This report on a pilot study, conducted in the spring semester of 2022 in five police science departments at universities in England, draws upon and complements findings from an earlier report from the same research project, Character Virtues in Policing (Kristjánsson, Thompson and Maile, 2021). As was noted in the report describing Phase 1 of this project, a research spotlight on the police is timely because of (a) the current changes in educational requirements in England and Wales making policing a graduate profession; (b) other factors associated with the professionalisation of policing; (c) the recent challenges that police forces have been facing to their legitimacy and socio-moral standing in the wake of various police scandals; and (d) the identified need for an intervention to cultivate practical wisdom that is explained in Section 1.
Among the recommendations of the first report was that virtue ethics needed to be foregrounded more explicitly in professional ethics courses within police science, not least the meta-virtue of phronesis (practical wisdom) that aids good decision-making in tricky dilemmatic situations of the kind that police officers often face. In the light of this key recommendation and encouragement from various police science lecturers, a short phronesis intervention was designed and trialled at five universities as part of Phase 2 of this project. The intervention comprised four 45-minute classes, along with a pre- and post-test using a validated measure of phronesis (Darnell et al., 2022).
This report describes the motivations behind the intervention, its theoretical underpinning, design
and outcomes.