Copy the page URI to the clipboard
Fenton-O'Creevy, Mark; Bowles, Benjamin; Maguire, Linda and Williams, Emma
(2024).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paae117
Abstract
In this article, we draw on emerging theories of the production of ignorance in organizations. We conduct a qualitative analysis of two forms of secondary data on policing in England and Wales: first, documents in the public domain from the Casey Review and the Angiolini Inquiry; second, qualitative data collected as part of ‘Operation Soteria’ a UK Home Office-funded programme designed to improve the investigation of rape and serious sexual offences. We highlight the adverse effects of avoidance of uncomfortable knowledge, organizational silence, and non-learning in policing. We argue that they are both important contributors to the crisis of legitimacy faced by UK policing, and barriers to effective change. Finally, we discuss structural conditions that support the production and reproduction of ignorance and approaches to ‘undoing ignorance’.
Plain Language Summary
Why do organisations that employ many good people commited to serving the public fail to notice, or challenge terrible behaviour? Some of the answers may lie in recent work on the production and uses of ignorance in organisations.
In the wake of the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, and other serious crimes by police officers, UK policing has suffered a major legitimacy crisis. Our recent study considers how factors contributing to the production of ignorance in policing organisations may help explain how these failures of trustworthiness in parts of policing could come about despite these organistions employing many good people.
Researchers have long been interested in how knowledge is acquired, produced, and used in organizations. However, in the last two decades, there has been increasing interest in the ways in which ignorance is produced, reproduced, and used. Researchers and theorists have begun to study questions such as how uncomfortable knowledge is avoided; how silence is produced ; how ignorance is used strategically for the avoidance of blame, and the conditions in which non-learning occurs . However, to date, ignorance in organizations and the structural conditions that underpin the production and reproduction of ignorance remain much less studied than the production and use of knowledge. A burgeoning literature on knowledge management and the production and use of knowledge in evidence-based policing has yet to be matched by serious attention to the production and use of ignorance in policing organizations.
In this paper we draw on emerging theories of the production of ignorance in organizations. We analysed data in, documents in the public domain from the Casey Review and the Angiolini Inquiry; and, qualitative data collected as part of ‘Operation Soteria’ a UK Home Office-funded programme designed to improve the investigation of rape and serious sexual offences.
Key issues we examine include:
- the avoidance of uncomfortable knowledge through strategies of denial, dismissal, diversion and displacement;
- the conditions that motivate police offers and staff to remain silent about work stress, mental health issues and other officers' breaches of professional standards: including learned helplessness, fear of the consequences of speaking out, and, in some cases, toxic leadership: and
- the conditions that lead to some police organisations becoming non-learning organisations.
Factors we identify as underlying these problems include:
- failure to mitigate communication problems associated with command and control organisations and rank structures, including disconnections across ranks;
- dysfunctional effects of the career system; and
- an overfocus on operations and rapid action at the expense of reflection and long-term strategic planning.
We conclude that the issues we identify may constitute significant barriers to the success of ongoing work on strategic change and reform in policing. We argue that important forms of uncomfortable knowledge that need to be grappled with at a senior level concern the lack of visibility of the daily realities of frontline operations to senior leaders, the need to trade off short- and medium-term operational capability to develop staff and implement strategic change effectively, and the systemic problems causing staff to believe that if they speak out, they will be disregarded or punished.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
