college of policing business plan

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• Government efficiency, transparency and accountability

College of Policing Limited: annual report and accounts 2021 to 2022

An overview of work done by the College of Policing between April 2021 and March 2022, along with a summary of the College’s 2021 to 2022 accounts.

College of Policing Limited annual report and accounts for the year ended 31 March 2022

Ref: ISBN 978-1-5286-3829-6, E02837790 12/22, HC 983 2022-23

PDF , 5.99 MB , 184 pages

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College of Policing Limited annual report and accounts for the year ended 31 March 2022 (print)

PDF , 1.66 MB , 309 pages

A report published by the College of Policing along with a summary of the College’s 2021 to 2022 accounts.

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Operational planning

Authorised Professional Practice

• Definitions and procedures
• Command structures
• Command support
• Core planning principles
• Planning resources
• Strategic planning
• Tactical planning
• Deployment planning
• Briefing and debriefing
• Operational review
• Reference material

This page is from APP, the official source of professional practice for policing.

The powers and policies available to help resolve an incident or operation should be considered at all times when developing force strategies, operational plans and tactical options. These may include the specific legal powers that police officers have, or policies agreed at a local, regional or national level. Selecting the appropriate powers and policies enables a strategy to be developed that addresses the threat in a proportionate manner and ensures accountability by demonstrating the decision-making rationale behind the strategy.

The incident may be part of a wider multi-agency response and have far reaching consequences, in which case partners will follow the Joint Emergency Service Interoperability Principles (JESIP) .

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Investigation of retail crime

Page contents.

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Joint guidance from the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing on police investigation of shop thefts.

Shops support our local communities by providing employment and leisure. Recent increases in retail crime and violence against shopworkers risk resulting in shop closures and damaging public confidence in the police’s ability to prevent crime, safeguard shopworkers and target offenders.

Shop theft is often accompanied by assaults and threats of violence by offenders. At the point of first contact, a robust threat assessment should be carried out using THRIVE  (threat, harm, risk, investigation, vulnerability and engagement).

Attendance at the scene

Police attendance for retail crime, as with other crime, will be prioritised in the following circumstances.

An emergency is where a crime is in progress and there is serious: 

• danger to life
• use of violence
• threat of violence

A priority is where a crime is ongoing and where no police attendance within one hour is highly likely to result in escalation or deterioration of the circumstances including:

• injury or damage
• specific concern for safety
• significant vulnerability identified
• loss of evidence
• loss of witnesses
• when a person is detained, their identify is not known and there is a risk of escape or violence

Crime review and investigation

In line with the College of Policing guidance, all reasonable lines of enquiry should be pursued to help identify suspects such as the following.

• Where there is clear recorded CCTV (or other) footage, police will recover that and seek to present it as evidence.
• Where there is clear eyewitness evidence, that person will be interviewed.
• Where there is strong evidence and forensic opportunities, police will seek to present these.
• Where property is stolen with unique features, such as a serial number, police will seek to recover it and obtain evidence.

Where CCTV is obtained, the images should be checked against those in the Police National Database (PND) using its facial recognition capability.

Find out more about following all reasonable lines of enquiry:

• Conducting effective investigations guidelines
• Investigation process APP

Repeat offenders

In many communities, there is a small number of prolific offenders that are committing most of the acquisitive crime and anti-social behaviour. A proactive approach that identifies – and targets resources at – these individuals will have a positive effect in preventing crime.

Local areas should work with retailers to identify those offenders that cause the most harm and develop joint action plans to target their offending, for example:

• trigger plans for offending
• use of ancillary orders such as Community Protection Notices (CPNs) or Criminal Behaviour Orders (CBOs) 
• designated single points of contact (SPOCs) for efficient of collection of evidence
• the use of business and victim impact statements to support prosecutions
• Read a practice note from Going equipped on tackling prolific retail theft

Interventions to reduce business crime

The College of Policing practice bank contains shared interventions on collaborating with businesses to identify repeat offenders. Examples include:

• Safer business action days
• CCTV business viewing events

Hot spot patrolling

Evidence has shown that hot spot patrolling in high crime locations will prevent crime .

