Mr. Alan Todd:

I believe training always struggles to keep up with the changing demand. There is a nervousness in policing, and perhaps in other agencies also, about training our people to fill a space that is not ours to fill. That is where the partnership conversation comes in to play.

Police forces, not only the force in Northern Ireland but also An Garda Síochána and all the other organisations with which I have worked, are can-do organisations. If one gives them a problem, they will fix it. That is in our DNA. It means that when these problems are thrown at us after 4 p.m. on a Friday through to 10 a.m. on Monday, we will do our level best and apply ourselves to the job of keeping people safe and doing all those things one would expect the police to do. If we continue to train our people in that space, it will be at the cost of something else. That is a conversation for the partnerships and the communities on the role of policing and the way it is intended to address this issue as we go forward. More gaps will develop and the police force can no longer be expected to assume responsibility for managing this space.

There will be core things we need to do, and these have changed over time. Members receive much more training in suicide awareness and suicide intervention and negotiation and problem solving. That has changed over time as well. There is much more nuanced use of policing powers in problem solving. We need the partnership structure to come together in a co-ordinated and collaborative way to bring solutions, rather than having us continue to train more of a declining number of officers using a smaller budget to do things that it is not part of our role to deliver in the first instance.

We need to have a training needs analysis to identify the things that police officers can reasonably be expected to do, as part of their core policing role on a day-to-day basis. There are then specialist roles on top of that. The road becomes never-ending once we accept that we will be the emergency service of last resort. To illustrate this point, a national recommendation was made to me, as the UK national lead for contact management, that we train all police call handlers in the UK in first aid because a call handler in a police centre, in an attempt to do the right thing, gave poor first aid advice to a person who suffered additional injury as a result of that advice. The recommendation was to train every contact management operative and call handler in the UK in first aid. That is the role of the ambulance service. It is a question of training our members to recognise what is needed and transfer the call. If we try to train all officer in everything, we will never succeed. Rather than managing risk, as we may believe, we will probably create risk because we are taking money and resources from somewhere else.