Just in case you missed the Home Secretary’s speech to the House of Commons last Tuesday (12 Feb 2013) on police integrity, here it is in full.

With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement about our work to ensure the highest standards of integrity in the police.

We are fortunate, in Britain, to have the finest police officers in the world. They put themselves in harm’s way to protect the public. They are cutting crime even as we reduce police spending. And the vast majority of officers do their work with a strong sense of fairness and duty.

But the ...

What should policing in England & Wales look like in 2020? That was the theme of yesterday’s event in London hosted by Policy Exchange.

The panel offering their thoughts on the matter were Hampshire Constabulary Chief Constable (and soon to be Chief Executive of the new College of Policing) and Head of the ACPO Futures Portfolio, Alex Marshall. Professor Tony Travers, Director of the London School of Economics. John Torrie, Chief Executive of Steria UK and Edward Boyd, Research Fellow, Crime & Justice at Policy Exchange (and author of the recent publication on policing ‘Cost of the Cops’. The ...

I was fortunate to be invited to attend the reform.co.uk event on the Future of Police Technology in London today (Thursday). It was an excellent event attracting top class speakers and attendees from Goverment, policing, prospective PCCs and industry. I attend quite a lot of events, but rarely have I taken so many notes.

Some idea of the complexity, interests, passions, politics and competing agendas that currently surround the issues of policing and police ICT, may be inferred from the fact that the event was held under the Chatham House rule and no wifi was provided to assist with tweeting or ...

I am attending the Crest Advisory PCC event in London today (#tag #PCCFuture), but who, apart from those involved in the process, is actually talking about Police and Crime Commissioners. To find out I let loose our analysts. Using the Radian6 social media monitoring platform (we are authorised resellers of the full range of Radian6 listening, monitoring and engagement tools) we took a look at just who has been talking and who has been influential over the last month. Check out our overview below…

Open_Eye_PCC_Whos_Talking_Report_Jun12_V1

So that you have access to the definitive version, I thought that I would upload the letter that Nick Herbert has had placed on the Home Office website in response to today’s protest march in London.

An interesting observation made on twitter today by @alantravis40 (the Guardian Home Affairs Editor) was:  Police use online #antiwinsornetwork to organise protest march – Home Office minister replies with letter at bit.ly/IZQszW #mismatch

In social media terms, boy do the Home Office have a long way to go.

In the face of 35,000 police officers marching in protest ...

Last year the Daily Telegraph pointed out that: “Hot weather prompted a rise in police calls”  and conventional wisdom holds that violent crime increases during hot weather. Even our language is peppered with references to “hotheads”, whose anger “simmers” until they either “lose their cool” and “blow up” or finally “cool down”.

Florida State University researchers found that, over two years, violent assaults consistently increased in Minneapolis as temperatures rose toward the 80s. They attributed the change partly to “social opportunity”: when the temperature goes up, more people spend more time outside. (In other words, they argued that ...

With anti social behaviour being in pretty much every prospective Police and Crime Commissioners ‘top things to focus on’ list, and with alcohol consumption being a key factor in a significant amount of said anti social behaviour, the recently released Home Office Research Report Number 60 makes for topical interesting reading and provides some useful practical evidence about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to alcohol intervention strategies.

The report is a summary of findings from two evaluations of Home Office Alcohol Arrest Referral pilot schemes which were set up across 12 police forces over the period Oct 2007 ...

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to an interesting event in London hosted by Nuance. They’re a leading provider of speech, text and imaging solutions for business and consumers and have been doing some really progressive work in bringing time and efficiency saving applications to policing.

Essentially the event showcased four application areas: voice biometrics (recognising people over the phone by their speech patterns), call automation through call steering and routing, secure interview transcription and speech enabled stop and search.

Whilst all offer significant value, from a frontline perspective the applications that took my eye were the ...

Predictive Policing: Buzz phrase of the moment or the latest tool for catching criminals and reducing crime in the police toolbox? Either way there’s a lot of noise and focus around predictive policing at the moment.

It’s said that once is accident, twice is coincidence and three times is a pattern (analysts: feel free to disagree here!) and so it is with ‘predictive policing’ at the moment.

The first predictive policing thing to catch my eye recently was the work that Spencer Chainey from UCL’s Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science (twitter: @SpencerChainey) has recently undertaken with the Trafford ...

View the story “Met Police Commissioner braves the Twitter inquisition” on Storify]