The top locations should be identified using police data, intelligence and business engagement insights. Patrol plans should then be developed using temporal analysis to provide a highly visible presence, in order to prevent crime, provide reassurance and increase responsiveness.

Problem solving

Hot spot patrolling activity should be supported by problem-solving policing to tackle the root causes of the offending. 

Problem-solving plans should be developed against repeat locations and prolific offenders using the SARA model to allow:

• identification of a specific problem
• thorough analysis to understand the problem
• development of a tailored response
• assessment of the effects of the response

Problem solving resources

• Crime reduction toolkit – retail tagging
• APP on policing business crime
• National Business Crime Centre (NBCC) guidance on shopworker safety
• Shopworker training videos

Serious and organised retail crime – police response

The threat of organised retail crime (ORC) is increasing and now poses a significant challenge to the retail industry and law enforcement. Shoplifting is often dealt with locally by police forces. Due to competing demands, intelligence regarding organised crime groups (OCGs) involved in this type of criminality is not prioritised. This leaves intelligence gaps that do not accurately reflect the scale and scope of the issues.

Some larger retailers manage incidents and intelligence themselves, often using third party companies who will manage their data and help develop a common operating picture of the biggest threats that are posed to them.

Due to the constraints of the General Data Protection Regulation UK (GDPR), retailers often do not have the confidence to share this information themselves. Lack of confidence in police may also mean that reporting processes do not inform law enforcement.

Opal is the National Intelligence Unit for Serious and Organised Acquisitive Crime under Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman’s portfolio. They will be working in collaboration with a number of high street retailers under an initiative called Pegasus. Opal will use policing expertise in intelligence development and OCG management together with industry data and knowledge.

A new ORC capability will be formed within Opal, which will be funded by the Pegasus group. This team will be centrally governed but will support police forces in identifying the OCGs operating in their area so that they can be effectively targeted locally.

Key activities of the unit include the following.

• The creation of a new dedicated intelligence team focussing on ORC, providing a unique interface for retailers to share intelligence with policing to develop into tangible activity, prevention and enforcement.
• Training provided to retailers on appropriate information and intelligence to share.
• The development of a National Strategic Assessment on ORC using both industry, police and third party data. For the first time, this will give a detailed analysis of ORC, the offenders and their modus operandi, as well as opportunities to tackle ORC.
• Use of facial recognition software across public and private sectors to identify the individuals who pose the highest threat of harm and risk.
• The identification of OCG’s which will be appropriately prioritised, mapped and allocated to local policing for onward management and intelligence development.
• The development of a performance framework to track activity and outcomes of the Opal ORC team.

Serious and organised crime resources

• Disrupting serious and organised criminals – menu of tactics
• Crime reduction

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An Effective Business Plan Can Plot the Course for Small Business Success

December is National Write a Business Plan Month. The SBA encourages you to mark the occasion by learning how to put together an efficient, high-quality plan that will increase your chances of small business success in the year ahead.

You wouldn’t try to find a new destination without mapping the route first. By the same logic, you don’t want to start a business without a plan to guide your path. A business plan can help you navigate all the roadblocks that come with getting your business up and running.

Which Type of Business Plan Should You Choose?

While some business plans may be more effective than others, there’s technically no wrong way to write one. Every business is different, and the type of plan you choose should ultimately boil down to your unique needs and goals. The two most common types of business plans are traditional and lean startup.

A traditional business plan might be right for you if:

• You’re detail-oriented.
• You want a comprehensive plan.
• You plan to request financing from traditional sources.

A traditional business plan is a great way to show you’ve done your homework, which is why it’s the preferred method of many lenders and investors. While a traditional plan may take more time to write, the extra effort is worth it in the long run. The more thorough you are, the better you’ll be able to answer questions about what your company is, how it will stack up to competitors, and why it will be a financial success. You don’t have to stick to a set structure, but the following nine sections should be included in a traditional business plan: executive summary and company description; market analysis; organization and management structure; service or product line description; marketing and sales strategy; and funding requests and financial projections.

