Meeting expectations, managing demand: long-term visions and short-term realities of modernising police-public contact

• In Event: INTERACT: Investigating New Types of Engagement, Response and Contact Technology in Policing

Abstract

This paper explores data from the INTERACT project, focusing on interviews with strategic national leaders and force-level leaders charged with driving forward an agenda of digitised police-public contact. The analysis considers the visions, approaches, and values operating in these two spaces, contrasting national priorities around ‘modernising’ policing and reaching new publics, with more local needs in respect of managing existing day-to-day demand. The discussion considers the different and sometimes contradictory frames that shape innovation design and delivery, comparing the relative influence of different actors in the operationalisation of ‘channel choice’ for an imagined public. The paper will highlight a number of working presumptions, including that an excess of low-value demands to deal with issues that are not ‘police business’ are threatening to hide a smaller number of high-value and potentially critical incidents - with technology seen as both the solution to this, and as a contributor to increased demand. An underlying concern with police legitimacy is presented as operating as a 21st century challenge which needs to be reconciled with a technologically-advanced delivery model. Exploring data from national strategic leaders, alongside local force leaders illuminates the priorities and presumptions operating at two distinct but co-dependent levels of UK policing at a time of significant challenge and change.

Authors

• Elizabeth Aston, Edinburgh Napier University

• Helen Wells, Keele University

• Estelle Clayton, Edinburgh Napier University

• Will Andrews, Keele University

• Megan O'Neill, University of Dundee

• Ben Bradford, University College London