Policing Politics, Culture and Control: Essays in Honour of Robert Reiner 9781472566096, 9781849463003

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FOREWORD This volume brings together essays in honour of Robert Reiner, and follows the growing custom of celebrating our most esteemed colleagues on the occasion of their retirement, that in turn derives from the longer-standing German tradition of Festschriften. A Festschrift worthy of its name requires three things: an honorand worthy of celebration, authors whose own scholarly excellence does honour to him, and contributions whose shared sense of a common project brings coherence to the volume. This book enjoys all three. As the intellectual portrait painted so eloquently by Newburn and Rock makes clear, Robert Reiner has played a central role in the development of British criminology over more than 30 years; and he will surely continue to do so long into the future. His richly sociological development of the study of policing has inspired new generations of policing scholars, many of whose leading lights are represented in this volume. The profoundly political nature of his work – both as the motivating premise of his scholarship and, substantively, as a subject of his enquiry – has helped to raise the criminological game from its lowly status as the tool of policy-making to a worthy exemplar of social scientific endeavour. Long before the coining of the term ‘public criminology’, Reiner was turning out just such scholarship: studies whose import transcended the boundaries of the academy to inform public consciousness. The contributions to this volume self-consciously continue this project and contribute to the exploration of criminological questions in ways that speak directly to public debate and political deliberation. If, substantively, the common object of analysis of many contributions to this volume is the police, the common lens through which this enquiry is pursued is political sociology. Reiner’s deep commitment to and development of a social democratic criminology clearly motivates and informs many of the chapters. As an early initiator and prominent exponent of this tradition, Reiner’s work has played a key role in prompting successive generations of criminological scholars to view policing as a central exercise of state power that needs not only to be understood sociologically but also to be justified in ways that are consistent with the proper scope and exercise of state authority. In fulfilling this role, Reiner has also inspired policing scholars, and criminologists more generally, to reflect upon the political questions raised by the exercise of the police power by the state. At the same time, his writings have served as a call to criminologists to attend to the wider implications of their own scholarship and to assume responsibility for its influence, and indeed did so long before the dreaded word ‘impact’ stalked the corridors of the academy. This self-consciously political brand of scholarship denies authors the luxury of indifference to the politics of policing and it demands of them an alertness to the

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intrinsically political nature of the exercise of the police power over citizens (a focus that is most obviously central to the chapters by Loader and Sparks and by Bowling, Phillips and Sheptycki, but which is evident in many others in this volume too). Policing, in all its guises, is a common thread running through many of the contributions to this volume, from the contested questions of local accountability (Jones, Newburn and Smith) to the effects of globalisation on international and transnational policing (see especially Bowling, Phillips and Sheptycki; Shearing and Stenning). Another important focus of attention is the role of the media both as a means of representing and of dramatising policing and as an object of police enquiry itself (for example, the chapters by Heidensohn and Brown; Greer and McLaughlin; and by Innes and Graef). This comes as no surprise: for just as Reiner is rightly renowned as the doyen of policing scholars, so too does he stand at the vanguard of cultural enquiry into the role of the media in the construction of crime, in the depiction of policing, and in the constitution of our understanding of law and order. Binding those chapters whose focus is primarily upon the police closely to those whose primary object of attention is the media, is a common concern with substantive questions about the role of culture and a commitment to cultural interpretation as central to understanding the meaning, as well as the practice, of policing and criminal justice. If policing, media, and cultural studies were not, before Reiner, obvious bed­ fellows, still less were questions of political economy the obvious fare of criminology. In transcending these disciplinary boundaries and in demonstrating the centrality of questions of political economy to our understanding of the working of criminal justice across jurisdictions, Reiner has promoted interdisciplinarity not, as it is so often practised, simply for its own sake, but because it permits a deeper and more nuanced understanding of those questions that genuinely lie at the borders of disciplinary enquiries. It is appropriate, therefore, that the contributors to this volume have backgrounds in sociology, law, media studies, psychology and, of course, criminology – and that several of the chapters see scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds joining together in collaborative endeavour. Criminology is a relatively young branch of scholarship and as such a rendezvous subject whose practitioners have (until very recently) been drawn almost entirely from those whose academic training was in disciplines other than criminology itself. That interdisciplinarity promises a lively creativity that results from the interaction of different disciplinary traditions; but it also creates potential disciplinary tensions and threatens incoherence. It is significant, therefore, that the chapters that follow reflect the maturing of criminology into an assured, stable and coherent endeavour, united not merely by a common object of enquiry but by the canons and standards of its scholarship. Few have played a more central role in the development of British criminology, or done more to promote its adherence to the very highest values of scholarship, than Robert Reiner. It is fitting, therefore, that not only do the contributing authors to this volume represent the very best of criminological scholarship but that their contributions break new ground in its pursuit. In what follows, we examine the



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contributions they make both in reflecting Reiner’s influence and in advancing his project of developing a thoroughly sociological understanding of policing, politics, culture and crime control. The chapters open with an insightful portrait of Robert Reiner by Tim Newburn and Paul Rock – painted with delicacy and evidently based upon profound and enduring friendship – that makes clear the intellectual and spiritual influences upon his scholarship. The powerful combination of an orthodox Jewish upbringing, of Talmudic study, and later schooling in the best of the British sociological tradition, explains much about Reiner’s mode of intellectual enquiry, its deeply ethical commitments, and its analytic rigour. The chapter by Loader and Sparks that follows picks up on some of Reiner’s later work to respond to his ‘lament’ for the threatened social democratic traditions of social scientific enquiry in which he was schooled. Loader and Sparks share Reiner’s concerns about the adverse impact of neo-liberalism and its effects upon the politics of crime control. Like him, they deplore the economic and social inequalities that characterise neo-liberalism and they share his objections to the ‘competitive egoism’ that dominates the culture of market societies. But they do not quite share his pessimism. They set out in some detail the bases upon which we might move ‘beyond lamentation’ to overcome the predicaments in which we find ourselves, to recover and revitalise the social democratic traditions that Reiner holds so dear. Not least among their grounds for optimism is the promise of political theory and the potential suggested by thinking about ‘institutions of just ordering’ as a means of instituting a more hopeful politics of crime control than presently prevails. The following chapter by Bowling, Phillips and Sheptycki builds upon Reiner’s analysis of law and order in late modern societies to explore changing patterns of policing in a globalising world. Drawing upon Reiner’s observation that certain groups within society become, in effect, ‘police property’ to be targeted, rounded up, and socially excluded, they trace the intersection between the concept of police property and discourses of race and ethnicity which result in practices that undermine police legitimacy. This chapter focuses on three distinct domains – the policing of borders, the policing of cities, and incarceration (whether as the subjects of mass imprisonment, as marginalised populations curtailed by national borders or in immigration detention centres) – to explore questions of racial discrimination, social marginality and exclusion. As the authors make clear, the resultant policing practices project the patterns of inequality and racial discrimination observed by Reiner in domestic policing onto a global canvas. The next two chapters by Hoogenboom and Punch and by Waddington each, in very different ways, explore facets of policing and policing research. Hoogenboom and Punch trace the development of police research and the particular contributions made by policing scholars across several jurisdictions including the US, Canada, South Africa, the UK, and, not least, the Netherlands. In his chapter, Waddington takes on the ‘authorised version’ of ‘cop culture’, namely that a monolithic and largely negative culture of the police station and the police canteen influences police action. Waddington’s argument is that it is a mistake to assume that police share a

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homogeneous culture, that this culture sets the police apart from society, and that it is determinative of their behaviour. Drawing upon a wide-ranging array of research studies, Waddington paints an illuminating picture of the complexities of police culture and the contradictory roles it plays in relation to police conduct. The three chapters that follow each address different facets of media representa­ tion of policing and criminal justice. The first of these, by Heidensohn and Brown, picks up on Reiner’s observation that in the 1990s a ‘new fashion for female cop heroes’ arose. Heidensohn and Brown trace the emergence and history of women in TV cop shows in order to explore the complex relationship between fictional portrayals and the changing realities of policing by women. Their analysis parallels and, in so doing, pays homage to Reiner’s own extensive analyses of media portray­ als of policing, while underlining the continuing marginalisation of women in both policing and police research. The chapter by Greer and McLaughlin draws both upon Reiner’s important contributions to a more nuanced understanding of media portrayal of policing and also upon his 1991 work Chief Constables to explore the plight of the ‘mediatised Chief Constable’ now subject to media coverage 24/7. According to Greer and McLaughlin, the twin burdens of constant media scrutiny and occasional ‘trial by media’ (whereby the media judge and sentence individuals in the ‘court of public opinion’) creates an adversarial, volatile news world in which police constables struggle to maintain their public reputation. The next contribution by Graef and Innes likewise explores the quintessentially Reineresque themes of media representations of crime and the politics of the police. Their chapter explores the conventions of crime reporting, develops a typology of the different policing narratives employed by new media, and considers their impact upon public understanding of policing. Taking as its substantive focus some of the key events of 2011 (the phone-hacking scandal, the summer riots and the police reforms introduced by the coalition government), the chapter looks beyond the mass media, which has been Reiner’s main focus, to examine the implications of social media communications in shaping our responses to and engagement with crime problems. It concludes with concerns about the vulnerabilities inherent in the ‘new’ politics of policing developed by the coalition government that are evocative of Reiner’s lament for a social democratic politics of policing. Manning’s chapter returns to questions of police culture and the ways in which representations of policing are mediated in social life. In so doing, Manning seeks to complement Reiner’s largely ‘secular’ accounts of policing by interrogating the ‘sacred side’ of policing that instead emphasises its dramaturgical character. Manning’s focus is thus upon the symbols, scripts, scenes and multifarious other means through which the police represent themselves. This classic social interaction perspective echoes Reiner’s own deep commitment to theoretically informed sociological enquiry and the chapter provides a wealth of insights into the ways in which the police serve, as Manning observes, as ‘a rich source of individual and collective dramas of control’. The next chapter by Levi and Maguire traces developments in policing policy and practice over the past decade. It argues that although the introduction of



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‘intelligence-led policing’ promised altogether more scientific, rationalised policing practices, the reality has been more faltering and patchier than early proponents envisaged. Levi and Maguire show that, by contrast, real change has been brought about in other areas such as the setting up of Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA); the introduction of Integrated Offender Management (IOM) to tackle prolific property offenders; and the growing focus on economic and financial crime. As the authors demonstrate, a particular feature of these developments is the changing patterns of partnership between the police and other agencies in both public and private sectors. Jones, Newburn and Smith focus upon a different and potentially more seismic change in policing portended by the introduction of directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC). Their chapter speaks directly to Reiner’s on-going concern with the police as agents of the state monopoly of force, the implications of this fact for the role of the police in a social democracy, and, in turn, for their democratic accountability. It is no surprise, then, that this chapter engages closely with Reiner’s writings and, in particular, with his insistence on the desirability of multiple accountability mechanisms capable of addressing the multi-faceted nature of the problem in preference to simple, single solutions such as local electoral control. The second half of the chapter provides a critical analysis of the introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners, the political drivers behind this reform, its aims and objectives, and the many important challenges that it faces: in ensuring local participation, in guarding against majoritarian override and in ensuring police responsiveness. On these and a host of other issues, Jones, Newburn and Smith suggest abundant grounds for concern and their conclusion strikes a decidedly Reiner-esque note of caution about the likely success of the PCC initiative. The topic of Downes and Morgan’s chapter focuses on a more specific but no less critical question for contemporary criminal justice, namely the age of criminal responsibility. It explores the implications of Reiner’s analysis in his Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control (2007) for the setting of the age of criminal responsibility. And it asks why, despite long-standing pressure to do so, the minimum age has yet to be raised. The chapter traces the history of the minimum age and examines why it has become a ‘red-line’ issue, not merely impervious to change but one which no political party is willing to address. The abandonment of any attempt to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility, despite all the evidence and arguments in its favour, exemplifies for Downes and Morgan exactly that failure of will that grounds Reiner’s lament for a social democratic criminology. In the final chapter, Stenning and Shearing return to big picture policing to address the meta-trends of pluralisation and globalisation in reshaping the nature and contours of policing. Perhaps surprisingly, this is the first chapter in this volume to engage in a sustained analysis of the differences between ‘police’ and ‘policing’ and the first to explore in depth the challenges to the institution of the police posed by the emergence of plural police providers – both private and public (or, as the authors prefer, non-state and state). Their chapter also traces the impacts of new technologies, not least surveillance mechanisms that radically transform the

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hi-tech and virtual end of policing. Like Bowling, Phillips and Sheptycki, Shearing and Stenning are also concerned to explore the ramifications of transnational, international, and global policing organisations and practices. These two themes come together in an insightful analysis of the impact of private transnational policing operations in the realm of Transnational Commercial Security (TCS) and an exploration of the profound challenges that such developments pose for policing and policing research. Their conclusion that the ‘evolution of policing’, to borrow Reiner’s term, can only be understood by looking beyond the police and policing itself to address much larger questions about changing patterns of governance and the factors underlying these changes chimes with the extraordinary breadth and high ambition of Reiner’s own work. Albeit mainly focused on just one central strand in Robert Reiner’s work – policing and the police – the essays in this volume reflect the wide range of his achievements: as an astute commentator on the broad political economy of crime and punishment, as a skilled and sensitive ethnographer, as a perceptive analyst of institutional dynamics and as a far-sighted reader of the cultural significance of criminal justice practices. They stand, in short, as a fitting tribute to a remarkable scholar. Lucia Zedner and Nicola Lacey

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Ben Bowling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at King’s College London School of Law. His books include Violent Racism (OUP, 1998), Racism, Crime and Justice (with Coretta Phillips, Longman, 2002), Policing the Caribbean (OUP, 2010) and Global Policing (with James Sheptycki, Sage, 2012). Jennifer Brown is currently a co-director of the Mannheim Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include police occupational culture, gender in policing and serious crime investigations. David Downes is Emeritus Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Roger Graef is a filmmaker, writer, broadcaster and criminologist. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Mannheim Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science since 1995 and was made Visiting Professor in 2011. He is the author of Talking Blues: Police in their Own Words (Fontana, 1990); Living Dangerously: Young Offenders in their Own Words (Harper Collins, 1993), and Why Restorative Justice? (Calouste Gulbenkian, 2001). Chris Greer is in the Department of Sociology at City University London. He has published extensively at the intersections of crime, media, culture and justice, and is Founding and current Co-Editor of Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal. Frances Heidensohn is Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and General Editor, British Journal of Sociology. She is the author of Women in Control?: The Role of Women in Law Enforcement (Oxford University Press 1996) and Gender and Policing (with Jennifer Brown, Macmillan, 2000). Bob Hoogenboom holds two chairs: one in Policing and Security at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the other in Forensic Accountancy at Nyenrode Business Universiteit. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Mannheim Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and teaches at the Dutch Police Academy. Martin Innes is Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Universities’ Police Science Institute at Cardiff University. He has conducted research on a number of aspects of policing, most notably murder investigations, counter-terrorism and neighbourhood policing. Trevor Jones is Reader in Criminology at the Centre for Crime, Law and Justice in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. He has published widely in the

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area of policing, including studies of police accountability, private security, and policing policy transfer. Nicola Lacey is Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory, University of Oxford. Her publications include Unspeakable Subjects: Feminist Essays in Legal and Social Theory (Hart Publishing, 1998); A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (OUP, 2004); Women, Crime and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of the d’Urbervilles (OUP, 2008); and The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies (CUP, 2008). Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of All Souls College. His latest book is Public Criminology? (with Richard Sparks, Routledge, 2010 ). Michael Levi is Professor of Criminology at Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.   His main research interests are fraud, corruption and organised crime within the UK and transnationally. Eugene McLaughlin is Professor of Criminology at the University of Southampton. His current research concentrates on the policing of multi-pluralist societies and the mediatisation of crime, policing and criminal justice policy. Mike Maguire is part-time Professor of Criminology at the University of Glamorgan and Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University.  He is a co-editor with Robert Reiner and Rod Morgan of The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Peter K Manning (PhD Duke, Sociology) is the Elmer VH and Eileen M Brooks Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, Boston. His interests in policing extend from the 1970s, and he has written extensively on policing, qualitative methods and formal organisations. His current research, including extensive fieldwork, is on the transformation of policing in Northern Ireland and Ireland since the Patten Report. Rod Morgan is Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice, University of Bristol and Visiting Professor at the Universities Police Science Institute, Cardiff University. Tim Newburn is Professor of Social Policy and Criminology, and Head of the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Together with David Downes and Paul Rock he is currently writing the Official History of Criminal Justice. Jill Peay is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her latest book is Mental Health and Crime (Routledge, 2010). Maurice Punch is Visiting Professor at the Mannheim Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at King’s College London. He has worked at universities in the UK, USA and the Netherlands; his research areas are police



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corruption, corporate crime, police accountability and use of firearms and state deviance in Northern Ireland.  Coretta Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published extensively in the area of ethnicity, racism and criminal justice, and is currently writing a book called The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations Among Prisoners (Clarendon Press, forthcoming). Paul Rock is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. James Sheptycki has been researching transnational crime and policing for two decades. His recent work includes Global Policing (with Ben Bowling, Sage, 2012) and Transnational Crime and Policing: Selected Essays (Ashgate, 2011). David J Smith is Honorary Professor of Criminology at the University of Edinburgh and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His contributions to policing studies include Police and People in London (Policy Studies Institute, 1983), Democracy and Policing (with Jones and Newburn, Policy Studies Institute, 1994), and Transformations of Policing (with Alistair Henry, Ashgate, 2007). Clifford D Shearing is the Chair of Criminology and Director of the Centre of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town. He also holds the South African National Research Foundation Chair in Security and Justice. He is currently developing research on environmental security. Richard Sparks is Professor of Criminology at the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. His most recent books are Public Criminology? (with Ian Loader, Routledge, 2010) and The Sage Handbook of Punishment and Society (co-edited with Jonathan Simon, Sage, 2012). In current work Loader and Sparks are continuing to explore the public roles of criminology in policy and political debates. Philip Stenning is Professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He is currently engaged in assembling an international research team to undertake ethnographic research on the transnational role of private security, as yet a seriously under-researched topic in the field of policing. PAJ Waddington is Professor of Social Policy and Honorary Director of the Central Institute for the Study of Public Protection at the University of Wolverhampton. After 25 years of studying the police academically, he has now become active in police education, creating the first exclusively pre-entry vocational degree programme in Policing in England. Lucia Zedner is Professor of Criminal Justice in the Faculty of Law and Senior Law Fellow, Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. She is also Conjoint

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Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where she is a frequent visitor. Her recent books include: Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press, 2004), Crime and Security (co-edited with Ben Goold, Ashgate, 2006) and Security (Routledge, 2009).

1 Robert Reiner:  An Intellectual Portrait TIM NEWBURN and PAUL ROCK*

Robert Reiner has long been a self-aware man, committed to the examined life, who has written at length and with honesty and clarity about the origins and development of his own thought. One has only to read what he has himself said to identify a small cluster of facts which have reflexively shaped his approach to politics, morality and learning. Robert Reiner was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Hungary in 1946 and came to England two years later where he was educated and nurtured for a long while within a largely Jewish world, living in Golders Green, one of North London’s Jewish areas, and becoming a pupil, first at Orthodox primary and secondary schools, and then, briefly, at a Talmudical college in Gateshead. ‘Until I went to Cambridge at the age of 18’, he wrote, ‘my only contact with non-Jewish (or even Jewish secular) culture was vicariously through books and the mass media. My only contact with non-Jewish people was fleeting and impersonal – in shops or on public transport’ (Reiner, 2011: xxvi). That exposure to the world of secular learning at Cambridge between 1964 and 1967, first in the discipline of economics, where he was taught by Frank Hahn (whom he admired) but to the mathematics of which he developed an aversion; and then in the discipline of sociology (where he was taught by Ralph Miliband, David Lockwood and John Goldthorpe) to which he succumbed; established a counterpoint between the sacred and profane, the small universe of Judaism and the larger universe of secular thought, which stayed with him for the rest of his life. At a time when sociology was becoming in vogue, and like many of his generation, he progressed to the LSE in 1968 to read for an MSc Sociology where an interest in crime and deviance was excited by his attendance at a seminar conducted by Terence Morris. He moved thence to the University of Bristol to read for a PhD, where he was supervised by Michael Banton, the doyen of sociologists of the police (see Reiner, 1992).1� It was suggested that he study the Police Federation, the lower ranks’ police union, and the outcome was a study of class, work, mobilisation and policing, The Blue-Coated Worker: A Sociological Study of Police Unionism,   *  We are grateful to Joanna Benjamin for her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1   Robert Reiner traces the beginning of the British sociology of the police to Banton’s The Policeman in the Community (Banton, 1964).

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published by Cambridge University Press in 1978, which set the broad contours of the research he would pursue for the rest of his professional life. In The Blue-Coated Worker Robert Reiner traced the history of the Police Federation, examined its changing role and position and, through a sample survey, explored police officers’ attitudes toward unionism, to work and careers and to broader socio-political matters (though he was prevented by a nervous Home Office from asking directly about voting intentions). Much influenced by his sociology lecturers at Cambridge, Robert Reiner’s The Blue-Coated Worker, as its title suggests, was a direct intellectual descendant of Lockwood’s The Blackcoated Worker (Lockwood, 1958) published in the late 1950s, and Goldthorpe and colleagues’ Affluent Worker studies (Goldthorpe et al, 1968; 1969a; 1969b) which appeared in the late 1960s. Though looking back on it, Robert Reiner suggests the choice of title involved a certain amount of chutzpah on his part (Reiner, 1998: 79), reviewers were unanimous in their praise of the work, and particularly its broad sociological perspective and implications (see inter alia, Martin, 1980; Chatterton, 1980 and Daniels, 1979). Serendipitously perhaps, its point of publication was also the ‘moment’ when the Police Federation became significantly more politicised and ‘front-page news’ (Reiner, 1998: 78) thanks initially to the battle being fought out over pay and conditions in what was to turn out to be last few months of the Callaghan Labour government. The ‘law and order’ Thatcher administrations that followed ensured that policing and the police remained topics of considerable public interest and debate. Robert Reiner has held posts as a sociological criminologist and sociologist of law in the Sociology and Law Departments of the University of Bristol between 1969 and 1987; the Law Department of Brunel University between 1987 and 1989; and the Law Department of LSE between 1989 and 2011, placing him as squarely in the discipline of law as in sociology, and reinforcing his position on the intellectual frontier. The progress of his career ran in strict parallel with the evolution of the sociology of the police in Britain itself. At the outset, when he began, the discipline was embryonic and the number of its adherents was small. It started as a ‘cozy club’ (Reiner, 1992: 437), made up of a few scholars who knew one another well – Michael Banton, Maureen Cain, Mike Chatterton, Simon Holdaway and others. But then the sociology of the police, like criminology itself, experienced a big bang. Robert Reiner once told one of us that, when he embarked on his professional life, he took it that he should read everything published in sociology, then, as the volume of books and articles mushroomed – when, as the saying went, academics never had an unpublished thought – he tried only to master the writings of sociological criminology; then only the sociology of the police; and finally only a small portion of the more significant works that appeared on the police and policing. As one of the pivotal members of that original, very small club, a man who was busily observing and helping to define the rapid growth of a nascent area of academic specialisation, Robert Reiner inevitably exerted great influence over his peers, their ideas and the wider field of criminology. One of the roles he adopted (common and necessary enough at the time) was to become a record-keeper who engaged in periodic stock-



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taking. His The Politics of the Police passed through four editions between 1985 and 2010, acting as a quasi-official register and chronicle that reported the progress of a discipline that was being ‘fundamentally transformed’ (Reiner, 2010: xi). Like so many of us, his initially becoming a criminologist had been more a matter of drift and happenstance than of clear-sighted resolve, ‘a mixture of cowardice, compulsion and convenience’ (Reiner, 1998: 75). After all, criminology was wellnigh invisible in the 1950s and 1960s: it was not known at school, and certainly not at Orthodox Jewish schools; it was little discussed publicly; perhaps the only widely acclaimed criminologist was the popularising lawyer and broadcaster, Edgar Lustgarten;2� and there were few enough other criminologists of any stamp at the time (only 72 people attended the very first National Conference on Research and Teaching in Criminology held in Cambridge in 1964, and 42 of them were academics; 20 being students and staff at the new Cambridge Institute of Criminology itself). But, when he did stumble across it, criminology not only usefully refracted his larger preoccupation with the problematics of power rooted in his family’s experience of persecution, but also offered a respectable, safe and distant camera obscura from which to view the lesser, alluring and alien life of the streets, what Gouldner (1962: 209) called at the time ‘the world of hip, . . . drug addicts, jazz musicians, cab drivers, prostitutes, night people, drifters, grifters and skidders, the cool cats and their kicks’, the demi-monde which must have seemed anthropologically exotic to one who had led a hitherto protected existence in a middle-class London suburb. He confessed that as a ‘stereotypically repressed grammar schoolboy with an orthodox Jewish upbringing, I had been fascinated to read the appreciative, tell-it-likeit-is studies of “nuts, sluts and perverts”3 within the then burgeoning labelling and naturalistic approaches to deviance’ (Reiner, 2011: ix). Being self-consciously Jewish, albeit a Jew who was to become in later life both conservative and radical, agnostic and practising, scholarly and politically engaged, his thinking, like that of the Max Weber whom he so admires, has been marked by fruitful contradiction. The tensions between fact and value, law and sociology, insider and outsider, Verstehen and structural analysis, study and comment, allow one to play the critical ethnologist, observing his or her own society, as it were, from the margins, adopting a perspective through incongruity, and giving interest to what many others take for granted. There is, after all, a wider elective affinity between Jewishness and the sociological imagination. Georg Simmel, another Jewish sociologist fascinated by the extraordinary patterns to be found in the most ordinary of phenomena, once remarked ‘We really are a very strange people’ (Letter to Martin Buber, quoted in Scholem, 1980: 70), and it was that sense of strangeness that can lead to the epoché of the natural attitude, the distancing that makes the social world puzzling or in need of correction, especially when it seems to be unremarkable to the untrained eye 2   Edgar Lustgarten, 1907–78, was called to the bar and then became a frequent broadcaster, relaying with dramatic intensity from 1952 onwards a series of accounts of famous murder trials, Prisoner at the Bar (based on www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/60835). 3   The allusion is to Liazos (1972).

