“Trust your instincts – act!” PREVENT police officers’ perspectives of counter-radicalisation reporting thresholds

ABSTRACT

The UK PREVENT programme aims to address radicalisation by identifying and supporting “at risk” individuals that are deemed vulnerable to extremism. Central to this process is the willingness of professional practitioners to report information to authorities, a duty consolidated through the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Despite this, little is known about the thresholds to report from a policing perspective. How risk performs beyond fixed indicators which pre-figure terrorism is also underexplored. This qualitative study provides insight into PREVENT police officers’ accounts of the reporting stage of PREVENT. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews identified the mobilisation of intelligence on the basis of “gut feelings” and “instinct”. Professional partners were encouraged to trust their own subjective judgements in the absence of observable risk indicators and tangible evidence. A simplified risk logic was said to provide several operational benefits, for example, aligning the PREVENT team with non-specialist actors. To unpack the data theoretically, this article is inspired by the “affective turn” in human and social sciences. Finally, the findings are supported by an examination of national counter-terrorism policing campaigns, PREVENT briefing documents, and Home Office initiatives. The key propositions have wider implications for policy and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Prevent
• counter-radicalisation
• policing
• gut feeling
• instinct
• risk
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Baker-Beall, Heath-Kelly, and Jarvis (2014); Heath-Kelly (2012, 2013); Lindekilde (2012); Martin (2014).

2. See Pickering, McCulloch, and Wright-Neville (2008); Innes et al. (2011); Lamb (2012a); Maguire, Frois, and Zurawski (2014); Maguire (2014); Maguire and Fussey (2016); Mullins (2016); Peddell et al. (2016).

3. See Thomas et al. (2017) for an analysis of reporting thresholds associated with intimates.

4. ACT has been disseminated across Police Scotland in response to Your View Counts – a public consultation survey which identified terrorism as the greatest concern to the public (Police Scotland 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Paul Dresser

Paul Dresser is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Sunderland. His research interests include pre-emptive counter-terrorism strategies, counter-terrorism policing, and counter-radicalisation policies. He has recently published work in the Journal for Deradicalisation, and the Centre for Applied Social Sciences (CASS) Working Paper Series.