Moving policing towards a more evidence-based future seems to me the single most effective mechanism for police reform and improvement. That sounds like a bold claim, but the reason it is so powerful and compelling is the scope to change the mindset towards a scientific and professional approach to balance the perhaps excessive focus on individual experience and craft in policing before the evidence-based policing (EBP) movement started to have an impact. Moving us towards a style of leadership that values certainty of impact and more scientific methods is at the heart of EBP and the wider public sector adoption of evidence-based practice.

By way of an introduction, I am a Metropolitan Police Officer and have been for 15 years. It doesn't feel like 15 years ago that I first put a warrant card in my pocket and sincerely declared that I would discharge all my duties to the best of my knowledge and skill, but more importantly, I don't think I could even guess at what those skills might end up being. I’ve picked up many of the more ‘usual’ skills along the way, but for me the most transformative and useful skills were sparked at a presentation given by one of the great leaders of EBP, Alex Murray, in about 2010. Alex is now a Commander in the Metropolitan Police Service (the Met), and at the time of the presentation was a Chief Inspector in West Midlands Police and had just formed the Society of Evidence Based Policing (SEBP).

With a slide deck covering a wealth of different pieces of evidence, Alex concluded with a stark suggestion. He had given us knowledge about how to be more evidence based, how to test more effectively and learn more about our impact – so how could we fulfil our policing oath if we didn't start to make use of what he had told us? He pointed out the fundamentally unethical behaviour of failing to use the best evaluation methods to understand the impact of policing and justify how we spend enormous sums of public money. Could we really say that we were discharging our duties to the best of our knowledge if we failed to use the knowledge that we could more scientifically test our impact?