Secondary Analysis of Operation Soteria - Police Officer Learning, Development and Wellbeing

The introduction of a new National Operating Model (NOM) in rape and serious sexual offences (RASSO) investigations across all 43 police forces in England and Wales (College of Policing, 2023) has been underpinned by a Home Office funded police and academic collaborative research project, Operation Soteria (Gov.UK, 2022). The team at the Centre for Policing Research and Learning (CPRL) at the Open University has been working on Pillar 4 of Operation Soteria since the inception of the project, focusing specifically on officer learning, development and wellbeing. The focus on continuous professional development for improving rape investigations and the link to officer retention are significant national policing issues. The focus for our proposal is the continuation of secondary data analysis on our existing mixed methods dataset. Using new and novel methods, we aim to understand further the root causes of one significant element of our work: police officer stress and job-related burnout. The lack of capacity and capability in forces to cope with the complexity of RASSO investigations is creating an unwell workforce (Sondhi et al., 2023). The need for our on-going work is acknowledged in the Police Covenant (Gov.UK, 2023a) to ensure the welfare needs of the police workforce and their families are met. Using our existing qualitative and quantitative data and on-going support from police practitioners, the unique and innovative aspect of this work is the additional analysis is to be able to advise forces on recognising symptoms and providing effective preventative strategies for the prevention of burnout. A key finding in our existing data is the reporting of high levels of stress and burnout (Sondhi et al., 2023). Policing is stressful by nature and our research suggests that officers are coming to work unwell, to the point of becoming burnout. Officers are displaying three measures of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and personal accomplishment. We would like to undertake a deeper analysis of our quantitative data, using Maslach’s Burnout Inventory (Maslach, 2003), a validated measure of burnout and its subsequent development into five granular workforce segments (‘effective’, ‘ineffective’, ‘overextended’, ‘disengaged’ and ‘burned out’ (Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter, 2001). We have a unique and extensive dataset. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from police officers of varying rank, across 18 English and Welsh police forces (n=2,108 an estimated 32% response rate) = supplemented by interviews and focus group with officer participants: (n=119). The data has already provided outputs in a number of areas, including rich feedback to forces and numerous academic articles and conference presentations. The work on Operation Soteria is having demonstrable impact and it is an important, national level policing initiative, receiving endorsement from the then Home Secretary, Suella Braverman on its launch (Gov.UK, 2023b). The Policing Productivity Review (Gov.UK, 2023c) acknowledges the importance of specialism in RASSO investigations and recommends that the National Police Chiefs’ Council embeds Op Soteria into the new outcomes framework, as well as recording practices for the National Standards of Incident Recording. Pillar 4 has joined the Minister of Policing’s Roundtable on police deployability, to discuss the issues of sickness, absence, retention and demand management. We suggest our findings will have societal impact, including victim-survivors of RASSO and society more broadly. Our work will be of interest to the police and frontline public sector organisations who work in vicarious or traumatic situations.