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Paul Mathias
Legal, criminological and forensic

Force for change

Paul Mathias describes how psychology has helped his work with the police.

18 February 2003

As a Chartered Psychologist serving as a senior officer with the Metropolitan Police Service, I was often asked if I was a psychologist or a police officer. But I was frequently at a loss to distinguish between the two roles: both embraced so many similar features, such as studying and interpreting human behaviour, gathering data of human reactions, and in extreme cases seeking approaches to control attitudes and behaviour.

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