I spent the last 8 years of my policing service working with the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit. My time there radically changed how I looked at violence prevention. Since retiring it’s clear my time there has shaped how I now look at developing healthy and safe workplace cultures. In this piece I reference this week’s report into police culture and a call for a reset.
This week, former Home Secretary David Blunkett is expected to call for a reset of police culture. It is a timely intervention. Public confidence depends upon policing getting this right. But after decades of inquiries, reviews, leadership programmes, codes of ethics and cultural change initiatives, perhaps there is a more fundamental question to ask. What if we have been trying to change culture from the wrong direction?
When we think about changing organisational culture, we instinctively look upwards. We ask what chief officers should do, what national leaders should say, what policies should be introduced and what inspections should measure. All of these matter. Leadership matters. Standards matter. Accountability matters however they are only part of the picture. Ironically, policing already has access to a model that has transformed thinking in another field—the public health approach to violence prevention. The lessons are striking.
Violence prevention stopped treating people as passive recipients
For years, violence was viewed primarily as a criminal justice problem. If violence increased, the answer was often more enforcement, tougher penalties and stronger criminal sanctions. Those remain important. But they are no longer seen as sufficient.
The public health approach asks a different question.
Instead of asking only how to respond after violence occurs, it asks how communities can prevent violence from becoming normal in the first place. That shift changed everything. Communities were no longer viewed simply as places where violence happened. They became active partners in preventing it.
Schools, youth workers, families, neighbourhood groups, sports clubs, employers and local residents all became part of the solution. Violence prevention became everyone’s responsibility.
Perhaps police culture requires exactly the same shift.
Officers are not just influenced by culture—they create it
One of the biggest misconceptions about organisational culture is that it flows neatly down the hierarchy. The chief sets expectations. Senior leaders reinforce them. Middle managers deliver them. Everyone changes. Reality is far messier. Culture spreads horizontally as much as vertically. It lives in conversations before briefings.
It survives in humour. It develops through WhatsApp groups, patrol cars and canteens.
It is reinforced every time someone chooses to speak up, or decides to stay silent.
This is where culture is truly built.
Every police officer contributes to that environment every single day. The question is whether they see themselves as active builders of culture or passive recipients of it. Simply, do they feel responsible to take on this role. My view is that despite a great pool of serving officers and staff many don’t feel that way. This is the reset needed, a culture where everyone feels responsible to protect the culture which will protect them.
The hidden power of active communities
One of my frustrations is that active bystandership is often misunderstood. People assume it is simply about challenging misconduct after it happens. It is much bigger than that. The real power of active bystandership is that it creates communities where poor behaviour struggles to become normal.
Violence prevention recognises this. Communities become protective factors. They create social norms that discourage harm long before enforcement becomes necessary.
Imagine policing through that lens.
Imagine teams where respectful challenge was expected rather than exceptional.
Imagine colleagues viewing intervention not as criticism but as care.
Imagine supervisors seeing peer challenge as evidence of trust rather than disloyalty.
That is not simply active bystandership. That is community-building. The approach is a way to co-create workplace culture. This is another type of reset needed to make the improvements identified by David Blunkett.
Culture is built in ordinary moments
Major scandals often dominate headlines. Yet those scandals rarely emerge overnight.
Most begin with smaller moments. An inappropriate joke. A dismissive comment. An unhealthy norm. A conversation nobody challenged. These moments accumulate. Behaviour that initially felt uncomfortable slowly becomes familiar. Familiarity becomes acceptance. Acceptance becomes culture.
Public health teaches us that preventing serious harm often means acting much earlier.
The same principle applies to policing. By the time misconduct reaches a disciplinary hearing, countless opportunities for earlier intervention may already have passed.
Protective factors matter as much as risk factors
Violence prevention doesn’t simply study what causes harm. It studies what protects people from harm. My last years in policing cemented an important learning from my career, the power of relationships. Relations are the currency of change in any community or workplace. When relationships really matter the outcome is rarely negative.
Strong relationships, supportive peers, positive role models, shared expectations, trust and connection are protective factors that reduce violence. The same factors strengthen organisational culture.
Healthy teams challenge one another because relationships are strong enough to withstand difficult conversations. Leaders admit mistakes because psychological safety exists. New recruits quickly understand that integrity is not simply spoken about, it is demonstrated. Culture becomes self-reinforcing. Like a healthy immune system, it identifies problems early before they spread.
Think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of a colleague who is caving under the pressure of both workload and financial worries. Nothing is getting better. The workload keeps increasing and after a shift they return home to a stack of bills through the letter box. Now imagine that at work colleagues check in. They notice some mistakes that you have made. They don’t judge you; they demonstrate care.
In likes of policing the counterbalance to high levels of prolonged stress isn’t simply the force wellbeing programme offered. The balance comes from the social connection that is around an individual. Another reset, officers disturbing the silence from the past and doing something as opposed to doing nothing.
Leadership still matters—but it cannot do everything
None of this diminishes the importance of leadership. Quite the opposite. Leaders create the conditions. They reward curiosity. They protect those who challenge respectfully. They demonstrate humility. They model the behaviours they expect however leaders cannot personally influence every interaction across an organisation employing tens of thousands of people. Peer influence fills that gap.
Research consistently shows that colleagues often shape behaviour more powerfully than policies do. People watch each other. They copy each other. They seek acceptance from each other. That is why communities matter. That is why relationships matter.
Moving from compliance to collective ownership
Perhaps the greatest lesson from violence prevention is that sustainable change rarely comes from compliance alone. People do not protect communities because a policy tells them to. They do so because they feel ownership. The same applies inside policing.
Culture changes when officers stop asking, “What should leaders do?” and begin asking, “What part do I play?” That question transforms everything. Every interaction becomes an opportunity to strengthen or weaken culture. Every conversation becomes an intervention. Every colleague becomes part of the solution.
A different kind of reset
If David Blunkett’s call becomes another conversation centred solely on leadership, governance and accountability, it will undoubtedly have value, but lasting change requires something deeper. Violence prevention offers policing a richer blueprint.
Top-down leadership, bottom-up ownership. Shared responsibility. Collective efficacy. Active communities. These are not just ideas for reducing violence on our streets. They are principles capable of transforming organisations from within. Culture cannot simply be instructed. It must be lived. It cannot simply be inspected. It must be shared and perhaps the biggest lesson violence prevention offers policing is this: The healthiest communities are not those with the most rules. They are those where most people believe protecting one another is simply what people like us do.
That is the culture policing should strive for.
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