Cambridgeshire Constabulary
Ethics Playing Cards
Copyright © 2025 Compass Ethics
4
No matter how much support is available, sometimes things go wrong. How do you deal with your own mistakes?
Case Studies
- A colleague asks you to cover for them so they are not linked to a mistake. What do you do?
- Will focusing on or even highlighting mistakes in the force simply undermine public confidence?
Discussion
A mistake caught early can often be corrected. An uncorrected error can infect everything it comes into contact with, undermining cases, prosecutions and public confidence, as well as destroying careers.
No one can go through a whole career without making mistakes. How you respond to a mistake is critical for self- and professional development. It is also possible to make no mistakes and still lose. Wicked problems don’t have simple answers. Sometimes, choosing the least bad option will still feel like the wrong decision even though it was the best option available.
- Reflective professional practice requires that members of the profession think both about what they are doing at the time, but also place that experience into a broader context that informs their wider professional understanding. Learning from mistakes is an important part of this.
- Clearly, negligence or dereliction of duty is at one end of the scale, but most genuine mistakes are not caused by malice or even high levels of incompetence, just the pressure of managing competing demands in a high stress or dynamic environment. Owning up and correcting them as soon as they come to light should be seen as normal operating procedure so lessons can be learnt and the mistake avoided in the future.
- A person who has made a mistake, reflected on the situation and learnt from it, and is able to move on, is in a much better position than someone who has never made a big mistake and might end up paralysed by indecision when they realise that something has gone wrong and that it is down to them. This is something that is recognised by healthy organisations as well.
- There can be a temptation to bury mistakes. Again and again, public life demonstrates that most high-profile scandals, public relations disasters, or organisational failures are caused not by the initial mistake, but by attempts to cover that mistake up afterwards. Most organisations have an innate tendency to try and protect themselves and their reputations, and mistakenly try and prevent mistakes from becoming public. Sometimes, the importance of maintaining public confidence is even used as a reason why the public must not find out about x or y. However, the long-term damage of a culture of cover ups far outweighs any short-term embarrassment, and trust is something that can take decades to build and one ineffectual coverup to destroy.
- Loyalty to a teammate is best expressed by challenging them before they commit to a mistake, rather than trying to cover up for them afterwards. Moreover, encouraging someone to own up quickly to their mistakes is better than allowing them to hide them.
Post Incident Management (see links) should work as a lessons-learnt process, but less extreme situations often rely on organisational memory. This highlights the importance of communications within and across organisations, and the importance of those formal and informal opportunities to share best practice.