This month marks the commencement of the ‘Virtues in Policing’ research project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The project builds on the Centre’s portfolio of work on professional virtue and character in several public professions. The project seeks to capture police officers’ ideas about the values that are most important to them as professionals, those they believe exemplify the ‘ideal’ police officer, and how they respond to bespoke policing-specific moral dilemmas. The research team hope to gain insight into how virtue ethics and the role and value of character and virtue in the profession might be cultivated. Through collaborative work with partner organisations, the new project will develop and trial an intervention designed to cultivate character and virtues that ultimately lead to the development of phronesis among policing professionals in the UK. Further information is available here.
