The Potential to Become a Good Police Officer

1.1. The job analysis

The purpose of the analysis was to create a shared language and understanding of the concept of required aptness. The aim of the framework was to equip the admission committees with the necessary tools to identify apt applicants: ones with the potential to complete a three-year bachelor’s degree in police studies and to become proficient police officers in the future.

Peeters (2009) refers to the line of education preceding police work and concludes that a clear “competency approach facilitates the integration of academic understandings and professional needs” (p. 54).

The role of police officer is complex in many aspects (Wilson, 2012). It entails communicating, collaborating and interacting with increasingly diverse communities, which requires broad cultural competencies. In addition, officers must have strong analytical, problem-solving, critical, and strategic thinking, and even technical abilities (Miller, 2008; Raymond et al., 2005; Scrivner, 2006, 2008; Wilson & Grammich, 2009a in Wilson, 2012).

Police roles have evolved in complexity throughout the last decades (Kraska, 2007 in Wilson, 2012). There is little literature defining what competencies and specific personality traits are necessary in candidates who will cope well with this growing complexity in the police role. Peeters (2014) claims that when defining competencies for police performance, the educational institution and the organisation should cooperate closely and create a competency profile that “should refer to the integration of knowledge, abilities and attitudes that are needed to act and behave adequately at work” (Peeters, 2014, p. 91).

Such cooperation at PHS demanded a process where the experienced-based knowledge-how (Ryle, 2015), or tacit knowledge (Polanyi & Sen, 2009) of fellow students as well as police officers became explicit. The idea was to “excavate” the core understanding that generations of police officers had on the nature of the apt colleague and create a common description that could serve as a shared tool of reference. The purpose was to move from an intuitive and unstructured tool for evaluation of applicants to an explicit and defined one. This tool could then become a cornerstone in a more solid and structured method for selecting future students to PHS.

1.2. The Norwegian Police admission process

By 2011, the PHS had four admission committees, each comprised of four members (a police lawyer, two police officers and one representative from another educational institution). The committees worked parallel in selecting 720 new students each year. In 2009 and 2010, structured observations of the committees’ work (Abraham, 2010) revealed a substantial risk for subjective bias and discrimination against the applicants. It also revealed a lack of a common understanding of what required aptness was and how it should be assessed.

As such, it was important for the PHS’ leadership to reach a broad consensus within the organisation on the criteria for a good “generalist officer” (Wilson, 2012).

The conclusions from the 2009–10 observations of the committees prompted the leadership at PHS to commission both a job analysis and, eventually, a new selection process.

To guarantee confidence in the outcome of the new selection process, it was crucial that there was broad understanding and acceptance of the new terminology and the definition of “aptness”. This, in turn, required contributions from many stakeholders among the 12,000 members of the Norwegian police organisation.

The admission committees have judicially-independent and autonomous authority to evaluate applicants. It was, therefore, necessary for the committees to acquire a deep understanding of the definition of the competencies and, later, in the tools that were used to measure them. The first step was to investigate what required aptness meant to the organisation in all its diversity.

2.1. Stage one: meeting the admission committees

The four admission committees gathered at an annual seminar (November 2010) where the present author and one of the external consultants asked them to pinpoint central criteria that they used to evaluate an applicant’s “required aptness to become police officer”. The same group of committee members participated in stage three of the process, April 2011.

2.2. Stage two: searching in central documents

Political documents are central in defining the police education’s mandate in Norway. It was, thus, important to identify what political leadership had to say about the demands placed on the police and their expectations as to the College’s curricula. Various central strategic and educational policy documents, produced at political, legal and top leadership levels, were central for the job analysis. We searched for documents that yielded descriptions of, and terminology, to describe the required behaviours, competencies and conduct of police officers or police students. The work started with a systematic search of databases in the PHS library for any documents that were relevant to the description of the current and future police student and police officer. With the help of an administrative admission employee at PHS, the search provided some 3,000 pages of these documents,¹ which were included and categorised into relevant terms and concepts.

2.3. Stage three: repertory grid and ranking process with central stakeholders

The grid interview was conducted in pairs. The pairs received a structured description of the interview process before changing pairs and ranking 19 competencies according to their importance (described in detail in 4.3.1). The process was carried out on four groups comprising mostly of police professionals, representing all the stakeholders in the PHS system as well as the Norwegian police force. This gave us a sample of 100 participants: police officers of various formal status in the organisation (leadership to active policing), as well as other stakeholders (civilians working in the police, PHS teachers, admission committees, diversity agents, etc.). In our selection of participants, we aimed to have a diverse group of people in terms of age, gender, and position within the police.

A practical aspect of the process was asking participants to devote 90 minutes of their otherwise scheduled meetings to the job analysis. Three of the meetings gave the opportunity to include many participants who were significant for the process. The fourth meeting represented additional individuals chosen by the author for their diverse roles and points of view. All four meetings where the analysis process was conducted took place during February and March 2011 at PHS in Oslo.