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(see Becker, 1998). Transforming the commonplace into the problematic is a gift. Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning reflected that ‘Robert has a knack of asking difficult questions that compel one to rethink one’s ideas, sometimes in quite fundamental ways’.4� Being an erstwhile student of the Talmud, a man who still freely cites Talmudic scholars, Robert Reiner is, secondly and importantly, a person of the book. He looks and acts the part of a learned scholar in classical mode; a man enamoured of bookish ideas; one who seeks not to vie with others but to learn and converse, to impart knowledge, to be a mentor5� and to serve as a good collaborator. Frances Heidensohn observed that ‘I’ve always found Robert the perfect, kind, gentlemanly colleague with whom to work’.6� He appears so utterly at home in the academic world that it is rather difficult to imagine him anywhere else. Yet his Judaism offered more than a life of quiet thought and scholastic exegesis. It combined scholarship, politics, theodicy and, most importantly, ethics. The biblical golden rule (love your neighbour as yourself) has provided the matrix of his daily life. Robert Reiner has never been completely neutral; morally detached; free of scepticism;7� or loath to cast what have sometimes been quite angry and polemical judgements on such matters as the impact of neo-liberal economic policies on crime.�8 After all, his parents were Holocaust survivors who had fled a country that had been authoritarian and antiSemitic under Admiral Horthy and the Arrow Cross Party and was to become totalitarian under Mátyás Rákosi and the Hungarian Working People’s Party, and it was difficult for him not to be engaged, especially with the politics of the repressive state. Despite a brief and afterwards disowned flirtation with the apocalyptic Marxism in which so many of his generation indulged in the 1960s and 1970s9� (he had wondered in an article in Marxism Today whether the class contradictions experienced by police constables might not induce them to become proletarian revolutionaries – Reiner, 1978), his politics have been Menshevik rather than Bolshevik, reformist rather than revolutionary. His has been a liberal cast of mind because, when he found his own voice, he knew too much about where Bolshevism could lead; was 4   Quoted by Jill Peay in her address to the British Society of Criminology on the occasion of its conferment of the Outstanding Achievement Award 2011 to Professor Robert Reiner. 5   Peter Waddington told us of how, at an early stage in his career, Robert Reiner ‘gave me tremendous encouragement. I think it captured his generosity of spirit’. 6   Quoted by Jill Peay in her address to the British Society of Criminology on the occasion of its conferment of the Outstanding Achievement Award 2011 to Professor Robert Reiner. 7   For a more general observation about the Jews, marginality and intellectual scepticism, see Elon (2002). 8   See his running series of commentaries in The Guardian newspaper, represented by www.guardian. co.uk/politics/2005/nov/24/ukcrime.uk and www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/23/uk crime-justice. In 2010, for instance, he castigated the policies of the Prime Minister, David Cameron: ‘a plethora of evidence indicts the key aspects of neo-liberalism: inequality is strongly related to violent crime, unemployment and marginal employment to property crime, and both are strongly accentuated by the egoistic and narcissistic culture of consumerism’ (www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/ jan/22/david-cameron-labour-crime). 9   He would later say that ‘I felt uncomfortable with the rather vulgar Marxist analysis which permeated the papers I wrote in the late 1970s even at the time. But I was emotionally carried along by a desire not to break ranks with the wishful thinking which then dominated so much British left sociology’. (Reiner, 1998: 83)



Robert Reiner:  An Intellectual Portrait 5

sensible that the British police were patently not the agents of an unambiguously repressive state apparatus;�10 and was affected by the principled liberalism of the academic lawyers who became his colleagues. Those whose history was steeped in stories about the atrocities of twentieth century fascism and communism find it difficult to regard Britain as anything but a polity that is more subtle, tolerant and complex than the new criminologists (Taylor et al, 1973) and radical controversialists have sometimes supposed. He reflected that ‘the generation of white émigrés who fled totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s . . . hallowed not just empiricism, but also all aspects of British culture and liberal democratic political institutions . . . . I recognized this pattern in myself’ (Reiner, 2011: xxv). Antagonistic to the political right; doubtful about the absolutism, impossibilism and millennialism of the revolutionary left; suspicious of ideas of human perfectibility; he could sometimes be touched by the Weltschmerz which has so often coloured British criminology. He wrote: I had no enemies from the Left, and an implacable moral and intellectual hostility to the Right. But perhaps an even more firmly rooted aspect of my outlook and personality has been a deep pessimism about the prospects of anything other than piecemeal progress, and scepticism about utopian enthusiasms’ (Reiner, 2011: xvi).

Just as the police whom he studied were prone to become ‘prematurely cynical from seeing the worst of people and ordinary people at their worst’ (Wambaugh, 2010: 198), so, at times, and in his turn, he could be gloomy about crime, policing and the state, repeatedly relaying narratives of decline, inequality, social exclusion (Reiner, 2010a) and the erosion of authority (Reiner, 1992b), and believing that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Like other British criminologists, he was slow to accept that crime and victimisation rates could actually have begun to decline in the 1990s. Robert Reiner’s oeuvre may then be read as an unstable compound of formal academic inquiry, Fabianism, political scepticism and moral passion. It is a distinctively LSE frame of thought. After all, the School had been founded by Fabians who ‘dreamt of an organized, well-run society rather than the free-for-all of “Manchester liberalism” . . . [who] were convinced that the first step to reform was to find out facts’ (Dahrendorf, 1995: 7). ‘I am’, said Robert Reiner himself, deeply imbued with [the LSE’s] double founding mission: To pursue the truth (to know the causes of things); AND to advance justice and human flourishing – as conceived of rather unfashionably since New and Blue (but not true) Labour in the Fabian way.11�

It is also an uneasy frame of thought, and much of Robert Reiner’s writing may be understood as a continuing attempt to yoke disparate themes together in some workable form: ‘How’, he asked in an essay with the revealingly Weberian title of 10   They were, he said, ‘fundamentally benign human beings, who were sometimes driven or drifted into undesirable behaviour because of the structural pressures of a social system which needed reforming to make it more just’ (Reiner, 1998: 86). 11   R Reiner; ‘LSE AU REVOIR’, address given at the celebration of his retirement, London School of Economics, 29 June 2011.

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‘Criminology as a Vocation’, ‘do we reconcile the responsibility to alleviate pressing concrete problems with the more uncertain search for their fundamental sources in the hope of reducing or eliminating them altogether?’(Reiner, 2007: 407). That search for reconciliation between passionate engagement and deep scholarly excavation is at the core of his work on the British police, the organisation which is at once his tribe, test-bed, lens and object of social and scholarly analysis. The police are, he said, a ‘social litmus paper [that] register[s] all the major changes in the broader social structure and culture’ (Reiner, 1998: 90). They are the agents of a state that from time to time required them to perform unattainable tasks and behave in unwarrantable ways. But they are also in his eyes a subject of analytic interest in their own right, to be examined, as other subjects are examined, simply because they are sociologically intriguing. So it was that the first edition of his The Politics of the Police, written in the throes of the miners’ strike and published in 1985, enshrined the dual purpose of ‘point[ing] out the deplorable consequences for the police and our social order of the polarised conflict then raging. . . . [And serving as] a text synthesising the growing research literature on the police’ (Reiner, 1992c: xi, xii) Andrew Goldsmith remarked of the book’s fourth edition, published 25 years later: While displaying a sympathetic understanding of the challenges associated with the performance of police duties and the need for orderly societies to have effective police forces, [Robert Reiner] was constantly attentive to the need for effective accountability mechanisms, and for social policy makers to be reminded that the police were, for the most part anyway, not responsible for the levels of social conflict and disorder they were forced to confront.�12

Arguably, above all its other very many qualities, The Politics of the Police is first and foremost a reflection of both the breadth of Robert Reiner’s scholarship, and his clarity of thought and argument. It manages to survey the history of British policing – navigating between traditional Reithian perspectives on the one hand and the views of the radical, revisionist historians on the other. It also offers an encyclopaedic review and original synthesis of the huge, and ever-growing body of work on the sociology of the police, offering defining reviews of the ‘rise and fall of police legitimacy’ and the nature and characteristics of ‘police culture’, both remaining largely unchallenged to this day. As if this were not enough (for several volumes, let alone one), The Politics of the Police also provided the outlet for the first full exposition of Robert Reiner’s unparalleled knowledge, and understanding, of the fictional representation of policing on screen and in novels. In one review, Paddy Hillyard (1986: 535) described this element of the book as a ‘tour de force’, and no doubt reflecting what most readers must think, went on to say that it left him ‘wondering about the number of hours that must have been spent in front of either a small or large screen’! (The top floor of Robert Reiner’s house in Finchley is laid out as a miniature cinema, replete with film posters.)   A Goldsmith, unpublished review of Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 4th edn.

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Robert Reiner:  An Intellectual Portrait 7

Having begun with the rank-and-file, followed up with the definitive overview of the whole sub-field of policing, Robert Reiner then took on the task (again following an important sociological tradition) of exploring the outlook, orientations, careers and philosophies of the British police elite in Chief Constables. In his review of the book, the iconoclastic former Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall, John Alderson (1993: 130), praised Robert Reiner’s ‘skilful probing’ in the quasi-life history interviews that formed the basis for the study, and remarked on some of the ‘disturbing conclusions’ that could be drawn from the volume. Centrally, to Alderson’s eye, the major insight was that the practice and quality of policing in England and Wales lies in the hands of forty-three conservative and, with few exceptions, unimaginative and unenterprising white males. Any idea of general public and political insights influencing policing operations as a democratic right is precluded by a mixture of custom, law, and archaic Royal Prerogative.

Intriguingly and by contrast, Robert Reiner identified the growing power and influence of the Home Office as the study’s ‘most interesting finding’ (Reiner, 1998: 89). On this front, he had selected his study at a propitious historical moment, for the centralisation of control that he was first to reveal fully in Chief Constables, was soon to become clear to all, as government policy shifted radically, putting national targets and Home Office influence at the heart of policing.13� Robert Reiner tends modestly to suggest that the auspicious timing of his studies owes much to chance. But it has been too regular an occurrence for this to be entirely believable. In more recent times, much of Robert Reiner’s work has been devoted to explorations of the changing nature of political economy and its relationship to crime and its control. In a series of publications he has argued both for the centrality of political economy to our understanding of crime and control – developing for example a devastating critique of the ‘new policing theories’ for their failure in this regard (Reiner, 2010b) – and also as the basis for the development of effective policy. If the roots of this approach to understanding policing first appeared in The Politics of the Police, then it has been fully realised more recently, in particular through Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control. With a book title once again reflecting intellectual debts (in this case to Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins�14), Robert Reiner set about an analysis of neo-liberalism and its many harms – or what he called ‘the revolution of the rich’ – ending, however, not with the unremittingly dystopian picture of the future so common in contemporary criminology, but with an encouragement to all engaged in such work to continue the labour involved in critique and resistance.�15 The creation of the new kinds of social and political movement required to overcome the barriers to change erected by neo-liberalism will undoubtedly be difficult to achieve, but as Elliott Currie (2009) observed in his review of Law and Order, it is precisely the ‘clear-eyed and thoughtful analyses like   Analysed in detail in Reiner and Spencer (1993).   See Morris and Hawkins (1970). 15   And in so doing rather contradicting his description of himself as someone who has ‘never had trouble with Gramsci’s recommendation of pessimism of the intellect, but I have chronic problems with his encouragement of optimism of the will’, Reiner (2011: xviii) 13 14

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this . . . [that] will be an indispensable aid in the creation of that kind of movement’. Typically, in summing up this argument Robert Reiner concluded Law and Order with an epigraph from a Talmudic tract, Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot): ‘It is not your duty to complete the work, but you are not free to desist from it’ (Reiner, 2007: 174).

References Alderson, J (1993) ‘Review of The Politics of the Police’ British Journal of Criminology 130. Banton, M (1964) The Policeman in the Community (London, Tavistock). Becker, H (1998) Tricks of the Trade (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Chatterton, M (1980) ‘Review of The Politics of the Police’ Sociology 14(5), 325–27. Currie, E (2009) ‘Review of Law and Order’ New Criminal Law Review 12(1), 131–34. Dahrendorf, R (1995) LSE: A History of the London School of Economics and Political Science 1895–1995 (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Daniels, R (1979) ‘Review of The Politics of the Police’ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science July 444, 1. Elon, A (2002) The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743–1933 (New York, Picador). Goldthorpe, JH, Lockwood, D, Bechofer, F and Platt, J (1968) The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). ——, ——, —— and —— (1969a) The Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). ——, ——, —— and —— (1969b) The Affluent Worker: in the Class Structure (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Gouldner, A (1962) ‘Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Value-Free Sociology’ Social Problems 10, 209. Hillyard, P (1986) ‘Review of The Politics of the Police’ Journal of Social Policy 15, 535–37. Liazos, A (1972) ‘The Poverty of the Sociology of Deviance: Nuts, Sluts, and Perverts’ Social Problems 3, 103–20. Lockwood, D (1958) The Blackcoated Worker: A study in class consciousness (London, Allen and Unwin). Martin, J (1980) ‘Review of The Politics of the Police’ Journal of Social Policy 9(2), 248–51. Morris, N and Hawkins, G (1970) The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Reiner, R (1978) ‘The Police, Class and Politics’ Marxism Today, March, 69–80. —— (1992a) ‘Police Research in the United Kingdom: A Critical Review’ in N Morris and M Tonry (eds), Crime and Justice: A review of research (Chicago, Chicago University Press). —— (1992c) ‘Preface to the second edition’ The Politics of the Police (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf). —— (1992b) ‘Policing a Post-Modern Society’ Modern Law Review 55(6), 761–81. —— (1998) ‘Copping a Plea’ in S Holdaway and P Rock (eds), Thinking About Criminology (London, UCL Press).



Robert Reiner:  An Intellectual Portrait 9

—— (2007a) ‘Criminology as a Vocation’ in D Downes, P Rock, C Chinkin and C Gearty (eds), Crime, Social Control and Human Rights (Cullompton, Willan). —— (2007b) Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control (Cambridge, Polity Press). —— (2010a) ‘Citizenship, Crime, Criminalization: Marshalling a Social Democratic Perspective’ New Criminal Law Review 13(2), 241–61. —— (2010b) ‘New theories of policing: A social democratic critique’ in D Downes, R Hobbs and T Newburn (eds), The Eternal Recurrence of Crime and Control: Essays in Honour of Paul Rock (Oxford, Clarendon Press). —— (2010c) The Politics of the Police, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2011) ‘Introduction’ in Policing, Popular Culture and Political Economy: Towards a Social Democratic Criminology (Surrey, Ashgate). Reiner, R and Spencer, S (1993) (eds) Accountable Policing: Effectiveness, Empowerment and Equity (London, IPPR). Scholem, G (1980) From Berlin to Jerusalem (New York, Schocken Books). Taylor, I, Walton, P and Young, J (1973) The New Criminology (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul). Wambaugh, J (2010) Hollywood Hills (New York, Grand Central Publishing).

2 Beyond Lamentation:  Towards a Democratic Egalitarian Politics of Crime and Justice IAN LOADER and RICHARD SPARKS*

The ideas and organization to restore social democracy have not been developed during the wilderness years to a point where there can be any real confidence that this direction will prevail. Nonetheless it remains the precondition for security and humane criminal justice. (Reiner, 2010a: 261)

I.  Introduction: Crime, Justice and the End of Social Democracy? During the course of a long and exceptionally distinguished career, Robert Reiner has consistently addressed crime, and the purpose and limits of crime control, through the lens of social democracy. In his works on policing from The Blue-coated Worker onwards, this orientation has formed part of the generative context. In later work on crime and crime control under conditions of the dominion of free market ideologies and consequent widening inequalities in Britain and elsewhere, Reiner (2007) has made this commitment increasingly explicit. Indeed, in recent essays he has stated that his current – and future – work is concerned to recover and extol the virtues of a social democratic criminology – a criminology committed to the idea that there can, as the slogan has it, be ‘no peace without justice’ (Reiner, 2010a, 2010b and 2011). It is an idea that Reiner has frequently and powerfully encapsulated by adapting a maxim coined by Rosa Luxemburg. Modern democratic societies, Reiner argues, face a choice ‘between some form of social democracy and, *   We wish to thank Katja Franko Aas, Ben Bradford, Albert Dzur, Nicola Lacey, Fergus McNeill, Mike Nellis, Pat O’Malley and Lucia Zedner for their constructive responses to earlier drafts of this paper. In light of the diverse but universally incisive nature of these comments we want to emphasise that the errors and confusions in this paper are no-one’s fault but our own.

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at best, the barbarism of high crime rates and a fortified society’ (Reiner, 2000: 219–20). The social democracy of which Reiner speaks is a political ideology and organised movement whose ambition is to tame capitalism, and its self-destructive excesses and systemic inequalities, in the name of the public interest or common good. Its organising principles are fairness, equality, solidarity and justice. It seeks to extend prevailing liberal conceptions of ideals that are shared in common so that equality becomes substantive not formal, freedom has a positive as well as negative dimension, individualism becomes reciprocal individualism and mutual responsibility, and justice means social justice – a fairer distribution of resources and recognition. Judt summarises the distinction between liberal and social democratic conceptions of the good thus: Social democrats . . . are something of a hybrid. They share with liberals a commitment to cultural and religious tolerance. But in public policy social democrats believe in the possibility and virtue of collective action for the collective good. Like most liberals, social democrats favor progressive taxation in order to pay for public services and other social goods that individuals cannot provide themselves; but whereas many liberals might see such taxation or public provision as a necessary evil, a social democratic vision of the good society entails from the outset a greater role for the state and the public sector. (2010a: 2)

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, when social democracy was, aspirationally at least, the governing ethos of much of Western Europe, these ideals were enshrined in the mixed economy and welfare citizenship. The state was, as Judt suggests, harnessed as a political force for good: ‘For social democrats, the primacy of politics meant using the democratic state to institutionalize policies that would protect society from capitalism’s harshest effects and promote the well-being and security of its weakest and most vulnerable members in particular’ (Berman, 2006: 206). Reiner conceives of social democracy in terms of its ethical virtues and its explanatory force, both of which he has imported into criminology. He has been a tireless and cogent advocate of the view that ‘policing by consent’ has vital social and economic preconditions. In his analysis of what he calls ‘the rise and fall of police legitimacy’ in Britain, Reiner argued that the ‘rise’ flowed from the gradual inclusion of organised labour within the institutions of the British polity during the first half of the twentieth century, while the ‘fall’ was a product of the social and political turmoil provoked by the exclusionary polices of the New Right in the 1980s and 1990s (Reiner, 2000: ch 2). His inference is that the police – notwithstanding their ‘tragically inescapable job’ as always potentially coercive managers of social conflict (Reiner, 2011: xviii) – are of secondary importance to the sustenance of order and security. Reiner has repeatedly and powerfully deployed Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective Phillip Marlowe to make this point: ‘Crime isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumour’ (quoted in Reiner, 2000: 220).



Beyond Lamentation 13

In recent work on the political economy of crime, Reiner (2007) has produced a Mertonian explanation of the effects of structural inequalities on violence and victimisation, and posted a strongly ethical objection to the competitive egoism that he sees as coming to predominate in the culture of contemporary market societies, at the expense of principles of moderation, fairness and solidarity that he associates with twentieth century social democracy. In Reiner’s view, and that of a number of recent commentators on comparative political economy, social policy and penal politics, these disruptions have been felt most keenly, and most damagingly, in those societies whose politics have been most acutely influenced by New Right ideology and whose economies have been most rigorously re-shaped along ‘neo-liberal’ lines – most obviously the United States and the United Kingdom.1 These accounts frequently look to Scandinavia (eg Pratt, 2008), and sometimes to Germany and other European states (or in a somewhat different vein to aspects of Japanese society) for alternative models of social steering that have in varying degrees retained elements of their ‘solidarity projects’ (Garland, 2001; 2012) into the present, and which in so doing have both restricted the scope of inequalities of income and wealth and moderated the sway of crime control policies premised on widespread insecurity and mutual fear. Loïc Wacquant and others have recently extended these debates to include not just the usual European and North American suspects but also emergent economies of the ‘south’ under the sway of the ‘Washington consensus’, an argument perhaps most fully explored to date in Latin America (eg Wacquant, 2003; Iturralde, 2010). Of late Reiner’s work, while continuing to include a strong ethical argument for social democratic criminology and crime policy, has increasingly assumed the form of a lament for social democracy’s lost and defeated principles.2 In part, this is straightforward homage to a better past. In ways that recall the views of authors such as Eric Hobsbawm (1994) and Tony Judt (2010a), Reiner writes that: I have been persuaded . . . that the 1950s and 1960s were a sort of golden age in objective terms, and that in the early 1970s something happened to set in train a general – though not unambiguous – decline in the quality of life (Reiner, 2011: xxviii).

But this orientation can also be detected in the absence of ‘any real confidence’ (Reiner, 2010a: 261) in the capacity of social democracy to exercise much influence under current conditions, even after the 2008 financial crash, or of concrete ideas for how it might begin to do so. Reiner is scarcely alone in adopting this stance. Many critical analyses of contemporary penality – including such analytically powerful and politically alert critiques as those recently offered by Wacquant (2009a) and Harcourt (2010) – have rather less to say about the shape of any alternative future to which such critical analysis might contribute.3 Reiner has, to be sure, argued that it   Downes and Hansen (2006); Cavadino and Dignan (2006); Lappi-Seppälä (2008).   Most explicitly, but by no means only, in the essay ‘Beyond risk: A lament for social democratic criminology’ (Reiner, 2006). 3   Pat O’Malley has, in this regard, argued that ‘critical criminology is deep in one of its more pessimistic phases’ (O’Malley, 2010: 81) and that its exponents ‘rarely suggest any way out of the nightmare they 1 2

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remains a ‘core criminological responsibility’ to ‘chart a way forward to reviving the conditions of social security and peace’ (2011: xxxi). It is simply not at all clear that he believes it possible to make the credo that has informed close to four decades of distinguished research and analysis into a viable and compelling guide to the future. But do cogent reasons exist for such lamentation? Is social democracy a dead political tradition, one of Ulrich Beck’s ‘zombie categories’? Or is it possible today to fashion an approach to crime and justice shaped by democratic egalitarian ideals which can speak meaningfully to, and with purchase on, the world we inhabit? This is the question we address in this chapter. It is, in our view, not only a pressing political question, but also one which presents a significant and ambitious intellectual challenge.4 Our principal task is to sketch – and we can do no more here than sketch – some theoretical orientations for a revived democratic egalitarian approach to crime and justice, and indicate how it might be put to work in clarifying what is at stake, and what alternative futures can be glimpsed, in contemporary crime control controversies.5 In so doing, we begin the work of providing some substantive answers to the question on which we sought to focus attention at the close of our book Public Criminology? – that of how to give meaning and shape to a ‘better politics of crime and its regulation’ (Loader and Sparks, 2010: ch 5). In Public Criminology? we focused primarily upon the variety of ways in which criminological scholarship has addressed the contentious character of the criminal question and outlined some strengths and drawbacks of a certain set of ways of engaging with this. Here we turn our attention to another face of the problem of promoting a better politics of crime and its control, namely that of imagining the institutional arrangements and cultural conditions under which a more hopeful and more richly democratic way of approaching questions of crime and justice might be developed (Loader and Sparks, 2010: 123). Before turning to this question, however, we must reckon soberly with the predicaments that social democracy – and any democratic egalitarian prospectus for crime and justice policy – faces today and ask ourselves if there are, indeed, compelling grounds for Reiner’s lament.

depict’ (ibid, 6). As we have noted elsewhere there may be cogent reasons why observers might see their contribution as in the first instance a defensive one – eg, Wacquant speaks of his interlocutors in Latin America as seeking to create ‘civic firebreakers’ (2009b: 166–67) in the face of a conflagration. The civic project is in this light one of trying to shelter existing institutions from an overwhelming threat. 4   In the main, this is not a challenge that criminologists or political theorists have risen to, hence the radically under-developed state of scholarship on the relationship between crime control and democratic theory (Lacey, 2008: 7). There are of course key exceptions especially among those who address the meetings points between penal theory and political theory, and hence between criminal justice and social justice, most directly (Braithwaite and Pettit, 1990; Hudson 1993; Matravers, 1999; Dzur, 2012). 5   There are many limitations to how far we can press this argument in this chapter. Not least of these is that we consciously focus almost entirely on the UK, with only passing reference to how similar questions might play out elsewhere in the world. One of many reasons for this restriction, quite apart from the fact that it concerns the case that we know best, is that it speaks in direct response to Reiner’s body of work.



