Cambridgeshire Constabulary
Ethics Playing Cards
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How important is it to use a person’s preferred pronouns?
Case Studies
- Athena only accepts binary male or female designations for personal information. How can you work with this in an appropriate way?
- Is there any reason why you shouldn’t just ask someone how they would prefer to be addressed?
- Is the binary Sir and Ma’am still the appropriate language to use in an inclusive workspace? Is this part of what keeps a disciplined force effective?
Discussion
Using inclusive language helps people engage in a positive way with you and is likely to produce a much more satisfactory outcome for everyone involved.
- What additional information is it appropriate to add to a person’s details to assist record keeping?
- The terms Sir and Ma’am have historically been an organisational culture of demonstrating respect for authority/seniority. Is respect for authority still key to organisational success?
- Are binary terms still appropriate? What alternatives might be used?
- What role does history, culture, and tradition play in this, and who chooses when established ways of doing things are to be changed?
- Do terms such as “Boss”, “Chief” or “Skipper” help navigate this? Do they still carry sufficient respect?
- What challenges do such titles pose for Police Staff who may not be subject to the hierarchy in the same way? In turn, does this contribute to a lack of respect for senior Police Staff who do not warrant the title?
- Is there a case for removing Sir / Ma’am / Boss / Chief in terms of the hierarchy when dealing with colleagues internally so some challenges PCOs face are minimised in terms of standing up when more senior colleagues are not acting to the truest level of ethics expected?
Note that even if one information recording system is changed, police and the wider justice system rely on multiple systems and platforms (e.g. the OASys uses a ‘PNC number’, C-NOMIS relies on the ‘NOMS Number’, Libra has no specific personal identifier for a defendant so police forces supply Libra with the own ‘Unique Reference Number’ (URN) potentially leading to multiple links to the same person, while the Police National Computer uses a ‘PNC Number’. Ensuring that people are consistently linked to appropriate information is clearly an extremely difficult task, meaning that the information you have available to you at any given moment may not reflect the preferences of the person involved. Taking that into account during interactions with the public will therefore prevent unnecessary friction.