On Police Leadership

A POLICE LEADERSHIP DIAGNOSIS FROM ACROSS THE POND

Selection and Training Are Essential For Ensuring Effective Leadership

Dr. Stephen A. Morreale, D.P.A.  (MAPLE Member)

In October 2025, the British government asked two men from opposite ends of the political spectrum to study something nobody wanted to look at directly: why police leadership in England and Wales keeps failing. Lord Blunkett, a former Labour home secretary, and Lord Herbert, a former Conservative policing minister, spent months gathering evidence from thousands of officers, staff, and members of the public. The report they published in early July 2026 does not read like a polite policy paper. It reads like a diagnosis.  The core finding: the systems meant to produce good police leaders are fragmented, inconsistent, and too often unfair. That is not a minor critique. That is a statement that the pipeline itself is broken.

This commission was not born out of curiosity. It followed a string of scandals and a growing sense, inside and outside policing, that the people running departments were not equipped for the job. The Police Federation called the review a “watershed moment.” The College of Policing’s chief constable, Sir Andy Marsh, called it the most comprehensive examination of police leadership in a generation. When the people who run the institution and the people who represent the rank and file agree on the scale of the problem, it is worth paying attention.

The specifics are where this gets uncomfortable. Chief constable appointments in some forces attracted only a single suitable candidate. Read that again. In a country with 43 police forces, some of the top jobs had no real competition behind them. Promotion standards varied so much from one force to another that observers described it as a lottery: where you served mattered more than what you could do. 

The training gap was worse than expected. Over one in five newly promoted sergeants and inspectors had not received formal leadership training within two years of taking on the role. Think about that. These are the people directly supervising officers on patrol, making split-second calls about how to use their people, and more than one in five of them got the job with no formal preparation for it. The report also flagged concerns about favoritism and nepotism shaping who got promoted and who didn’t.

Without UK-specific figures to compare against, I would be surprised if American departments would fare any better if we conducted the same audit here. This is something to consider in the U.S.   The recommendations are worth reading closely because they indicate what is actually broken, not just what sounds good in a press release. They called for central funding to be restored for police leadership development, on par with how other public services like the NHS are funded. They proposed a new senior constable rank, designed to formally recognize and reward experienced frontline officers who already mentor and lead without holding rank. They called for nationally accredited training for new constables, so a recruit’s foundation does not depend on which force trained them. And they recommended a national ethics capability to promote consistent, inclusive standards across the country.

That senior constable idea is the one worth contemplating. It acknowledges something policing rarely admits out loud: leadership happens on the floor, in the trenches, on the street, not just in the chain of command. The officer who trains rookies, calms down a chaotic scene without raising their voice, and gets pulled aside by three colleagues a shift for advice is leading, whether or not their collar says sergeant. Most departments, British or American, have no formal way to recognize or develop that person until they test for rank.

Not everyone in policing sees fast-tracking as the answer. Raffaele Cioffi, chair of the Sussex Police Federation, welcomed the report but added a warning: any move toward fast-tracking future leaders should not come at the expense of operational experience. That is the balance every leadership development conversation has to hold. Identifying leadership potential early is good. Promoting someone past the years of actually doing the job is not.

American policing is more fragmented than the UK’s 43 forces. We have roughly 18,000 separate agencies, most of them small, each running its own promotion process with its own standards, or often no real standards at all. If a lottery exists in a country with 43 forces, what does the equivalent look like across 18,000 in the U.S.? We lean hard on testing. Written exams and assessment centers decide who gets the stripes, and those tools measure how well someone prepares for a test, not how well they lead people. I have watched agencies hand someone a sergeant’s badge and treat that as leadership development. It is not. It is a title change. If you run an agency, this report gives you three questions worth asking this month: (1)    Do your newly promoted sergeants and lieutenants get real leadership training, and how long  after  promotion do they wait for it?  (2) Is your promotion process consistent and defensible, or does it depend on who you know?  (3) Do you have any formal way to recognize the officers who are already leading from the floor, without rank, before they ever test for one.

None of this requires a national commission. It requires a chief willing to look at their own pipeline honestly, the same way Blunkett and Herbert looked at theirs. Leadership development is not a program you run once a year. It is a system you build on purpose, or one that builds itself badly by accident. The UK just spent eight months proving which one they had. Most American agencies have never bothered to check.

Dr. Stephen A. Morreale

Professor of Criminal Justice | Author | Keynote Speaker | Podcast Host | Retired Police Leader

(Dr Morreale is  MAPLE member) Helping police & public safety leaders lead better | Host, The CopDoc Podcast (175 episodes, 144 countries) | 33 years policing | DEA and HHS-OIG leader (Ret.) | Professor-20 years

Article References

College of Policing. (2026, July). Police leadership commission report published. https://www.college.police.uk/article/police-leadership-commission-report-published

LBC. (2026, July). Police leadership system ‘too weak’ to meet future challenges, new review warns. https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/police-leadership-system-too-weak-to-meet-future-challenges-5HjdcXs_2/

Police Federation of England and Wales. (2026). Police Federation calls leadership review a ‘watershed moment’ for policing. https://polfed.org/news/latest-news/2026/police-federation-calls-leadership-review-a-watershed-moment-for-policing/

Ideas are the author’s own. Claude AI assisted with dictating, refining, and drafting. The author revised, edited, and takes full responsibility.