Beyond Lamentation 15

II.  The Predicaments and Prospects of Social Democracy Today This is not the place to rehearse in any detail the story of the decline (or in some accounts the death) of social democracy in Britain, nor its inevitable counterparts, the rise of Thatcherism and ‘neo-liberalism’. Many such historical accounts exist (Jessop et al, 1988; Marquand, 1988, 2004; Hay, 1996). These are the stuff not just of every account of economic history of the last 30 and more years (Offer, 2006; Skidelsky, 2009; Judt, 2010b) but of their links with changes in social policy (Levitas, 2005), political discourse (Hall, 2011; Marquand, 2011), civil liberties (Feldman, 2002; Ewing, 2010), broadcasting and cultural policy (O’Malley and Jones, 2009), health (Iliffe, 2008) and almost any other policy field, or indeed broader dimensions of cultural and social being, that we might mention. The number of these accounts multiplies with every week’s publications of The New Statesman, Will Hutton column, the many outpourings of think-tanks, blogs and so on. There is no shortage of diagnoses. Reiner is surely not mistaken (and certainly not alone) in noting that there is indeed a rupture between the world that has been re-made by these forces and the one that we have lost. Neither is it obvious, despite the deep and intractable nature of the economic and social crisis to which an under-regulated and massively volatile form of capitalism has all-too visibly brought us since the financial crash of 2008, with its manifold implications for the sense of security, reliability and orderliness of the world, that a social democratic counter-narrative is currently proving most resonant in convincing shocked and sceptical publics that it knows the way towards a more hopeful and more certain future. In the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis a rash of articles announced that the game was now up for neoliberalism and that it was poised to be replaced by a more progressive agenda. In electoral terms, and for the most part in terms of economic management too, this has not so far come to pass, as David Miliband (2011) has coolly noted (see also Crouch, 2011). In several respects Reiner’s stated lack of ‘any real confidence’ that the change of political direction for which he has argued with such earnest devotion is likely to come about looks no more than realistic. Indeed, the political mood in much of Europe has now so far darkened, in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis of 2011, that many commentators increasingly predict a lurch to the right rather than a revival of progressive idealism (eg Selbourne, 2011). As a much earlier classic analysis of such upheavals made clear, the outcome of turbulence in the relations between states and markets can be violent, reactionary and intensely unfriendly to democracy (Polanyi, 1944). Why then are we here taking issue with the analysis of our greatly admired colleague, still less claiming that crime and justice represent fit topics for a reconstruction of social democratic thinking? There are several steps in this argument. We render them here in somewhat ‘potted’ form, awaiting fuller development

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in subsequent work. Before moving on to the reconstructive stage of our claims we want to explain why there are several good reasons to exercise caution before accepting Reiner’s analysis either of the past or the present. This is in no way to minimise the predicaments and challenges confronting any proposed renewal of the social democratic project, either in general or in respect of crime and justice in particular. It is, however, to suggest that these may need to be re-stated and respecified if they are to have much purchase on the present. No-one who thinks seriously about these things can be in much doubt that something of major significance took place during the 1970s, crystallised in and empowered by Mrs Thatcher’s election victory in 1979. Moreover that shift had consequences for the economy, politics and culture of the UK, with which we are in many respects still living now, and those effects have been felt not least in the major alterations that have taken place in crime and criminal justice and in their associated forms of political rhetoric and intervention. We have discussed fairly extensively elsewhere (as have numerous others) what some of those effects have been, and in particular why forms of politics that have predominantly embraced neo-liberal premises rather than favouring more social democratic approaches to social ordering tend to place crime and punishment closer to the centre of their concerns (see further Loader and Sparks, 2004; Loader, 2009, 2010; Sparks 2003, 2006). There is no question that this was a moment of ‘structural politics’ (Hay, 2002). Crises, as Stuart Hall and colleagues note in their discussion of the role of law and order politics in the rise of the ‘authoritarian state’ in the 1970s, do not ‘emerge from nowhere’ but rather arise out of a pre-existing field of ‘tension, hostility and suspicion’ (Hall et al, 1978: 181). They also take the view that ‘moments of “more than usual alarm” followed by the exercise of “more than normal control”’ tend to be associated with significant historical upheavals and social-political transition (1978: 186). One question that animated Hall and colleagues was what might happen when circumstances conspired to bring political leadership and cultural authority into particular question. They conceived this as calling forth a ‘modification in the modes of hegemony’ and as engendering a ‘tilt’ towards ‘the pole of coercion’. What follows, they argue, is ‘an exceptional moment in the normal form of the late capitalist state’ (Hall et al, 1978: 217). It is worth reminding ourselves of this formulation now because it avoids two kinds of error in a good deal of recent writing about change in the political character of crime and punishment since (roughly) 1970. It does say that something of lasting significance may have taken place and been spotted by Hall et al – let us not forget, even before Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory of 1979 – and that this is consistent with a shift in the nature of the dominant political, economic and moral categories of the times (see also Hay, 2002). It does not however suppose that this came from nowhere. Quite the contrary, it suggests that the very existence of a legitimation crisis in (or since) the 1970s speaks to the exhaustion of the formerly ruling ideas and practices. In other words, we should begin the hunt for explanation of the ascent of neo-liberalism in the entropy of the mid-century ideas and institutions, rather than



Beyond Lamentation 17

the reverse. Conversely, however, there is no suggestion here (consider the use of terms like ‘modification’ and ‘tilt’ for example) that somehow the game is up just because the then current moment of alarm or contention is provisionally resolved in one way or another. Even so, we do not seek to deny that the ‘tilt’ turned out to herald a transition with lasting and far-reaching effects. Nevertheless there are good reasons for avoiding the division of recent history into neat periods, a strategy which, among other problems, tends to leave the transitions between periods curiously under-explained. In our earlier paper we claimed to detect ‘a standing temptation’ for the sociology of crime and punishment to treat the 1950s and 1960s as little more than a foil, a screen against which to project the real object of enquiry – criminal and penal policy in the period since the 1970s (Loader and Sparks, 2004). We suggested that this stance runs the risk of doing violence to the past, of underplaying its tensions and conflicts, of inadvertently re/ producing one-dimensional – implicitly rose-tinted – accounts of both the history and politics of penal modernism, and the reasons for its (apparent) demise. The connected problem here concerns what Andrew Gamble (1997: 358) calls ‘endism’ – the tendency to assume that we are ‘crossing a major watershed in human affairs which will leave few things unchanged’. O’Malley (2000) similarly censures this sort of approach as tending to produce ‘criminologies of catastrophe’. The other face of this tendency, we suggest, is to explain everything we observe in the present and very recent past as the out-workings of a single inherent dominant position – usually ‘neo-liberalism’. As Garland (2001: 22) similarly argues, it is dangerous to ‘see discontinuities everywhere’. Instead, he emphasises that ‘new practices and mentalities co-exist with the residues and continuations of older arrangements’ (ibid: 167). This is not a merely theoretical argument, though it is clearly that too. The sense in which it is a theoretical argument is at least two-fold. First, it involves a discussion about how best to theorise the nature of the disruption that occurred during and since the 1970s and their criminological consequences. Second, it certainly involves a set of claims about the gathering ascendancy of certain bodies of ideas – about the respective roles of state and market, about human motivation, socialisation and social ordering and about their implications for crime and its control – that came to renewed prominence in that period. The ‘crisis’ eventually favoured the New Right, as Stuart Hall (1979: 16) put it, because it came to be ‘lived in its terms’. Those ideas rapidly came to include a set of diagnoses of Britain’s social ills, including the emergence of what rapidly came to be known as an ‘underclass’, principally at the door of a morally over-indulgent and inefficient ‘welfare state’. It is no part of our argument to deny the bearing of these ideas, nor the problems that their influence continues to pose for the reformulation of progressive alternatives. The respects in which this discussion is not, in the ordinary sense, merely theoretical, have to do with its implications for what is feasible, or indeed thinkable, now. In the present context it matters because it is all too easy to argue oneself into a position in which all that is good and valuable lies in the past (whereas much that was messy, unpleasant, inefficient, reactionary, stuffy, snooty, racist, sexist,

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homophobic, gerontocratic, xenophobic, secretive, unaccountable, high-handed, elitist and arbitrary about that past is all too-readily overlooked). That tends to mean that those good things whose loss we lament are simply inaccessible to us now. Conversely, the present is the home of populism, punitiveness and paranoid fears, notwithstanding any sightings to the contrary. There is a need to think again about change in respect of crime control and punishment, both in how we interpret the past and in how we think about the prospects that might lie in the present and future. We have argued that these issues are best thought of as being elements of an historical inquiry into politics (Loader and Sparks, 2004: 6). That means placing questions of ‘contestation and resistance’ (O’Malley, 2000: 162) much closer to the heart of the project. It implies making the conflict between cultural meanings and political ideas central to understanding trajectories of change. It demands an effort to grasp, in relation to crime and social order, the terms of conflict between what Raymond Williams calls the ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ elements of culture (Williams, 1977: 121–77; 1981: 204–05). It requires, in short, a commitment to close understanding of the ‘local’ political and cultural struggles out of which ‘global’ change is fashioned (Loader and Sparks, 2004: 17). To proceed thus is, as we have indicated, to develop the project that we began in Public Criminology? That is to say, it is to treat criminologists as players in public contests to ‘name’ the crime problem and fashion solutions to it; to grasp the implied or express models of motivation, intervention and change that have characterised and continue to animate different varieties of criminological thinking. Centrally it is to attempt to re-envisage the relationship between the understandings of order, authority, legitimacy and justice that have animated successive criminologies and the active traditions of liberal, socialist, conservative, feminist and other bodies of political thought that intersect them. It is certainly part of our case here that these ways of addressing the criminal question through developing a fuller historical sociology of its twists and transformations is a more open and prospective one: it aims to drill some holes in the disciplinary wall between criminology and political theory. It is also, however, an argument for writing the history itself differently and better. One reason for dispensing with the all-too-neat succession of eras of criminal justice history is to let go of the miserabilist premise that everything always gets worse all the time. Another is to better grasp the oscillations and contradictions that occur within the periods of ascendancy of particular regimes (Hay, 2002), as well as the counter-movements that jostle for attention, albeit in unequal struggles, at any given moment. Thus, to return briefly to the moment of the late 1970s so alertly intuited by Hall and colleagues, it is clear that Mrs Thatcher came to power at least in part by compellingly articulating a ‘reactionary thematisation of late modernity’ (Garland and Sparks, 2000). Reagan and Thatcher and their successors consciously distanced themselves from the gradualist, meliorist and socially inclusionary priorities of welfarist social policy. Where once the post-war political ‘settlement’ had envisaged a future founded on a mixed economy, the· moderation of inequalities through redistributive taxation and a preoccupation with social planning and intervention,



Beyond Lamentation 19

the Reagan-Thatcher ‘restoration’ offered instead a headier mix of free-market economics, anti-welfare social policy and cultural conservatism, elements of which have remained prominent (if not in many circles orthodox) ever since. This novel ‘state regime’ with its potent confluence of neo-liberalism in economic affairs and its techniques of governing and neo-conservatism in social and cultural matters thus came to dominance by representing the accumulation of problems of the Keynesian welfare state as a twin crisis of ‘ungovernability’ and uncompetitiveness. This in part explains why governments on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1970s have staked much of their claim to legitimacy on tough-mindedness in crime control (Sparks, 2003: 156). However, it is simply not the case that everything in criminal justice became nastier and harsher. Here we can do no more than list some of the more notable sites of struggle. There were significant ‘trials of strength’ between leading British politicians and judges (Rozenberg, 1997), and between British practices and European institutions (eg van Zyl Smit and Snacken, 2009), many of which proved liberalising. Consciousness of human rights played little overt role in the political imaginary of British ‘gas and water socialism’ (Marquand, 2004: 51), but they have become key terms in any developed democratic idiom now. There have been very significant internal reform movements within both the police and prison services which, while by no means ideologically unambiguous, have certainly not been merely reactionary (Liebling, 2004; Crewe, 2009). The rehabilitative ideal may have declined sharply during the 1970s, and with it the wider dominance of ‘penal-welfarism’, but is has made something of a come-back in a number of places lately, even if in problematic forms. Capital punishment, abolished under social democracy, was not restored under Thatcher, despite her personal belief in it and several parliamentary debates on it. Restorative justice has been perhaps the most prominent and internationally widespread social movement in the penal sphere of the last 20 years (Strang and Braithwaite, 2001). There is a good case to be made in the UK, but not just there, that we have witnessed greatly reduced tolerance towards discrimination, and the use of undue force, by police and prison personnel, and significantly enhanced means of investigating these. It can equally be argued that the police today – for a complex of reasons that include the decline of deference and the rise of more contested populist politics – operate under forms of routine, sceptical scrutiny (and are to this extent more alert to the conditional nature of their legitimate authority) that were quite unknown during the mid-twentieth century heyday of policing ‘by consent’.6 Similarly, while politicians have not been slow to try to appropriate popular support for victims of crime, gathering popular solidarity with crime victims is not simply reducible to mere ideological gestures. Indeed the reorientation both of 6   These latter changes were at least in part the result of campaigns against state violence and the struggles of social movements formed within and shaped by the identity politics of the 1960s. It is worth recalling here that social democracy – and its attendant modes of social control – was confronted from the 1960s onwards by a critique mounted, not by neo-liberals, but by a more anti-statist, libertarian left (eg Pearson, 1975).

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public concern and of police resources and priorities towards victims of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, the physical and sexual abuse of children, racist violence and hate speech, bullying and harassment in workplaces all suggest a cultural shift at the level of sensibilities towards avoidable suffering of much wider and less easily politically diagnosed character (confer Boutellier, 2002), including towards people who would formerly have stood beyond the pale of respectable sympathies (Hoyle, 2012). We might add that these concerns have increasingly come to include, however incompletely, victims of large-scale abuse at the hands of states and corporations elsewhere in the world – victims of genocides, refugees and forced migrants, indigenous peoples as victims of environmental degradation and land grabs, women victims of forced marriage, sexual slavery of various kinds, child soldiers, bonded labourers and many other forms of social suffering. Moreover there has been marked variation over time in the centrality attributable to criminal justice politics. The assertive and somewhat authoritarian rhetoric characteristic of early Thatcherism gave way (especially during its years of greatest economic optimism and political dominance around the end of the 1980s) to a period during which the penal question was less overtly politicised. Indeed, it seems to have been the conjunction between a number of unpropitious contingent events and a declining swing in the political-business cycle (Melossi, 1993), that signalled a return to a crude politicisation of penal severity from 1993 onwards (Leacock and Sparks, 2001). So far we have sought to introduce a few queries and complexities into the story of the politics of crime control in Britain since the late 1970s. It is no more than a sketch, but it is still an argument for light and shade. Anyone with substantive knowledge of policing, prisons, social work, youth justice or any other policy field can doubtless supplement, extend or revise it in many directions. We accept without reservation that the politics got tougher and the climate hotter around and since 1979, and that from 1997 New Labour, in its terror of being outflanked on the ‘law and order’ issue and its compulsive legislative hyperactivity, added many new powers and restrictions on liberty (see also Tonry, 2003; Newburn, 2007). However we have also argued that there is much more to this history than a pleasing, ideologically neat and tidy, contrast between kindly old social democracy and savage neo-liberalism. Both of those orders presided over social worlds that were less wholly made in their own ideological image than it is at first tempting to think. Each encountered resistances to their long marches through the political culture of their time. Developments in the surrounding culture were never wholly within willed political control. Nevertheless, the account that we have begun to outline here, though less defeatist and more hopeful than some ‘standard’ readings of the triumph of the neoliberal hegemony offers little for the comfort of unreconstructed social democracy in anything much resembling its mid-twentieth century guise. There are many reasons for this, most of them well-documented and in little need of elaboration. It may just be that comprehensive cradle-to-grave social welfare provision does not simply place unaffordable demands on public finances but is too constricting



Beyond Lamentation 21

and too uniform for late-modern citizens, and too inflexible to meet their diverse needs and demanding preferences (even if some of these ‘demanding preferences’ are themselves the mediated consequence of neo-liberalism). The levels of authority and deference implicit in many forms of social and economic planning can no longer be relied upon among people more apt to think of themselves as discerning consumers rather than passive receivers of services. In many respects the forms of ‘democracy’ invoked in social democracy always were somewhat attenuated and partial – its dominant orientation being more concerned to protect the ‘social’ rather than to extend democracy.7 For these reasons many otherwise sympathetic observers – including those who frame some strong and articulate objections to the evacuation of ‘the public domain’ in neo-liberal regimes (Marquand, 2004) – nevertheless count the antique forms of social democracy as addressing a society that no longer exists, and premised upon the continuity of communities of feeling and membership that have vanished along with the shipyards, foundries, pits and mills in which they laboured and around which they clustered. Perhaps too, with certain key exceptions, the social democratic tradition never did have quite as much to say about crime or criminal justice as we might suppose?8 Or if it did its social imaginary alighted upon a certain array of figures – spivs, black-marketeers, wayward children, delinquent and maladjusted teenagers, needy addicts, East End gangsters, Glaswegian ‘wee hard men’, Soho pornographers – but bequeaths us fewer resources for thinking about rogue traders, narco-capitalists, people traffickers, computer hackers and other members of the late-modern rogues gallery. All of this demands that we address a number of aspects of present realities that the social democratic tradition as we have received it from the past may find hard to accommodate. These include not just the obvious dimensions of economic and cultural globalisation that pose such evident problems for the steering capacities of the nation state and which accentuate the powers of global markets relative to those of individual states. At the same time, largely because of the flows of people, commodities and cultural goods across borders that go along with globalisation, we now require much more concerted attention to questions of diversity and plurality within ‘national’ political cultures than was ever the case inside the comfort zones of mid-century social democracy. On one hand, among the relatively affluent strata of their populations many countries have experienced new levels of demand for individual self-realisation and expression through lifestyle choices and consumerism 7   David Marquand (2000) reminds us of the following entry, from 1966, in the diary of Labour politician Richard Crossman. Speaking of his fellow cabinet ministers Crossman writes that: ‘They have the routine politician’s attitude to public opinion that the politician must take the decisions and then get the public to acquiesce. The notion of creating the extra burden of a live and articulate public opinion able to criticise actively and make its own choices is something which most socialist politicians keenly resent’.  8   In the British case, these exceptions certainly include contributions to welfare-focused youth justice policies in both England and Wales and especially Scotland, the creation of novel institutions such as Intermediate Treatment and the social work knowledge that underpinned these. It is true that David Downes (1983) once described Margaret Thatcher’s usurpation of ‘law and order’ as the ‘theft of an issue’, implying that crime was a problem that might once ‘naturally’ have belonged to the left, like health. But was this really so? Perhaps it is more accurate to suggest that it ‘belonged’ to the post-war consensus.

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and correlative demands for political recognition and representation. At the same time widening material inequalities, fractures that segment societies on lines of ethnicity, region, age and gender as well as just class, expose a new and more complex map of exclusions, affiliations and frictions. Such developments impose inordinate complications upon our inherited conceptions of citizenship as a central concept of social democracy. On the other hand, it is evident that some former capabilities of the nation state are now delegated to or shared with private interests, whereas others increasingly belong to the trans- and supra-national level of political organisation, a transfer of potency both down and up simultaneously. In other words, whatever the problems of crime, social justice and just ordering may now be they simply cannot be contained within the framework of the politics of any single nation state (Fraser, 2008: ch 2). We find ourselves in a realm where the very objects of politics are fluid and shifting, and in which questions of recognition, identity and respect may matter as much as more traditional distributive questions concerning the allocation of benefits and entitlements (Allen, 2004). Our aim here is not to engage in a dispute with Robert Reiner, whose analysis is in so many respects so similar to our own. Our purpose instead is, at least in part, to cheer him up – the world has not been as wholly lost to neo-liberalism as Reiner’s analysis can be taken to suggest. But it is also to argue that we need to lift our sights – the challenges of responding to a messy globalising world call for much more than a restatement of the state-centric, one-nation tradition of social democracy as the template for our political aspirations. Our position on this matter is just that almost none of the most pressing questions can best be thought of as being about the reinvention of old models, and that there are probably few moments in history when they could. Rather we want to articulate a certain number of principles (and following these one or two partly-worked examples) that might offer some constructive orientation to the present and imaginable near futures. These are certainly animated by visions of (to coin a phrase) a better politics of crime and justice that we owe in large part to the social democratic tradition of politics, even if they were never concretely achieved, or incompletely achieved, by social democratic parties in government.

III.  Theoretical Reorientations: Towards Institutions of Just Ordering I wish in no way to detract from the extraordinary feats of many on the left who fought a rearguard action against the wave of neoliberalism that swept across the advanced capitalist world after 1980. This showed optimism of the will at its noble best. But a powerful inhibitor to action was an inability to come up with an alternative to the Thatcherite doctrine that ‘there is no alternative’. This inability to find



Beyond Lamentation 23 an ‘optimism of the intellect’ with which to work through alternatives has become one of the most serious barriers to progressive politics. (Harvey, 2000: 17)

Faced with these predicaments, the reinvention of a coherent and compelling democratic egalitarian approach to crime and justice represent an uphill intellectual and political struggle. There is today mounting evidence of the disastrous effects of inequality across various public policy domains – social cohesion and trust, physical and mental health, educational performance, teenage pregnancy and obesity (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). Recent comparative literature on levels of violence and the use of imprisonment points broadly in the same direction – more equal societies tend to have lower levels of violence and incarceration (eg Downes and Hansen, 2006; Karstedt, 2010). However an ‘evidence-based politics’ (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010: ix) which seeks to document the effects of neo-liberal inequalities and bring them to public notice remains a necessary but insufficient response to the situation faced by social democracy today. ‘No compilation of facts’, Brian Barry has argued, ‘can tell us about the fairness or unfairness’ of particular public policies, or distributions of social goods and bads, or institutional arrangements (Barry, 2005: 13). ‘For that’, Barry contends, ‘we have to have a theory’. But what sort of a theory? What theoretical orientations can guide the project of remaking and reimagining a democratic egalitarian approach to crime and justice? One option is to return to criminological theory. This is, for the most part, the path that Reiner has taken in recent years. His ongoing work seeks to recover the rich tradition of theorising about crime and social structure – from Marx, to Bonger, to Mannheim, to Merton – with a view to developing what he calls a social democratic criminology. Reiner has, in particular, creatively used Merton’s anomie theory to make a compelling sociological and moral argument about the consumerist egoism of neo-liberal societies and the effects of structural inequality on serious crime (Reiner, 2007: chs 4–5). Reiner is certainly not alone in developing theoretical and empirical enquiry along these lines (Elliott Currie is a notable kindred spirit – Currie, 1997; 1998), and there remains great value and promise in continuing to work in these ways. Our understanding of crime, and capacity to control it, would be greatly impoverished if one were to give up tracing the connections between crime and economic and social inequalities and much of the most convincing work on this has been carried out in the last few years. The institutionalanomie theory of Messner and Rosenfeld (which is entirely compatible with critical readings of neo-liberalism that emphasise the erosion of ‘the public domain’ in the face of the might of markets (Marquand, 2004)) is one of the most thorough and best-evidenced of these (Messner and Rosenfeld, 2007). Recent work on both sides of the Atlantic and from an increasingly global array of perspectives has done much to extend our knowledge of the corrosive effects of extreme inequalities under the kinds of conditions that Wacquant (2008) terms ‘advanced marginality’, and especially of their spatial focusing in contemporary cities, favelas, slums and ghettos (eg Dorling, 2006; 2010; Fagan and Meares, 2008; Adorno, 2010). But, these strengths

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notwithstanding, there remain clear limitations to Reiner’s appropriation of criminological tradition as a means of grounding a democratic egalitarian politics of crime and justice. The main risk of turning to criminological theory is that it makes democratic egalitarian ideals hostage to crime patterns or fluctuations in crime rates, as if its plausibility as an approach to crime and justice flowed entirely from its ability to offer an adequate explanation of crime levels. What this forgets is that there is always more at stake in explaining and controlling crime than who has the best explanation or the most effective crime control strategy, vital preconditions though these are. In a democracy it matters not only that crime is controlled, but also how it is controlled – and ‘how’ questions admit of considerations that stretch far beyond matters of instrumental effectiveness, as we shall see.9 A reinvented democratic egalitarian politics must without question possess a compelling account of crime reduction and control, and find ways of designing institutions informed by and compatible with the best evidence we can marshal. But it must not fall into the twin traps of claiming a monopoly of criminological wisdom for those positions most congenial to its own preferences, or of thinking that the only issue at stake is finding the best explanation of crime and knowing what works to reduce it. To start here is to risk getting the project of remaking democratic egalitarian ideals in this field stuck in the wrong place. A second option – and one way of seeking to avoid this trap – is to turn to political theory. Here one would aim to mine social democratic thought with a view to developing a contemporary theoretical account of social justice that does not concern itself – at least first and foremost – with specific issues of crime and punishment. The task is to revisit the constitutive principles of the social democratic tradition – equality, justice, a positive conception of liberty, solidarity – and reassess their virtues and uses in the altered political and socio-economic conditions we now confront.10 There is much of value in pursuing this path – and a good part of the task we have in mind involves intellectual work of this kind. To start here – outside criminology – is to post a reminder of the ideals at issue when governing authorities and citizens think about crime and act to control it, and of the importance of staging arguments about crime and justice on that terrain. It is also to situate questions of crime on a wider canvas of social and political thought about redistribution and recognition, a point to which we return. But there are also limitations to an approach which holds that the fashioning of a more democratic and egalitarian politics of crime and justice must somehow wait for, and flow from, a generic reinvention of social democratic theory and practice. 9   It is worth recalling here the mischief made in recent decades by conservative criminologists attacking social structural explanations for their alleged failure to account for rising crime amidst plenty in the 1960s and falling crime amidst inequality since the mid-1990s (Wilson, 1985; Felson, 2009). The mischief lies in the fact that crime was in part being used as a stick to beat social democracy (or, in the US, liberalism) by critics who were hostile to this political tradition for other – typically undefended – reasons. 10   For some recent examples of efforts to restate and revise the social democratic tradition for the altered conditions of the present, see Barry (2005), Meyer (2005) and Held (2010).



Beyond Lamentation 25

To start too far back in the realm of ideal political theory is to think about equality and justice in ways that generate new – this time philosophical – forms of lament (compare Miller, D, 2008). More particularly, it risks giving a further – and plainly unhelpful – lease of life to the structurally fatalist idea that crime is epiphenomenal, and can only be addressed seriously following a radical reconstruction of economic and social relations. This stance forgets that reworked democratic egalitarian ideals have to do some work – clarify choices, offer conceptual desiderata, guide action – in specific domains of public policy, as well as excluding the possibility that such ideals can be reworked through (rather than prior to) an encounter with those domains. In so doing, it overlooks the reasons that exist for thinking that questions of crime, security and justice – questions in which all citizens have a basic stake – offer a significant site for reinventing social democratic politics (Loader and Walker, 2007).11 If this is the kernel of what from the 1980s onwards came to be known as Left Realism in criminology it was, at least in these key respects, quite correct. These considerations point in the direction of a third option, which we wish to pursue here. This option gives shape to the idea of a better politics of crime and its regulation by thinking conceptually and practically about institutions of just ordering. Its pursuit calls for a project rooted not exclusively in criminology or in political theory, but in seeking instead to develop a richer, more productive dialogue between them than has generally been attempted hitherto (confer Amatrudo, 2009). This project has two overarching orientations. It aims, first, to draw upon democratic egalitarian ideals with a view to working through their value, meaning and application to questions of crime and its regulation under the conditions we have sketched above. This means doing intellectual work on vexed criminological issues from inside the broad social democratic tradition, though without becoming a prisoner of it. In so doing the project aims, secondly, to offer a diagnosis and critique of the visions of order and governance embedded in actually existing practices of crime control (to establish, as it were, a political frame of evaluation) and to sketch viable democratic egalitarian alternatives which can help unfreeze the present and guide the making and imagining of alternative futures (Olin Wright, 2010: ch 2; see also Levitas, 2010). It is, in short, a project informed by a utopian realist ethos which combines a sober grasp of the world as it is with a keen sense of 11   One reason for seeking to connect democratic egalitarian theory to the crime question is to challenge the recent tendency of centre-left parties to treat crime and its control as a post-ideological zone in which the guiding considerations are tactical, and crime is not conceptualised as a site for the application of social democratic ideals – a tendency reinforced by the fact that leftist politicians do not generally enter politics to do something about crime, or reform criminal justice. The tactical considerations can involve shoring up the support of core supporters for whom crime is a serious problem and who are assumed to support punitive responses to it, or rhetorical and policy stances designed principally to fend off the rightist accusation that the left are not to be trusted on crime. Such responses are sometime depicted as, or understood by their authors to be, social democratic on the grounds that they aim to protect the poor and marginal who disproportionately experience criminal harm. But they are typically underpinned by the idea that ‘law and order’ remains conservative property and that the best that the left can do is to neutralise it, an act that almost always takes place on terms set by one’s political opponents. One thing that theoretical renewal can do in this field is to demonstrate that it is possible to do better than this.

