The Officers We’re Losing: Why British Policing Must Rethink Cognitive Diversity

I have ADHD, and I am a serving police sergeant. I have spent a career watching officers like me get managed toward the door — chaotic paperwork, missed deadlines, “needs to improve organisation” on the appraisal — while forces spend heavily recruiting people who look, on paper, easier to manage. This is written from inside that experience, not about it.

British policing invests heavily in recruitment, training and development, then systematically loses officers whose cognitive profiles don’t fit institutional assumptions about what “good” looks like. That is not simply losing difficult-to-manage individuals. It is losing capabilities forces will need most as the job gets harder to predict.

This isn’t an accommodation argument. It’s a question of whether senior leaders can recognise capability that doesn’t present in the conventional way.

The uncomfortable question

Consider an officer profile: consistently late despite genuine effort, loses equipment regularly, takes three times longer than colleagues on written work, questions established procedures, and appears disorganised during routine periods. Most performance management systems would flag this officer for intervention, and many would eventually exit the service.

Now consider the same officer: spots patterns others miss, performs with exceptional calm during critical incidents, builds deep community relationships, works complex cases with obsessive focus, and thinks laterally when standard approaches fail.

These are not two different officers. They are the same person, one whose neurological profile includes ADHD. The question for senior leaders is not whether such officers exist in our forces. They do, in significant numbers. The question is whether our leadership culture can recognise that the second set of characteristics may be worth more to policing than the first set costs us.

What the evidence shows

Start with the brain scans, because they’re weaker evidence than they’re usually presented as being. The largest neuroimaging study of ADHD ever run — Hoogman and colleagues’ 2017 ENIGMA-ADHD collaboration, comparing 1,713 people with ADHD against 1,529 controls across 23 sites — did find smaller volumes in several subcortical brain regions in children with ADHD. But the case-control differences in the adult participants were not statistically significant. The clean story — ADHD is a fixed structural brain difference that persists unchanged into adulthood — is not what the largest study actually found. What it found is closer to: real, measurable differences in childhood brains, and a picture that gets murkier by adulthood, for reasons still being worked out.

That matters here because it means the case for taking adult ADHD seriously in a police workforce has to rest on behavioural and occupational evidence, not a brain scan. That evidence is where it gets interesting.

A US Forest Service study screened 302 wildland firefighters using a validated self-report scale and found 19.5% scored in the range suggestive of ADHD — against a general adult population rate of around 4.4%, roughly four times higher. A self-report screen isn’t a clinical diagnosis, but the gap is too large to be noise, and it lines up with a broader pattern: similarly elevated rates turn up in military combat roles and other emergency services. High-stakes, high-variability operational work appears to draw in, and retain, people whose attention systems are tuned for exactly that kind of demand — plausibly because these environments provide the stimulation an under-aroused ADHD brain needs to perform at its best, rather than in spite of it.

Closer to home: a 2023 survey of UK police force employees who are autistic and/or have ADHD — a small sample, 51 respondents with ADHD out of 117 total — found 78% said their ADHD brought benefits to their policing work, citing their ability to thrive in fast-paced environments and their commitment to the job. Small sample, self-selected, self-reported — this is not proof of anything at population scale. But it is our own officers describing what the trait does for them at work, and that is worth more attention than it currently gets.

The strategic capability we are discarding

Rory Sutherland, the behavioural scientist, uses an analogy worth borrowing. Around 20% of honeybees ignore the waggle dance — the efficient communication system that directs foragers to known food sources — and fly off to explore at random instead. For years this looked like inefficiency. It isn’t: without those bees, a hive that has fully optimised around today’s flowers has no way of finding tomorrow’s when the current patch runs dry.

James March’s 1991 paper on organisational learning gave this the formal name: exploitation (efficiency, refinement, doing the known thing well) and exploration (discovery, the unfamiliar approach) are both necessary, and an organisation that over-invests in the first becomes brittle — excellent right up until conditions change, and then blindsided, because nobody was looking anywhere else. British policing has spent decades optimising for exploitation. Performance frameworks, promotion criteria and the culture’s working definition of professionalism all reward consistency, process compliance and predictability. Those are real virtues. They are not the only ones the job needs, and they may not be the ones it needs most as the operating environment gets less predictable — county lines tactics shifting faster than response protocols can track, a vulnerable person who doesn’t respond to the standard safeguarding script, a critical incident unfolding chaotically enough that composure under pressure matters more than procedure.

