Evidence should be checkable

Sources come before confidence

Material factual claims should be supported by an identifiable source, a transparent calculation, or an explained mechanism. Primary sources are preferred where they exist: legislation, judgments, official statistics, government and parliamentary material, the College of Policing, HMICFRS, police data and peer-reviewed research. Secondary reporting is useful for context, but it should not replace the original evidence when that evidence can be checked directly.

A citation is not decoration. It should support the claim beside it. Statistics should carry enough context to understand what they measure: period, geography, denominator and a meaningful comparison where one exists. Association is not described as causation unless the evidence supports that inference.

Law and policy are stated in the right jurisdiction

Policing is not governed by one UK-wide legal system. Articles should identify whether a law, policy or dataset applies to England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland or the whole United Kingdom. A Bill, consultation, announcement, enacted provision and commenced legal duty are not treated as the same thing.

Where an article discusses legislation, the preferred legal source is the legislation itself or another authoritative UK source. Guidance is distinguished from a legal duty, and a policy commitment from something already operational.

Evidence, judgement and recommendation are different things

Articles are allowed to reach conclusions. Neutrality does not require giving weak evidence the same weight as strong evidence. But the route to the conclusion should be visible. Where the evidence is uncertain, the uncertainty belongs in the argument. Where a recommendation goes beyond what research can establish, it should be recognisable as judgement rather than disguised as a finding.

Operational examples should be real and verifiable. The site does not invent officers, incidents, quotations or personal experience to make an argument feel more persuasive.

AI tools are tools, not evidence

AI tools may be used in parts of research, drafting, coding, analysis or checking. Their output is not treated as a source. A model-generated citation, quotation, legal proposition or statistic is not evidence merely because it looks plausible; claims still need to resolve to a source that a reader can inspect.

The same rule applies to automated research tools on this site. They can help find and organise material, but the underlying paper, dataset, judgment or official publication remains the evidence.

Corrections should leave the article more reliable

Factual errors should be corrected when identified. A substantive update should use the article's updated date rather than silently presenting old material as newly published. Where a correction changes the meaning of an important claim or conclusion, the change should be made clear enough that a returning reader is not misled about what changed.

Broken source links should be repaired where a stable replacement exists. If a source can no longer be verified and the claim depends on it, the claim should be reconsidered rather than left in place because it was previously published.

Independence and contact

The site is written and maintained in a personal capacity. Its views do not represent any police force, the Home Office or another organisation mentioned in an article. That independence does not remove the obligation to be fair to people and institutions being criticised; contested claims should be grounded in evidence and credible alternative explanations considered where they matter.

Corrections, methodological challenges and source problems can be sent to [email protected]. A useful correction identifies the article, the disputed passage and the evidence that supports a change.