On the decision-making framework for policing: A proposal for improving police decision-making

Abstract

This article introduces the Decision-Making Framework for Policing (DMFP), a comprehensive tool designed to enhance the decision-making understanding of police officers. The DMFP considers the principles of heuristic, naturalistic, and rational decision-making along a fluid cognitive continuum to create a framework that addresses the limitations of the existing police National Decision Model (NDM). It achieves this by including 10 proposed typologies of police decision-making including: Routine, Tactical, Operational, Crisis, Investigative, Ethical, Interpersonal, Administrative, Managerial, and Strategic. These are integrated alongside existing and adapted decision-making models which are presented using a mnemonic letter strategy. Although the DMFP is theoretical, and its utility is presently untested in comparison to the existing NDM, it is presented to provide a tool to help improve officers' tacit knowledge, pattern recognition, and experiential learning through provision of easily recallable mnemonic decision-models. Thereby fostering a deeper understanding of cognitive processes and the factors influencing police decisions, potentially increasing consistency in reasoning, reducing decision errors, and enhancing policing outcomes.