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 as a municipal police officer in America, I used behavioural analysis to stop 308 cars. I searched 38 per cent of them, and found drugs, guns, or fugitives in 68 per cent of those searches – with no racial disparity. For reference, Stanford analyzed 100 million traffic stops and found that the average municipal police officer finds contraband in only 18.2 per cent of their searches ^[1]. My targeted work produced 19 fugitives, 11 arrests for distribution or trafficking, and 11 illegal firearms - two of them stolen. All in a sleepy beach 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.

I leave you with the wisdom of Ari Gold, who famously said: “We only have a finite amount of time on this planet and you can be viciously mediocre or you can get the fuck after it.”