Functioning in the hot seat: exploring the competencies of police incident commanders
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".