Self-Selection Policing: Catching Serious Criminals — and Bad Cops — Through the Small Offences They Can't Help Committing
Academics behind a tactic called self-selection policing say offenders who commit small rule-breaches are far more likely to be involved in serious crime — and want forces to apply the same test to misconduct in their own ranks.
Nathan Tracey
Audio edition
≈ 6 min · narrated
A policing tactic that treats minor offences — parking illegally in a disabled bay, driving while disqualified, shoplifting — as leads to serious crime has been built up over three decades of research at the University of Huddersfield.
The idea, known as self-selection policing (SSP), comes down to one finding: people who commit serious crime don’t stick to it. Professor Jason Roach and the late Professor Ken Pease set out the theory and the evidence behind it in Self-Selection Policing: Theory, Research and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), building on a Home Office-funded study they ran with Sylvia Chenery and Chris Henshaw in Huddersfield in the late 1990s.
The approach is getting fresh attention for a second reason: its authors, and others, argue the same logic applies to officers who bend small rules — and that spotting that pattern earlier could catch misconduct before it escalates.
Background
The founding study, published by the Home Office in 1999 as Illegal Parking in Disabled Bays: A Means of Offender Targeting, checked the police records of drivers parked illegally in disabled bays. About one in four of the vehicles was linked to someone with a live warrant, a disqualification, or active criminal involvement, according to the University of Huddersfield.
A later study by Roach, published in Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, looked at the offending histories of disqualified drivers caught behind the wheel and found a large share had convictions for other, often serious, offences. Roach and Pease say the pattern holds in the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe too, where studies have repeatedly linked serious driving offences to violent and acquisitive crime.
How the tactic works
Most proactive policing starts with intelligence on a person and waits for an offence. Roach and Pease’s approach flips that around: officers treat a minor offence, committed in plain sight, as the trigger for a closer look at who committed it. As Roach has put it, offenders who commit small offences are, in effect, “offering themselves up for police attention.”
By committing small offences, active serious criminals are “offering themselves up for police attention.”
The two advantages its supporters point to: it doesn’t rely on profiling or prior intelligence — the trigger is an offence, not who someone is. And it costs little, because the stop is already happening; the only change is what the officer does with it.
Applying the same test to officer conduct
Roach and Pease’s work has also been applied to a second target: officers themselves. The idea is that officers who commit small rule-breaches — a bit of dishonesty in paperwork, rudeness to the public, cutting corners on protocol — are more likely to be the same officers who go on to serious misconduct.
Baroness Louise Casey’s 2023 review of the Metropolitan Police’s misconduct system found that behaviour “which in most other organisations would lead to instant dismissal or serious disciplinary action” was often dealt with through light-touch measures such as “reflective practices,” and that the force had failed to spot repeated patterns of bad behaviour in individual officers.
A 2024 issue brief by the US-based National Network for Safe Communities found that around 5% of officers were responsible for around 20% of all citizen complaints in the departments it studied, with a small number of officers behind an outsize share of use-of-force incidents and payouts.
Two cases keep coming up in discussion of the approach. Wayne Couzens, the Metropolitan Police officer convicted of murdering Sarah Everard, had been reported for indecent exposure several times before the murder, with no action taken; one victim later told the Guardian that if police had acted, “we could have saved Sarah.” David Carrick, a Met officer convicted as a serial rapist, had a long history of complaints against him, including multiple reports of abuse, before he was prosecuted.
What the researchers say should change
Roach and Pease argue forces should pick trigger offences based on evidence, not gut feeling — testing which minor offences actually link to serious offending, rather than acting on whatever behaviour happens to irritate officers. Roach’s own study of disqualified drivers says practical problems — data access at the roadside, officer time, recording — still need sorting out before trigger offences can become routine practice.
Analysis
This section is the site’s own view, kept separate from the reporting above.
The theory holds up well for its original job — spotting active offenders through minor traffic and acquisitive offences — and the Huddersfield and disqualified-driver studies are solid ground to stand on. The stretch to professional standards is the more interesting claim, and the shakier one: it feels right, and the Casey Review backs the general picture, but it hasn’t been tested the way the driving research has. That gap matters, because the whole approach turns into plain prejudice the moment “offences that flag serious offenders” slides into “behaviour that annoys colleagues or bosses.”
The base-rate point also deserves more airtime than it usually gets: one in four means three in four are not. A trigger offence justifies a check, not a presumption. Any force using SSP — on offenders or on its own officers — should be tracking who gets checked, for the same reasons it already tracks stop and search.
Sources and further reading
- Jason Roach and Ken Pease, Self-Selection Policing: Theory, Research and Practice, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
- Sylvia Chenery, Chris Henshaw and Ken Pease, Illegal Parking in Disabled Bays: A Means of Offender Targeting, Home Office Policing and Reducing Crime Unit, 1999.
- Jason Roach, “Self-selection Policing and the Disqualified Driver”, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 13(3).
- Jason Roach, “The Self-Selection Policing Approach”, Psychology Today (Stopping Crime blog), 2022.
- Jason Roach, “Those who do big bad things still do little bad things: re-stating the case for self-selection policing”, University of Huddersfield Research Portal.
- University of Huddersfield, “Helping the police with their enquiries — research aids policing”, May 2015.
- House of Commons Library, “Casey Review: Misconduct in the Met and officer dismissal”.
- National Network for Safe Communities, “Police Misconduct: Addressing the Few”, 2024.
- The Guardian, reporting on the Wayne Couzens and David Carrick cases.