Blue: A Memoir – Keeping the Peace and Falling to Pieces

by John Sutherland

In my experience, a good skipper is absolutely indispensable. He or she sets the standards, the culture, the tone, the level of expectation and the appetite for work. There’s just no substitute for high-quality frontline leadership – feet on the street, not tucked under a desk.

Let me tell you the difference between raising boys and raising girls,’ he says. ‘With a boy, you’ve only got one willy to worry about; with a girl, there are millions of the bastards.’

And the undeniable experience – in policing and beyond – is that the imposition of targets has a tendency to skew behaviour. The pursuit of the target affects the integrity of the measure, and the danger is that we end up doing what’s counted, rather than what counts.