Emma

Emma

Tell us a bit about yourself
2025 marks 10 years of working for the Police, through a variety of privileged roles! My enjoyment and skills centre around people and being able to support and empowering others.

I really enjoy learning and developing myself and for me that comes from working with a diverse range of people. I try to maintain that outside of work where I’ve run the London marathon for charity and taken calls for Red Nose Day. 

Can you tell us about your role?
I work as a counter terrorism source handler, which means I get to work with so many different people across society. I work to identify, recruit and train productive relationships to gain intelligence on National Security threats and risks.  

What does a typical day look like for you?  

This role covers a lot, I could be starting early to go meet a source before they go to work who has been able to provide insight into a group of concern, writing intelligence to be assessed, or having meetings with partner agencies to scope gaps in intelligence where sources could assist. Ensuring the proportionality, necessity and legality is paramount to this work, so I could also be spending time with lawyers understanding case law.  

What has your career path been to this role?
I studied criminology at university and absolutely loved it. The course content included everything from criminal law, the psychology of criminal behaviour, to cybercrime.
I knew I wanted to work within the police and felt that being a civilian offered me more flexibility to explore different departments.  

All my roles have been within intelligence, overt and covert, starting in cyber crime, moving into online child abuse before moving into the world of counter terrorism working to assist surveillance officers on live operations, to my current role now within the world of Human Intelligence (HUMINT).  

What has been your proudest achievement?
Becoming a source handler. The training for my role is really intense, but rightly so. Everyday working with the unsung heroes behind national security who will never be able to share the risks they take every day to keep our country safe.  

Naturally, due to the secrecy within this world there are a lot of sacrifices we have to make and many of my proudest moments I can never share with family and friends. However I truly do have pride in the work I do and it’s the genuine impact I feel I’m able to contribute, in keeping the country safe, which gives me a buzz and the passion to go to work everyday. 

What do you find most rewarding in your job? 

It’s not uncommon for people to have prejudice against law enforcement, whether that’s from personal or shared experiences. A person deciding to work as a source can be the most life changing decision they ever make and they put sole trust of their security in our team. Because of this, the sense of ‘team’ is the focus in creating productive relationships and it goes beyond being transactional.  

We always seek to leave a person in a better position than when they started their relationship with us and that can be as simple as having better coping strategies to deal with stress or having more self-confidence and feeling empowered.

You can find and listen to Inside Counter Terrorism Policing wherever you get your podcasts, including Acast, Apple, Spotify and others.