3 - Human and police decision-making

Summary

Introduction

In the hope of achieving a seamless continuation from the previous chapter, we move next to look at what is arguably the most obvious arena in which psychology and policing interact – police ‘decision-making’. We begin with a brief introduction to the psychology of human decision-making (‘RoboCop’ aside, those working in policing are humans after all),1 before looking at a common model adopted by UK and US police at least, to better understand and deal with the underlying mechanisms involved with a crime – the ‘problem-solving approach’, in this case the SARA model (see Box 3.2).

We will, albeit briefly, look at some of the guidance and training currently available to UK police to aid them with making decisions, including the National Decision Model (NDM) developed by the UK College of Policing2 before expanding to explore the psychology of human bias and error, with particular focus on police decision-making in criminal investigations, often referred to as investigative decision-making. Cases of homicide and sexual offences have more recently become a burgeoning area for psychological research and its interaction with policing.

Policing is often an incredibly difficult profession in which effective decisions (in sheer volume and magnitude if nothing else) need to be made in double-quick time. This chapter concludes with some well-meant suggestions as to how good police and investigative decision-making can be enhanced, while at the same time, how negative influences that promote ‘bad’ and erroneous police decision-making can be reduced.

The fact that police are ‘human beings’ (a point sometimes lost by some in the media) means that they rely on the same brains and cognitive processes that the rest of us do. This accepted, then an appropriate starting point is to explore human decision-making processes in general, before moving to how these processes are used by those involved in policing. There is an argument to be made that not enough of this more general ‘human species-wide’ research has been imported (for example, from experiments in laboratories) into the policing world, or that indeed not enough research on decision-making has focused on police and policing. We begin more generally perhaps with human decision-making.