IN many ways, Geoffrey Barnes is like a teenager trying to teach their parents, or even grandparents, how to move with the times and use technology to make life a little easier.

There’s some resistance, confusion, questioning and trepidation about these “new ways”. But to achieve change, he has to be patient, persistent and not lose faith that an old dog can learn new tricks.

It’s been more than a year since the American academic left his post at the illustrious University of Cambridge as a lecturer and expert in the field of evidence-based policing (EBP) to take up the role as the WA Police Force’s first director of criminology. He’s at the forefront of trying to revolutionise the way our force polices, and to scientifically evaluate new ways to reduce crime.

His team has about 10 projects or experiments under way at the moment. A lot of their work is about helping cops predict crimes, issues and people at high-risk of causing harm in the future using artificial intelligence or “machine learning”, rather than just reacting after the fact.

Some of the EBP projects include:

IDENTIFYING people most likely to cause a road crash that will kill or seriously injure them or others, using 4.7 million infringements police have on record that have been handed out over the an eight-year period. “We could possibly use that information to say maybe we need to do something a little bit different with this particular infringement, maybe there needs to be a (compulsory) education component to it,” Dr Barnes said.

HELPING police choose the best locations for random breath testing operations and to identify the best people to test if there is a queue of cars, who are more likely to blow over the limit, based on the vehicle they are driving and existing data.

A TRIAL on police blitzes in entertainment hotspots such as Northbridge and Fremantle found police going to these precincts and having a visible presence every other weekend had the same effect as being there every weekend.

ANOTHER trial, an early intervention program called Turning Point, aimed at keeping first-time offenders out of courts and prisons “detected a little bit less offending but it probably didn’t reach that statistical significance”, Dr Barnes said, but added it was a cheaper alternative because many people in the diversionary program didn’t progress to court.

The internationally renowned academic said police had to move past the traditional three “Rs” of policing — “rapid response, random patrol and reactive investigation” — into a new era of three “Ts” — targeting, testing and tracking.

“None of this is actually Big Brother data collection, in a lot of cases it’s data that’s already sitting there,” Dr Barnes said.

“Every law enforcement agency worldwide is sitting on terabytes of data. We really need to make use of that, and extend it out to inform how we police.

“The central purpose of (my) role is to not just accept things that we as police have been doing for centuries are actually working and to subject everything we do to a rigorous test so that we can see what works, what doesn’t work and what might work.”

Despite a lukewarm EBP-trial of body-worn video cameras in 2016 that revealed the technology had failed to reduce assaults on police or increase the rate of convictions, but did result in faster guilty pleas, Police Commissioner Chris Dawson last week announced frontline cops would start to be equipped with the devices from early next year.

Dr Barnes said the decision came down to common sense in the absence of overwhelming research.

“In December we presented these results to the corporate board, to the Commissioner and he said, ‘OK, I’m not seeing a lot here to justify this’. But then the discussion became yes, but we are seeing instances in which there are citizens with their own cameras where the filming begins 13 minutes into the incident and we don’t have any idea what led up to it, all we have is the sensational bit,” he said.

“Ultimately it wasn’t going to be this study that drives us into body-worn cameras, it’s going to be a few incidents in which we really, really wish we had our own video and I think we’ve had a few of those incidents in the interim.”

Dr Barnes said no police force could be pushed into a different way of thinking and operating overnight, because many cops grew up in the system — learning to do things a certain way from their superiors and then passing that on to new recruits.

“I think policing is about where medicine was say 50 or 60 years ago ... it wasn’t until the 60s or even 70s that evidence-based medicine became a thing,” he said.

An internal review ordered by Mr Dawson soon after he started last year is believed to have cast doubt on the future of the EBP team, which has shrunk from about 20 last year when Dr Barnes arrived to eight. But Dr Barnes is confident the Commissioner and police hierarchy remain fully committed to an evidence-based, rather than opinion-based, approach to policing.

“I’ve worked with dozens of different police agencies at this point and I can only think of one or two other agencies that have been better at embracing the evidence-based ethos. It’s still early days here, and there are certainly a lot of people who are unconvinced,” Dr Barnes said. He added that it was important not to be “too aggressive” in pushing for change. “Coming up against the realities of policing has been a crucial thing and I think we’re really moving towards a good middle ground.”