A lean startup plan  might be right for you if:

• You want to explain or start your business quickly.
• Your business is relatively simple.
• You plan to regularly change and refine your business plan.

The lean startup format is ideal for entrepreneurs who want to keep things high-level and adaptable. At their core, lean startup plans focus on only the most important details — making them a viable streamlined alternative. Lean startup business plans can take as little as an hour to write and are typically only one page. By sticking to the following basics, expressed through visual tradeoffs and fundamental facts, you leave a lot of room to fill in the blanks later: partnerships, activities, and resources; value propositions; customer experience, target market, and channels; and cost structure and potential revenue streams.

Regardless of which route you choose, the SBA is here to help. Our  Business Planning Guide is easy to use and contains templates you can follow. Our  “How to Write a Business Plan” course, offered through the SBA Learning Center, will show you how to plan, outline, and develop your own business plan. Of course, if you prefer a more hands-on option, an  SBA resource partner is standing by. Learn more at sba.gov . 

About the author

U.s. small business administration.

Will fashion ever be truly diverse?

A new program at parsons school of design aims to close the gap for designers with disabilities.

In fashion, who is at a show — or on the runway, appearing in magazines or designing at a brand — is often just as important as who isn’t.

More recently, that question has become less an incentive for catty gossip and more urgently a question of equity: why is the fashion world still so thin, White, ableist and cisgender, especially when so many of its followers and consumers are not? (A popular meme shows the headshots of the creative directors at several leading luxury brands, all of whom are White with closely cropped brown hair.) While size inclusivity and body diversity have become buzzwords, the feeling persists that models outside of the stereotypical beauty ideal must adhere to yet another set of standards.

And for those who may see style as essential to the protection of their identity and comfort — for whom its power for exploration and self-presentation are part of their identity as trans, queer or disabled — what’s aspirational to one consumer can feel like a message that they simply have no place in the world of self-expression and clothes, even as fashion brands roll out products at a breakneck pace and insist that “everyone” should buy them.

A major new initiative at one of the country’s leading fashion schools hopes to challenge these inequities. Parsons School of Design, the New York City-based college that has produced designers such as Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs, will launch a program for designers who identify as disabled, in conjunction with Irish writer and disability activist Sinéad Burke’s consultancy Tilting the Lens.

The Style section

Called the Parsons Disabled Fashion Student Program, it has a fund of more than $500,000 to recruit and mentor three incoming students across several of its fashion programs, including providing support for tuition as well as living and access costs.

A group of advisers, mentors and supporters is packed with boldface names and luxury brands — mentors include model Aaron Rose Philip, who has worked with Moschino, Collina Strada and Versace, as well as Fondation Chanel’s head of finance Rachel Iseman. The Ford Foundation will support research on disabled students’ experience in fashion school, which will help shape the program and be made available to other institutions, and H&M will provide funding for the scholarship.

Applications are due in March — they will be reviewed by the admissions committee for the degree program for which the student is applying as well as the program’s own selection committee, made up of disabled Parsons faculty and some advisory members — and the first three students will matriculate in the fall.

For the program’s founders, this isn’t just an opportunity to make fashion more accessible but to change the way that future generations think about the function of fashion.

“Fashion inherently is a practice that affirms our bodies, connects us to land and the natural environment, establishes relationships to communities, and of course is a cultural, artistic and economic field. It’s all of that,” says Ben Barry, dean of fashion at Parsons, who identifies as disabled and has been working to develop this program for three years. “I think within a colonized western context, fashion has been taken up as a form of hierarchy. A form of separating people, policing people, and creating division rather than connection.” (Take, for example, the feeling of insecurity and foolishness almost any of us, even the most fanatically fashion-forward, feel looking at a runway show.)