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the world as it could be (Giddens, 1990). Our task in the remainder of this chapter is to sketch some of the contours of this project. We do so by exploring the promise of the language of just ordering, and deploying that theoretical orientation in the creative reinterpretation of what is at stake, and what futures can be glimpsed, in some current crime and justice controversies. Social democratic approaches to crime and justice have long exhibited what Neil Walker calls an ‘internal tension’.12 As we have seen, social democrats situate crime in structural arrangements marked by economic inequality and social and political exclusion. They therefore tend to view the police and other agencies of front-line social control as cosmetic institutions working on the behavioural surfaces of social relations. Reiner’s aforementioned writing on policing, and his more recent claims about criminal justice agencies ‘keeping the lid’ on problems whose source and solution lie elsewhere, are exemplary illustrations of this overall orientation. It is an orientation which inclines social democrats to be sceptical and minimalist about the role of police and penal institutions – if crime is about social and political justice there exist clear limits to what front-line social control can ever achieve absent such justice. There is great force in these claims. Yet this approach not only runs an everpresent risk of lapsing into structural fatalism, it can also leave social democrats with disturbingly little to offer in any discussion of what we want the police and criminal justice to do in the here and now. One characteristic response to this dilemma has been to explore the ways in which police and penal institutions can be made to contribute to social cohesion and integration. The project of penal welfarism can plausibly be understood in these terms – as the penological wing of social democracy oriented to correcting the effects of deprivation and returning the delinquent to productive citizenship (Garland, 2001: ch 2). But a similar impulse to make police and criminal justice agents of social integration also informs such current practices as problem-solving or reassurance policing, justice reinvestment, restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence. In each case, however, the same set of criticisms can be, and has been, pressed: namely, that such initiatives erode individual rights, exceed the legitimate limits of policing and punishment and fail to register and respect the difference between criminal justice and social policy. Such tensions have been in evidence for at least the last 30 years (Smith, 2010). There is, in our view, a deep and inescapable tension here. But that tension can also be reinterpreted as a virtue – and as a platform from which to develop a more constructive and hopeful democratic egalitarian account of crime and justice. In other words, one can start from a position which states that part of what the social democratic tradition today has to offer a better politics of crime is a deep sceptical orientation to penal enthusiasms of all kinds, as well as a social and political critique of the hegemonic fantasies of governing crime through a penal lens or governing a democratic polity through crime (Simon, 2007). Understood thus, social democracy has an active part to play in documenting and exposing the human, social and 12   The argument in the following two paragraphs draws upon and develops a point made in an unpublished paper by Neil Walker (Walker, n.d.). We are grateful for the author’s permission to use it.



Beyond Lamentation 27

economic costs of these governing visions. That job is to warn against an over-identification with police and criminal justice as sources of social ordering and highlight the pathologies of three decades of neo-liberal ‘investment’ in the penal state. It is to keep posting reminders of the ‘tragic’ properties of police and penal institutions and to urge that we pay constant and careful attention to ensuring that their necessary coercive interventions in social life are parsimonious and conducted in a manner that does ‘minimal damage to civility’ (Manning, 2010: 20). Robert Reiner has, as we have said, been an acute and committed purveyor of these civic wisdoms. But can social democracy do more in the justice field than seek damage limitation? These were certainly questions raised by the Left Realists (Young, 1997), whether or not they were wholly successful in exploring their implications. Young cites Currie on the inadequacies of eliding a critical perspective with a minimalist one: Twenty or so years later, under considerably changed conditions, minimalism is still probably the dominant voice of [American] progressives on these issues, a fact that has helped keep progressives on the fringes of public debate. Part of the problem is that minimalism, in its desire to downplay the severity of the crime problem, is often just plain wrong in its empirical understanding of serious crime and drug abuse in the United States today. . . . They help to perpetuate an image of progressives as being both fuzzy-minded and, much worse, unconcerned about the realities of life for those ordinary Americans who are understandably frightened and enraged by the suffering and fear crime brings to their communities and families. (Currie, 1992: 91)

So is it possible to retain what is of value in a sceptical, minimalist approach to penality while also giving shape to a more institutionally creative democratic egalitarian approach to the crime question? Can one revitalise and (re)invent police and penal institutions in order that they become active agents of just ordering? What might the resulting political forms and spaces look like? We turn now to these questions and highlight the considerations and possibilities that arise when one casts contemporary social democracy as a project committed to fostering and sustaining institutions of just ordering.

A.  Why Ordering? The problem of crime is inevitably one of order, and the problem of order that of justice (Young, 2002: 269)

There are many reasons why a democratic egalitarian approach to crime ought not to make crime its primary organising frame and object of enquiry. For all its common-sense obviousness, crime has a number of limitations in this regard. It focuses attention upon social bads in ways that can give rise to narrow ‘law-and-order’ thinking, privilege criminalisation as a response to social problems and foster overidentification with penal measures. It creates too much space for eliminative ideals and can set in train a cosmetic perfectionism which drives self-reinforcing cycles

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of government hyperactivity. A crime focus also risks disconnecting thinking and action in this field from wider questions of distributive justice and human dignity and well-being. Indeed, part of the reason for the paucity of exchange between criminology and political theory over the last several decades may have to do with the disjunction between criminology’s (dismal) focus on negating social bads as compared with political theory’s post-Rawlsian concern with the meaning and distribution of primary social goods. Given this, there is much to be said for focusing social democratic thinking on a family of terms – order, security, civil peace – which can more readily and fruitfully be conceptualised as basic goods. Doing so leads one to think hard about the conditions under which these goods can be realised and sustained. It also enables one to more easily orient attention towards the mix of institutional practices and resources (criminal justice and non-criminal justice) that are required to foster peaceable social relations, and hence think about crime control as a regulatory problem for which criminalisation and other command-and-control strategies are not the principal register of intervention. This is not to wish away the dilemmas and value trade-offs that are entailed in the pursuit of order, nor to deny that security can be a ‘voracious ideal’ (Waldron, 2010: 178; see also Loader and Walker, 2007: ch 1). Neither is it to take an abolitionist stance on the criminal law (and hence criminalisation). It is, however, to shift the conceptual and practical focus towards the goods one is seeking to realise, not simply the bads one wants to suppress. It is akin, to borrow from a neighbouring field of public policy, to fostering health as well as tackling illness. An orientation towards ordering also helps to ground the claim that ‘crime and justice’ are core social democratic issues. They are core not only because criminal harms are suffered disproportionately by the poor and excluded. There are core more crucially because what is at issue is a set of questions pertaining to what Sir Neil MacCormick (2007: 173) calls the ‘general circumstances required for successful communal living’. Crime politics is not, in other words, only about locating and censuring offenders, or protecting others from them, unavoidably necessary as these interventions may sometimes be. It is also about access to the resources required to enable people to pursue their life projects. This is plainly in part a matter of keeping the objective risk of harm within manageable proportions – and in this sense about crime control. But it is about much more that, and the ‘much more’ directs us towards the question of how to distribute resources and recognition so as to enable individuals to live together comfortably with risk (Loader and Walker, 2007). Once cast in these terms, it is possible to give greater weight to David Downes’ oft-cited charge about the ‘theft of an issue’ (Downes, 1983; confer Taylor, 1981). The problem of order is not ‘natural’ conservative (or Conservative) territory at all, even if it is an enduring preoccupation of conservative (and intermittently of Conservative) thought. There is a competing and distinctive social democratic conception of that problem which concerns equalising access to a basic or foundational good of social life, and to ensuring that the allocation of relevant resources underpins forms of ‘general’ ordering from which all citizens derive ben-



Beyond Lamentation 29

efit rather than a ‘specific’ order which privileges certain interests and aspirations over others (Marenin, 1982). Order and security are public goods and should, as such, lie somewhere close to the heart of democratic egalitarian politics.

B.  Just Ordering? There are, then, good reasons to think that order and security constitute core social democratic values. But a renewed social democratic politics of order cannot elevate the production of order into a stand-alone goal, unrelated to, and unconstrained by, other values and goods. Rather, we need a democratically egalitarian account which pinpoints the things that should permeate and shape the ways in which ordering work is undertaken – an account, in short, of the considerations that must obtain if we are develop the idea of just ordering as a guiding principle. We think that three sets of considerations need to be addressed in this regard. The first of these is human rights. From the perspective of just ordering human rights offer basic protections for the individual against state’s coercive intrusions and place necessary constraints on the scope and reach of penal power. They thus form a key means of giving effect to the aforementioned idea of damage control, by placing identifiable limits on the coercive interventions that the state and other governing authorities can make on the lives of individuals. This is first and foremost a matter of legal rules and principles – and a democratic egalitarian politics of crime needs to be able to work effectively in this legal domain. But one is also registering the importance here of fostering police and penal institutions whose working practices are infused by a human rights ethos – institutions whose selfunderstanding encompasses the idea that part of what it means to control crime and pursue order is to understand that task in human rights terms (Patten, 1999). Nor today can we confine thinking about human rights to state institutions. We must also explore ways of ensuring the rights protections and a rights ethos inform the practices of private authorities undertaking public functions in the security field, as well as examining further how human rights fit into any schema of just ordering in the international and transnational domain (Clapham, 2006). Human rights protections and associated working cultures are, across these fields, a vital part of what makes ordering just, of sustaining order in ways that treat human beings with equal concern and respect. But it is also – as we have argued elsewhere (Loader and Sparks, 2010: 85–93) – a necessary but insufficient basis for the full articulation of just ordering as a regulative ideal. Social democrats should be active and trusted allies of liberals in the struggle to defend and extend human rights protections. But social democracy is a project to build upon and extend liberal justice (Barry, 2005), a project which treats human rights as a necessary platform for the good society, not as being coterminous with it. A second set of considerations – which begin to speak to how social democracy entails more than human rights, and takes one beyond liberal justice – concerns the relationship of just ordering to questions of social justice and solidarity. This

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is difficult territory and the site of what we have argued is a deep tension in social democratic thought about crime. It is also an issue which would benefit from much greater attention than it has thus far been given – either in political theory or criminology (Zedner, 2010: 90). With this in mind, we do no more here than indicate some of the lines along which that enquiry might usefully seek to travel. The basic question at issue is how much social justice/social solidarity work one wants police and criminal justice institutions to undertake. The answer, put simply, is not too much, but not nothing. Not the latter if what that means is that police and criminal justice practice takes no account of wider relations of inequality and the impact of its practices on those relations. Not the former if that has the effect of either overreaching the limits of criminal justice or of colonising public policy with crime control values and priorities. In seeking to steer a course between these poles, a revived democratic egalitarian approach to crime can usefully attend to the following three dimensions of the problem. First, one can frame this issue negatively and argue that wider patterns of inequality are precisely the thing at issue when one seeks to control the necessary ‘damage to civility’ that flows from coercive interventions into social life. In other words, part of what it means to worry about that damage is a concern for the ways in which police and penal institutions reproduce and even exacerbate extant relations of inequality and domination, and an attendant wish to limit those effects (Manning, 2010). Secondly, and in a more positive vein, one is reminded of the importance of (creating) institutions that can recursively attend to, and focus public debate on, the appropriate mix of the economic, social and police/penal resources that contribute to the production of order. Against a backdrop of the vast material and symbolic ‘investment’ in penal modes of ordering we have witnessed since the 1970s, and given what is known about the limits of police/penal ‘solutions’ to the problem of order, there is a pressing need to devise mechanisms which can, at the very least, fix attention on this issue and spur creative thinking about how best today to re-socialise the crime question and to connect it to debates about the contemporary meaning and reach of citizenship and civic solidarity.13 Part of the promise of justice reinvestment in this regard – and one reason why one can make a principled case for it that refutes the charge that it is a disingenuous, technical fix to reduce the prison population (Tonry, 2011) – concerns the way in which it offers incentive structures, and attendant modes of local public deliberation, which hold out the promise of redirecting resources from penal to more social and preventative forms of ordering. Thirdly, one can begin to render explicit, work with and make a virtue out of a basic social fact about police and penal institutions – namely, that they confer and withhold dignity in ways that make them powerful mediators of status identity and belonging. To describe this as a basic fact about justice institutions is to note that the acts and omissions of these institutions (from the casual slight to the most fateful arrest) send authoritative signals about empathy, recognition and respect, and stand as powerful markers of people’s membership of a political community, and 13   Part of what is entailed here is a fuller exploration of the promise and value (as well as the limits) of recasting certain ‘crime’ problems, such as drugs and violence, within the frame of ‘public health’.



Beyond Lamentation 31

their place within its hierarchies (Sparks and Bottoms, 1995; Loader, 2006). Indeed, the great insight of recent work on procedural justice has been to recognise and powerfully demonstrate this very point – that it matters enormously to people how respectfully (or otherwise) they are treated by police and criminal justice actors (eg Liebling, 2004; Tyler, 2006; Jackson and Bradford, 2009). To make a virtue out of these basic facts is to pose serious questions about the amount and types of solidarity work one wants police and criminal justice institutions to perform. Minimally, one might focus those institutions on the task of repairing the bonds of trust between strangers that criminal victimisation weakens. Or else one can begin to think more creatively about how crime control institutions might work to promote and thicken forms of solidarity between individuals and across social classes and groups. In either case, one is emphasising the importance of doing justice in ways that affirm (rather than threaten) the dignity and sense of belonging of all those whose lives are embroiled in criminal justice processes – in whatever role (victims, witnesses, suspects and offenders) and irrespective of economic, social, ethnic, religious or citizenship status (see, more generally, Margalit, 2000). This, moreover, is not an alternative purpose to that of regulating crime or managing order – it is a way of structuring how such ordering work is done and a reminder of the fact that such work matters for reasons that extend far beyond protection from criminal risk. In these respects it is clear that legitimacy is irrevocably a political concept and one that bears upon the distribution of chances, risks and wrongs as well as to ‘procedures’ strictly so-called. It is intrinsic to the whole matter of the rule of law and not simply to public perceptions of the conduct of officials. It will not do to draw the boundaries of legitimation problems too narrowly. This consideration also informs the third constitutive element of just ordering – which has to be with how to create institutions whose ordering priorities and practices are meaningfully shaped by, and minimally credible to, all those who are affected by them. Here we are concerned with the relation of just ordering to democratic legitimacy. In this regard, it is worth noting that one effect of the ‘heatingup’ of crime – and one reason for developing a more nuanced historical sociology of recent criminal justice politics – is that it has brought police and criminal justice agencies under significantly greater scrutiny, at least of certain kinds. Such institutions are now routinely called upon – by politicians, the media, victims and campaign groups, and a range of regulatory bodies – to account (in all senses of that term) for their actions, and to provide reasons and evidence for what they do – much more so than was ever the case during an era when police and criminal justice enjoyed apparently greater legitimacy and public consent. This, moreover, should arguably count as one of the benefits of a ‘hotter’ penal politics – as well as a further reason why there is no returning to a more closed, opaque mode of elite governance of crime. These can also be interpreted as forms of what Green (2011) calls ‘ocular democracy’, by which he means processes that subject ruling authorities to the critical gaze of spectators within mass democracies. A democratic egalitarian approach to justice should seek to protect and extend such practices of rigourous citizen ‘observation and surveillance’ (ibid: 12). It does so with the aim of ensuring

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that those who wield power and allocate resources in pursuit of order are called upon to candidly account for their actions in public processes which, Green (ibid: 13) argues, these actors should not be permitted to manage and control. But does just ordering demand more than requiring criminal justice actors to justify their decisions before the eyes of the people? In short, yes. We think that there exist good reasons today for renewing a social democratic approach to crime and justice by thinking more imaginatively about how to extend the democratic credibility and responsiveness of crime control institutions and seeking to foster experimentation with deliberative institutions and mechanisms that help make good the claim that these decisions are legitimate in the eyes of those affected by them. In so doing, the aim is to chart a course between what David Estlund calls ‘epistocracy’ (or rule by knowers) on the one hand, and the emotive populism that many fear will flow from any attempt to extend democratic participation into the realm of crime control on the other. The case against the former is that epistocracy is a mode of rule that cannot today ground its authority in publicly acceptable forms of justification – irrespective of the quality of expert decisions (Estlund, 2008: ch 11). The counter to the latter charge is to suggest that the populist punitivism of recent decades has been to the result of too little effective democratic participation in the question of how to regulate crime, not too much of it (Miller, L, 2008); that turning people into angry, simmering spectators of crime and justice dramas about which they care deeply is counter-productive, and that where democratic participation has been effected the results are generally more positive than fearful liberals expect (Barker, 2009). Democracy, as Bonnie Greer aptly puts it, is a ‘tumultuous’ phenomenon.14 We cannot decline to engage with the emotions we find there.15 Two sets of reasons underpin the claim that extending democracy should today form a central plank of a revised social democratic approach to crime – and of just ordering as a guiding ideal. The first is that democratic accountability gives practical effect to the idea that all affected by crime and justice decisions should be accorded equal concern and respect in the making of those decisions, and be entitled to a voice in the processes through which they are arrived at. The issues at stake here have in part to do with whether relevant decisions are taken in ways that accord ‘participatory parity’ (Fraser, 2008: ch 2) to those who are affected by them. To this extent, they overlap with the concerns about legitimacy raised by scholars of procedural justice. But the relevant issues also touch on matters of resource allocation, 14   Greer uses this expression in an interview defending her decision to take part in a television programme where one of the other guests was Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party (The Independent, 22 November 2011: www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/ yes-from-total-discord-to-sweet-harmony-6265753.html). 15   The introduction of elected Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales in 2012 is sure to provide a further and important test of these disputed claims. Critics of this proposal have charged that enabling a single elected politician to set police budgets and determine police priorities risks unleashing a nasty majoritarian populism which will threaten the rights of minorities and undermine effective policing. One of us has recently countered that Commissioners are a flawed attempt to give effect to some important democratic principles, and that it remains possible for the centre-left to organise itself in order to use this new political office to advance a social democratic crime control agenda (Loader and Muir, 2011; see also Jones, Newburn and Smith, this volume).



Beyond Lamentation 33

value conflict, mediating between interests and determining the terms of collective co-existence in ways that stretch far beyond the question of people’s treatment at the hands of police organisations. The wider issue, as we shall see, has to do with thinking about crime control as one site through which to build trust in politics and political institutions as mechanisms to regulate conflict, allocate resources and determine the means by which social relations are ordered. The proper response to the pathologies of contemporary crime politics is to seek to craft a better democratic politics, not to flee from politics altogether. A second argument in support of this claim is that deliberative democratic procedures enhance the quality of decisions – and tend to generate the best decisions that can meet with the satisfaction of all those affected (Estlund, 2008). The negative way of expressing this point is to conceive of democratic input as a check against relevant allocative decisions being taken according to the self-corroborating biases of bureaucrats and professionals, or on the basis of what governing elites presume ‘public opinion’ to be. In diverse, messy, fractured societies, or cities, or neighbourhoods, it is no longer possible to think that this ‘we know best’ disposition offers a credible basis for priority setting and resource allocation. By contrast, public and democratic processes – of election and/or deliberation – can focus attention on key issues, galvanise a wide range of affected voices (including those of marginal and most heavily victimised groups) and generally increase the supply of relevant social knowledge that informs decisions. They provide a circulatory system – a series of ‘sluices and beltways’ (Habermas, 2006) – that keep institutions in touch with social relationships and conflicts. As such, deliberative politics offers a viable basis for more informed, intelligent and publicly intelligible practices of ordering – practices in which individuals can feel they have a stake even when the outcomes do not go their way. Such involvement can, moreover, have an internal relation to people’s feelings of secure belonging – and at best foster virtuous circles of compliance (Loader and Walker, 2007: ch 8). There is then a case for re-thinking – from democratic egalitarian starting points – the relationship between forms of democracy and practices of crime control, and for moving beyond the view that democratic input is something to be frightened of and kept at bay, or else something that translates only into remote steering by elected politicians. We recognise that there is much more work to be done in making good this case – both as a sociologically grounded normative position on ordering, and in terms of how it might be worked through in the case of particular issues or crime control institutions. The bulk of that work lies ahead of us, and is part of what it entailed in developing a better account of the relationship between democratic theory and crime control. For now, we simply want to record what we take to be the value and promise of thinking about policing and criminal justice as sites of democratic responsibility – an aspect of collective life whose benefits depend upon ongoing ‘public work’ (Boyte, 2004). This means that we think of such institutions as undertaking their ordering work in ways that contribute to the protection and enhancement of democratic politics – a way of thinking that explicitly shapes policing and criminal justice in post-conflict societies (Loader, 2006), but which

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slips from view in prevailing modes of thinking about the meaning and import of crime control in mature democracies. It means fostering forms of what Dzur (2008) calls ‘democratic professionalism’ which are open to public input in shaping how problems are framed and priorities established and encourage citizens to be and feel accountable for the practices of ordering and justice which are conducted in their name. In short, it means recasting police and related crime control institutions as facilitators of a better democracy and figuring out ways to make them places of civic engagement and deliberative practice – integral parts of what Marc Stears (2011) calls ‘everyday democracy’. Does this mean a greater preparedness to take risks? Yes it plainly does. It is an inevitable consequence of emphasising the ‘democrat’ in social democrat that one creates structures which generate outcomes of which one does not approve. One can and should guard against this when basic freedoms are in need of protection – hence the importance of human rights within our schema. One also needs to think carefully about those dimensions of criminal justice and penality that ought to be shielded from public determination, and about how one configures the interactions between public demands and different kinds of expert knowledge. But in the end, a large part of what thinking about crime control as democratic practice means is enabling all affected groups and interests to participate in ongoing public contestation about ordering in processes that makes all decisions open to scrutiny, contest and revision. Does it mean direct democracy – and too many meetings, taking up too many evenings? No it doesn’t. But it does have to do with designing processes that make space for those affected to be heard, consulted and be given voice in public debate. There is no shortage of models of democratic innovation from which one might learn here – from citizens assemblies, to participatory budgeting, to creating minipublics – and one needs to think carefully and creatively about the scope and limits of these innovations as ways of democratising crime control (Sousa Santos, 1998; Fung and Olin Wright, 2003; Fung, 2004; Smith, 2009). But under conditions of globalisation and the rise of private authority, such thinking has also to address some hard questions regarding the sites and spaces (neighbourhood, municipal, regional, national, transnational) at which decisions are most appropriately taken, and the kinds of democratic accountability, and forms of deliberative practice, which can give effect to just ordering at these different sites. It is to these matters that we turn, briefly, in conclusion.

IV.  Institutional Reinventions: Just Ordering and Contemporary Penal Politics Several years ago, Phillip Pettit described social democratic theory as a ‘philosophy for policy-making’ (Pettit, 1987: 543). By this, he meant that such theory does not



Beyond Lamentation 35

and should not prescribe a ‘closed list of political programmes’. But he also clearly intended to signify that social democratic theory aims to provide something more than a guide to how to think about justice and equality; it is also a guide to action (compare Cohen, 2008). As should by now be clear, this intention has informed our efforts to sketch the outlines of a theory of just ordering. Our hope for this sketch is that it can contribute to the work of reinventing a democratic egalitarian approach to crime and justice in ways that exercise critical purchase on the world we inhabit and guide the task of shaping alternatives to it. We hope, in short, to have outlined some desiderata which can help us evaluate politically candidates for current reform projects, on grounds of their effects on distributive fairness, their proportionality, their effects on communities, their openness to deliberative decision-making and so on. This is not, we should emphasise, a sketch of any kind of full-blown theory of social democracy. Rather, it is an account of how social democratic ideals might be renewed, and put to work, in the domain of crime and justice in ways that seek in that ‘local’ setting to advance the project of fostering more equitable and democratic social relations. But it is at the same time to remain cognisant of the limits of the crime and justice frame and of the myriad ways in which wider sources of inequality and injustice constrain, and even undermine, what it is possible to accomplish within it. For these reasons, the kinds of ‘reinvention’ we believe are required are not to be located only in the realm of theory. The renewal of a democratic egalitarian approach to crime and justice also requires the revitalisation and (re)invention of institutions – in our terms, the kinds of institutions that give practical meaning and effect to the ideal of just ordering. By this we do not intend to suggest the requirement to ‘build’ institutions with the solidity and seeming permanence exhibited by those that the old social democracy strove to construct. It is instead to argue that a democratic egalitarian politics of order needs to cultivate an imagination that engages fully with questions and principles of institutional design, not only in respect of the scope, practices and governance of existing institutions, but also in thinking about and creating new experiments in justice and security. We might still valuably couch this task in terms of revising and extending for our times the idea of the ‘public domain’ and its attendant values of citizenship and political community. We might also want to insist on the importance of some antique questions to do with the limits and accountability of coercive authority. But if the theory of just ordering we have started to sketch in this paper is to be cashed out as a guide to policy-making it must be able to confront the challenges we described at the outset and their attendant hard cases. To be sure, the future development of just ordering will mean putting it to use in some familiar terrain within the confines of nation states – in disputes about police legitimacy, safety in urban neighbourhoods, or the scale and purpose of imprisonment. It will mean engaging in debates about, say, the return of localism within criminal justice, or the role of civic action in addressing crime. But just ordering also has to come to terms with – and find ways of speaking to – important questions of security and surveillance technology (its uses, targets, regulation and future development). One has to be able to think though what just

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ordering means in a world in which commercial firms – large and small, local and global – play a much greater part in structuring access for order and security, and delivering punishment. One has to find ways of making this idea work in guiding how we might think and act in respect of, say, global drugs markets or human trafficking and in reckoning with the implications of emerging transnational modes of control, and how such control can be aligned with questions of justice and the public interest. These are all hard questions with no clear answers – whether of a social democratic or any other kind. Given this, we have merely sought to suggest that the task of answering such questions in ways that contribute to a better – by which we mean a more democratic and egalitarian – politics of order requires not only that we develop a sober and sociologically informed assessment of the stiff challenges that ‘the solidarity project’ faces today (Garland, 2001), but that we do so in ways which remain attuned to the immanent possibilities of a more just ordering of social relations, and with a willingness to innovate, experiment and learn from and about those possibilities. We have, in short, sought to offer some reasons for believing that one can do better than look back and lament.

