myAIPMBest case scenario: What a post-pandemic future could look like for policing
Mike Richmond, Australia New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency (ANZPAA) | Policing Insight
"Many countries are beginning to ease lockdown restrictions, but as the world charts a path out of the pandemic, the future remains uncertain for all including policing. Assistant Director of Strategic Foresight for the Australia New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency (ANZPAA) Mike Richmond examines the different post-pandemic 'scenarios' that law enforcement may be faced with in the coming months and years.
Undoubtedly, Covid-19 is the worst pandemic in living memory and has produced significant upheaval to many international and domestic socio-economic systems, and impacted relationships between and within nations.
The policing world has shifted from responding to ’pre-Covid normal’ policing challenges like alcohol-fuelled violence, property crimes, and road safety to a new equilibrium dominated by public health policing, mental health, family and domestic violence, cybercrime, fraud and other complex challenges. Police jurisdictions around the world are reporting substantial changes and even declines to local crime rates.
Not only have things changed, but they have changed at different speeds. Only a few months ago, much of emergent police strategy focused on the relentless advance of technology and the new forms of policing and criminal innovation those advances create.
Now technology seems to be relatively ‘out of focus’, lagging the changes wrought by rapidly moving government policy, changing community expectations and emergent social trends – not least of all the secondary economic crisis created by the strategies put in place to mitigate the pandemic.
The pandemic has also served to substantially alter out perceptions of time. Where once we might have measured operational time horizons in weeks and strategic time horizons in months and years, due to the pandemic hours and days have often seemed a better fit. We expected systemic change to always be a decade away, whereas now we can almost touch it at arm’s length."
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Best case scenario: What a post-pandemic future could look like for policing, Mike Richmond, Policing Insight, 2020