why was the ndm introduced?
The NDM is based around the police force mission statement and the Code of Ethics, which should be considered when completing each of the stages. You should ask yourself whether the action you are considering is consistent with the Code of Ethics, what the police service would expect, and what the community and the public as a whole would expect of you.
The NDM stages are:
Stage 1 Gather information about the problem in hand. Not only should you work out what you do know, but what you do not know. You will use the information gathered in stage 1 throughout the rest of the process and also when your decisions are being assessed and judged after the event.
Stage 2 Determine the threat, its nature and extent so that you can assess the situation and make the right decisions. Ask yourself, do you need to take the necessary action straight away or is this an ongoing problem? What is the most likely outcome and what would be the implications? Are the police the most appropriate people to deal with the problem, and are you best equipped to help resolve the problem at hand or would somebody else be better?
Stage 3 Knowing what the problem is, you will need to determine what powers you and the police have to combat the problem. Ask yourself which powers will be needed and if the required powers and policies need any additional or specialist assistance to be instigated and introduced. Is there any legislation that covers the process?
Stage 4 Armed with all of the information regarding the problem and any policies and other legislations that may exist, you are in a position to draw up a list of options. You should also use this opportunity to develop a contingency plan or a series of contingencies that can provide you with a backup plan if things do not go exactly to plan.
Stage 5 Once you have determined the most appropriate action, it is time to put this in place. Perform the most desirable action and, if necessary, begin the process again to get the best results possible. Review the process and determine whether or not you could have done things better and what you would do in the future if you were faced with a similar, or the same, problem.
The NDM puts the Code of Ethics at the heart of all police decision making. This distinguishes the NDM from other decision-making models and recognises the need for all police decisions to be consistent with the principles and standards of behaviour set out in the Code. confidence in policing.
Chief constables in England and Wales have adopted a new decision-making approach for the police service that puts values at its heart.
The National Decision Model (NDM) will replace all existing decision models in policing. It is part of a concerted drive to focus on delivering the mission of policing while acting in accordance with values, enhancing the use of discretion and professional judgement, reducing risk-aversion and in so doing helping to strike the balance between demand for police services and increasingly limited resources.
The development of the NDM has been led by Chief Constable Adrian Lee and Chief Constable Brian Moore who chair the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) Ethics and Risk Co-ordination portfolios respectively ensuring that the way the police service approaches risk has a sound ethical grounding.
Mr Lee, chief constable of Northamptonshire Police, said: The NDM is a deliberately simple model and it shares common ingredients with the three models for decision-making it replaces. The model is for use by the whole of the police service, not just for operational decisions, and provides a practical tool for police officers and police staff making difficult decisions in challenging circumstances.
The most significant shift for the new NDM is the central touchstone that focuses on the policing mission, the values we share, risks and protection of human rights. These factors must be considered at every stage because the decisions officers and staff make need to be both technically and ethically right.
The elements of the model are very familiar to people but I think rather than saying I think this is how I did it, you can say theres a model. Here are the five stages. I went through them and at each stage I was trying to implement what I understand to be the mission and values of the police service. If as a result of that some harms come that was completely avoidable then thats how I defend my decision-making. Its about helping staff to properly record their rationale.
Surrounding this central core of the NDM are five stages, each of which encourage a considered approach to intelligence, risk, and applicable powers and policy as precursors to taking action interspersed with prompts to review action taken and develop a working strategy based on intelligence, threat and risk.
Mr Moore, chief constable of Wiltshire Police, said: Understanding and managing risks, both those to the general public and those to the police service itself, are fundamental to effective policing.
The adoption of the NDM is a significant development in this regard and will also contribute to achieving reductions in bureaucracy as well as developments in safeguarding and public protection.
Chief constables across the country have agreed that the NDM will officially replace the Conflict Management Model (CMM), Scanning, Analysing and Responding to and Assessing Problems (SARA) and the Values-Based Decision-Making model with immediate effect.
Work has already begun on the implementation of the model, led by the ACPO Business areas and the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA). An e-learning package is being developed to provide quick and readily available training, which can be brief and simple, like the model itself.
There is considerable discussion in the USA about the relevance of the OODA loop to policing, and this again focuses on conflict management situations (the "Active Shooter"). There are two important differences between combat (the canonical use of OODA) and conflict management. Firstly, the preferred outcome is not to kill the offender but to disarm him (either physically or psychologically). This means that you sometimes need to give the offender time to calm down, orienting himself into making the right decision. And the cop needs to stay calm. George “Doc” Thompson, who taught US police a de-escalation technique known as Verbal Judo, once said "We know that the most deadly weapon we carry is not the .45 or the 9mm, it is in fact the cop’s tongue ... A single sentence fired off at the wrong person at the wrong time can get you fired, it can get you sued, it can get you killed." So it's not just about having a faster OODA loop than the other guy (although clearly some American cops think this is important). And secondly, there is a lot of talk about situation awareness and anticipation. For example, Dr. Mike Asken, who is a State Police psychologist, has developed a model called AAADA (Anticipating, Alerting, Assessing, Deciding and Acting). There is also a Cognitive OODA model I need to look into. However, I interpret @antlerboy's request for theoretical underpinning as not just a historical question (what theories of decision-making were the creators of NDM consciously following) but a methodological question (what theories of decision-making would be relevant to NDM and any other decision models). But this post is already long enough, and the sun is shining outside, so I shall return to this topic another day.
Footnote
I referred above to the decisions that police and others are most interested in discussing.
Argyris and Schön introduced the distinction between Espoused Theory and Theory-In-Use. Perhaps we need a third category to refer to what people imagine to be the central or canonical examples of the theory. We might call it Theory-in-View or Theory-in-Gaze.
This is not quite the same as Prototype Theory, which determines membership of a given category in terms of the similarity to the canonical example.
Update 2022: Reading Annemarie Mol has introduced me to Lolle Nauta's concept of exemplary situation. So perhaps that's the term I should use?