References Adorno, S (2010) ‘Violence Democracy and Citizen Security’ Annual Activity Report 2009 (São Paulo, Brazil, National Institute of Science and Technology (INCT)). Allen, D (2004) Talking to Strangers (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Amatrudo, A (2009) Criminology and Political Theory (London, Sage). Barker, V (2009) The Politics of Imprisonment (New York, Oxford University Press). Barry, B (2005) Why Social Justice Matters (Cambridge, Polity). Berman, S (2006) The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Ideological Dynamics of the Twentieth Century (New York, Cambridge University Press). Boutellier, H (2002) Crime and Morality (Amsterdam, Springer). Boyte, H (2004) Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press). Braithwaite, J and Pettit, P (1990) Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Cavadino, M and Dignan, J (2006) Penal Systems: A Comparative Approach (London, Sage). Clapham, A (2006) Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Actors (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Cohen, GA (2008) Rescuing Justice and Equality (Camb, Mass, Harvard University Press). Crewe, B (2009) The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Crouch, C (2011) The Strange Non-death of Neo-liberalism (Cambridge, Polity). Currie, E (1992) ‘Retreatism, Minimalism, Realism: Three Styles of Reasoning on Crime and Drugs in the United States’ in J Lowman and B MacLean (eds), Realist Criminology: Crime Control and Policing in the 1990s (Toronto, University of Toronto Press).



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—— (1997) ‘Market, Crime and Community: Toward a Mid-Range Theory of PostIndustrial Violence’ 1 Theoretical Criminology 147–72. —— (1998) Crime and Punishment in America (New York, Henry Holt). Dorling, D (2006) ‘Prime Suspect: Murder in Britain’ 166 Prison Service Journal 3–10. —— (2010) Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists (Bristol, Policy Press). Downes, D (1983) Law and Order: Theft of an Issue (London, Fabian Society). Downes, D and Hansen, K (2006) ‘Welfare and Punishment in Comparative Perspective’ in S Armstrong and L McAra (eds), Perspectives on Punishment (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Dzur, A (2008) Democratic Professionalism (Philadelphia, Penn State University Press). —— (2012) Punishment, Participatory Democracy and the Jury (New York, Oxford University Press). Estlund, D (2008) Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton, Princeton University Press). Ewing, K (2010) Bonfire of the Liberties: New Labour, Human Rights and the Rule of Law (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Fagan, J and T Meares (2008) ‘Punishment, Deterrence and Social Control: The Paradox of Punishment in Minority Communities’ 6 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 173–229. Feldman, D (2002) Civil Liberties and Human Rights in England and Wales (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Felson, M (2009) Crime and Everyday Life, 4th edn (London, Sage). Fraser, N (2008) Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (Cambridge, Polity). Fung, A (2004) Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton, Princeton University Press). Fung, A and Olin Wright, E (eds) (2003) Deepening Democracy (London, Verso). Gamble, A (1997) ‘Conclusion: Politics 2000’ in P Dunleavy, A Gamble, I Holliday and G Peele (eds), Developments in British Politics 5 (Basingstoke, Macmillan).  Garland, D (2001) The Culture of Control (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2012) ‘Punishment and Social Solidarity’ in J Simon and R Sparks (eds), The Sage Handbook of Punishment and Society (London, Sage). Garland, D and Sparks, R (2000) ‘Criminology, Social Theory and the Challenge of our Times’ in D Garland and R Sparks (eds), Criminology and Social Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Giddens, A (1990) The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, Polity). Green, JE (2011) The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (New York, Oxford University Press). Habermas, J (2006) ‘Political Communication in Media Society’ 16 Communication Theory 411–26. Hall, S (1979) ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ Marxism Today January, 14–21. —— (2011) ‘The Neoliberal Revolution’ 48 Soundings 9–27. Hall, S, Clarke, J, Critcher, C, Jefferson, T and Roberts, B (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, Law and Order and the State (London, Macmillan). Harcourt, B (2010) The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Camb, Mass, Harvard University Press).

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Harvey, D (2000) Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press). Hay, C (1996) Re-stating Social and Political Change (Buckingham, Open University Press). —— (2002) Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke, Palgrave). Held, D (2010) Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (Cambridge, Polity). Hobsbawm, E (1994) The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London, Vintage). Hoyle, C (2012) ‘Victims, the Criminal Process and Restorative Justice’ in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 5th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Hudson, B (1993) Justice in the Risk Society (Maidenhead, Open University Press). Iliffe, S (2008) From General Practice to Primary Care: The Industrialization of Family Medicine (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Iturralde, M (2010) ‘Democracies without Citizenship: Crime and Punishment in Latin America’ 13 New Criminal Law Review 309–32. Jackson, J and Bradford, B (2009) ‘Crime, Policing and Social Order: On the Expressive Nature of Public Confidence in Policing’ 60 British Journal of Sociology 493–521. Jessop, B, Bromley, S, Bonnet, K and Ling, T (1988) Thatcherism (Cambridge, Polity Press). Jones, T, Newburn, T and Smith, D (2000) Democracy and Policing (London, Policy Studies Institute) Judt, T (2010a) Ill Fares the Land (London, Penguin). —— (2010b) Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, Vintage). Karstedt, S (2010) ‘Liberty, Equality and Justice: Democratic Culture and Punishment’ in A Crawford (ed), International and Comparative Criminal Justice and Urban Governance (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Lacey, N (2008) The Prisoners’ Dilemma (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Lappi-Seppälä, T (2008) ‘Trust, Welfare and Political Culture: Explaining Differences in National Penal Policies’ in M Tonry (ed), Crime and Justice: A Review of Research (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Leacock, V and Sparks, R (2001) ‘Riskiness and At-risk-ness: Some Ambiguous Features of the Current Penal Landscape’ in N Gray, J Laing and L Noaks (eds), Criminal Justice, Mental Health and the Politics of Risk (London, Cavendish). Levitas, R (2005) The Inclusive Society: Social Exclusion and New Labour, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, Palgrave). —— (2010) ‘Back to the Future: Wells, Sociology, Utopia and Method’ 58 Sociological Review 530–47. Liebling, A (2004) Prisons and their Moral Performance (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Loader, I (2006) ‘Policing, Recognition and Belonging’ 605 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 349–67. —— (2009) ‘Ice Cream and Incarceration: On Appetites for Security and Punishment’ 11 Punishment & Society 241–57. —— (2010) ‘For Penal Moderation: Notes towards a Public Philosophy of Punishment’ 14 Theoretical Criminology 349–67. Loader, I and Muir, R (2011) Progressive Police and Crime Commissioners: An Opportunity for the Centre-Left (London, Institute for Public Policy Research), available at http:// www.ippr.org/articles/56/7957/progressive-police-and-crime-commissioners-anopportunity-for-the-centre-left. Loader, I and Sparks, R (2004) ‘For an Historical Sociology of Crime Policy in England and Wales since 1968’ 7 Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5–32.



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—— and —— (2010) Public Criminology? (London, Routledge). Loader, I and Walker, N (2007) Civilizing Security (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). MacCormick, N (2007) Institutions of Law: An Essay in Legal Theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Manning, P (2010) Democratic Policing in a Changing World (Boulder, Paradigm). Marenin, O (1982) ‘Parking Tickets and Class Repression: The Concept of Policing in Critical Theories of Criminal Justice’ 6 Contemporary Crises 241–66. Margalit, A (2000) The Decent Society (Camb, Mass, Harvard University Press). Marquand, D (1988) The Unprincipled Society (London, Cape). —— (2000) ‘Democracy in Britain’, Jubilee Lecture St Antony’s College, Oxford available at http://davidmarquand.com/index.php?limitstart=16. —— (2004) The Decline of the Public (Cambridge, Polity). —— (2011) ‘Towards a Realignment of the Mind’ 82 Political Quarterly 140–45. Matravers, M (ed) (1999) Punishment and Political Theory (Oxford, Hart). Melossi, D (1993) ‘Gazette of Morality and Social Whip: Punishment, Hegemony and the Case of the USA, 1970-92’ Social & Legal Studies 2(3), 259–79. Messner, S and Rosenfeld, R (2007) Crime and the American Dream, 4th edn (Belmont, CA, Thomson Wadsworth). Meyer, T (2005) The Theory of Social Democracy (Cambridge, Polity). Miliband, D (2011) ‘Why is the European Left Losing Elections?’ 82 Political Quarterly 131–37. Miller, D (2008) ‘Political Theory for Earthlings’ in D Leopold and M Stears (eds), Political Theory: Methods and Approaches (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Miller, L (2008) The Perils of Federalism: Race, Poverty and the Politics of Crime Control (New York, Oxford University Press). Newburn, T (2007) ‘“Tough on Crime”: Penal Policy in England and Wales’ in M Tonry (ed), Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Offer, A (2006) The Challenge of Affluence (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Olin Wright, E (2010) Envisioning Real Utopias (London, Verso). O’Malley, P (2000) ‘Criminologies of Catastrophe?: Understanding Criminal Justice on the Edge of the New Millennium’ 33 Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 153–67. —— (2010) Crime and Risk (London, Sage). O’Malley, T and Jones, J (eds) (2009) The Peacock Committee and UK Broadcasting Policy (London, Palgrave). Patten, C (1999) A New Beginning: The Future of Policing In Northern Ireland (Belfast, Independent Commission). Pearson, G (1975) The Deviant Imagination: Psychiatry, Social Work and Social Change (New York, Holmes & Meier). Pettit, P (1987) ‘Towards a Social Democratic Theory of the State’ 35 Political Studies 537– 51. Polanyi, K (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York, Beacon Press). Pratt, J (2008) ‘Scandinavian Exceptionalism in an Era of Excess, Part I: The Nature and Roots of Scandinavian Exceptionalism’ 48 British Journal of Criminology 119–37. Reiner, R (2000) The Politics of the Police, 3rd edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

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Reiner, R (2006) ‘Beyond Risk: A Lament for Social Democratic Criminology’ in D Hobbs and T Newburn (eds), The Politics of Crime Control (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2007) Law and Order (Cambridge, Polity). —— (2010a) ‘Citizenship, Crime, Criminalization: Marshalling a Social Democratic Perspective’ 13 New Criminal Law Review 241–61. —— (2010b) ‘Theories of Policing: A Social Democratic Critique’ in D Downes, D Hobbs and T Newburn (eds), The Eternal Recurrence of Crime and Control (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2011) Policing, Popular Culture and Political Economy: Towards a Social Democratic Criminology (Aldershot, Dartmouth). Rozenberg, J (1997) Trial of Strength (London, Richard Cohen Books). Selbourne, D (2011) ‘Idling Towards the Apocalypse’ New Statesman, 28 November. Simon, J (2007) Governing Through Crime (New York, Oxford University Press). Skidelsky, R (2009) Keynes: The Return of the Master (London, Penguin). Smith, D (2010) ‘ “Out of Care” 30 Years on’ 10 Criminology & Criminal Justice 119–35. Smith, G (2009) Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Sousa Santos, B (1998) ‘Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre: Towards a Redistributive Democracy’ 26 Politics & Society 461–510. Sparks, R (2003) ‘States of Insecurity: Punishment, Populism and Contemporary Political Culture’ in S McConville (ed), The Uses of Punishment (Cullompton, Willan). —— (2006) ‘Ordinary Anxieties and States of Emergency: Statecraft and Spectatorship in the New Politics of Insecurity’ in S Armstrong and L McAra (eds), Perspectives on Punishment (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Sparks, R and Bottoms, AE (1995) ‘Legitimacy and Order in Prisons’ 46 British Journal of Sociology 45–62. Stears, M (2011) Everyday Democracy: Taking Centre-Left Politics beyond the State and the Market (London, Institute for Public Policy Research). Strang, H and Braithwaite, J (eds) (2001) Restorative Justice and Civil Society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Taylor, I (1981) Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism (London: Macmillan). Tonry, M (2003) Punishment and Politics (Cullompton, Willan). —— (2011) ‘Making Peace, Not a Desert: Penal Reform should be about Values not Justice Reinvestment’ 10 Criminology & Public Policy 637–49. Tyler, T (2006) Why People Obey the Law (Princeton, Princeton University Press). Wacquant, L (2003) ‘Toward a Dictatorship over the Poor? Notes on the Penalization of Poverty in Brazil’ 5 Punishment & Society 197–205. —— (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge, Polity). —— (2009a) Punishing the Poor: The Neo-Liberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, Duke University Press). —— (2009b) Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press). Waldron, J (2010) Torture, Terror and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House (New York, Oxford University Press). Walker, N (n.d.) ‘Social Democracy and Security’ unpublished ms. (on file with authors). Wilkinson, R and Pickett, H (2010) The Spirit Level (Harmondsworth, Penguin). Williams, R (1977) Marxism and Literature (Oxford, Oxford University Press).



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—— (1981) Culture (London, Fontana). Wilson, JQ (1985) Thinking about Crime (New York, Basic Books). Young, J (1997) ‘Breaking Windows: Situating the New Criminology‘ in P Walton and J Young (eds), The New Criminology Revisited (Basingstoke, Macmillan). —— (2002) ‘Critical Criminology in the Twenty-First Century: Critique, Irony and the Always Unfinished‘ in K Carrington and R Hogg (eds), Critical Criminology: Issues Debates, Challenges (Cullompton, Willan). Zedner, L (2010) ‘Reflections on Criminal Justice as a Social Institution’ in D Downes, D Hobbs and T Newburn (eds), The Eternal Recurrence of Crime and Control (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Zyl Smit, D van and Snacken, S (2009) Principles of European Prison Law and Policy: Penology and Human Rights (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

3 ‘Race’, Political Economy and the Coercive State BEN BOWLING, CORETTA PHILLIPS and JAMES SHEPTYCKI

This chapter explores the intersection between ‘race’, political economy and the coercive power of the state. Reflecting on Robert Reiner’s (2007) analysis of law and order in late-modern societies, we examine the reconfiguration of the global economy and transnational-state-system by neo-liberal authoritarian politics arguing that socio-economic inequality is patterned by ethnic and racial discourses. Black and brown people are cast as the ‘usual suspects’ along with other members of the ‘dangerous classes’ leading to their more frequently becoming the ‘property’ of the police and the prison. Policing the streets and border zones and the functioning of the world’s prison systems invokes racial characteristics in ways that can be described as global apartheid (Richmond, 1995). The nexus between immigration and criminal law enforcement entrenches people in the ‘global south’ and among the over-policed and imprisoned in the ‘global north’. Using a theoretical lens comprising elements of transnational criminology and political economy, this chapter seeks to make visible new variations on racial and ethnic discourse and their effect on the everyday experience of the coercive powers of border protection, policing and imprisonment.

I. Context There can be little doubt that nineteenth century thinkers would be perplexed by the complexion of the twenty-first century ‘transnational capitalist class’ (Robinson and Harris, 2000; Sklair, 2009). First, consider how racial discourses coloured the mindset of modern political and social thought. According to Stephen Jay Gould (1996) ‘when the grandfather of modern academic racism, Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816–1882), asked . . . about the nature of supposedly inborn and unchangeable differences among racial groups, he laid it right on the line’ (p 379). Gobineau argued that ‘the various branches of the human family are distinguished by permanent and ineradicable differences, both mentally and physically’ (p 381), further, they ‘are unequal in intellectual capacity, in personal beauty, and in

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physical strength’ (ibid) and warned that intellectual and moral decline that would surely follow the ‘mixing of the races’, a process for which a new word – miscegenation – was coined in 1863.1 Gobineau’s ideas were unexceptional for his time. North American Enlightenment thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson thought much the same (ibid: 65–66), as did many prominent Europeans – from Linnaeus to Kant and Hegel (Eze, 1997). As is well known, the scientific discourse of ‘race’ carried over into criminology. Cesare Lombroso made a direct link between ‘race’ and crime, concluding that ‘many of the characteristics found in savages, and in the coloured races, are also to be found in habitual delinquents’ (quoted in Phillips and Bowling [2002: 580]). Modern thinking concerning race was quite essentialist. There was a hierarchy of ‘racial types’ – a pigmentocracy – with the lighter skinned people at the head while the darker the skin the further back and behind in the human race. These expectations fused with common sense and scientific notions about criminality, so it is not surprising that criminology provides fertile ground for understanding discourses about ‘race’. Now consider this. In 2011 the occupant of one of the most powerful positions in the global power structure, the Office of the President of the United States, was Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan and mother was an American of English, Welsh, German and Irish ancestry. In that year Obama was, according to Forbes Magazine, the second most powerful man in the world, after Hu Jintao, President of the People’s Republic of China, and before Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, King of Saudi Arabia. Readers will no doubt be aware that two of the most highly placed individuals in the previous US presidential administration of George W Bush (2001–09) were Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, both people of African American heritage. But they might not know that in 2011 Lakshmi Mittal, a steel magnate of Indian origin with dual nationality in both India and the UK, was counted as the richest man in India and in the United Kingdom. Forbes reckons him to be the sixth richest man in the world with a personal wealth estimated at more than US$31 billion. The richest man in the world in 2011 was a Mexican, Carlos Slim Helu, who has an estimated wealth of US$74 billion, and three of the world’s 10 richest men were not white. As the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close Forbes observed shifts in global economic power with a steep increase in the number of billionaires from the emerging ‘BRIC economies’ (Brazil, Russia, India and China); in 2011 the number of billionaires from China had almost doubled to 115 from the previous year, while with 101 and 30 representations respectively, Russia and Brazil saw a two-thirds jump. India had 55, six more than the previous year while only three of Africa’s 14 billionaires were of European origin, the remainder being Egyptian, Nigerian or black South African.

1   The word ‘miscegenation’ was coined in a hoax propaganda pamphlet produced in New York City in December 1863 Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro written by two Democrat journalists to discredit the Republican Party and strengthen opposition to the War effort. The word has subsequently acquired wide usage. See Pascoe (2009).



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These facts suggest an important shift in global power. It is not that racist discourse has disappeared or that ethnic advantage and disadvantage have dissolved. On the contrary, most of the poorest in the world are dark-skinned, whether you look at the global South or the inner-city neighbourhood or prisons of the global North. In late-modern societies, major economic readjustment has resulted in the privatisation of basic necessities such as water, sanitation, education and health. Spending on welfare has been slashed at the same time that the nature of work, mass migration and global inequality have shifted radically. The results of this are countries that have entrenched poverty with people surviving on one US dollar a day living cheek-by-jowl with the unimaginably rich. However, the emergence of a more ethnically cosmopolitan transnational capitalist class has somehow disrupted modernist assumptions about the primacy of ‘race’ in the hierarchical ordering of humanity. These changes are not easy to articulate and our brief introductory remarks make the point in only a perfunctory way. In this chapter we reflect on the relationship between ‘race’, political economy and the coercive powers and practices of the state through a transnational lens.2 We argue that, although the essentialist discourses of modern racism now no longer have the sheen of scienticity they once had – rendering, for example, books such as Herrnstein’s and Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) tendentious as well as turgid – a residuum of raciological discourse remains evident in the global structuring of social exclusion. Sociological study of the police and prisons is uniquely placed to render this visible.

II.  Theoretical Considerations In this section we offer brief theoretical considerations about race and ethnicity, globalisation and the shifting nature of the coercive arms of the state.3 Our aim is to use a transnational viewpoint to explore the theoretical and empirical research on border protection, big city policing and the prisons to investigate how discourses concerning ‘race’ and ethnicity play out in a global context. We contend that borders, police and prisons – often considered as separate domains of state activity and scholarly research – can best be understood as a complex unity. Transnational criminology offers valuable insights into contemporary discourses of ‘race’ and ethnicity and that scholarship concerning social exclusion and the sociology of the global system have a lot to gain from the study of transnational policing and crime. In the spirit of the other chapters in this collection, we think that Robert Reiner’s 2   We refer to transnational rather than ‘international relations’; the former has been used to indicate relationships principally between sovereign states while the latter gestures at more fully globalised relationships where actions, activities, institutions and organisational structures transcend and transgress the formal boundaries of the nation-state system. The ‘transnational-state-system’ can be taken as a shorthand term for this bundle of processes that include, inter alia, economic, cultural, political and social relations. 3   Our analysis is restricted to the work of border protection agencies, police and prisons and therefore other components of the coercive state such as the military are not considered here.

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contributions to understanding the politics of policing and of ‘race’ that inspired an earlier generation of thinkers can be re-drawn on a global canvass yielding important insights concerning democracy, liberty and security in the global social order. ‘Race’, as we have already suggested, is a modern term which is essentialist in its insistence that biologically inherited indicators such as skin colour and hair texture signal fundamental qualitative differences within the human species (Kleg, 1993). Ethnicity is a somewhat different concept in that it also encompasses sociological and cultural attributes such as language, religious affiliation and other aspects of the mythological fundament of group affiliation (ibid). Anthony Smith argued that that all nations have dominant ‘ethnic cores’ and that the construction of any specific ethnic identity draws on the pre-existing history of the ‘group’ using ethnosymbolism to fashion a sense of shared history, common identity and social solidarity (1987; 2003). Paul Gilroy offers a critical appraisal of ‘lazily imagined’ ethnonationalism which fuses the language of ethnicity with assumptions about racial inferiority and superiority (2003, 2006). His is an assault on both racism and the concept of ‘race’ and he is very critical of solidarities defined through ethnic absolutism, be it ‘white supremacy’ or ‘black nationalism’. He argues that, particularly in a world that has gone global, contemporary valorisations of ethnic affiliation that actually originate from the same conceptual apparatus that produced European fascism ‘retain the power to destroy a possibility of human mutuality and cosmopolitan democracy’ (2003: 7). The concept of ‘race’ does not express a natural distinction among human beings, but was invented to legitimise racism. We concur with Gilroy and echo his sentiments. Theoretically, ethnicity and the ethnonationalist legends and myths that sustain ethnic identity – the ‘chosen tribe’, ‘the select’, ‘God’s people’, bearers of the ‘one true faith’, etc – have an almost ‘alchemical power’ (ibid: 32). Speaking normatively, such historic lore needs to be deconstructed so that the virtual realities of ‘race’ can be prevented from fomenting the dismal and destructive life that they do. Gilroy’s (2003) antidote to the alchemical power of racial and ethnic discourse is what he calls ‘multicultural conviviality’, an idea that relies on the universalist leanings of WEB Du Bois and Franz Fanon, a ‘planetary humanism’ that is tolerant, humane, pluralistic and cosmopolitan in outlook. Under transnational conditions, however, ethnic resentments and racist ideologies linger to create a major social division globally and within local contexts. Marginalisation, criminalisation and prisonisation remain redolent with ethnic and racialised discourses. The relationship between the police and public is central to social order. Among the insights that can be gleaned from the work of Robert Reiner is that the category of ‘police property’ is, in effect, a master category within the subculture of the police occupation. He defines the category thus: They are low-status, powerless groups whom the dominant majority see as problematic or distasteful. The majority are prepared to let the police deal with their ‘property’ and turn a blind eye to the manner in which this is done. Examples would be vagrants, skidrow alcoholics, the unemployed or casually employed residuum, youth adopting a deviant cultural style, ethnic minorities, gays, prostitutes and radical political organizations.



‘Race’ and the Coercive State 47 The prime function of the police has always been to control and segregate such groups . . . The concern with ‘police property’ is not so much to enforce the law as to maintain order using the law as one resource among others. (2010: 123–4).

One nineteenth century term roughly synonymous with this concept is ‘the dangerous classes’ and since that time perceptions of the propertied classes have been such that those groups classifiable as ‘police property’ have been understood as a deep threat to the social order generally (ibid). The idea of ‘police property’ – which implies ‘rounding up the usual suspects’, the physical detention of a human being, and physically holding in police stations – can be extended to the prison system, where inmates become even more literally the property of the state. However, ‘not all that is policing lies in the police’ (ibid: xiii) and one of the most important reasons for the increasing legitimacy of police in the United Kingdom since their inception in the modern period was the gradual inclusion of the majority of the lower classes into the body politic, a trend that was reversed in the latter part of the twentieth century, markedly so in the early years of the twenty-first. Whereas the incorporation of the greater portion of the labouring classes and the corresponding diminution of the dangerous classes increased the legitimacy of liberal democratic policing in common law jurisdictions the world over, this trend has been reversed primarily because of the increasing social exclusion resulting from free market policies (Reiner, 2010). To this may be added other insights from the sociology of crime and policing. Firstly, the practices inspired by ‘law and order’ rhetoric have a tendency to reinforce the targeting of those identified as ‘police property’ for heavy-handed policing. In turn, this reinforces the social exclusion of these ‘folk-devils’ – including the transnationally mobile ‘global vagabonds’ (Bowling and Weber, 2008). An appreciable ‘amplification’ of social order problems follows which further exacerbates feelings of insecurity having the paradoxical effect of further undermining police legitimacy giving rise to yet more heavy-handed policing in a perpetual ‘amplification spiral’ (Cohen, 1972; Hall et al, 1978). Within this negative dialectic, the discourses of ‘race’ and ethnicity become more fraught. On the one hand, policing aimed at controlling the ‘dangerous classes’ may lead to perceptions of racial bias since ethnic minorities tend to make up a disproportionate segment of this class and these feelings only increase as the overall proportion of society excluded from the benefits of full membership increase. On the other, increasing inter-communal tensions arising within a multicultural society wracked by economic hardship grow in proportion to the influence of discourses that stoke the fires of ethnic rivalry. The inability of the police, court system and prisons to prevent the victimisation of weaker minority groups further challenges the legitimacy of the institution (Reiner, 2010). The overwhelming experience among the marginal is of being ‘over-policed and under-protected’ (ibid). This all too short discussion from the sociology of crime and policing portends difficult times ahead. From the dawn of modernity, police conflict with the residuum at the base of the social hierarchy has been ever-present. In the recent past neo-liberal policies have tended to ‘hollow out’ the governance capacities of states,

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widening social inequality and increasing the size of the pool that comprises the ‘dangerous classes’ and thereby ‘police property’. This class stratum is by no means exclusively made up of ethnic minorities, indeed it is still the case in most countries of the global north that the majority of the socially excluded are white. Cultural conflict is exacerbated within this lower class strata and policing affects this in a variety of ways, as we will show in subsequent sections. The perverse effect is that the legitimacy of policing in liberal democracies is undermined, heightening the sense of insecurity as ever harder styles of police control are pursued. The long-term effect is the gradual undermining of fundamental human rights and freedoms.

