Thaindian News

By Dipankar De Sarkar
London, March 29 (IANS) Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair is to co-direct a new training programme for senior Indian police officers.Blair, who stepped down in 2008 following major disagreements with London’s Conservative mayor Boris Johnson, will teach IPS officers at Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology.

Under an agreement signed earlier this month with the National Police Academy of India, 420 Indian police officers will be provided mid-career training, Cambridge University said.

Working in groups of 140, the trainees will take part in eight-week courses, six of which will be spent in India, followed by a further fortnight’s training in Cambridge.

Blair’s position came under a cloud after members of his police force, also known as Scotland Yard and responsible for the greater London area, shot dead an innocent Brazilian man July 2005 after mistaking him for a terrorist.

Accused by the opposition Conservative party of “a serious lack of judgment about the leadership of the most important police force in Britain,” Blair resigned in December 2008, saying: “without the mayor’s backing I don’t think I can continue.”

Cambridge University said the three-year initiative will begin later in 2010 and will be co-directed by Lawrence Sherman, the University’s Wolfson Professor of Criminology, and described Blair as “one of the UK’s most experienced leaders in strategic policing and change management.”

The Institute of Criminology has helped educate nearly 200 British chief police officers, including more than 30 chief constables, who head all the territorial police forces except two responsible for London.

Speaking at the signing of the 2.4 million pounds contract in Hyderabad earlier this month, Sherman said: “This agreement represents the steady integration of the science of criminology with the profession of police leadership following the path laid out at Cambridge in 1959 by the University’s first Professor of Criminology, Sir Leon Radzinowicz.

“That path will lead to increasing recognition of the great complexity of policing, placing the knowledge base supporting the profession on a par with medicine or engineering.”