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Functioning in the hot seat: exploring the competencies of police incident commanders

Lorna Ferguson (Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada)
Laura Huey (Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada)
Hina Kalyal (Management and Organizational Studies, Huron University College, London, Canada)
Judith P. Andersen (Department of Psychology, University of Toronto - Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada)

Policing: An International Journal

ISSN: 1363-951X

Article publication date: 21 October 2024

48

Abstract

Purpose

Incident commanders (ICs) are senior police officials tasked with being the key operational decision-makers and leading a command team during major, critical and public order incidents (e.g. bomb threats, hostage situations and protests). Such events are often characterized by heavy time pressures and little information, requiring a highly skilled, integrated emergency response across multiple agencies and significant police planning, organizing and management. ICs must possess the necessary skills, traits and behaviors to deal with such incidents and their challenges. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the competencies of ICs.

Design/methodology/approach

We conducted a thematic analysis of thirty-eight (n = 38) in-depth interviews with police personnel who have professional experience as ICs.

Findings

Results provided information on the competencies important for effective incident command, including a range of skills, traits and behaviors these police personnel should exhibit, such as command presence, decision-making, confidence, risk assessment, teamwork, task management, stress management, humility and others.

Originality/value

We provide a novel literature contribution by proposing a framework of police IC competencies and their interrelatedness based on first-hand interviews with experts in the field. Practitioners and policymakers need to know actionable strategies for developing standardized training and assessment curricula for ICs. The next steps are to delineate what skills, traits and behaviors are trainable and need to be selected for at the time of recruitment (e.g. occupational aptitude, personality). We provide the foundation upon which researchers and practitioners can make actionable decisions on moving forward to attain these important goals.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (No: SSHRC-IDG 435-2023-1114). However, SSHRC had no other involvement in the conceptualization, design, analysis, decision to publish or preparation of this manuscript.

Lorna Ferguson: conceptualization and framework, data collection and analysis, writing – original draft (all sections), writing – reviews and editing (all sections) and visualization; Laura Huey: funding acquisition, data collection, writing – original draft (introduction and literature review); Hina Kalyal: writing – original draft (literature review and discussion), writing – review (literature review); Judith P. Andersen: funding acquisition, assisted with conceptualization and framework, writing – original draft (discussion and visualization) and writing – reviews and editing.

Citation

Ferguson, L., Huey, L., Kalyal, H. and Andersen, J.P. (2024), "Functioning in the hot seat: exploring the competencies of police incident commanders", Policing: An International Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/PIJPSM-04-2024-0071

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024, Emerald Publishing Limited

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