Table 1 presents the characteristics of the groups:

2.4. Participants and data

All participants in the processes volunteered to participate and could withdraw at any time. Only aggregated group data was used and no data on individuals or their statements were recorded. Thus, the study did not require approval from the Norwegian Data Protection Authority.

3.1. Repertory grid

The explorative interview method “Repertory grid” (Kelly, 1955) was selected in order to help participants explore the content of required aptness. In these structured interviews, participants explored comparisons of traits and descriptions of a role (police student) they knew well.

3.2. Shapes competency model

A commonly used method in job analysis in Norway is the use of a standardised personality-based competency model. The participants are asked to prioritise which personal competencies they assess are most important for the required job. This is done in order to assess the relative importance that different stakeholders put on the chosen personal competencies. The shapes competency framework, developed by the psychometric test developer Cut-e (2017) lists 18 general work competencies and is loosely based on the personality model of Kurz and Bartram (2002). In addition to the 18 original competencies in Shapes, we defined and added a 19^th competency to the model.² Diversity and inclusion were absent from the original Shapes model and was necessary for the analysis. This competency Inclusion was judged to be crucial when trying to measure professionalism within the field of law enforcement and contact with the diverse general public.

4.1. Stage one: Seminar with the admission committees

The 32 members of the admission committees were gathered (in November 2010) and divided into four groups of eight (their original committees). Each committee took part in a 45-minute group process with the support of the present author and one of the external consultants. Each committee came up with concepts and descriptive terms to define the “required aptness to become police officer” and presented their concepts to the rest of the group.

The session continued with each committee presenting their chosen terms on the wall and every committee member prioritising three of the concepts by marking their top choices. The author ranked 11 of the most central terms, which all agreed had to be a part of the future evaluation of an applicant’s required aptness.

4.2. Stage two: Central strategic documents in the police force’s system

The document analysis was conducted during the months of January to June 2011 and consisted of the careful study of the documents with the purpose of extraction concepts that gave a description of the good police officer or police student as proposed by official policy documents.

The 3,000 pages of documents were systematically searched to collect statements mentioning definitions or descriptions of a good police officer or a good police student. For instance, if a document described that a good police officer should be conscientious, the term conscientious was extracted. The list of adjectives, phrases and concepts became the raw material for the concept analysis (see chapter 5. Data).

4.3. Stage three: Standardised 90-minute process

Prior to the four meetings (described in chapter 2.3), all the 100 participants received a short letter explaining the purpose of the analysis and the form of this step: a 90-minute process with no preparation required.

The process was identical all four times, starting with a random division of each group into pairs. The random division was done to avoid close colleagues being paired together. The pairs started with the Repertory grid interview. After 45 minutes, each group was again sorted into new random pairs to work with the Shapes competency model.

5.1. Analysis

Starting with the 400 concepts derived from method 1 (Repertory Grid, stage three), we analysed the data. The author systematised the gathering and analysing of the 400 collected terms. The structuring of the qualitative data started by an “open coding” that was grounded in the sample’s broad knowledge of the theme. We then compared the open codes to each other and grouped them into categories (axial coding) (Dourdouma & Mörtl, 2013) that strived to capture the essential meaning of becoming the good police student.

We systematised the various terms according to the number of times they were mentioned. The axial coding enabled us to treat the gathered terms as quantitative data by managing to distil the 400 terms into a matrix of 18, where nine were defined as Essential and nine as Desirable for the execution of the desired activity.

The process continued by integrating the remaining terms from the various sources into this initial list. We added the prioritised 11 terms from stage one to the 140 terms from the central documents (stage two). Here again, qualitative categorising around clusters yielded eight terms before being processed into the 18 categories that form the axial coding of the Grid method. The same process repeated itself with the eight competencies from method 2, the Shapes competency model, which were defined by the sample as Essential.

In June 2011, the author presented the 13 competencies (see Table 4) to the organisation’s leadership at PHS. The leadership concluded that the 13 competencies were central to the purpose of defining a good student and future police officer.

However, there was concern that 13 competencies were too many for two reasons:

Figure 1

The leadership of PHS requested further reduction of terms. The author regrouped the 13 competencies according to common content, but they remained in their original form as core competencies in six competency areas. A group of five experienced student supervisors (from group 2 in the sample of stage three) formulated operationalised texts for each of the competency areas. The texts were meant to create a common understanding and communication on the underlying 13 core competencies both to the admission committees and to future applicants.

In September 2011, the PHS leadership approved the six competency areas as the content of the term “acquired aptness”, and they were consequently implemented in the selection system.

6.1. The practical use of the competencies

Since 2012, PHS has used the new competency areas for redesigning the information given to potential applicants, including the application website and information given during the application process. In addition, the competencies were central in preparing the admission committees for their work, and they developed a strong ownership of them. The competencies were actively used in training and the practical work of the committees.

