Cambridgeshire Constabulary
Ethics Playing Cards
Copyright © 2025 Compass Ethics
2
How can the Force better support new recruits into the profession?
Case Studies
- How can someone with limited life experience be expected to handle: murder, rape, RTAs, suicide, DV, child sexual exploitation etc?
- How do you handle rarely knowing the outcome of an interaction with the public? I.e. closure is unusual for many incidents.
- Are we recruiting the right people? What are we doing right/wrong?
- Are we retaining the right people? What are we doing right/wrong?
Discussion
Even people with extensive experience can find the challenges of policing overwhelming sometimes, so this is not limited to new recruits. The pace of life and work today mean that many opportunities to just talk with colleagues no longer exist - often there is no work canteen, and given family pressure and commitments, trying to find non-structured time to meet up with your team can be very hard. This can have the effect of undermining camaraderie, by making the building of a shared culture more difficult. While that is difficult to account for in a spreadsheet, the benefits of being able to have a space to just talk, and share experiences (and in the process, also share best practice) is immense and without this, it makes the sharing and embedding of organisational values much harder as a result. People who feel part of something are going to be more resilient than those who are still struggling to find their place and do not yet feel part of a team.
- How can your own team make a little more time and space for more informal conversations about work?
- Can a buddy system, or rotating mentorship be utilised to help people to understand other perspectives, but also draw on experience and help answer the practical and also hypothetical questions that can cause doubts, worries and concerns?
- Continuing Professional Development opportunities for both staff and officers can assist in supporting both those newly into the profession, and those who have been in it for some time - retention being just as important as recruitment.
- How do you know how to initiate support through the TRiM process?
- Talking about those challenges with experienced colleagues can help both before and after they are encountered. For example, learning to deal with only seeing ‘part of the story’ in most cases, in much the same way that a surgeon is unlikely to have any knowledge of a patient’s life before or after the period immediately surrounding an operation, can help significantly.
- People Hub has a whole page dedicated to helpful advice for new police officers. Operational Learning and HR can be contacted for advice if there are specific cases of concern.
A points-based recruiting system that relies upon self-reported skill competency, but ignores character, behaviour and mental suitability, or fails to adequately assess language and communication ability, may not be selecting the most appropriate people. How do you assess for mental robustness, and how do you support and foster this initially and in an ongoing way?