Your Experience Could Help Change Policing
We want to hear from serving and former police officers, police staff and families about their experiences of misconduct and disciplinary processes, including what went wrong, what worked well and what could be done differently to help shape meaningful change.
One of the most important parts of It Stops Now will be hearing directly from the people who have experienced the issues we are trying to address.
Policies, procedures and statistics can tell us a great deal, but they do not always show what it is actually like to spend months or years under investigation, what happens to an officer's confidence while they wait for a decision, or the effect that uncertainty can have on relationships, families and life outside policing.
We want to help give those experiences a voice.
We want to hear from you
Over the coming months, we will be publishing stories from serving police officers, former officers, members of police staff and the families who have lived through disciplinary, misconduct or other difficult processes within policing.
We know that some people have experiences stretching over several years and could probably fill a book with everything that has happened to them. For the purposes of It Stops Now, we are particularly interested in identifying specific parts of those experiences that demonstrate where something worked well, where something went wrong and most importantly, what could have been done differently.
This is not about collecting the most shocking stories we can find. We want to build a better understanding of how these processes affect real people and use that experience to support constructive conversations about how policing can improve them.
Families have a story too
We are particularly keen to hear from families.
An investigation may formally involve one police officer or member of staff, but its impact rarely stops with them. Partners can find themselves supporting someone whose mental health or confidence is deteriorating, children may notice that something is wrong without fully understanding why, and families can spend months or even years living with uncertainty about what happens next.
Those experiences are rarely captured in official statistics, yet they are an important part of understanding the true impact of prolonged disciplinary processes.
If you are the partner, parent, child or other close family member of someone who has been through such a process, your perspective matters too.
You do not necessarily have to be named
We also recognise the reality facing serving police officers and staff who may want to speak about their experiences but are understandably concerned about doing so publicly.
Where appropriate, we will therefore consider publishing stories anonymously.
We will need to take sensible steps to protect individuals, ongoing proceedings and other people who may feature in a story, but we do not want someone's inability to put their name or photograph alongside an article to mean their experience cannot be heard.
Likewise, you do not need to identify every individual involved in what happened to you. In many cases, names are irrelevant.
We want to hear what worked as well
It is equally important that It Stops Now does not become somewhere that simply collects criticism of policing.
If you went through an investigation and were treated properly, kept informed, offered a good welfare support or dealt with by people who demonstrated that accountability and compassion can coexist, we want to hear about that too.
Understanding what good looks like could be just as valuable as identifying where the system has failed.
If one force, department or individual approach is getting something right, there may be lessons that can be applied elsewhere.
Turning experiences into evidence for change
There is a reason we want to collect these stories. It Stops Now is seeking constructive engagement with policing leaders, decision-makers and government about the issues affecting officers and staff, and we want those conversations to be informed by more than our own opinions.
When we talk about the consequences of an investigation lasting several years, we want people to understand what those years actually looked like for the person and their family. When we discuss welfare, we want to be able to demonstrate what meaningful support looks like and where people felt abandoned. When we propose changes, we want those proposals to be informed by people who have actually experienced the system.
Individual stories will not replace research or evidence, but they can help us understand what the evidence means in the real world.
Tell us your story
If you have an experience that you believe could help others understand these issues, we would like to hear from you.
You might be a serving officer currently going through a difficult process, someone who has since left policing, a member of police staff, a family member who supported someone through an investigation, or someone whose experience ultimately showed how these processes can be handled well.
You do not need to write a polished article before getting in touch. Tell us what happened, what impact it had and what you believe could have been done differently and we can work with you to identify the part of your experience that could make the greatest contribution.
We cannot promise that every story submitted will be published and there will be occasions where legal, privacy, safeguarding or other considerations mean that publication would not be appropriate.
What we can promise is that the purpose of sharing these experiences will always be the same: to learn from them and use them constructively in the pursuit of a better system.
If policing is going to change, the experiences of the people who have lived through that system need to be part of the conversation.