Even fashion houses’ efforts at diversifying can fall victim to this desire for hierarchy and separation, which Burke, the founder and CEO of Tilting the Lens, hopes this program will help address. Burke is a 33-year-old Irish writer and disability activist who is widely followed for pushing for diversity and inclusion from the front row of luxury fashion shows. She has appeared on the cover of British Vogue twice, in September 2019 and this May, and was the first little person to attend the Met Gala , in 2019. She regularly attends shows such as Gucci and Burberry, and her consultancy, which she founded in 2020, has worked with brands including Starbucks, Ralph Lauren and Netflix. In many ways, she is the ultimate insider, but she also felt like she was one person being tasked with representing many.

“No effort as important as equity, inclusion, accessibility, and even, shall we say, sustainability, should be reliant on one individual,” says Burke, “and shouldn’t be as malleable as, if that person leaves, there is not enough robustness within the organization that it isn’t maintained. ”

Philip, who is among the program’s mentors, is a 22-year-old trans model born with cerebral palsy who has appeared on the runway for brands including Moschino and Collina Strada. She was admitted to Parsons as a teenager but couldn’t afford the tuition. “I feel like sometimes things happen in life where if you’re not able to do something for yourself, you’re able to do it for your community at large,” Philip says.

She has also felt frustrated that opportunities for her, such as walking a Moschino runway show or posing with Donatella Versace, don’t lead to more opportunities for those like her. “I have my disability, I have my transness, I’m a black woman. But none of these things stop me from being able to work and do my talent the way that I am meant to because of other people’s inability to accommodate me physically.” Designers acknowledge “what it takes for me to give on the level that my White counterparts give on, my able-bodied counterparts give on,” Philip says, but often “these bigger fashion houses, that have power and leverage and money and resources, they’re so unwilling to not be ableist.”

But the program also represents, frankly, a bold commitment — the ambition of which, Barry and Burke hope, will be a way of combating the tokenism seeming inherent to our era in fashion, when an initiative introduced by a creative director may be unceremoniously canceled as soon as another creative director or business leader arrives.

“I knew I needed to combat any type of token or performative gesture,” says Barry, who is 40. “While I occupy this role as dean, I see my body as a vessel to create institutional change.”

The school itself may require adjustments for students in the program, and Barry, who joined Parsons in July 2021, said that the program is one effort he’s made among many to diversify the school, including hiring 10 new full-time faculty members who come from “communities that have been structurally marginalized.”

But Burke and Barry aren’t just thinking about the school itself: Outside of the campus, fashion houses are often in locations that are not readily accessible, especially in European fashion capitals like Paris or Milan, with its cobblestone streets and older buildings which often only have stairs.

“If we think about how somebody who is a wheelchair user, somebody who is blind or low vision, somebody who’s neurodivergent, for example, may work in an atelier in Rome, in Paris, in Milan, in London — due to the infrastructure of those cities, it could be incredibly challenging, and that is without bias and mind-set,” says Burke. “So some of that work [is] to connect with these brands even from an educational and awareness perspective.”

Rebecca Cokley, who works as the Ford Foundation’s first U.S. Disability Rights Program Officer, which is providing funding for the Parsons’s initiative’s research, thinks of how often what are seen as accommodations for a few lead to progress for many. “I always remind people, captions exist because disabled people demanded [them],” as do curb cuts and four-wheeled suitcases, says Conley, who is a little person. “The amount of technology and tools and apps that exist because we were segregated from something … We did that for you.”

“This is very much a piece of that,” she says. “What does it mean to have disabled people regularly at Parsons? It means that non-disabled people are going to expect to see disabled people at Parsons. And then when they enter the industry, they’re going to wonder why there aren’t disabled people there. And so they’re going to be more open to having disabled people apply for internships. They’re going to be more open to thinking about how we adjust what fashion looks like, or the stitching we use or, what kind of clasps we use. It is so phenomenal to be in a role where, I tell people, I don’t get to innovate yet; I’m just trying to make things right at this point. But at the same time, understanding that the outside world does see this as innovation.”

“I dream of a day,” Cokley says, “where anybody with a disability, and obviously little people, expect to be a Sinéad, versus an Oompa-Loompa.”

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