Ned Donovan

This is me. I work on a street crimes unit for a police department in the southeastern United States. That means proactively doing my best to get guns and drugs off of the streets. Who needs effective altruism when you can save a life by just taking a stolen gun off a bad guy or by busting a fentanyl trafficker on the side of the road? Before moving to America, I was a cop in London for a few years. And before that, I was a journalist. I still try and write.

This is what I do. I really enjoy talking to people. I'm good at it and it's how I find most of my dope and stolen cars. The part of policing I enjoy the most is observing behaviour and its indicators. This can be anything that lets people try to deceive, distract, and discourage officers from uncovering crimes.

These are my stats. In roughly a year of policing in America, I used behavioural analysis to stop 308 cars. 38 per cent of those cars were searched; in 68 per cent of those searches I found drugs, guns, or fugitives. Stanford sets a 32 per cent contraband "hit rate" as the benchmark nationwide for the average officer. This targeted work produced 19 fugitives, 11 arrests for drug distribution or trafficking, and 11 illegally possessed firearms, two of them stolen. All in a sleepy town of 4,000 residents.

This is how I'd like to be useful. I want to talk about behavioural policing to non-policing audiences. I think the startup and corporate world could do well from learning how experienced cops analyze and act on these indicators that are almost always given by criminals, but rarely spotted. Deception looks the same in an office as it does on a traffic stop. If you know what you are looking for. Which most people don't. If you'd like me to teach you how, or just come and talk to your company, drop me a line.