Part of my Crime Fiction Experts series
Dr Vicky on the police world crime writers keep skipping
Crime writers love full riot gear.
The helmet goes on, the visor comes down, the shield comes up, and we know what’s coming. Someone’s about to get hit. The kit is shorthand for an officer who’s about to start swinging.
There’s a small problem with that. It’s wrong.
“I would argue that ‘full riot gear’ is far more likely to encourage calmness and discipline,” says Dr Vicky. “I think this also feeds into the idea of public order being big, angry men. Aggression and confrontation may come from the crowds, but the policing response is much more measured.”
Meet Dr Vicky, a serving public order commander
Dr Vicky is one of my Crime Fiction Experts, and she’s an experienced public order commander and uniformed police officer. Sporting events, festivals, protests, raves, VIP visits, she’s commanded all of it. She also holds a Professional Doctorate in the impact of public order uniform on police mindset, which makes her the only person I know who can talk about riot gear from both inside the helmet and the academic literature.
She’s asked to stay anonymous, and I’m respecting that. Most of my Crime Fiction Experts are looking back on their service. Vicky is still in hers, which is worth flagging because the perspective is different when the job hasn’t finished with you yet.
Why riot gear calms officers (the science of the helmet)
Vicky’s doctorate built on a theory called ‘enclothed cognition’. It’s worth slowing down for, because it will reshape how you write any scene where an officer gears up.
“In essence, it is not the uniform itself that affects behaviour, but it is the collective memory of what has happened to you in that uniform,” she explains. Every time an officer wears that kit and walks away from a deployment unhurt, every drill where the pads do their job, all of it builds up. The kit becomes a record of what it’s already survived.
“Putting on public order uniform has the effect of focusing an officer’s purpose, and providing a sense of security that their training and their kit is sufficient for whatever they are about to encounter.”
That’s a long way from the wild-eyed riot copper of fiction. And here Vicky says something that should sit on every crime writer’s desk:
“I think writers can miss the opportunity for this moment of calm and confidence, often mistaking it for adrenaline and aggression.”
Read that twice, because she’s telling us what we’re missing. A character gearing up isn’t psyching themselves up for a fight, they’re settling into something they’ve done many times before, drawing on muscle memory and the quiet knowledge that the kit works. That’s a quieter, harder, more interesting beat than the one we often reach for.
The ‘lucky underpants’ theory: where confidence really comes from
This is the line I want every writer to sit with.
She’s developing her doctoral research into a personal development guide for people outside policing, and her core argument cuts right through the pop-psychology version of confidence:
“I suggest that confidence is less from power-dressing and positive affirmations, and more from ‘lucky underpants’.”
What she means is that confidence comes from association, not from the symbolism of what you’re wearing. For writers, that’s the gift. Your character’s costume choices aren’t telling us who they want to be. They’re telling us what’s worked for them before.
Why the briefing, not the kit, sets an officer’s mindset
Here’s the other half of Vicky’s research, and it’s the bit I think could be important for the crime writers reading this.
If you want to know how an officer is going to behave in any operation, don’t look at what they’re wearing. Look at what they were told in the briefing.
“It was widely accepted that kit, uniform and tactics are determined through complex intelligence and risk assessment. This is a practical thing, and does not set the tone of an operation. It is the briefing style (community policing, vulnerability, warrant) that most impacts upon someone’s behaviour. So the operational commander stating ‘this is a community policing operation’ or ‘we are expecting to see violent disorder’ will do much more to frame mindset than what the officer is wearing.”
If you’ve got a scene where officers turn up and behave a certain way, that mindset was set in a room you probably haven’t written. It was set in the pre-op briefing, by the words the commander chose and the tone they used to deliver them. That’s where the operation actually starts.
Writers tend to skip the briefing because it feels procedural. Vicky’s saying it’s the most important scene in the chapter.
‘Hurry up and wait’: the reality of public order deployment
If you’ve written a public order scene where officers arrive, deploy, have some drama, and head home, you’ve written something that doesn’t really happen.
“Public order policing is best summed up as ‘hurry up and wait’,” Vicky says. “You rush to be ready for when you are needed, but then you might sit on the van for several hours with nothing to do.”
She’s honest about why fiction skips this. “Unless you are writing a really detailed character arc where we need to spend time in someone’s head, there is very little you can say about waiting in a van!”
Fair. But the waiting matters. It’s where the team dynamic gets built and where the briefing actually settles in. If your officers are written as fresh and reactive the moment they hit a scene, you’ve missed the six hours that made them who they are by the time they got there.
Why the maverick officer doesn’t work in public order
The rogue officer is a brilliant character archetype. The one who breaks protocol, ignores their commander, charges in, saves the day. Crime writers love them.
In public order, you can’t have one.
“One of the things I tend to notice in fictional public disorder scenarios is how frequently an officer or unit will ‘go rogue’,” Vicky says. “Disregarding an order because they are bit of a maverick and, of course, ending up as the hero. Policing in general is a disciplined service, but public order along with armed policing is really an area where discipline, training drills and tactics are paramount.”
