mind where a women chief constable have been subject to the most appalling behaviour by this police and crime commissioner. So much so, that they have both felt obliged. One to retire early, and one to move on to another appointment. So those relationships can actually work against women wishing to put themselves into those very difficult working relationships
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AVERY: Tim Prenzler says he’s seen similar behaviour targeted at women in high-ranking roles in Australia as well.
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TIM: Certainly in Australia, the first female police commissioner that we had in Victoria, Christine Nixon, she faced a major campaign against her from the police union and other senior officers and some rank-and-file officers. I think the problem for her was that she was brought in from the outside, but being a female and being an outsider was like a double jeopardy situation for her. So, one of the problems she had in advancing a major reformer gender she had was very strong resistance, quite overt opposition from groups within the police and associated groups outside such as the police union.
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AVERY: How women are brought into the police organization and at what level is also something our guests had something to say about. For many years two of the foremost solutions pitched to help increase diversity among ranks were called direct entry and fast track. Direct entry saw women from other industries placed into senior positions like sergeant and inspector, without ever putting in time as a constable. Whereas fast track saw women start at the constable level and then moved up to senior positions quickly. For example, in the UK it was a three-year track. Think of Jennifer Brown’s Christmas Tree Analogy. Instead of starting women officers at the bottom branches, women with diverse work backgrounds are added to the service in the middle of the Christmas tree or they start at the bottom and jump branches quickly. In 2018, Marisa Silvestri says she wrote a speculative paper on direct entry when it was still a rather novel idea.
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MARISA: I talked about it in that paper as potentially a really disruptive tool because what it could do, could actually rather than tinkering around the edges with equalities policy, here we have a policy that we have for the first time, actually tries to shake up the core meaning of what it means to be a police officer. Time gets disrupted here because arguably you could join as an inspector, or a superintendent as was the case. It’s a really really radical approach to changing the ideas and diversifying policing. I did argue that could be a hugely disruptive tool, not just in terms of embodied diversity but in terms of bringing about a diversity of thought. It did bring a higher number of women into the force and it argued that direct entrance did make a difference, so they were much more open and inclusive and empowering and in style and more collaborative and less hierarchical and they had this kind of transformational style about them and they were winning to challenge ways and norms and ways of doing things. But of course, they undoubtedly suffer from issues of credibility and authority and there’s lots of examples there. Unfortunately, the studies by the College of Policing weren’t gendered but I think you can read between the lines there and make some kind of summations there around those credibility contests that might exist to particularly women who were deemed to be not authoritative enough in leadership positions, so if you can get their direct attention of course your authority will be questioned
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AVERY: That trend of female leaders brought in through direct entry of fast-tracked facing non-compliance from subordinates because of their pushback on organizational reform is something Jenny Fleming saw too.
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JENNY: What you get then is the occupational culture sweeping in to kind of foil some of those efforts, and then you get those opportunities for existing dinosaurs as we might say men and women who have traditional views about who should be in and who should be out and the way in which they need to come up through the ranks.
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AVERY: Which means the program brought in through the help, ensure women are given leadership positions made it even harder for women to hold ranks at the top of the policing Christmas tree.
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JENNY: They were being blocked and they were leaving because their potential or their expectations of the roles that they were told they could expect never really materialize. We do have a couple of really successful people on direct entry that are still in the system. But direct entry is also on pause because essentially, I would go as so far to say it was more or less blocked by senior probably male officers in the system.
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AVERY: Here’s Jennifer Brown.
