15. from Craft to Profession: Educating Police Officers in South Wales

The Statement of Common Purpose was a document issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers in 1990 which set out the standards the police service should maintain to in their everyday work within communities. It set forth a 'common' standard of behaviour and working practices which would be employed by all forty-three police forces across England and Wales and was, in many senses, a precursor for the managerialist and performance-driven approach imposed on the police organization since that time. Its contents were not too dissimilar to the founding principles of policing introduced during the late 1820s, known as Peel's Principles of Policing (Peak and Glensor, 1996), which included such statements as 'The Public are the Police and the Police are the Public'. However, whilst in many senses these principles still persist, as the public, society and community expectations change, the police service in England and Wales has had to re-evaluate the way it trains and educates its staff to support a more professional approach to the delivery of its services. In particular, there has been a need to consider producing a police officer who carries out his/her duties drawing on a bank of high-quality research-led information supported by an ethical approach in its application. This article will consider the main forces for the introduction of such an approach and examine the ways in which how police officers are educated needs to be altered from being a 'craft or task based' education to one of a profession.