Chris Bunting. Times Higher Education Supplement, August 2001
ANTHONY Forde looks like a curious hybrid of a police officer and an academic. On top, the buttoned-up blazer and tightly knotted tie wouldn't be out of place at a freemasons' lodge. Below, the jeans and deck shoes quietly hint at senior common room sociologist chic. It is an unusual combination, but, for some reason, it sits comfortably on the founder of Britain's first undergraduate degree in police and criminal investigation.
A collector of stereotypes would be disappointed in the University of Central Lancashire academic. A serving policeman until last year, he exudes the down-to-earth, professional affability of an experienced officer. Answers to questions are brief and to the point.
But Forde is no Policeman Plod, blundering around the halls of academe. No sooner are we in his office, than he is talking, with arms gesticulating, on the causes of death of Lindow Man, a bog body dating back to the 1st century AD and housed in the British Museum. Forde dives into a half-hour exposition on why archaeologists' conclusion that the man died in a ritualistic killing might be just poor detective work.
"The archaeologists, who seem to find ritual killings whenever they find bodies, will tell you that this man was brought out, knocked unconscious, fracturing his skull, had a ligature put round his neck and wound so tight that it fractured his two vertebrae and then had his throat cut to ensure the blood was coming out."
Forde believes they have staged evidence to fit their hypothesis. "I think the evidence points to a suicide. Lindow Man has also got a wound to the back of his head, a sheared tooth and a wound to his chest that they haven't accounted for," he explains.
According to his theory, the cut to Lindow Man's chest is neat and it looks like he might have been trying out what it felt like to cut himself before cutting his neck. He then cut his neck but didn't get all the way across (a characteristic of suicidal rather than homicidal neck slashes). The ligature failed too (Forde claims the narrow cord used was highly unlikely to have had enough force to break the man's vertebrae). Finally, an increasingly desperate Lindow Man smashed himself in the head with an unidentified object, causing a massive impact that whipped his head back, sheared his tooth, broke the bones in his neck and caused the damage to the back of his head when he hit the ground.
"Although I must stress that we shall never know exactly what happened to this man, I think an awful lot of rethinking has to be done. When I talked to one of the people involved in formulating the original theory, I asked him how he came to his conclusion. He said he just made it up: 'We decided it was going to be a sacrifice because there had been lots of others and we made it fit them.' I was absolutely gobsmacked but he was quite happy about it," Forde says.
His willingness to confront accepted thinking has got him into trouble more than once in his life. After leaving formal education at 18 to follow his brother into the police force, he served in the special constabulary before joining the Metropolitan Police in the early 1980s, aged 21.
He was out again after just over a year. "Let's say the Metropolitan police and I did not see eye to eye on the way that police work should be done," he says.
Though Forde is unwilling to talk specifically about the "gross unprofessionalism" he witnessed, he does speak in the abstract about police cultures in which "it becomes acceptable to give members of the public a slap or more than that, if necessary, as a way of getting what you want". Forde found himself bullied and ostracised by colleagues because he would not fit in with the culture.
"For years afterwards I wondered whether it was my fault in some way, whether there was something I could have done, but in the end I decided it was their problem and I had to leave. It gave me an insight into what the police force can be if things go wrong."
After working as a legal executive into his late 20s, Forde resumed his search for a career in criminal investigation. He began training in forensic anthropology, the science of recovering and identifying human remains, at Sheffield and Bradford universities and later studied under the "high priest" of the subject, Walter Birkby at the University of Arizona.
"I was getting experience working with one of the most respected men in the field, assisting him to identify bodies in cases that were sent to him from across the United States. We were using bone analysis techniques that would be a mystery to many conventional pathologists trained in the use of soft tissue rather than bones. He describes the work as "the intellectual challenge of solving the puzzles at the core of a case".
When Forde returned to the United Kingdom, he found the law enforcement authorities unable to accommodate his new skills. The police forensic science service said that what he did was too close to a pathologist's line of work. The pathologists, however, said he needed a medical training to work with them. The Derbyshire police, who did express an interest in his experience, ruled he had to enter the service as a police constable and serve two years' training on the streets before he could work in his specialism.
It was a "slightly disaffected" Forde who joined the University of Central Lancashire last year after serving his apprenticeship at Derbyshire and being refused permission to travel to Bosnia to identify human remains after the conflict there because it would get in the way of his normal police duties.
Forde insists that he admires the competence and commitment to duty of most of Britain's police service, but he says that some of his experiences of inflexibility and conservatism among its officers have helped inspire his desire to reform their professional training. "Historically, the police have recruited people without any qualifications. There is research evidence and a fundamental feeling that police officers have a bit of a narrow perspective on life. They usually go into the police at a young age and they see nothing but policing. They are usually conservative in their attitudes, have not had a broad education and do not have a broad depth of understanding of society. I felt that by bringing them to university we could broaden their understanding, expose them to a lot of different cultures and different people and hopefully turn out police officers who were very switched on and aware of wider issues in our society."
While police-related university courses are well established at institutions such as Portsmouth University and the Scarman Centre in Leicester, none attempts the comprehensive practical introduction to police work that Forde's undergraduate degree at Central Lancashire will deliver, preferring to concentrate on specialised academic subjects such as criminology or investigative psychology.
The Central Lancashire course, which will welcome its first handful of students this autumn, will not only offer courses in specialist subjects such as forensic science and multicultural policing, but train all its students in the everyday skills of work on the beat. First-year students will be asked to don riot gear and tackle a man trying to knock their heads off with a baseball bat, while a house has been bought where realistic crime scenes can be created. An outdoor area has even been set aside for simulating the recovery of human remains.
"I do feel it will be revolutionary in terms of police training because we are offering a real and fairly comprehensive undergraduate training route to the police and other criminal investigative agencies in the country. The route into the police at the moment is still to do basic training in uniform skills and basic law at the internal police training centres. Then recruits are put onto the street for another 18 months. Courses are few and far between and tend to be short, although some people study beyond that.
"We are able to train students for three years. If you imagine how much information we can equip them with before they get into operational policing, then you will have people with a much broader knowledge about the discipline of police investigation entering the service. Hopefully, with those kind of people entering at the bottom it will increase the competition for higher positions and raise the standards in the whole service."
This was an alarming prospect for one detective who chief inspector Forde recently met. "All he said was, 'Oh my God! I'm going to have 21-year-olds coming in knowing more about police investigation than I do'," Forde laughs. "That would be nice, wouldn't it?"