III.  Policing Borders The world is on the move. People are travelling to live permanently in the cities, to travel to the metropolis daily, and to travel long distances to places where there is an economic need. On one hand, neo-liberal ideology demands ever greater flexibility in global markets, free movement of capital, goods and services. This requires free movement of labour to work in factories manufacturing goods in places where they are cheapest and to places where tourist services are provided.4 Of course, consumers of services must also be mobile enough to travel to enjoy them. On the other hand, the increased movement of people, especially in the context of increasing socio-economic inequalities, brings new security risks and new security demands. Strong border protection is portrayed as essential for domestic security. In this context, border zones – especially between rich and poor countries – become increasingly contested territory. The outcome is the simultaneous demand for greater movement of people and greater protection against the insecurities – in both senses – which is associated with this. In practical reality, the lines on the map that cross continents dividing one country from another are easily transgressed. Moreover, the massive shifts in travel and communications technology make globally integrated capitalist economies, transnational communities and human movement around the globe in the most general sense possible in unprecedented ways. As Richmond (1994) argues, state sovereignty can no longer be maintained in an absolute way: ‘all boundaries are permeable and borders can no longer be defended with walls, iron curtains, armed guards, or computer surveillance systems’ (Richmond, 1994: 205). Physical obstacles remain of course – seas, oceans, deserts and mountain ranges carry their own risks for those on the move – and all too frequently result in deaths and injury. Death in 4   While neo-liberal ideology on the surface seems to promote free movement of workers, the logic of global capital works in practice to drive wages down in a process facilitated by border controls. These immobilise workers in low-wage, rights-free economies, for example in the US-owned malquiladoras, south of the US-Mexican border, and any number of under-developed countries in the global South. These also help to maintain an illegalised, insecure and therefore exploitable workforce within countries of the global north (Bowling and Sheptycki, 2012: 102–04).



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these places is far from natural because border control policies are known to force people into the most dangerous routes (Weber and Pickering, 2011). Tens of millions of people cross borders every day and telecommute by networked computer such that transnational communication takes place largely or entirely unaffected by national boundaries. Economic relations are globally integrated. Advanced telecommunications networks means that information and financial capital cannot be controlled by any one government or even many governments working in concert. It seems that the capacity of the nation state to provide security for the people who live within its borders is now contestable in many places. Some places have become chronically unsafe with violent crime escalating to unbearable proportions. In others places, private providers of security including mafia-type organisations vie with state providers. For all of these reasons, the centrality of the nation state has become problematic in today’s world: its legitimacy is both challenged and yet simultaneously reasserted, especially by the most powerful ‘seigneural states’ (Bowling and Sheptycki, 2012). Despite the neo-liberal yearning for both free movement and small government, the coercive arms of the state – the securityindustrial-complex (including private security, security and intelligence agencies, criminal justice agencies, courts, prisons) – have expanded in both power and resources in recent decades. This is no more evident than in relation to policing borders and people defined by their migratory status. The securitisation of migration has occurred in a context within which the movement of people (and goods) is seen as a source of insecurity whilst being necessary to the functioning of the global order. The prevailing logic therefore is premised on the need to strengthen border controls and surveille the movement of people within domestic spaces especially at specific security nodes. Land borders are increasingly militarised and airports are in themselves highly securitised geographical nodes. The ‘smart border’ is designed to work like a semi-permeable membrane to speed the flow of the ‘tourist’ (meaning both people seeking leisure and the globally mobile business class) and to select, eject and immobilise the ‘global vagabonds’ (Bowling and Weber, 2008). For Leanne Weber, these border defences operate at multiple sites of enforcement creating ‘functional borders’ which are ‘located wherever and whenever border protection functions are performed’ including naval interdiction on the high seas to practices within sovereign territory including surveillance, detention and deportation (Weber, 2006: 2007). Border security officers are a neglected cousin of the domestic bobby. Their job, to police land borders, airports and coastlines, involves a complex web of organisations working above and beyond the border, as well as at the physical frontier itself in ways not dissimilar to other forms of policing (Bowling, 2010). It involves immigration officers, police (including Special Branch and other intelligence officers), customs, coastguard, the military and a range of local and national government departments. A complex legal framework has grown up that creates the auspices for a range of activities including carriers’ liability and penalties for facilitating unlawful migration, conventions harmonising asylum policy and Interpol sharing of travel document database (Weber and Bowling, 2004). These strategies seek to project

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population control externally so as to prevent migrants even from approaching the border. For people travelling to the US from many countries, the practice of ‘pre-entry’ immigration clearance means that people are processed before departure. In Europe, the creation of a common visa regime means that once a person has been denied entry in any European country, they are denied to all. The so-called Dublin system also means that once people have arrived in one country, they can be removed back to that country. In Australia the ‘Pacific Solution’ involved the deployment of naval forces to interdict ‘asylum seekers’ attempting to arrive by boat and ‘suspected unlawful non-citizens’ in offshore detention centres (Weber, 2007). A key element of the emerging policing system is the posting overseas of liaison officers, including officers drawn from domestic immigration agencies who work in foreign airports. On key routes, these agents check passports of departing passengers, compare the details against domestic databases to prevent those on watch lists or judged undesirable even from leaving port or airport. In many places of course walls have been built. The US southern border fence is under construction mainly in New Mexico, Arizona, California and Texas. In effect it is a grouping of physical fences secured in between with a ‘virtual fence’ including sensors and cameras monitored by Border Patrol. Similar walls are under construction on the Russia/Chechnya Border, India/Bangladesh, Pakistan/Afghanistan, India/Burma, China/North Korea and one is proposed between Mexico and Guatemala. Parts of the border between Greece and Turkey are still fortified with minefields. Spain and Italy are defended by security fences, electronic surveillance and armed guards. The most notorious ones are around the tiny Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa, where many people have been shot trying to climb the fence (Weber and Pickering, 2011). At the European borders, the development of Frontex provides an operational force for the protection of land, air and sea borders with rapid response teams. Markers of nationality, race and ethnicity are crucial to the process of social sorting which underpins border control. However, it is important to emphasise that these are not the only dimensions along which people are defined as ‘the usual suspects’ or the vagabonds. Our focus here is the experiences of black and brown people but we are mindful of the historical exclusion of Gypsies, Jews and the ‘whites of a different colour’ from Southern and Eastern Europe. As Pearson reminds us, raciological arguments were taken as enthusiastically in discussions of the degeneracy of the English ‘Imperial race’ at home and the ways in which its logic was deployed in laws against vagrancy (Pearson, 1983; Beier, 1985). This sorting involves many different processes occurring in widely differing institutional sites involved in the control of physical borders and surveillance of populations defined as suspicious because of their being attributed migratory, criminal or terrorist risks. Narratives of race and ethnicity contribute to shaping all of these processes. In recent years, a process of convergence, referred to as ‘crimmigration’ has occurred in which immigration offences have shifted from being administrative infractions to criminal offences and in which immigration law has become infused into the criminal justice process (Stumpf, 2006).



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Once at the border, immigration officers have wide discretion in deciding who to detain for further questioning and to deny entry and it is clear that race and ethnic markers are used as a ground for stopping and detaining passengers. A detailed qualitative and quantitative study carried out by the UK Immigration and Nationality Department in collaboration with Essex University found that immigration officers’ decision-making drew on a wide range of objective and subjective factors as well as generalised assumptions and beliefs. The most important triggers for further questioning were nationality and perceived socio-economic circumstances of a passenger (Woodfield et al, 2006). The study also produced clear quantitative evidence of the role of racial or ethnic markers in the social sorting that is carried out at airports. It showed that black passengers were 17 times as likely to be stopped at UK airports by comparison with white passengers. This pattern of racial disproportionality was largely attributable to nationality. This was anticipated by the researchers since it has long been established that people from certain countries were more likely to be detained because of the varying visa regimes that applied to each country. The countries whose citizens were least subject to checking and detention for interview were those with populations with predominantly European ancestry. The unique contribution of Woodfield et al’s study, however is that it was able to distinguish between ethnicity and nationality by collecting data from countries with racially mixed populations including Canada, the USA and South Africa. The study found that in comparison with their white counterparts, black Canadians were eight times as likely to be stopped by comparison with their white counterparts, black South Africans 10 times as likely and black Americans more than twice as likely. As well as a relatively straightforward relationship between ‘race’ and nationality, there is a more complex entanglement between ‘race’ and class. Immigration officers made judgements, using racial cues, about income, respectability and the likelihood that the traveller will be ‘tourist’ or a ‘vagabond’. As Reiner says in relation to ‘police property’, police sometimes mistake members of ‘higher status groups’ for ‘police property’ (2010: 124), especially in relation to ethnic minorities where police are ‘not as attuned to the signals of respectability’ (ibid). In practice, border guards actively exclude poor people, and those who carry the markers of poverty (such as dark skin), whose right to travel around the west with dignity and without suspicion is being denied to them. The reverse is true for the wealthy. Noting the report’s finding that immigration officers ‘no longer ... ask a well-travelled American businessman how much money he has brought with him or for details of his bank balance’, Gary Younge dryly points out the man most likely to steal your pension walks through without a word, while the one most likely to flip your burger or clean your house hugs the bottom of trains because legitimate means of entry are barred to them. So much for global citizenship.5

The racial disparities that are observed in border controls echo those that target the domestic interior. In the UK, systems for the registration of aliens, 5   Gary Younge, ‘The west persists in using race to decide who can cross its borders’ Guardian, 22 January 2007.

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processes for checking identification at key contexts such as labour exchanges and in employment go back to at least the early part of the twentieth century. Cooperation between police and immigration officers dates back to the 1971 Immigration Act, which gave constabulary powers to immigration officers for the first time. Since then the extent and nature of Immigration Service powers have grown and it has, de facto, its own internal police service (Weber and Bowling, 2004; 2008). The United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA) was created in 2008 as a deliberate effort to create a uniformed agency with a clear law enforcement agenda to replace the border bureaucrats in the old Immigration Service. There is no doubt that the UKBA has become more effective in removals. While about 10,000 people per year were removed in the 1990s, in 2010, more than 39,000 people6 were removed from the UK (Blinder, 2011). The scale of deportation from Britain is dwarfed by the USA which deported 387,000 people in 2010 among whom 43 per cent – around 64,000 – were deported as ‘criminal aliens’. Many of those people were identified by the Homeland Security Department’s ‘Secure Communities’ system, which seeks to identify immigrants for deportation through fingerprints taken by local officers when booking people on criminal charges. Local law enforcement agencies send fingerprints to the FBI who shares the fingerprints with Homeland Security to look for ‘potentially deportable immigrants’. In New York, for example, federal immigration officers on Riker’s Island, New York review all cases to see if any new defendants are deportable, either because they were entirely undocumented or lacking a residency permit. In the Bronx, nearly one in three defendants is a non-citizen. The police practice of asking for identification documents and evidence of immigration status from black and ‘foreign-looking’ people they encountered during routine traffic stops, or who were witnesses to an accident or crime goes back a long way in countries including the United Kingdom (Weber and Bowling, 2004). In recent years, this has gradually been institutionalised in US immigration law and policing practice, most controversially in Arizona and Alabama (Provine and Sanchez, 2011). It is also clearly evident elsewhere including Australia (Weber, 2011) and Japan (Namba, 2011). The convergence between immigration and criminal law that has been in process since the mid-1980s can be detected in relation to non-citizens convicted of deportable offences. Non-citizens convicted of minor offences, drug possession or shoplifting for example, are likely face pre-trial detention followed by immigration detention, followed by deportation. In a speech given at El Paso, on the US-Mexico border on 10 May 2011,7 President Barack Obama invoked the definition of the USA, ‘as a nation of immigrants – a nation that welcomes those willing to embrace America’s ideals and America’s precepts’, following in the footsteps of ancestors ‘who braved hardship and great risk to [. . .] be free to work and worship and start a business and live their lives in peace 6   This excludes the 18,000 people refused entry at port and subsequently removed. This has fallen from a peak of around 45,000 refused entry at port in 2002. 7   Transcript of President Barack Obama’s speech at the Camizal National Memorial on 10 May 2011, El Paso, Texas, as delivered by the President.



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and prosperity’. On the other hand, he said, the immigration system is ‘broken’, citing the 11 million undocumented aliens who’ve ‘cut in front of the line’, making mockery of legal migration, working for less than minimum pay with the result of burdening middle-class families, tax avoidance, declining national prosperity and competitiveness. Obama’s solution: a commitment to strengthening of border security ‘beyond what many believed was possible’. This included the completion of the US-Mexico border fence; a doubling of Border Patrol agents; and total cargo screening. His vision is ‘an inter-operable risk management approach’ that can accelerate legitimate flows of goods and people while enhancing physical security.8 At the same time many States – among them Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia – have introduced far-reaching laws criminalising migration and preventing access of undocumented migrants to public facilities. A New York Times editorial on 28 August 2011 described the Alabama law as the country’s ‘cruellest, most unforgiving immigration law’. It described it as a ‘sweeping attempt to terrorize undocumented immigrants in every aspect of their lives, and to make potential criminals of anyone who may work or live with them or show them kindness’. It has the effect of making it a crime to be an undocumented migrant by ‘criminalizing working, renting a home and failing to comply with federal registration laws [and] requires the police to check the papers of people they suspect to be here illegally. Businesses that knowingly employ illegal immigrants will lose their licences. Public school officials will be required to determine students’ immigration status and report back to the state. Anyone knowingly “concealing, harboring or shielding” an illegal immigrant could be charged with a crime, say for renting someone an apartment or driving her to church or the doctor.’ The Guardian reported the effect of legitimating oppressive policing based on ‘looking illegal’ was that some Mexican immigrants in Birmingham, Alabama are going into hiding or fleeing to neighbouring states.

IV.  Policing Cities This is the urban millennium. Sometime between 2000 and 2010 the world passed the tipping point and now the majority of people world-wide live in large towns, cities or mega-cities. The contemporary global city is cross-cut by conflicting currents associated with globalisation. The demography of the city, the ethnic composition of its neighbourhoods is shaped by patterns of migration and their interaction with patterns of housing, employment and policing. It is well-recognised that the typical metropolis is multicultural. Cities at the core of the global system, like New York, Paris, London and Hong Kong – but even ones less central such as Toronto, Rio de 8   Declaration by President Obama and Prime Minister Harper of Canada – Beyond the Border, White House, 4 February 2011.

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Janeiro, Cape Town and Mumbai – are cauldrons of cultural complexity. Amidst the ethnic diversity in these global cities there remain unmistakable patterns of social and economic exclusion. Poverty is nothing new. Neither is it new that the burden of poverty has fallen most heavily on ethnic minorities lacking social and cultural capital, to echo Bourdieu’s formulation. But is in the urban megalopolis that poverty exists amidst plenty. Privatisation, neo-liberalism and the opening up of global markets have created great wealth for the few. In certain places, the consequences are strikingly visible: the glaring contrasts between wealth and poverty, prosperity and insecurity, private affluence and public squalor, venality and desperation, and the voracious appetites of narcissistic consumers gluttonously feeding within the sight of the very poorest people in the world. And, thanks to the shrinking of social distance brought about by electronic media, knowledge about how people live is instantly and copiously available to all. Social stratification of Dickensian proportions is evident and, if the class system is not altogether novel, it is also rather different from what was on offer in the nineteenth century. At the top are those who have it all. They are cosmopolitan, metropolitan, affluent and educated and often attached to banks and other financial institutions, the primary beneficiaries of the new global economy. Next is a relatively protected core of traditional employees and professionals in the productive industries, the service sector and the public sector whose jobs are reasonably secure, with benefits and economic guarantees still intact. The third tier are the small business owners and small-time entrepreneurs, to which should be added economic players in the ‘grey economy’, whose fiscal fortunes are tied to the market but who play with distinctly smaller stakes than the ‘Masters of the Universe’ who stoke the bonfire of the vanities. The fourth tier is the fastest growing, the working poor, those whose wages, if they are employed at all, are frequently too low to support them and their families. Last of all are the growing underclass, a lumpen proletariat which, even in the prosperous countries of the so-called developed world, have been – for several generations now – cast out of the productive economy; instead living at the economic margins. This class hierarchy is cross-cut by competing cultural groupings defined in ethnic and racial terms at virtually every turn and, because the effects of social and economic exclusion are so intense, there is extensive conflict throughout the system (Judt, 2010). Due to the fragmentation of enforcement and security provision typical of policing in the contemporary mega-city there is tremendous psycho-social stress. Mike Davis captured the ecology of fear in the City of Quartz thus: ‘we live in fortress cities brutally divided between fortified cells of affluent society and places of terror where the police battle the criminalized poor’ (Davis, 1992: 93). In Davis’ part of the world, the Los Angeles Police Department and Sheriff’s Department share their turf with private security contractors too numerous to name, some of whom announce their presence in certain neighbourhoods with ‘Armed Response’ signs. In California, citizens’ perceptions of insecurity have clearly weakened the sense that ‘the state’ is arbiter of social order. Davis wrote about Los Angeles, but a host of comparative studies have shown that policing Globopolis looks pretty much the



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same everywhere (Caldiera, 2000; Huey, 2007; Marks, 2005; Mitchell and Beckett, 2008; Policing and Society, 2000). In all places the emergence of criminalisation rhetoric ensured that concerns of general service policing provision by public policing bodies have given over to law enforcement concerns about ‘fighting serious criminality’. The fear grew not only because of this rhetoric but also because of the increasing perceptions that ‘government’ could not ensure the modicum of social peace essential to the public life of a liberal democracy while policing in pursuit of suitable enemies and (often racially or ethnically defined) folk devils grew paramilitarised and hi-tech. Policing post-apartheid South Africa has been subjected to intense scholarly scrutiny and the model revealed is instructive. In the decade after apartheid ended in 1994, the country was the recipient of a significant amount of international aid aimed at smoothing the transition to democracy, a significant proportion of which was targeted at policing. At the same time, transnational enterprises were interested in securing the country for future investment. Subsequent developments can be seen as falling into three stages. In the early years there was an attempt to integrate the public police service and reorient it around the philosophy of ‘community policing’. Simultaneous with this was the unplanned and un-coordinated efflorescence of the private security industry. In the second phase foreign police development assistance and governmental programmers concentrated on developing a generalist policing capacity on the ground. Policing in South Africa during the years of apartheid had been bent to the task of policing racial segregation, so the practical task was to develop the capacity to deliver basic police services. Towards the end of 1990s, there arose an increasingly insistent discourse about controlling ‘organised crime’ which dominated the agenda and the emphasis in public policing gradually shifted to enforcement activities and away from community policing provision. According to Diana Gordon once the new government had become established the ‘imperatives of regime performance’ came to carry more weight than the perceived need to deepen democracy (Gordon, 2001). By regime performance, she was referring to the ability to cope with a rising tide of crime and violence and consequent high levels of fear. This was the beginning of stage three. Monique Marks’ observations of public order policing units in Durban showed the inability of training and policy programmes to achieve reform in the face of poor supervision and command of the rank-and-file (Marks, 1999). She observed the tendency to deploy hard-edged public order units on general policing duties, which only served to blur the distinction between police ‘repressive’ and ‘service’ roles, in the minds of the public and of the police rank-and-file themselves. Simultaneously with the failed effort to create a post-apartheid policing service oriented to community was the non-stop growth of private securitisation and the enclavisation of wealth and privilege alongside destitution (Singh, 2005; Spinks, 2001). In the context of these powerful forces, attempts at community capacitybuilding looked paltry (Loader and Walker, 2004; Johnston and Shearing, 2003). Even in post-apartheid South Africa, many of the main targets of police oppression were defined in terms of their foreignness and in terms of ethnic identity. For

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example, the murder of white supremacist Terre’ Blanche in April 2010 confirmed that the old-style racial hatreds remained alive in South Africa while widespread rioting and xenophobic violence against immigrants from Mozambique, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and elsewhere in southern Africa in 2008 showed that ethnic hatred and violence in the country still proliferated. Nor was the violence of 2008 just against foreign nationals – Asian shopkeepers in Durban (a long-established ethnic minority in the country) were also reported to have been victims in the rioting (Neocosmos, 2010; Duval Smith, 2008). The politics of policing racial and ethnic conflict permeated the atmosphere of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, but policing that mega-event was really no different from anywhere else (Boyle and Haggerty, 2009). ‘Spectacular security’ is ‘invigorated with cultural constructions and speculative popular imaginations about what could potentially transpire’ (261). We would seek to emphasise that this cultural construction is infused with racial, ethnic and class dimensions and would argue on that basis that the observable patterns of policing in Beijing and Brussels, Detroit and Durban, Jakarta and Jalalabad, Nairobi and Newcastle, St. Petersburg and São Paulo are shaped by a ‘common sense that intrusive security and surveillance measures represent an inevitable feature and future of urban life, [which forecloses] debate on the necessity, desirability and inherent dangers in our new spectacle of security’ (ibid: 271). In considering the contemporary urban landscape there are strong local differences to be sure, but looked at from a global perspective, what we see are variations on a theme. Depending on where you go law enforcement standing orders are rather akin to the US military’s Urban Operations manual: MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain [Kraska, 2007]). The official British military acronym for this is FIBA: Fighting in Built Up Areas, but the unofficial terminology is ‘FISH and CHIPS’: Fighting in Someone Else’s House and Causing Havoc in People’s Streets. This accurately describes the policing of the favelas of Brazil, the shantytowns of Southern Africa, Banlieue 13 in France and South Central Los Angeles. Increasingly the exercise of police power is unsystematic, sporadic, particularistic and often corrupt (Marenin, 1996: 323). Clearly at the ‘edge of the knife’, in the zones of the socially excluded and disadvantaged when the various labels for suitable enemy can easily be made to stick, things do look mean (Chevigny, 1995). This contrasts starkly with the not so Mickey Mouse social order of Disneyland (Shearing and Stenning, 1987) where the socially privileged are presumed to live and play, security governance is certainly less brutish and ‘in-your-face’. Policing in the contemporary city has worrisome features. For those who move easily between ‘security bubbles’ – home, beach-front property, country club and office – along ‘secure corridors’, it might not appear so (Sheptycki, 1997). The power of enforced topography obscures the topography of power being enforced. But these ‘bubbles of security’ are real abstractions which separate the ‘risky’ from the ‘at risk’, the ‘normal citizen’ from the ‘folk devil’. It is a system of differentiation based on class and racial divisions, between which lies a chasm of social exclusion. Putting this in the context of the world system we see a multiplicity of law enforce-



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ment and security agencies (both public and private) enforcing social inequality inscribed at a global scale (Bowling and Sheptycki, 2012). Katharyne Mitchell and Katherine Beckett have explored how privatised ‘crime risk consulting’ shapes urban space (Mitchell and Beckett, 2008). They focus attention on two institutions that influence the management of land use: bond-rating agencies and global security firms. These institutions have the power to intensify gentrification or displace marginalised populations and Mitchell and Beckett specifically show how patterns of urban movement and urban usage are thus shaped in Mexico City and New York City. But these processes are more general and the emerging global metropolis is a ‘city of walls’ created by property developers, not city planners (Caldiera, 2000). Saturation law enforcement strategies, otherwise known as zero tolerance policing, displaces problem populations by confining the dangerous classes to particular bubbles of governance. When we look at policing in the global city we see strategies for trying to ‘keep the lid on’ what are, in effect, boiling cauldrons of insecurity. There is no escaping the conclusion that socially exclusionary tactics for policing racial and class segregation are advantageous to the relative few at the top of the social structure of the emerging global capitalist system. It is equally evident that, in transnational conditions, the discourses of ‘race’ and ethnicity cross-cut the realities of class conflict and amplify the insecurity of all. The ‘dark side’ of globalisation – if we might be permitted to use the phrase – is the fear of globally mobile dangerous classes confusingly labelled with an admixture of epithets including illegal aliens, potential terrorists, unwarranted asylum seekers, economic migrants and so forth (Bosworth, Bowling and Lee, 2008). Our tentative aim here is to suggest that an important area for critical reflection is how discourses of ‘race’, ethnicity and class are affecting the policing of the new global city. But these patterns are no less evident than when we look at the plight of the human beings, the prisoners and other detainees, who have become the ‘property’ of the contemporary ‘secure estate’. These criminalised populations are, of course, a product of a process initiated by the police and their roles as ‘gatekeepers’ to the courts, jails, prisons and detention centres around the world.

V.  The Global Prison The black face in the White House finds its unwelcome mirror image in America’s carceral archipelago. There prison cells are disproportionately occupied by African Americans and Hispanic Americans. This would, of course, be of no surprise to de Gobineau, who regarded the black ‘race’ as low in intellect, incapable of differentiating between right and wrong, unable to empathise with others’ suffering, and also driven by great energy, desire, sensuality and will (Biddis, 1999). And despite the demise of these pseudo-scientific notions in the post-war period, books like The Bell Curve still make good copy. A ready audience seeks understanding of the

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troubling reality that in Western nations across the globe,9 minority ethnic and cultural groups are more often subject to the coercive powers of the state, beginning with stop and search on the street and ending with their incarceration in what we can think of as a loosely connected global penal estate. According to the World Prison Population Briefing, more than 10.1 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, a 300,000 increase in the world’s prison population over last two years (International Centre for Prison Studies, University of Essex) For Reiner (1993) the attempt to understand the rapid growth of the black prison population in the 1980s and 1990s these patterns in England and Wales was like searching for a chimera. The debates had become stuck on the question of whether this was the result of discriminatory criminal justice practices by state agents or explained simply in terms of minority groups’ involvement in crime. Such mesolevel analyses continue, with fortunately more criminological data to draw on than was available at the time Reiner was writing, but attention has also shifted to macrolevel theorising, which attempts to unpack the structural dynamics of what Loïc Wacquant (2009a) calls ‘carceral affirmative action’ or the hyperincarceration of African Americans. Robert Reiner’s (2007) work on the political economy of crime and its control offers further insights in that it underlines the significance of economic, political, cultural and social dimensions. The political economy of punishment through race in the US has its origins in the work of African American scholars such as Du Bois, whose contribution to criminology and to sociology more broadly has only been recently acknowledged (Gabbidon, 2007). Du Bois saw the state as a ‘dealer in crime’, often arbitrarily criminalising free Southern blacks to extract their labour in the convict leasing system. Building railway tracks, mining, logging and doing agricultural labour provided an estimated profitable income of $48,000 in 1890 (Du Bois, 1901). Building on these historical themes, Angela Davis (2003) looks to the contemporary equivalent, the prison-industrial complex where the mass incarceration of African Americans depletes the social wealth of their communities; with so many absent men it is impossible to maintain the economic, religious and cultural infrastructure. This state-ritualised violence, Davis asserts, is legitimised by a normative racial contract which unquestioningly accepts domination of, and harm against, racial minorities, obscured by the mask of a colour-blind justice system. Vast economic profits accrue to the private security corporations who successfully bid for the provision of security and ancillary services, or who obtain capital infrastructure contracts to build prisons. A further hidden punishment of ongoing stigma and subordination is experienced as released prisoners are often denied the right to vote (making them politically expendable), excluded from juries and denied employment, housing and welfare assistance. These processes reproduce a permanently inferior and perpetually marginal ‘undercaste’, which represents a 9   In fact, some time ago, Tonry (1994) alerted us to this racial disproportionality in prison populations in England and Australia which then, as now (see C Phillips, The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity and Social Relations among Prisoners (Oxford, Oxford University Press, Forthcoming), traps minorities, to an even greater extent than in the US.



