“Police Don’t Need ‘Soft Skills’”: The Place of Emotional Intelligence in Police Education

Emotional intelligence (EI) can bring significant advantages to policing practice that benefits all stakeholders; the police, other agencies, the public, victims and offenders. Within the policing programme curriculum, however, there is little emphasis on its merit as a topic to learn and develop. In this chapter, I look at how we have integrated it into our teaching, how it has evolved and how it has contributed to communication, decision-making, well-being and the bridging of public confidence that serves to strengthen “policing by consent”.