The real question is how do the decision makers in these bureaucracies come into contact with and then accept these outsiders coming in and telling them how to behave.
Sometimes the process starts with mindfulness training
Mindfulness seems harmless and innocuous to most people. Many people who are seriously ill or who are experiencing stress at work find taking part in mindfulness training or having mindfulness therapy helps them to feel better.
However when you are working for an NHS or police service that is under-resourced and underfunded stress and feelings of anger and disappointment and concern for the people you are employed to serve is an important indicator that all is not well.
Undertaking training / therapy that makes you feel content and passive while all the professional structures around you are collapsing is unhelpful in the long term.
Mindfulness interventions have at their core Buddhist philosophies relating to ideas such as the illusion of individual existence.
It is much easier for organisations to become infiltrated when their staff are in a happy trance of positive thinking where scepticism and critical thinking can be dismissed as "fear" and the opposite of "love".
great critique of positive thinking here
Would prefer to see police (and the NHS) listening to users.
Of course it is good for mental health / NHS service users to have input into services, however this can go badly wrong and has in fact gone badly wrong all over the country.
Lots of people are harmed by quackery and bad practice within NHS mental health services.
However any vulnerable person in this situation who attends a community activist group campaigning about psychiatric abuses is likely to find that the group is covertly run by Scientology or some other similar controversial group.
Cults have been targeting and recruiting vulnerable people for many years and when clinical commissioning groups consult with service users about what services they find helpful they are very likely to receive feedback praising and advocating various abusive organisations - or more accurately front organisations that hide their true origin
One of the ways in which our public services are being asset stripped and funds are being diverted towards abusive groups is via this mechanism.
I suspect it is one of those hidden networks, ie men who all went to the same public school, that is the real problem. You scratch my back, I'll scrath yours, and all the little people can just take the consequences.
There may be an element of that but it is much more likely to be groups pretending to empower women, disabled people and minorities including TRA groups that are using vulnerable people as mascots and as a human shield for their nefarious activities.
In fact the use of vulnerable people as mascots and human shields to deflect criticism is one of the indicators of such abusive groups in my experience