Furthermore, PHS changed the conditions for the feedback given to candidates not admitted due to lack of required aptness. Since 2012, rejected candidates have received feedback in terms of where they did not meet standards and how they could improve in these areas. The committees as well as the administration at PHS stated that the consistent use of the competency areas in feedback to applicants simplified the process significantly and contributed to clarity and transparency.

Since 2019, PHS has also applied the competency framework to assess students during their year of supervised training,⁴ where they perform actual police service with a supervising officer. Later feedback from the supervisors found the competencies to be a useful framework for assessing students’ aptness, as well as giving feedback to the students about their performance in the field.

The broad use of the six competency areas, both internally in the organisation and towards the public, points to a widespread consensus on their applicability. It is possible that the broad participation of as many as 100 central stakeholders in the job analysis, as well as the ease with which the six areas are communicated, lead to growing familiarity with and acceptance of the concepts and their content.

Our study shows that the admission committees are very loyal to the active use of the 13 core competencies as well as the six competency areas, when evaluating applicants for aptness.

24 of the 36 members of the admission committees are police professionals, who represent the whole police organisation. They help PHS promote the competency-areas “approach” throughout the organisation. The use of the same competency-areas in the evaluation of students in all districts creates growing awareness of the standard for “aptness” throughout the whole organisation – which was one of the main goals of this job analysis.

6.2. Strengths and limitations of the methods

The methods used along the three stages of the analysis proved to yield both different types of concepts as well as different degrees of effort and resources needed to harvest them.

Levine et al. (1980) claim that a varied and mixed job analysis that makes use of more than one procedure/method ensures a solid foundation of documentation and is better than a job analysis that is based solely on one method (for example interviews or merely going through central governing documents). Although we tried to expand the range of data sources to include colleagues and organisational strategists (Perlman & Sanchez, 2010), our participants still consisted mostly of police officers and police leadership. This may have led to a certain degree of social conformity among the participants (Garavan & McGuire, 2001) or to the insertion of outdated competencies reinforced by a police occupational culture (Stanislas, 2014). Involving more stakeholders from the public, or even from other police entities in other countries, could have contributed to an even deeper understanding of the demands future police students and officers will face.

Various stakeholders from the public are the direct recipients of the police service in society. Involving representatives from all walks of life, especially underrepresented groups, in defining which qualities police officers should have could contribute to greater trust in the police service, as well as helping to make the requirements of the role of a police officer more relevant to the needs of the recipients. Despite its importance, PHS did not have the time and resources to conduct such an external survey. Future development of the analysis should involve stakeholders from the public.

6.3. Costs and benefits of job analysis

A frequent objection to conducting a job analysis to identify a competency framework is that it is a time-consuming and financially costly process. This was not entirely true in the case of PHS. Using existing meetings as the source for concept harvesting reduced the cost of organising and funding large gatherings. Recent developments in online meeting technology might make it more efficient to involve bigger and more diverse groups of contributors if the process was adjusted to the digital world’s limitations.

PHS paid for 70 consultant hours. In addition, two employees used an accumulated period of about three weeks of full-time work. While these costs were by no means insignificant, they provided good value for the organisation by creating a new standard for admission fairness and transparency, an assessment structure, and a framework for a common understanding of what is required of the apt applicant.

6.4. Further development

The author sees the importance of revisiting the job analysis in order to control the relevance of the competencies for the education of a police officer and the future role they will fill. Development in the current demand of the police role, as well as societal and even political changes, will also play a role in determining the evolution of the definition of the competencies. The terror attack of 22 July 2011 in Norway, the migration wave of 2015 in Europe and the ongoing terrorist attacks in the world are some examples of such changes. A dynamic understanding of the role of police students and future police officers can pave the way to future skills and competencies that will become necessary and relevant. Including new and relevant skills that are closely connected to the police’s ability to perform its role in a constantly changing and more diverse society is a measure of the future relevance of the framework.

Since 2019, the students have also been graded by trained supervisors on their conduct and aptness during their B2 (field training) year, using the same six competency areas. This underscores the relevance and applicability of the job analysis, as the use of a common language for assessment, throughout the three years of education, contributes to consistency in the evaluation. The competency areas are currently used both to evaluate students’ potential prior to admission and again for the evaluation of the students’ actual behaviour as an indicator of their development of the desired competencies during their field training.

The use of the same competencies in such a real-world setting can help the competency model stay relevant and useful in the future. This can also provide opportunities to validate the admission process.

The Norwegian model, which encompasses the creation of a clear competency framework that stems from the police organisation’s needs for its future force and is closely connected both to the selection process of apt police students and the police education, can hopefully be relevant to other police forces as a corner stone in building up their future force with the suitable personnel.