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One has to question what the mindset is....from my perspective it certainly is not ...."How can we make this work?" "How do we accomplish this?" But rather more the opposite it would seem.
The feed back I have at the moment is that yes they took a awful long time to get there [and they are still not there yet as they still have a 500 foot lower limit] but the progress was a careful walk forward not a run and a trip. Yes there was a great deal of military background knowledge but it is a civil scenario that is being played here and SPIFR to boot. IFR itself is new to UK police aviation without this additional complication. It is difficult enough to get any pilots without throwing the additional skill requirements into the melting pot and making sure that all members of a unit are trained up to a decent standard and you do not have a mix and match situation of some pilots being able and others not.
There were additional difficulties in that EASA washed their hands of the deal because the police in the rest of Europe simply solved their problems by being 'Public Aircraft' and left the UK problem to the CAA.
Perhaps the problem from their perspective was as difficult as inserting UAV's into the civil scenario?