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JENNIFER: I mean I would just emphasize that the rank-and-file discredit the direct entrance partly because you haven’t won your spurs so you haven’t been through the rank structure, you don’t know the rank-and-file experience, you haven’t had that span of operational exposure. And so, if you were put in charge of a public order event or firearms operation, there’s a loss of confidence for you know what you're doing and you can draw on your own experience and the second element is the procedural injustice as they see it. Which is, I’ve paid my dues, I’ve put my time in, and this often-graduate drops in at senior rank and my 15, 16 years counts for nothing, and my slot has been taken and I’ve lost my opportunity for my promotion. So, they see it as inherently unfair, and police officers in my experience, have both direct and subtle ways of actually showing how they disapprove of a particular person. I think in the army it was called insolent. But they do have ways of subverting when the authority of their senior officer even though it is a very highly structured, hierarchical organization. But there are lots of ways you can undermine your senior
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AVERY: One of the changes being made, including in direct entry hires, is a move toward professionalization of police officers. Something that’s been happening for a few years in the UK and now is being applied to higher rank practices in Canada. It’s a push to advance equity, diversity and inclusion by increasing educational requirements and professionalization training. Jenny Fleming says that where she wants to see more research done in the future.
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JENNY: It’s essentially a college driving a professional qualification framework that in fact is pushing recruitment of people with degrees. This goes right back to conversations that you may have with Tim, but with others who have dealt with corruption and misconduct where they have felt that more educated people are more likely to lessen kind type of practice within the organization. So on the same level, the college believes that more educated people will be more likely to introduce a sense of professionalism and therefore potentially a more equitable, diverse and inclusive workplace. Now this is to be tested, and probably not in my lifetime, but currently there are 3 ways to get into the police force in Britain and they all require you to get a degree or have a degree before you come in.
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JENNIFER: I think when Jenny and I talk to police officers, if you talk about this professionalization of gender, they get very upset because they have entirely different conception what they understand being a professional is. Of course they have done it without the preparatory work and the evaluative work, I’m skeptical myself to see if it will succeed because as one of my colleagues said all they’ve done is to put police training skills and put them on campus because these cohorts of young officers are often carolled- into specialist courses and they are not into mingling with the student body, they often wear uniform, they are often called away from classes because operation of contingency, they are being paid as police officers and they need to be on duty.
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AVERY: Jenny Fleming says when it comes to research, she has a long list of must-haves but there is one in particular she wants to see the results of.
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JENNY: I’m not going to be able to do this because I’ll be old and dead probably, but I would like to be looking 5-10 years down the track at the impact if any, on the whole experiment of the professionalization program. One of the things that is so disappointing to me, and for most of policing scholars is the lack of evaluation that the organizations do themselves of new initiatives or anything at all for that matter. So, they don’t want us to do it, and they won’t do it. If they do, do it, like for example the direct entry thing they had me look at, you know, it’s very basic, it’s very KPMG I would say. So, in some ways what I would really like to do it to be and able to, because if you’re going to evaluate, you’re going to have to evaluate from the beginning, you’ve got to be putting your markers and you’ve got to be looking at it from the beginning. I’d love to have been able to see if there is going to be any difference to an organization where the culture is slightly more collegial, where it is more equitable, more diverse, more inclusive. I suspect this is not the answer, but it would be very interesting to have a look at it.
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AVERY: On Jennifer Brown’s list of research must-haves, beyond professionalization, is the impact of new professional standards.
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JENNIFER: I think ethics and policing. I think instilling a sense of professional ethical conduct in a way that is equivalent to the legal profession or to the medical profession. Which is your absolute DNA about the way you conduct your professional life. Now I know there are rouge medics and there are rouge lawyers, but by and large, there is a strong ethical ethos. And again, for the police service, there is these whole informal ways and means of doing things, which, in part lead to some devious practices. It leads to a misplaced sense of loyalty, but you don’t actually report the misdeeds and the misdoing of your fellow officer. There’s a circling of the wagons when a police service is criticized and the sense in which they are defensive and protective of themselves. For me it’s looking at the way in which we can really understand the personal moral stance of the socialization and acculturation of why officers end up doing the things that they do. Why part are they preserving that is really strong kind of professional ethic.
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AVERY: For Tim Prenzler, he wants to see more studies on recruitment.