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form of citizenship not unlike the second-class citizenship of the Jim Crow period (Alexander, 2010). While David Garland (2001) and Jonathon Simon (2007) have described the late-modern prison as a tool in the governance of social marginality, the racialised dynamics of these social sorting processes are more fully discussed by Loïc Wacquant (199, 2001, 2009). In a show of its might and authority, the state, according to Wacquant has engaged in the ‘social and moral excommunication’ of its racialised and forever inassimilable (foreign national) aliens. Losing out as a result of post-Fordist economics of de-industrialisation, labour informalisation, service industry suburbanisation, welfare state retrenchment and abandonment, ‘hyperghetto’ residents seem to be on a conveyor belt moving only in the direction of state control and debasement. For women this leads to coercive workfare or surveillance to determine welfare eligibility, while for men, the trajectory is towards penal supervision or custody. Europe’s blacks, consisting of national minorities and recent migrants, also find themselves ensnared by punitive penal policies which have been exported from the US (Wacquant, 1999).10 National minority groups have experienced under-employment and unemployment as de-industrialisation has removed opportunities for low-skilled work and welfare support has been drastically reduced. Migrant containment and expulsion represents a ritualised method of reasserting state authority, as political sentiment reinforces a social resentment against the groups assumed to disrupt the national order, whilst also conveniently obscuring state responsibility for immigrant integration. Foreign nationals who find themselves incarcerated within Europe’s borders are, of course, divorced from the labour elite who travel the globe easily, accessing corporate jobs. These prisoners include those spurred by ethnic and nationalist strife, socio-economic and demographic pressures, and ecological crises, typically moving from developing and transitional nations in the global South to the developed world of the global North. As Goldberg (2002) argues, the racial state of the twenty-first century acts as traffic cop, simultaneously upgrading the privileged global labour elite and regulating the disprivileged vagabonds through mechanisms of containment. These are each nation state’s internal ‘suitable enemies’ or as Bosworth and Guil (2008) note, it is the darker skinned people who are subject to cultures of control. Any political fallout is prevented by what De Giorgi (2006) calls ‘social legitimacy’ as public opinion supports punitive or exclusionary immigration control to neutralise the threat of welfare dependency, crime and terrorism. A related phenomenon is the increasing evidence of imm-carceration, that is the rapidly developing use of the prison as a means to contain certain categories of immigration offenders. This includes people who have committed serious crimes and been detected at the border – for example drug couriers who will eventually be deported and the so called ‘non-returnables’, people who for some reason cannot be returned to the countries from which they have travelled, either because they are at risk of torture or victimisation on return, or who have problems verifying 10   Wacquant (1999). But see Lacey (2010) and Newburn (2010), who challenge Wacquant’s claims of cross-national penal transfer.

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their identity. For these people, the official justification for imprisonment is merely exclusion. There is no pretence that the purpose of the imprisonment is rehabilitation, or reform, but merely incapacitation and a demonstration of the solidity of the borders. Immigration detention centres have a distinctly punitive and criminallike character. They look and feel like prisons and border patrol agencies look like criminal police. Immigration is a system of inclusion and exclusion that defines what is expectable within the borders of the state, but deals with a problem defined as belonging to another state. Databases of criminal records including fingerprints, DNA, travel documents and deported aliens have been created across law enforcement agencies, immigration and the prison. In this context, prisons have ‘become a site of information gathering on what is otherwise a transient, fragmented population’ (Bosworth, 2008: 210). A clear result of the relationship between political and economic marginality and the cleavages of race, ethnicity, nationality and religion is the emergence of what we might call the cosmopolitan prison. In Europe, foreign nationals make up an average of 20 per cent of prisoners with some countries having exceptionally high rates including Belgium (43 per cent), Greece (44 per cent), Switzerland (70 per cent) and Luxembourg (73 per cent) (Franko Aas and Bosworth, 2012). Evidence from the US and France (Wacquant, 2001), suggests that prisons are marked by racial division in which horizontal cleavages between ‘raced prisoners’ shape life inside, unlike previous eras where vertical relations between prisoners and guards was the key structural arrangement (Sykes, 1958; Irwin, 1980; Jacobs, 1977). According to Wacquant, the ‘code of the street’ trumps the old convict code of inmate solidarity; respect must be shown at the individual level with ethnically based gangs the collective means for ‘doing time’, with brutality and violence the means of achieving this. Qualitative research in two male prisons conducted by Phillips (2008, forthcoming) and Earle (2011) suggests a less dystopic picture in England and Wales. There the social world of the prison consists of a state of loose ethnic solidarities, cultural fusion in prisoners’ self-identities, which has created both what Gilroy calls ‘convivial multiculture’ as well as more familiar racial tensions that were encountered in the first waves of prisons research (Genders and Player, 1989). Conviviality, the relaxed minimalisation of racial difference where multiculture can be creative, vibrant and, above all, negotiable, is underscored by wary, unstable, inconsistent and contradictory social relations. There is a marked instability in social hierarchies inside where white privilege is no longer assured but black prisoners’ assertive presence is more certain, albeit contested. The racial dynamics of the late-modern British prison are such that race is essentialised and reified, but also somewhat contradictorily, racial difference is rendered unremarkable by prisoners. At the same time, there is ample evidence to indicate discriminatory treatment of minority ethnic prisoners by prison officers, with regard to the use of force against them, their greater likelihood to experience punitive segregation or to be denied privileges, particularly those of black origin, and those whose faith identities are Islamic.11   Phillips and Bowling (2002); Beckford et al (2005); HMIP (2010).

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We end this section with a final note of caution in thinking about globalised incarceration. While some scholars have emphasised mobility and extensive communication networking as modes of reconfiguring and hybridising youth cultures in disparate nations, young English prisoners’ identities clearly need to be represented, and social relations inside understood, through the lens of the local. The younger prisoners interviewed by Phillips and Earle identified most viscerally with their locality, often defined specifically by their ‘postcode’ (an alphanumeric address code introduced by the Royal Mail in 1959). This central geo-spatial referent which defined local identity – and which cut across colour lines – was the basis for hostile territorialism. These spatialised identities were of central significance in the young men’s lives both inside and outside prison. These area-based solidarities often usurped or overlaid identities organised through race or ethnicity, providing for the performance of masculinity and structuring micro-interactions, allegiances and disputes inside. Mutual defensive support in minor prison ‘beefs’ (disputes) was part of the obligation to assist other prisoners who were from the same residential area. Such relationships were often formed in prison as the basis for sociality and companionship, marking common belonging external to the prison. They also provided a route for exchanging goods in the informal economy to mitigate the pains of imprisonment. Just like life outside, money, drugs and power are the name of the game in prison.12

VI. Conclusion In 1903, WEB Du Bois declared that ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men’. He was not wrong. Despite years of war, struggle and compromise, when the Souls of Black Folk was published, black Americans were still not free and would spend the next 60 years struggling for basic civil rights. Many people in the southern states still could not leave the plantations on which they were born and most were ‘bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary’ (Du Bois, 1903: 29). Even in the most cultured cities of the South, blacks were a ‘segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges’ (ibid). Things had to change, and change they did. By the end of the twentieth century, the formal structures of segregation had been dismantled. The 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision struck down segregation in schools as unconstitutional and overturned the 1896 ‘separate but equal’ case of Plessy v Ferguson which had legalised Jim Crow segregation. A decade later, the 1964 Civil Rights Act ended formal segregation in public facilities and protected the right to vote. Anti-miscegenation laws were finally ruled unconstitutional in the 1967 Supreme Court Case, Loving v   Crewe (2010).

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Virginia. Racial inequality persists, but the economic, political and legal structures that keep it in place have changed radically. Of course, the twentieth century problem of the ‘colour line’ was by no means drawn only across US society. The idea of immutability of racial difference, supported by racial science, was institutionalised in a variety of forms including the White Australia policy (1901–73), the German racial state (1933–45) and South African apartheid (1948–94). In these and many other countries, coercive measures were inaugurated to regulate the movement of populations defined by their supposed membership of specific racial groups. This includes laws defining people of colour as having limited rights, ‘pass laws’ restricting movement, formal segregation of residential spaces (including ghettos and townships) as well as restrictions on rights to vote, own property, share public facilities and marry or have sex across the colour line. By the end of the twentieth century formal legal divisions of the peoples of mankind were no longer tenable. The categories upon which they are based were acknowledged as arbitrary and the science and state structures that were built upon them were shown to be inhuman and unjustifiable (Kleg, 1993). The collapse of South African apartheid and establishing the universal franchise there in 1994 symbolises in some ways the final transgression of the colour line. And yet, more than a decade into the twenty-first century, racial and ethnic divisions persist in a number of forms. In this chapter we have shown that in the spheres of street policing in the ‘global city’, in the policing of movements of people across national boundaries and in the cosmopolitan prison, the colour line still persists, seemingly as deeply entrenched as ever. In 1994, Anthony Richmond, the pioneering ‘race relations’ researcher, argued that the attempt to restrict the movement of people around the world has led to a form of ‘global apartheid’. Nearly 20 years on, this pattern remains clearly visible: the poor and hungry of the global South are denied access to the resources of the global North and those that do manage to evade restriction and control, or who are the offspring of those that did, face marginalisation in the social and economic sphere, as well as criminalisation and prisonisation. Susan Smith’s work on residential segregation in housing shows how racism becomes institutionalised. This is a pervasive process sustained across a range of institutions whose procedures combine to produce a ‘mutually reinforcing pattern of racial inequality’. Organisations allocating power and resources, develop conventions which distinguish the deserving from the undeserving and the reputable from the debased, in order to help prioritise applicants queuing for goods and services. Virtually all these conventions invoke ‘racial’ attributes, tacitly or explicitly, as a criterion for exclusion or inclusion in the dispensation of scarce resources (Smith, 1989: 102).

Similar patterns of inclusion and exclusion are evident in the operation of immigration and street policing and in the prisons. In recent history, invoking racial attributes has been very explicit – the ‘whites only’ signs were taken down in the US only in the 1960s and South Africa in the 1990s. Today’s racial exclusion also has its explicit edges. The use of nationality, sometimes coded in racial terms, is used



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as a ground for targeting people for stop, questioning and search both at borders and in domestic space is in many countries (Weber and Bowling 2011, Bowling and Weber 2011). Specific immigration policing practices target migrant workers, using ‘foreign appearance’ as the ground for identity checks following other kinds of contact with police. Ethnicity and migratory status are intertwined in many cases. Officials in the Netherlands, for example, refer to their entire ethnic minority population – largely comprised of people with origins in the Maghreb or the Antilles – as ‘foreigners’ whether or not they are born in Holland. Ironically, systems created to identify ethnic minorities in Europe, and to develop targeted policies were originally for the stated purposes of integration, the promotion of equality and anti-discrimination. These same structures are now used to identify, anticipate and control the supposed threats of undocumented migration. There is an increasing trend towards a re-statement of ethnic separation and the of the supposed ‘inassimilability of migrants’. Witness, for example, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor’s statement that ‘multiculturalism has utterly failed’.13 The focus of contemporary security practices is ‘integrated management’ with high levels of surveillance and control. Much of the research in this field has focused on the relationships between police, private security, intelligence and military agencies, but the prisons provide another window into the effects of the new penology emphasising the classifying and managing of dangerous groups who cannot be ‘normalised’. Whether this relates to people detained while migrating, in breach of their conditions of entry or overstaying, or to people convicted of criminal offences, the process is driven by the precautionary logic of exclusion. The official justification for confinement is purely incapacitation for those defined as presenting a risk beyond the threshold of manageability. This process has had the effect of widening the experience of punishment. Although the official justification for detention in holding cells at airports, street level stop and search, detention in immigration centres pending removal is not to punish – these are in fact experienced as punitive as well as being obviously coercive and exclusionary. Linking the theory and practice of migration control with policing and imprisonment illustrates the ways in which penalties, quasi-penalties and other burdens can be inflicted without the need for trial or other ‘due process’ protections. Coercive powers have migrated from the criminal justice system to inhabit organisations, such as border protection, hitherto thought to be administrative but which now clearly have punitive, deterrent or incapacitative powers. The question of whether these can justifiably be seen as a criminal sanction is almost irrelevant since its effect is punitive. The incarceration, exclusion and deportation of ‘crimmigrants’ is experienced as a penalty and is also clearly used for the purposes of penality. The enforcement of global apartheid has some very damaging consequences. Even in its most benign form, it entrenches inequality and division along north/ south lines coded explicitly or implicitly in racial and ethnic categories. Racially coded penalties cause harm to the lives upon whom they are inflicted: loss of work,   BBC News, 17 October 2010.

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reputation and resources, combined in many instances with the horrific experience of forced immigration detention and deportation. This affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world each year with the resulting family separation, loss of home and so on. The most serious harms include death at the border resulting from the actions of border guards, migrants taking extreme risks leading to death by dehydration in the desert or drowning at sea, evading police raids, or the deaths caused by electric fences and landmines at the militarised border (Weber and Pickering, 2011). In its most extreme form, racialised exclusionary practices include rendition overseas of ‘terrorist suspects’ to face torture and extrajudicial execution. Taken as a whole, the effect is the immobilisation of entire communities. For Stuart Hall (1992: 359), the key question for the twenty-first century is whether the people of the world can find the ‘capacity to live with difference’. In Gilroy’s terms, the choice is between post-colonial melancholia and multicultural conviviality. To achieve the latter means that we must fashion new networks of ‘connectedness and solidarity’ that can ‘resonate across boundaries, reach across distances, and evade other cultural and economic obstacles’ (Gilroy, 2001: 5). At present, however, neo-liberal and authoritarian winds seem to be blowing us further down the wrong road. Rather than pursuing economic equality and tearing down metaphorical walls and physical fences between people, we are erecting longer, stronger and taller ones. The result entrenches difference ever more deeply within and between societies, a world polarised between a ‘gilded but insecure elite and a threatening temporarily subjugated mass’ (Reiner, 2010: 258). If justice is to be achieved in the context of a new cosmopolitan reality, a radical shift in global political economy is required. At the same time, the mechanisms of exclusion, segregation and criminalisation that have persisted into the new century must be challenged. The analysis set out in this chapter suggests that resisting the power of the coercive state – border protection, police and prisons – is a good place to start.

References Alexander, M (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, NY, The New Press). Beckford, JA, Joly, D and Khosrokhavar, F (2005) Muslims in Prison – Challenge and Change in Britain and France (Basingstoke, Palgrave). Beier, AL (1985) Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London, Methuen). Biddiss, M (1999) ‘Gobineau and the Origins of European Racism’ in M Bulmer and J Solomos (eds), Racism (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Blinder, S (2011) Deportations, Removals and Voluntary Departures from the UK (Oxford, The Migration Observatory). Bosworth, M, Bowling, B and Lee, M (2008) ‘Globalisation, ethnicity and racism’ Theoretical Criminology 12(3), 263–73.



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Bosworth, M and Guil, M (2008) ‘Governing through Migration Control: Security and Citizenship in Britain’ (2008) British Journal of Criminology 48. Bowling, B (2010) Policing the Caribbean: Transnational Security Cooperation in Practice (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Bowling, B and Phillips, C (2002) Racism, crime and justice (London, Longman). Bowling, B and Sheptycki, J (2012) Global Policing (London, Sage). Bowling, B and Weber, L (2011) ‘Stop and Search in Global Context: An overview’ Policing and Society 21(4), 480–88. Boyle, Philip and Haggerty, Kevin (2009) ‘Spectacular Security: Mega Events and the Security Complex’ International Political Sociology 3(3), 257–352. Caldeira, Teresa (2000) City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press). Castles, S and Miller, MJ (2003) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 3rd edn (New York, NY, Guilford Press). Cohen, S (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London, MacGibbon and Kee). Crewe, B (2010) The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Chevigny, P (1995) The Edge of the Knife; police violence in the Americas (New York, The New York Press). Davis, AY (2003) Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York, NY, Seven Stories Press). Davis, M (1992) City of Quartz (London, Vintage) 193. De Giorgi, A (2006) Re-Thinking the Political Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on PostFordism and Penal Politics (Aldershot, Ashgate). Du Bois, WEB (1901) ‘The Spawn of Slavery: The Convict-Lease System in the South (1901)’ in SL Gabbidon (ed), W.E.B. Du Bois on Crime and Justice: Laying the Foundations of Sociological Criminology (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1901/2007). —— (1903) The Souls of Black Folk (Harmondsworth, Penguin). Duval Smith, Alex (2008) ‘Is this the end of the Rainbow Nation’ The Observer, 25 May. Earle, R (2011) ‘Boys’ Zone Stories: Perspectives from a Young Men’s Prison’ Criminology and Criminal Justice 11(2), 129–43. Eze, E (1997) Race and the Enlightenment: a reader (Oxford, Blackwell). Franko Aas, K and Bosworth, M (eds) (2012) The Borders of Punishment (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Gabbidon, SL (2007) W.E.B. Du Bois on Crime and Justice: Laying the Foundations of Sociological Criminology (Aldershot, Ashgate). Gabbidon, SL, Greene, HT and Young, V (2001) African American Classics in Criminology and Criminal Justice (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage). Garland, D (2001) The Culture of Control (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Genders, E and Player, E (1989) Race Relations in Prison (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Gilroy, P (2001) Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Boston, Harvard University Press). —— (2006) After Empire or Postcolonial Melancholia (New York, Columbia University Press). Goldberg, DT (2002) The Racial State (Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell). Gordon, D (2001) ‘Democratic Consolidation and Community Policing: Conflicting Imperatives in South Africa’ Policing and Society 11(2), 121–50. Gould, Steven Jay (1996) The Mismeasure of Man, revised edn (New York, W.W. Norton and Co).

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Hall, S et al (1978) Policing the Crisis (London, Macmillan). Hall, S (1992) ‘New Ethncities’ in J Donald and A Rattansi, (eds) Race, Culture and Difference (London, Sage and Open University Press). Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (2010) Muslim Prisoners’ Experiences: A Thematic Review (London, HMIP). Herrnstein, RJ and Murray, C (1994) The Bell Curve; Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, The Free Press). Huey, L (2007) Negotiating Demands; the politics of Skid Row Policing in Edinburgh, San Francisco and Vancouver (Toronto, University of Toronto Press). Irwin, J (1980) Prisons in Turmoil (Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company). Jacobs, JB (1977) Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society (Chicago, Il, The University of Chicago Press). Johnston, Les and Shearing, Clifford (2003) Governing Security; Explorations in Policing and Justice (London, Routledge). Judt, T (2010) Postwar; a history of Europe in the latter half of the 20th century (New York, Penguin). Kraska, P (2007) ‘Militarization and Policing – Its Relevance to 21st Century Police’ Policing, a journal of policy and practice, 1(4), 501–13. Lacey, N (2010) ‘Differentiating among Penal States’ (2010) British Journal of Sociology 61 Loader, Ian and Walker, Neil (2004) ‘State of Denial?: Re-thinking the Governance of Security’ Punishment & Society 6(2), 221–28. Kleg, M (1993) Hate Prejudice and Racism (Albany, NY, SUNY Press). Marenin, Otwin (ed) (1996) Policing Change; Changing Policing; International Perspectives (New York, Garland Publishing). Marks, M (1999) ‘Changing Dilemmas and Dilemmas of Change: Transforming the Public Order Police Unit in Durban’ Policing and Society 9(2), 157–80. —— (2005) Transforming the Robocops: Changing Police in South Africa, (Durban, University of Kwazulu-Natal Press). Mitchell, Katharyne and Beckett, Katherine (2008) ‘Securing the Global city: Crime, consulting, risk, and ratings in the production of urban space’ Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 15(1), 75–99 NACRO (1991) Black Communities and the Probation Service: Working Together for Change (London, Nacro). Namba, M (2011) ‘“War on illegal immigrants”, national narratives and globalisation: Japanese policy and practice of police stop and question in global perspective’ Policing and Society 21(4), 432–43. Neocosmos, Michael (2010) From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Dakar, Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa CODESRIA). Newburn, T (2010) ‘Diffusion, Differentiation and Resistance in Comparative Penality’ (2010) Criminology and Criminal Justice 10. Pascoe, P (2009) What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Pearson, G (1983) Hooligan: A history of respectable fears (London, Palgrave Macmillan). Phillips, C (2008) ‘Negotiating Identities: Ethnicity and Social Relations in a Young Offenders’ Institution’ Theoretical Criminology 12. —— (forthcoming) The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity and Social Relations among Prisoners (Oxford, Oxford University Press).



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Phillips, C and Bowling, B (2002) ‘Racism, Ethnicity, Crime and Criminal Justice’ in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford, Oxford University Press) 579–619. —— and —— (2012) ‘Ethnicities, Racism, Crime and Criminal Justice’ in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 5th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Pickering, S and Weber, L (eds) (2006) Borders, Mobility and Technologies of Control (Dordrecht, Springer). Pilkington, H and Johnson, R (2003) ‘Peripheral Youth: Relations of Identity and Power in Global/Local Context’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 6. Policing and Society (2000) ‘Special Issue on Policing and Human Rights’ 10(1). Provine, DM and Sanchez, G (2011) ‘Suspecting immigrants: exploring links between racialised anxieties and expanded police powers in Arizona’ Policing and Society 21(4), 468–79. Reiner, R (1993) ‘Race, Crime and Justice: Models of Interpretation’ in LR Gelsthorpe (eds), Minority Ethnic Groups in the Criminal Justice System (Cambridge, The Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University). —— (2007) Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control (Cambridge, Polity). —— (2010) The Politics of the Police, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Richmond, AH (1994) Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism and the New World Order (New York, Oxford University Press). Robinson, WI and Harris, J (2000) ‘Towards a Global Ruling Class? Globalization and the Transnational Capitalist Class’ Science and Society 64(1), 11–54. Shearing, Clifford and Stenning, Phillip (1987) ‘“Say Cheese”: The Disney Order that is Not so Mickey Mouse’ in CD Shearing and P Stenning (eds), Private Policing (Newbury Pk Calif, Sage) 317–23. Sheptycki J (1997) ‘Insecurity, Risk Suppression and Segregation; Some Reflections on Policing in the Transnational Age’ Theoretical Criminology 1(3), 303–16. —— (2007a) ‘High Policing in the Security Control Society’ Policing 1(1), 70–79. —— (2007b) ‘Criminology and the Transnational Condition; a contribution to political sociology’ International Political Sociology 1(3), 391–405. Simon, J (2007) Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Studies in Crime and Public Policy (New York, NY, Oxford University Press). Singh, Anne-Marie (2005) ‘Some Critical Reflections on the Governance of Crime in Post-Apartheid South Africa’ in J Sheptycki and A Wardak (eds), Transnational and Comparative Criminology (London, Routledge-Cavendish). Sklair, Leslie (2009) ‘The transnational capitalist class and the politics of capitalist globalization’ in Samir Dasgupta and Jan Nederveen Pieterse (eds), Politics of globaliza­ tion (London, Sage) 82–97. Smith, A (1987) The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, Blackwell). —— (2003) Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Smith, SJ (1989) The Politics of ‘race’ and residence (London, Polity). Spinks, Charlotte (2001) A New Apartheid? Urban Spatiality, (Fear of) Crime and Segregation in Cape Town, South Africa (Houghton St, London, London School of Economics, Development Studies Institute).

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4 Developments in Police Research: Views from Across the North Sea BOB HOOGENBOOM and MAURICE PUNCH

Both of us have been involved in researching and teaching the police within the criminal justice area for several decades. This chapter traces our involvement in policing and reflects on how research on this area has altered; our perspective is one which looks in part at the UK but primarily examines the Dutch situation. The chapter has four sections; first Maurice’s view as an insider-outsider; second, Bob’s critical insider’s view as an internationally oriented academic, but one trained in the Netherlands; third, we comment on significant international developments in police research, and finally there are some concluding remarks. Two introductory comments are necessary. First, research from North America and the UK has been used by other societies as a key reference point. Each society will, however, have its own specific focus and flavour, filtering that material to suit its own societal context and academic culture: that filtering process also occurs in the Netherlands. Second, the work of Robert Reiner has been both a major source for this transfer of knowledge and understanding, and an inspiration for us and for our colleagues in the Netherlands.

I.  Maurice Punch’s view I became interested in policing as a research area through teaching police officers in the early 1970s at Essex University. The local constabulary was sending officers to study and this led to my first collaborative article (Punch and Naylor, 1973). Police research in Britain was then in its infancy, with Michael Banton’s (1964) comparative study of police forces in Scotland and the USA and Maureen Cain’s work (1973) being the exceptions. Most academics looked west to the USA for guidance and inspiration.

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A. USA Much of the early work in America was conducted on low-level, front-line policing in urban settings. The pioneers were Skolnick (1966), Bittner (1967) and Westley (1970), closely followed by Rubinstein (1973), Manning (1977), Van Maanen (1973) and Wilson (1978). Ethnographic research with participant-observation by solo researchers in the high crime areas of American cities was the common model. Fieldwork would be conducted locally, Bayley (1976) being an exception, with comparative research in Japan and India. Two insights emerge from this work. On the one hand that many officers broke the disciplinary rules and the law; and frequently did so on a regular basis. They applied discretion, surprising and dismaying researchers in equal measure; they used excessive force on occasion; and many were open to free meals and gratuities. This confirmed the widely held negative image of policing. On the other hand the portraits were enlightening about the intrinsic dilemmas of the work and how often street knowledge and the ‘cop code’ led to practical solutions. The officers were seen as skilled street-corner professionals solving problems through a palette of responses to suit the occasion. In Bittner’s (1967) study, looking at policing ‘skid row’, the patrolman was a shrewd, street-wise mastodon, keeping order on his territory. And it was always a ‘he’. For researchers in the early 1970s, the US dominated. Essential reading for young acolytes consisted of the founding fathers – Skolnick, Bittner and Westley – but also the work of Reiss (1971), Chambliss and Seidman (1971), Black (1980), Marx (1988) Sherman (1964, 1978), Muir (1977), Quinney (1970) and Miller (1973). In time, the methods and slant of the material became less reliant on ethnography and contained survey data; the Police Foundation in Washington D.C. engaged in action research, including the renowned Kansas City Preventive Patrol project (Police Foundation, 1974). Goldstein’s (1979) work on ‘problem oriented policing’ (POP) gave a methodology to new-style ‘community oriented policing’ (COP) and the early models of COP and POP transferred across the Atlantic and far afield. American policing, despite its problems and lack of institutional cohesion with many tiny forces, remained a rich source of ideas and innovation. For police practitioners and academics in the 1970s America was clearly the land of the leading scholars, and of research, publications and organisational innovation. But it also remained the land of violence, discrimination and corruption in policing with major scandals in a range of cities (Punch, 2009). And at times the problems of urban crime seemed near insuperable.