Commanders, she explains, have a level of autonomy over how they deliver tactics. But the unit moves as one, everyone pulling in the same direction. The lone hero charging off to do their own thing isn’t a brave maverick in this context. They’re the person who breaks the whole thing.
If you want to write tension, find it somewhere other than insubordination. Vicky’s actually given us a much richer source of conflict: the briefing. What if your commander gives the wrong steer? What if the brief and the reality on the ground don’t match?
‘Get uniform to do it’: how fiction disrespects response officers
This is small, sharp, and very obviously something Vicky has rolled her eyes at more than once.
“It is the smaller details that frustrate me as a reader. One of the biggest being when any kind of specialist says ‘get uniform to do it’. I have a real sympathy for response officers in fiction, but they are not slaves to everyone else!”
If you’ve got a detective in your manuscript who treats uniformed officers as fetch-and-carry staff, Vicky’s noticed. So have a lot of other people in the job. Response officers are the ones who turn up first, hold scenes together, deal with the public, and frequently catch the offender before CID arrive in their nice coats.
Why officers feel safer in public order than on solo callouts
This one surprised Vicky too.
“I did expect that officers would feel more at risk, or in more danger, in public order scenarios than in their ordinary daily role. In fact, the opposite was true.”
The reason? The training, and the team.
“This was largely attributed to the extra training received, and the fact that in public order, unlike many other areas of policing, officers are deployed in groups. The old saying of safety in numbers, and knowing that if you were to get hurt that there would be people there to look out for you was a big part of that.”
For crime writers, that’s worth holding onto. Your patrol officer responding solo to a domestic at 3am is more exposed than the same officer in full kit at a protest. The crowd might look scarier on the page, but it’s the corridor at three in the morning that actually keeps officers up at night.
What keeps a public order commander awake at night
I asked Vicky what keeps public order commanders awake before a major event. Her answer wasn’t what I expected.
“In my personal opinion, you are the most worried about things completely out of your control. You know as a commander that you have planned for contingencies and things that could change at the last minute, but some things are beyond planning.”
And then there’s the one she actually told me about: “The one that sticks with me was coming within two minutes of cancelling a festival mid-event because of nearby lightning. I have never seen so many people glued to a weather report!”
Two minutes. Stop and picture it. Thousands of people in front of a stage, music playing, the artists not knowing, the crowd not knowing, and a commander somewhere quietly watching a storm system creep across a meteorologist’s screen, doing the maths on shutting the whole thing down. One person, one weather map, one phone call away from cancelling the night with all that would entail from a crowd turned angry.
Why Blue Lights gets public order policing right
When it comes to public order in TV and film, Vicky flagged one show: Blue Lights.
“As well as being a great drama series, it is probably one of the most accurate modern police shows I have seen. There are some very perceptive depictions of team dynamics and relationships, and we are given an insight into some of the moral and ethical challenges that officers face. The public order scenes are frighteningly realistic and portray the bravery and selflessness of officers on the front line.”
If you’re writing public order and haven’t watched it, add this one to your list.
Public order: the police story almost nobody writes
Here’s the line that stopped me when I read it: “Public order is fairly underrepresented in fiction and drama. Detective stories outweigh public order by a hundred to one!”
A hundred to one.
She’s using that loosely, obviously, but the point under it is real. There’s a whole subgenre of police fiction that almost nobody is writing, and she’s just told us why it would work. Crime writers default to detectives because that’s the shape the genre has settled into. It’s what editors commission and what readers expect. But it isn’t the only police story available, and after spending time with Vicky’s material I’m not sure it’s even the most interesting one.
That’s not a smaller version of a detective novel. The jeopardy is collective, the decisions are public, and the character isn’t trying to outwit a single killer but to hold a complex moving operation together with everyone watching. It’s a richer canvas, frankly, and one Blue Lights has already proved an audience will turn up for.
If you’ve been looking for a way to write police that isn’t another detective with a drinking problem and a hunch, Vicky’s just handed you a brief.
The one rule for writing public order: discipline
If you do write this book, here’s the one thing Vicky wants on the desk next to your laptop while you’re writing it.
“Discipline. Discipline. Discipline! These are not just regular officers who have picked up a shield and a helmet, they have extensive specialist training and most likely a wealth of real-life experience.”
It isn’t about adrenaline or aggression. It’s about the discipline that runs underneath all of it, the kind that means the kit calms an officer rather than provokes them, and that was already at work hours earlier in the briefing room before anybody had even put their boots on.
Write that, and Vicky might just stop noticing.
Dr Vicky is one of my Crime Fiction Experts. An experienced public order commander and uniformed police officer with extensive experience across sporting events, festivals, protests, raves and VIP visits, she also holds a Professional Doctorate on the impact of public order uniform on police mindset, and is developing her thesis into a personal development guide for professionals outside policing. For advice on public order, police uniform, county policing or women in policing, you can find her here on my website.
