When patrolling Hull council estates in the 1990s, a hostile reception Constable Django Sibley might have included teenagers hurling bricks at his panda car.
For the roughly 9,000 officers of the Los Angeles police department Sibley now oversees, the everyday threats are far graver.
In a sprawling metropolis struck by a mental health crisis and awash with guns and gangs, those tasked with policing the United States’ second-largest city know every call carries the potential for catastrophe.
Sibley, who moved to southern California from his native Humberside more than two decades ago, is now charged with leading the civilian panel that oversees the LAPD and reviews shootings by officers.
Post-George Floyd, with departments across America reporting staffing shortages and cratering morale, Sibley said he had sympathy for the tough job expected of Los Angeles beat cops.
“It’s not easy to be a police officer in Liverpool or Hull or Newcastle,” he told The Times from the LAPD headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.
“But the obvious difference between the UK and US is the availability of guns. Here in the United States you have to think that every time you pull over a car, every time you go to a house for a domestic violence incident, there’s a significant likelihood that the person has access to a firearm.
“That can happen in England, and it does sometimes, but it’s not something that you would routinely worry about.”
While it may seem that being armed is an advantage for American police over their British counterparts, Sibley argues it is anything but.
“The police in somewhere like Hull or Liverpool get into more fights on a Friday night than they do in Los Angeles,” he said.
“But they can do that without having to worry about somebody taking their pistol off them.
“Here, a police officer cannot lose a fight. You cannot. That is literally a life-threatening scenario because you could lose control of your firearm.
“So while carrying a gun on a day-to-day basis is necessary — because there are a lot of guns here and they need them to be able to defend themselves — it’s also a liability that an unarmed British police officer does not have to contend with.”
Sibley is well-placed to discuss the differences of policing on both sides of the Atlantic.
Tall and bald with a firm handshake, he resembles the gruff northern English city detective he might have been had he not left for sunny California.
Despite his decades away Sibley has maintained his Humberside accent, with only the occasional flicker of an American twang.
Sibley decided on a career in law enforcement as a teenager after growing up in Hull, the East Riding of Yorkshire port city that struggled with crime after the decline of its fishing industry.
He studied geography at Liverpool University and wrote his dissertation on the efforts Merseyside police made to mend ties with the community after the 1981 Toxteth riots.
Sibley joined Humberside police, initially working as a beat officer before joining a specialist unit. He moved to Los Angeles for a master’s degree at the University of Southern California.
After a health problem kept him from rejoining front-line policing, he returned to the US and took a job in 2004 with the LAPD inspector-general’s office, which serves as the “eyes and ears” of the Los Angeles Police Commission.
He rose through the ranks to oversee serious use of force cases, including officer shootings. Since September Sibley has been the executive director of the commission, the civilian panel that oversees the LAPD.
During his career in the US the criminal justice landscape has been transformed.
The 2020 murder of Floyd at the hands of a former Minneapolis officer amplified “defund the police” rhetoric while the ubiquity of mobile phones means every arrest can be filmed with the potential to go viral.
Officers across America have reported plunging morale, with fears of having their lives and careers destroyed by social media.
Sibley believes such sentiments are common in the LAPD, which according to projections will next summer have its lowest staffing numbers in about 30 years.
“I think it’s a widespread view and it’s a belief many officers probably hold,” he said. “They don’t want to be the next officer who is being replayed on TikTok.”
The solution to policing in the social media age is to ensure officers are properly trained and equipped, according to Sibley, so that they are confident in decisions they can be forced to make in life-or-death scenarios.
Sibley said oversight had to be strong so that the community felt the department was providing a “good quality” police service.
In Los Angeles this has not always been the case. There was a time in the 1990s when the LAPD was synonymous with corruption and brutality.
Before Floyd, arguably the most infamous case of excessive force in American criminal history was the Rodney King beating in 1991. The incident shone a light on racist policing and triggered the Los Angeles riots in 1992, which remain some of the worst civil unrest the country has seen.
Since those dark days, however, the department is widely viewed as having cleaned up its act.
Sibley touts the LAPD’s progress over the past 20 years, noting that serious use of force incidents have dropped by 50 per cent.
His inbox will likely remain busy over the next 12 months, however, with 70 such cases in 2023, according to the most recent official report.
He believes being English has helped his career and that his accent has “reinforced” his independence — crucial for a watchdog.
“That outsider status, I think, is beneficial,” he said.
A father of two Angelenos, Sibley has no plans to swap the sun and palm trees for the rain of Humberside, though confesses to occasionally missing home.
“I enjoy Hull when I go back there,” he said. “But I think on balance my life is probably of slightly higher quality here.”