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TIM: I’d like to see some really strong experiments with supportive recruitment policies where police departments make a really big effort to attract female applicants and support them through the application process. With pre-application classes, training in the physical test, all that kind of thing and see what the outcomes are in 5-10 years as well. I’m interested in recruitment but I recognize that it’s, there’s not a lot of value in bringing in large numbers of female officers, if they then drop out because they have negative experiences on the job. But there are a lot of people doing research in the area of supportive policies and I think teres some pretty good emerging best practices in that area.
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AVERY: and for Marisa Silvestri she wants a better foundation and understanding in definition. And something that came up time and time again in our interviews this episode. Police culture.
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MARISA: I love the opportunity to talk about culture. For me, it’s a really hugely under-theorized concept in policing despite being one of the most familiar terms even most police scholars know. So, for me, when we think about it in terms of gender, police culture kind of gets subsumed and collapsed into referring to this kind of macho cult of masculinity. And somehow that equates to police culture. That call to masculinity is actually very focused on a very macho physical culture. So, a culture of physicality which often associates with the lower ranks of policing. That analysis of culture that I found in my own research was applied to all women. So, there I was in my late 20s doing my PhD, I was interested in women in leadership. When they were talking about policing, they weren’t referring, for me when I was trying to make sense of narratives and when I talked to police leaders, they don’t talk about the physical aspects of policing. You know, you can't do it, you’re not up to it. They were talking about a different type of masculinity, but that analysis of culture couldn’t be found within the literature. Managerial masculinity is very different, but it’s there and there’s no doubt women experience its force but it’s a different kind, it’s a much more competitive form of masculinity. Culture for me I think remains really powerful, it’s a really powerful way to subvert policy and it’s a really powerful way to maintain inequality. When a systematic analysis of all women being ranks in policing and from entry to exit. That’s what I’d like to know, what makes them enter, what makes them stay, and what makes them leave. So I think a really systematic mapping exercise which really drills down to particularly career transition points are significant and we don’t really have that. I think a better understanding of the constraints and the enablers in the women’s lives. So you know what does work for those that made it, what were the conditions of success- that’s really important. I think its really important that we have a better understanding of the inequality regimes that exist within policing, intersectional analyses, black and minority women’s experiences in policing, we know very very little about, and I’m just fed up of myself saying that I must do this research. So this is something that is really really significant and you know what’s really interesting, I think we need to understand men’s awareness and engagement with diversity issues. We need to understand how they engage with all of this and how they are experiencing these new non-gender-neutral policies to get a sense of how we might mobilize everyone in policing to move towards a much more diverse place. I think they’re the key things that I would like to see more research on.
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AVERY: Thank you for listening to CRSP Talk. This podcast is a production of the Centre for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. Executive producers for this episode were Debra Langan and Carrie Sanders. And we'd like to thank our incredible guests for sharing their work and resources with us.
Marisa Silvestri is a Reader in Criminology at the University of Kent. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender crime justice, policing and organizational cultures. She is currently working on two books: Police Leadership: Changing Landscapes and Police Leadership: Critical Perspectives. Tim Prenzler is a professor of Criminology in the School of Law and Society at the University of The Sunshine Coast in Australia. His research interests include crime and corruption prevention, police and security officer safety, security industry regulation and gender equity in policing. Jennifer Brown is a visiting professor in the Manheim Centre at the London School of Economics. She is also a chartered forensic and chartered occupational psychologist. Her research interest is in police occupational culture, especially with reference to stress experienced by officers and diversity -- particularly women's roles and coping strategies. And Jenny Flemming is a professor of Criminology at the University of Southampton and is the Co-Director of the Institute of Criminal Justice Research at the University of Southampton. She is the Editor-In-Chief of Policing and Society, an international journal of research and policy. For the past 20 years, she has worked on an informal and formal basis with police agencies and police associations in Australia, the United Kingdom, Scotland, Canada, The Netherlands, the United States and New Zealand.
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AVERY: For more information on CRSP please find us online at CRSP.online, we will be back soon with more research to uncover. I’m Avery Moore Kloss.