Cambridgeshire Constabulary
Ethics Playing Cards
Copyright © 2025 Compass Ethics
9
Why is it important to keep work discussions professional at all times?
Case Studies
- People who police interact with regularly may pick up nicknames or find themselves being mentioned in casual chat, inside or even outside of work. Is that ok?
- You join a team that regularly plays “car snooker” while on traffic duty, pulling over vehicles based on the paint colour. Your new shift partner has the highest break. Are you happy to play?
- Your colleagues start talking about a new recruit and how “good-looking they are.” How would you feel if you were the new recruit coming into a team and had overheard these comments?
- A newspaper report about a police WhatsApp conversation relating to a double murder in Nottingham quotes “a couple of students have been proper butchered”. BBC News East Midland 24 April 2024 – how do you feel about this newspaper report?
Discussion
Police officers and staff are often to privy to the most personal information it is possible to imagine. This can be a burden but it is also an honour which needs to be respected by acting professionally at all times. It is important to remember that it is easy to become desensitised or to use dark humour (which can be important when coping with stress), however it is imperative to remember what it may sound like if overheard by others.
- How might you realise that the accepted norms for language and referring to others are slipping in a team? How might you challenge this or change it? Is it different as a team member and as a team leader? How can you safely challenge this when it is coming from more senior members of staff than yourself?
- When a group of people work together, they often use shorthand references for people who are already of context and history. This can be an efficient way of communicating essential information in a timely manner, but it can also easily lead to miscommunication where there is an expectation of knowledge that is in fact not there for whatever reason, or in shaping attitudes and perception in a negative (or even favourable) way. Language shapes thinking, which determines action, so this can lead to unintended or unconscious bias creeping in very easily.
- At what point might pulling over a vehicle based on the paint colour morph into profiling of people?