Strange official response to the case of the police recruit cheats

The PSNI decided to put cheating recruits through the course again, instead of getting new, clean applicants, writes Terry Prone.

You could imagine putting it to a job applicant as a killer scenario question designed to explore the judgment, analytical competence, economic awareness, decision-making capacity and ethical core of the applicant. All in one question. That can’t be bad.

That one question would be: “You have become aware that 50 trainee police officers have cheated in the examination that marks the end of their course. They have cheated in collusion. You are the chief constable of the force. What do you do?”

The only problem with that, as a scenario question, is the probability that the job applicants to whom it was offered might not find it credible. I mean, 50 students in collusion to cheat the system? Come on. Not probable, particularly when they all want to join a force dedicated to upholding the law.

It may not be probable, but it happened. Now, how, precisely, the collusion was initiated and carried through is unclear from the information just released by the PSNI. The PSNI wannabe officers who did the cheating are described as having “individually memorised examination questions and collectively shared this information between themselves with a view to assisting them prepare for any re-sit examinations they might have been required to take”.

This is simultaneously confusing and intriguing because it raises the issue of where and in what circumstance the lads and lassies (because we assume they are equal opportunity exam cheats) got such a time-constrained look at the exam papers that each of them had to memorise only one question.

Having done this minor memory task, they then met in plenary session to share the totality of information garnered in thin slices. Your guess is as good as mine as to why they would be planning re-sit examinations, as the PSNI chief constable’s statement mentions, but as mood music, the phrase is worrying. If they needed to cheat to get through an exam 50 of them had failed in the first place, the PSNI has a problem bigger than a bit of cheating.

The PSNI chief constable who issued all of this in a less than informative but ostensibly transparent press release didn’t explain, and you could forgive him for being a bit distracted by what looks like pretty much the entirety of the class of 2016 cheating their lanyards off in an exam and getting caught at it.

Guesswork suggests that someone (we carefully attribute neither rank nor function to the person) within the PSNI wished to see most of the students do well and therefore did the old thing of leaving the exam papers open on a desk so that each, in sequence, could cop on to and memorise just one of the questions. Were you and I, dear reader, on the Northern Ireland Policing Board, we would want this investigated before we ever went near the students, because it would indicate that someone, singular or plural, who is already paid to serve within the PSNI, subverted the interests of the force in order to make sure that a bunch of students wouldn’t fail their exam. (Or, possibly, wouldn’t fail it a second time.) Were you and I, dear reader, on that board, we would want that person or persons identified and disciplined to within an inch of their lives.

Then, and only then, would we move on to the more than four dozen students who have demonstrated altruism (if you want to be positive about it) or capacity to conspire (if you don’t) as well as competence in memorising small chunks of data.

Fifty of them shared enough information to raise all of them above the bar, a level of collaboration which would qualify them for a lucrative career in organised crime. The problem is that organised crime doesn’t appear on any of their career plans. Instead, they claim to want careers combating organised crime. Not to mention combating disorganised crime.

These newbies also demonstrated group think, which is precisely what, worldwide, police cultures are increasingly under attack for. Group think within police forces means that the system protects itself first and protects those within the system second. This is done at the expense of those the system purports to serve. Good police forces, worldwide, are grappling with the task of eliminating it. Bet most of them wouldn’t have thought it could happen before the new arrivals even get sworn in.

But that’s what happened. Nobody seems to have shouted stop. Nobody seems to have said, “Folks. You know the old mafia statement that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead? Well, that kind of applies here. Common sense suggests that when you have 50 people involved, the conspiracy, to misquote Yeats, will not hold.”

Now, let us step back and look at the police force involved in this issue. The PSNI is a relatively new and comparatively noble entity, based on the most rigorous examination to which any police force has been subjected, consequent upon decades of well-placed mistrust based on evidenced rottenness in its predecessor. It is frequently used as an example of how bad practice can be eliminated and an organisation worthy of internal pride and external trust created from the toxic ashes of the past.

In that context, we might assume that the brightest and best would apply for membership of the organisation, and that some of the minority of potentially rotten apples among those applicants might be identified prior to acceptance by psychometric and other testing. I say “the minority” because human behaviour allows for deterioration to bad apple status over time. What’s weird, in this instance, is that so large a number opted for rotten apple status so early.

What’s also weird is that the powers that be did not immediately terminate the whole lot of the class with extreme prejudice. Instead, they decided that the 50 involved in what they describe, with teeth-grinding euphemism, as “impropriety” would have to go through the entire course again and thereafter re-sit the examination. Putting 50 students through the totality of a 22-week training programme in its entirety is an interesting budgetary choice. Instead of getting new, clean applicants, the Queen’s shilling is going to be spent boring the asses off students who didn’t get, first time around, the pivotal one line instruction: “Do not cheat.”

Understandably, the chair of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, Anne Connolly, questioned the students’ “suitability and future credibility to perform the duties of constable and did not agree that the sanctions imposed were appropriate or adequate”.

The chief constable stands over those sanctions as “proportionate and appropriate”.

This may be because he is handcuffed by all sorts of rights applying to the students, and by knowledge he cannot properly share in public. He has had to make a tough call in a grievously disappointing situation.

One has to hope that he factored into the making of that call the reality that, down the line, the very fact of graduating into the PSNI as part of the class of 2016 may taint or be perceived as tainting, every member of that class.