The IMF’s own post-mortem on why it failed to see the 2008 financial crisis coming is a useful outside case: its Independent Evaluation Office found “a high degree of groupthink, intellectual capture… and inadequate analytical approaches” running through an institution staffed almost entirely by people trained the same way, at the same schools, to think about risk the same way. A 2023 quasi-experimental study found autistic employees were significantly more likely than their neurotypical colleagues to identify and report inefficient processes and dysfunctional practices at work — not because they were trying to be difficult, but because they were less inclined to let a shared assumption go unquestioned just because everyone else seemed to accept it.

The leadership culture question

This is territory senior leaders have to engage with directly: institutional culture may be systematically selecting against capabilities the organisation genuinely needs.

Performance management systems are good at spotting visible weaknesses — lateness, administrative delays, non-compliance with routine procedure. They are far worse at spotting invisible strengths — pattern recognition, creative problem-solving, crisis performance, deep community knowledge. Forces measure what is easy to measure, then mistake the measurement for the whole picture.

Promotion processes reward officers who move smoothly through institutional expectations. The officer who questions why something is done a certain way — not from insubordination, but from a genuine need to understand a system before following it — tends to get coded as “difficult” rather than as someone whose discomfort might be pointing at something real. Assumptions about professionalism conflate conformity with competence: the tidy desk and the timely paperwork are proxies for professionalism, not professionalism itself. An officer with chaotic admin and exceptional operational judgement may be doing more for the organisation than one with immaculate files and routine thinking. None of this means lowering standards. It means being honest about which standards actually predict capability, and which are simply what the culture finds comfortable.

The organisational resilience question

Policing is getting more volatile, not less — evolving organised crime, radicalisation pathways, technology-enabled offending, forms of public disorder nobody has planned for yet. None of that gets solved by doing what already exists, slightly more efficiently. It needs officers who see what others miss, question what others accept, stay composed when a standard response would be overwhelmed, and connect information in ways a checklist wouldn’t.

These aren’t rare people forces need to go out and recruit. They are already serving, and a share of them are currently being performance-managed, culturally sidelined, or quietly resigning because the organisation couldn’t see what they were worth. Cognitive diversity is well established to improve team performance on complex problems — organisations get it not through good intentions but by finding which of their own systems select against difference, and changing those systems. For a senior leader, that’s harder than a policy update: it means examining your own instinct for what a reliable officer looks like, and asking whether that instinct is tracking real performance or just your own comfort with people who think the way you do.

A different leadership proposition

The case here is not to accommodate neurodivergent officers despite their differences. It is to deploy them because of their differences — as assets that complement the neurotypical majority rather than duplicate it. That takes supervisors who understand that brilliant crisis performance and chaotic administration can sit in the same person, and manage accordingly. It takes HR systems that can tell a genuine performance issue apart from a cognitive difference that needs a different kind of management. It takes promotion panels that can recognise leadership potential that doesn’t present in the usual shape.

Most of all, it takes senior leaders willing to say organisational excellence looks like more than one thing — that a force needs both the officers who run the waggle dance efficiently and the ones who fly off in a different direction.

The officers currently being managed out are not broken versions of the officers forces wish they had. They are different officers, and the next time a standard approach stops working, they will be the ones who were needed. The question for senior leaders is whether they have the imagination to see that before it’s too late — and the will to build a force that can hold both kinds of excellence at once.

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Sources and further reading

• Martine Hoogman et al., “Subcortical brain volume differences in participants with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children and adults: a cross-sectional mega-analysis”, The Lancet Psychiatry, 2017 — the ENIGMA-ADHD collaboration; case-control brain volume differences were significant in children, not in the adult subsample.
• US Forest Service, “Wildland firefighters and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” — 302 firefighters screened with the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS v1.1); 19.5% scored in the range suggestive of ADHD.
• “A survey of the workplace experiences of police force employees who are autistic and/or have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”, 2023 — 117 respondents, including 51 with ADHD; 78% reported their ADHD brought workplace benefits.
• Rory Sutherland on the honeybee waggle dance and the exploration/exploitation trade-off — see his talks and writing for Ogilvy/The Spectator’s “Wiki Man” column.
• James G. March, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning”, Organization Science, 1991.
• IMF Independent Evaluation Office, “IMF Performance in the Run-Up to the Financial and Economic Crisis: IMF Surveillance in 2004–07”, 2011.
• Kate Hartman et al., 2023 — quasi-experimental study finding autistic employees more likely than neurotypical colleagues to identify and report inefficient processes; discussed in the Deloitte review “The neurodiversity advantage”.