B.  Crossing the North Sea Despite the intellectual pull of the US I went east in 1973 on sabbatical leave to the Netherlands. With the help of inspector Wim Broer I studied the work of



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community beat officers in Rotterdam, focusing on the social role of the police (Punch, 1979b). A year later, several weeks were spent with the Amsterdam Police in the Warmoesstraat Station in the city centre. In 1975 I moved to the University of Utrecht, and subsequently was offered a professorship at Nyenrode University in Breukelen, becoming a permanent resident in the Netherlands. The research in Warmoesstraat lasted five years (Punch, 1979a and 1985); it relied on qualitative methods with a symbolic interactionist perspective. This methodological and theoretical approach with fieldwork was rare in the Netherlands and in Continental Europe. Some saw it as methodologically suspect and not ‘scientific’, while for many Dutch social scientists the police were to be condemned and not researched. I thought it strange in the mid-1970s in Amsterdam when policing was a major topic of controversy that no-one in a large Sociology Institute ventured outside the university walls to study the police operating in the vibrant but crime-ridden red-light district surrounding the Institute. Since that period my interest in policing has been intertwined with two Dutch police officers, Wim Broer and Kees van der Vijver. Both joined the police during a period of turbulence in the late 1960s, studied and obtained degrees and became influential change agents for policing on secondment to the Ministry of the Interior. Wim has since played a leading role in Dutch policing while Kees became the director of ‘SMVP’ – literally ‘Foundation for Society, Safety and Police’ but otherwise known as the ‘Dutch Police Foundation’ – and Professor of Police Studies at the University of Twente. Bob Hoogenboom emerged in the second generation of police scholars. In the mid-1970s the Netherlands was in the grip of rampant progressivism in social and political life. The underlying paradigm in criminal justice was fundamentally different from the USA, UK and neighbouring countries. There was ‘regulated tolerance’ (Brants, 1999) regarding drugs, prostitution, pornography and homosexuality and a belief in rehabilitation, with remarkably low prison sentences. This is well portrayed in Downes’ comparative study, Contrasts in Tolerance (1988). The police I encountered rarely used violence and were not seemingly corrupt; and the views of many senior officers were enlightened and tolerant. Police chiefs, prison governors and ministerial officials all supported lenient enforcement policies, decarceration and legalising of soft drugs. The fact that the country had been occupied by the Nazis (1940–45), that segments of the police and the judiciary had played a dubious role during the Occupation and that some post-war reformers had been involved in resisting the repressive regime and/or been imprisoned, doubtless played a role in creating this critical climate. It took some time for me – adjusting to a new society and entering the intricate, many-layered reality of Amsterdam policing in the Warmoesstraat Station and beyond – to discover there were covert, deviant levels to Dutch policing (Punch 1979a, 1985). Rather like the UK, there was in the early 1970s little police research in the Netherlands. Criminology had yet to develop substantially in the universities. Serious scholars went to Leuven or Gent, which were within easy reach, or else to the US. Although there was a number of stimulating individuals in the criminal

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justice area they existed under the leaden wings of Law. Slowly interest in criminal justice began to develop with work in the ‘WODC’ – the Research Centre of the Ministry of Justice (equivalent to the Home Office Research Unit in the UK). The WODC became central in funding research in criminal justice and policing, much of which was based on surveys and/or interviews; observational studies remained rare. But there was a growing body of empirical research and increasing interaction with networks abroad – notably when the late Josine Junger-Tas took over the WODC.

C. Changing Police An important milestone was the report by Eric Nordholt, Ries Straver and Jan Wiarda (POS, 1977) Politie in Verandering/A Changing Police. The turbulent changes in Dutch society in the 1960s had revealed the Dutch Police to be progressive on the surface but rather rigid and conservative underneath; and somewhat bewildered as to how to respond to the radicalism sweeping the country. Straver has described the unreflective, rigidity of much policing in the 1960s. As a newcomer he proposed ‘team policing’ to his chief who dismissed the idea abruptly with ‘We don’t want Yugoslavian workers’ councils here’! (Zwart, 2004: 71). But a new generation of progressive officers – ‘young dogs’ – was emerging. The English expression ‘young Turks’ would fit ill in a socio-political climate which – with the arrival of populist, anti-immigrant politicians a decade ago – exhibits a measure of xenophobia with increasingly virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric (van Swaaningen, 2004). The new guard were widely read and determined to reform the police organisation; A Changing Police provided the blueprint for renewal in Dutch policing for many years. Its main theme was the need for the police to have legitimacy: policing needed to become more democratic both internally and externally. The second half of the 1970s thus ushered in a period of persistent demands from within and without for change in policing. This also helped to focus interest on policing as an object of study. Broer and van der Vijver, then at the Ministry of the Interior in the Research and Development Department in The Hague, were highly influential in that process of change. Stimulated by the ideas in A Changing Police and American publications, they focused on ‘unfreezing’ policing through a series of action research projects on team policing and area policing (effectively the ideas of ‘COP’). Notably, all of this policy-relevant work emanating from The Hague was conducted with academic supervision and was widely disseminated. In a relatively ‘small’ society like the Netherlands a few crucial gatekeepers for research and publications can act as catalysts for change. Broer, van der Vijver, Straver, Nordholt and Wiarda and others not only helped to spread the message of reform though teaching at the Dutch Police Academy (NPA) for educating senior officers, but also aided in fundamentally altering the style and structure of Dutch policing. The propulsion they gave to research, publications and change has been



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crucial both in developing policing and in making Dutch policing open to academic research. And the initiative came largely through central government funding and a few academically formed members of the criminal justice system. For instance, Broer and van der Vijver helped sponsor with funds from the Ministries of the Interior and Justice an international conference hosted at Nyenrode University in 1980. This attracted both police officers and many notable scholars from abroad, including Robert Reiner (Punch, 1983). The conference helped to strengthen the link with American academics and with the researchers of the Police Foundation; several of them – Wycoff, Sherman, Kelling – were invited back on a number of occasions and reciprocal visits were made to the US; international links which have in more recent years ossified. The growth of research on criminal justice and policing in the Netherlands began to develop with funding from the two ministries, especially the WODC at the Ministry of Justice under the regimes of Wouter Buikhuisen, Dato Steenhuis, Josine Junger-Tas and Jan van Dijk. Much of this work could be typified as ‘governmental science’ with ostensibly a strong policy-relevant orientation and a focus on survey and interview-based research. Another important institution in generating and lubricating police research was the SMVP. Thus a genealogy can be charted from A Changing Police and the implementation of team policing and community-oriented policing in Haarlem, Amsterdam and the other forces to the work of SMVP. Both Broer and van der Vijver played a role in researching Haarlem and in implementing change in Amsterdam. Later van der Vijver moved to become the Director of the Police Foundation, at first a small scale and low-key organisation. Slowly and surely it has built up both an agenda for a community-oriented, public-oriented and multi-agency style of policing with an indisputably Dutch flavour, and generated a stream of projects, seminars and publications (Punch, van der Vijver and van Dijk, 1998; Punch, Hoogenboom and van der Vijver, 2008). The Dutch Police Foundation has also enjoyed a more solid impact than the Police Foundation in the UK which has not always been widely supported by practitioners. In contrast, the Dutch Police Foundation’s seminars and conferences are well attended; they attract police from all levels, as well as other criminal justice and private sector professionals. Running through this work are a number of themes: analysing the interaction between the public’s feelings on, and the agencies responsible for, safety; a vision of policing as close and responsive to the public, whilst being intimately involved in the community and stimulators of initiatives from citizens; unravelling the nature of the police organisation, and its engagement with the public; and how technological and infrastructural change in the police can be implemented successfully (Punch, van der Vijver and Zoomer, 2002). From A Changing Police onwards it has been accepted that in order to function effectively in a democratic society the police as an institution has to have legitimacy with the public and other stakeholders. This echoes the ‘policing by consent’ paradigm in Britain and is seen as a leitmotif for a socially engaged, restrained and accountable police that fits the Dutch political and social culture. As documented above, there has been a relatively small coterie

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of police chiefs, government officials and academics who have taken input from abroad and shaped it into a distinctively Dutch style of policing; and that relatively small network has been highly influential during some 30 years. Since those days in the mid-1970s, with very little police research, there have been major advances: the range of subjects, methods and publications in Police Studies has expanded; the use of qualitative, observational studies has also increased; and far more research is being conducted by women in the Netherlands. But the Netherlands is not alone in this. In the UK research on criminal justice has similarly expanded exponentially, with the Home Office Research and Development Unit playing an important role; Critical Criminology and the deviancy perspective have been enhanced by substantial empirical research on the police, including, most notably, that of Robert Reiner (1978, 1991, 2007, 2010). There are now over 100 universities in the UK; the majority have programmes in criminal justice and several universities – notably Cardiff and Portsmouth – have developed a strong orientation to policing. Many senior police officers in the UK have more than one university degree and other officers are studying for degrees through structured relationships with universities or through distance learning (Lee and Punch, 2005).

II.  Bob Hoogenboom’s View: Towards a Sociology of Dutch Police Research A.  First Generation: Former Police Officers as ‘Crossovers’ From the early 1980s until recently police research in the Netherlands was dominated by police officers who either left the police early in their career to pursue academic interests or combined policing with academic work. These ‘crossovers’ of robes and codes are not unique to the Netherlands (see, in the UK, Waddington (1991), Holdaway (1979) and Young (1991)). But one by one the dominant researcher generation is retiring. Who were they? Reiner’s work (2010) in describing and analysing the cultural traits of police provides an answer relating to their shared characteristics. The ‘capo di tutti capo’ is without doubt Cyrille Fijnaut; recently retired, he is the best known police researcher in the country. His PhD (Fijnaut, 1979) on the history of policing in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards is testament both to his indefatigability and to the historical and comparative nature of his work. And, like Robert Reiner (!) his house is an impressive police library (a library that is to be moved partly to the Dutch Police Academy and partly to the National Archive) and the product of a life dedicated to his subject. Fijnaut’s preoccupation is both admirable and unsettling. In the words of Robert Reiner, police officers are very much morally driven: policing is not just a job from nine to five, but ‘it’s a sect, something worthwhile doing, a way of life’. One senses



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the same moral drive with Fijnaut. On the other hand, intuitively I feel the need to create some distance between my own academic interests and my social life. Fijnaut studied at the Police Academy – a four-year programme for future senior officers – and combined police training with studying Philosophy and Criminology at Leuven University in Belgium. He worked briefly as a police inspector, left the force and chose academia. Fijnaut and the other ‘crossovers’ retain some of the characteristics of the police culture analysed by Robert: morally driven, atheoretical, action-oriented, cynical and even somewhat suspicious. Although they may endeavour to be critical as academics, deep down they remain loyal in diverse degrees to their professional roots. Through their formative period at the Academy they were initiated into the police profession and culturally socialised along with their peers; their ‘year groups’ at the Academy form strong ties that bind them throughout their entire career. Since 1988 I have lectured at the Police Academy and have gradually come to understand a little of the sociology of Dutch policing by observing, interacting and drinking with young aspiring officers, the latter being a somewhat underestimated ‘method’ of academic research (Van Maanen, 1986). The social bonds are very strong and loyalty as a cultural trait runs through their work, thinking, writing and even their veins. With the exception of one of them, Jan Naeyé, they have rarely reached the independent and critical stance of Robert and many other academics in the UK and the US. Fijnaut, however, endeavoured to combine his academic work – along with involvement in a number of governmental committees – with a reasonably critical stance. His book on a DEA-infiltration operation in Belgium in the early 1980s (Fijnaut, 1983), and especially his work with others on the limits of police effectiveness regarding the levels of crime, is challenging and provocative. Here the political function of the police is used as a theoretical framework; and his analysis of the limited effects of policing on the very nature and character of crime levels in society resonates with theoretical and empirical findings in international police research. Kees van der Vijver is another ‘crossover’ to sociology. In 1993 he published his PhD on the relationship between the police and the public (van der Vijver, 1993). Working on secondment as a researcher for the Ministry of the Interior he, together with Wim Broer, helped to introduce community policing in the Netherlands in the mid-1980s. As noted above, their influence on policies and policing was substantial, but, as importantly, they were also strongly research oriented. I started my ‘police career’ with a placement in the research unit of the Ministry of the Interior in 1983, and in 1984 was offered a contract as a researcher. It was Broer and van der Vijver who initiated me into conducting police research. In the early 1990s, moreover, van der Vijver became Director of the Dutch Police Foundation. Here his excellent work in setting the agenda for safety and security in the Netherlands with projects, conferences and expert-meetings moved him away from ‘academic’ police research to more applied work. The academic work was picked up again from 1996 when he became Professor in Police Studies at the University of Twente. Here again he conducted research projects primarily on aspects of community policing in the widest sense (van der Vijver and Terpstra, 2004).

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Another cultural trait mentioned by Robert (practical, down-to-earth antitheoretical) runs to an extent through the work of several of these ‘crossovers’. There is hardly any theoretical connection between the already rich tradition on policing with regard to political functioning, order keeping as the core, the myths of policing in relation to effects on levels of crime, the ‘difficult’ relations between political parties and the elite of the police, etc. Compared to Robert’s work and that of others, much of the Dutch work comes across as largely descriptive and only occasionally with some light, theoretical brush-strokes. Piet van Reenen is yet another former police officer; he published his PhD in 1979 on the dynamics of police violence in Dutch history. van Reenen analysed the political function of the police and the structural use of violence by the state in times of political turmoil, combining historical and political science lenses to understand policing. van Reenen is also a part-time professor of Police and Human Rights at Utrecht University and has returned to his PhD theme (van Reenen, 2010). This is an analysis of the police as a ‘threat system’, challenging common-sense wisdom in society and the police research community itself, emphasising the role of the state monopoly over violence. Van Reenen reconnects here again with his early work but also taps into the classics of policing. Both the PhDs of van Reenen and Fijnaut were an inspiration to me during my time studying history at Erasmus University. That led to a move into the field of police research in 1983. I used Fijnaut’s theoretical model for the historical dynamics in European police systems (political function, primary order keeping and intelligence gathering, gradual centralisation and increasing international cooperation) for my dissertation on the history of the Rotterdam Police Force between 1880– 1940 (Hoogenboom, 1984). Isolation and machismo are two other traits Robert mentions as being pivotal to our understanding of police culture. As academics Fijnaut and van Reenen fit the isolationist point. Although both have been involved in research teams, and of course have been members of professional staffs of university departments and other organisations, basically they work alone. Machismo is perhaps too strong a word for this but they have powerful egos and strong personalities and dominate many a discussion. Furthermore, neither has founded a ‘school’ associated with their work; indeed, there has not been a concentration of talent and resources to create a centre of excellence in policing and criminal justice in the Netherlands. Solidarity is another cultural trait mentioned by Robert. Jan Naeyé, yet another crossover, left the Amsterdam force and after graduating became involved in an independent capacity in complaints procedures against the Amsterdam police force (Naeyé, 1979). Doing this Naeyé challenged the internal solidarity both on a professional and on a social level; and this had some repercussions in that he was accused of ‘fouling the nest’. It was – and still is – not an easy thing in the Netherlands to emerge from the warm and secure ties that bind police officers and criticise your own organisation. He pursued his line of interest and conducted a series of research projects on police violence and violence against the police (Timmer, Naeyé and van der Steeg, 1996). Naeyé is the only ‘crossover’ who has kept an ongoing structural



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interest in the exercise and misuse of power by the police and justice system (Naeyé. 1995).

B.  Enter the ‘Civilian’ In 1994 I was interviewed on TV about my PhD ‘The Police Complex’ (Hoogenboom, 1994) and pointed to the origins in 1979 of police research with the PhDs of two former police officers, van Reenen and Fijnaut. The next day a certain Maurice Punch informed me, a historian, about my lack of historical knowledge of his work in Amsterdam! It was he, a civilian, who started police research in the Netherlands. The Dutch term for civilian is ‘burgher’ and it is used by Dutch police in a largely disparaging way to accentuate the distance between their caste and the public. Indeed, wherever I go abroad I’m asked regularly by police audiences, usually in the opening exchanges, whether or not I have a police background and if am I one of the ‘club’. Collegial relationships, let alone friendships, between the ‘crossovers’ and the ‘burghers’ have never developed along especially warm lines. But an increasing number of the latter have entered the field of police research as in the late 1980s the Ministry of Justice created the WODC and started the substantial financing of criminal justice related research. Moreover, the research department of the Ministry of the Interior also started hiring researchers. My first three research projects for them were on regulatory bodies, private security and private investigations. Largely by chance, I had become interested in ‘policing’ outside the criminal justice system and was much influenced by the ground-breaking work in the 1980s of Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning (1987) on private security. Also in 1988 I started teaching at the Police Academy and have done so ever since. In my teaching of future and serving officers and in my research Robert’s books, particularly on chief constables and the Politics of the Police, have been my constant travelling companions. Since the early 1980s there has been an expansion in the areas of policing and criminal justice. For instance, the Law and Criminology departments at Erasmus University (Rotterdam), Utrecht and Leyden started doing criminological research, sometimes with specific police-related questions. In the last decade Erasmus University, Leyden and the Free University of Amsterdam have started collaborating in a joint criminology programme attracting a large number of students. Crime had become a ‘hot topic’ in the Low Countries. Furthermore, at Leyden University in the late 1980s Professor Uri Rosenthal started the ‘Crisis Research Team’ (referred to as the ‘COT’) with a wide range of projects. And from 1988 until 1994 I was a member of the COT. Throughout the years the COT performed many evaluations of large-scale public order incidents such as the Heizel Stadium disaster in Brussels, and of strikes, demonstrations and football hooliganism, describing and analysing operational procedures, communication issues, and strategic and tactical failings of the police, other agencies and administrators. The research at

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times has been highly critical of the professional level of the police and others; it is usually taken most seriously by politicians and professionals (Rosenthal, Charles and Hart, 1989). Crime, safety and security entered the political and research agenda in the late 1980s. This led to a stream of academic and commercial research for the national government, local administrations, the private sector and regional police forces. In 1999 the Ministry of the Interior also set up a programme for police research to compete with the WODC at the Ministry of Justice. This ‘Police Research Fund’ has sponsored research of various methodological styles, with commercial and university researchers and ranging from policy-relevant to more fundamental work. The programme was recently evaluated and criticised for its lack of a consistent (theoretical) research agenda and for its foremost policy-oriented nature. In a sense this sums up succinctly the field more widely. There are lots of actors, including private and commercial agencies, but with little coherence or coordination. Then yet another actor, the Dutch Police Academy, entered the field. This had been primarily for educating the future elite, but has of late become a powerful, many-faceted institution. In a rapid expansion policy since 2004/05 the Academy now employs some 13 readers (lectors in Dutch). Non-university higher educational institutions which are not universities are not allowed to appoint professors but can appoint readers (taking ‘reader’ in the British system as the near equivalent to lector). They work half-time at the Academy, are all civilians and academics, and their duties are to develop knowledge in their particular field. They cover areas such as intelligence, surveillance, crisis management, public order, criminal investigations, cyber-security, financial crimes, local community policing, the history of policing and forensic investigations. It is clear that the Academy would like to play a prominent role in promoting research within this rapidly developing field, jostling alongside other diverse stakeholders.

C.  Policy Oriented, Ad Hoc and Action Driven Much of the research conducted by the aforementioned actors is ad hoc, policy driven and lacks theoretical depth. To a degree this is related to the fact that much funding has been channelled from central government and that many of the early influential actors were ‘crossover’ practitioners from criminal justice or held dual careers as part-time academics, continuing to function inside the police or prosecution service. Moreover the police studies area has since become diluted with vague notions and broad sweeping concepts like ‘safety and security’, ‘integral security’, ‘public private partnership’ and more recently ‘nodal security’. These all have the characteristics of what Robert calls ‘neophilia’ (Reiner, 2007). Theoretical depth is largely missing and the use of ‘feel good’ notions like ‘safety and security’ results in conversations between financiers and researchers, and within the research community – if they speak at all with each other – in quasi-‘sacred’ phrases. Above all, nobody wants to offend anyone; it’s very much ‘live and let live’. Also a powerful



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‘production logic’ has entered the field with quite substantial budgets involved. The Netherlands has effectively witnessed the emergence of ‘a security-academiccorporate complex’ which has an internal political/commercial rationale to keep it moving. Police research in the Netherlands has become an over-occupied terrain. The first generation of ‘crossover’ researchers has been supplemented with many other actors entering the field. From the turn of this century higher education institutions – the equivalent of the old polytechnics in the UK – started teaching ‘safety and security’ in places like The Hague, Leeuwarden, Tilburg, Rotterdam and Enschede (some being cities without a university). Hundreds of students now take courses on safety and security-related topics as a popular, general subject unrelated to their professional futures. Furthermore, after 9/11 in the US and especially after the two dramatic political killings in the Netherlands of the politician Fortuyn (2003) and the writer/film-maker van Gogh (2004), ‘security’ in many shapes and colours is suddenly everywhere. It is in educational programmes, research programmes and especially in the consultancy sector. Large consultancy firms like Price Waterhouse Coopers, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Berenschot and dozens of other smaller ones have set up safety and security units. They are involved on many levels in the Dutch public sector with consultancy assignments ranging from IT-security, local safety and security programs, and intelligence-led policing to detecting Muslim radicalisation in the inner-cities. From an academic point of view this is damaging for our cumulative body of knowledge because most of the reports, studies and findings generated by this booming business are never published. Within this context I would like to draw attention to two other elements of the sociology of researchers in the Netherlands. First, I discuss the ‘non-intervention principle’ and the resulting lack of an academic debate. Second, I discuss the ‘inward-looking’ nature of the research, which in many ways is still stuck in the traditional paradigm clinging to the ‘monopoly’ of state-organised policing by limiting research to public policing.

D.  Non-intervention Principle There is hardly any academic debate among the previously mentioned first generation police researchers; or, for that matter, with the other ‘civilian’ researchers. This absolute lack of critical debate and of a professional academic culture is striking. Professional scepticism and professional criticism among the broader community is hardly developed at all. If criticism is given this tends to be taken personally. Of course this is something of a caricature: there are some critical discussions but overall the Dutch police research climate is ruled by ‘live and let live’. We meet at conferences, play our Goffman-like acts, and make the usual sneaky remarks disguised in well-spoken sentences, but there is a structural lack of professional debate on the theoretical foundations of the field itself.

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Suspicion, another cultural trait of the police culture, is again probably too strong a word here but there is some deep-seated distrust among the elite, and between them and the rest of the research community. Robert’s ‘front-and backstage’ realities of the police culture, drawing on Goffman, can also be applied here. Front-stage we listen to each other at meetings and conferences, and sometimes (but not that much) we read each other’s work: in short we play the game. Backstage its ‘Coronation Street meets Tony Soprano’: a combination of stereotyping, gossip and venom. This lack of professional debate is frustrating for those of us with a broader orientation. But perhaps ‘fragmentation’ covers the current situation even better. There are dozens of professional magazines: the 25 regional police forces each have one, as does the Police Academy, while the Ministry of Justice publishes the ‘WODC’series; the Dutch Society of Criminology has a journal, and recently a number of criminologists started a new journal called Cultural Criminology. Many interest groups and institutions, like the Police Foundation and the National Prevention Institute, have their own publications and also digital outlets. The ‘production logic’ for a relatively small population is overwhelming. The many outlets have taken on the shape, form and complexity of a range of patchwork quilts: all with different colours, different designs and with different ‘crime, safety and security’ languages.

E.  Traditional scope  Crime and crime control have been and still are very much limited to the formal criminal justice system. Whereas ‘policing’, in the sense that Robert uses it in his work, involves a multitude of semi-public and private actors; yet the research community by and large has neglected the changing patterns of policing. Fijnaut (1985), in contrast, looked into the future of policing in two ground-breaking articles in the Dutch Police Journal and foresaw the interweaving of public policing, regulatory bodies and private security. Two decades before the new wave of ‘nodal security’ he had pinpointed the ongoing fragmentation of the police function. But whereas many lament the demise of public policing Fijnaut predicted increasing forms of cooperation. This 1985 prediction was the inspiration for my PhD thesis The Police Complex: On the cooperation between the police, regulatory bodies and private investi­ gations (Hoogenboom, 1994). I concluded that the three ‘police systems’ operated in three different realities. There was cooperation on different levels; but legal obligations and tasks, legal powers, objectives and, for instance, cultures differ enormously. This ‘interweaving’ and the blurring of boundaries in different research projects and writings has been a focus of my own recent work (2010). In many ways I feel the hard-won sociological lessons police research taught us through the classics are slipping through our fingers in the Netherlands. Although police research, and safety and security research, has proliferated the results are highly diffuse. More is not always better. I think we have to plough back again in



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time and to our body of knowledge in the classics to understand the political function of policing and in so doing move away from an intrinsically benign focus on community policing and move more into Robert’s ‘factual policing’. At the same time this function must include the ongoing interweaving taking place in the real world. I made the case for this in my inaugural lecture at the Free University Bringing the police back in: Notes on the lost and found character of the police in police studies (2009); the influence of Robert’s work ran throughout my lecture.

III. Comment In this section we shall focus on three factors that have become apparent since the early 1970s. First, the balance of power in police research has shifted away from North America. Clearly several significant figures remain there but it is noticeable that most of these are long-established academics, including Bayley, Brodeur, Mastrofski, Weitzer, Weisbrud, Sherman (who is now in the UK at Cambridge), Manning and Skogan. A number are remarkably prolific but there does not appear to be a new generation of similar calibre to take on their mantle. The same can be said for the Netherlands: the first generation of police researchers has not passed the torch to a new, comparable generation. In terms of fresh ideas and quality of output the best material in our opinion now comes largely from the UK, where a generation of creative and prolific criminal justice academics has arisen, a number of whom have contributed to this Festschrift. They can draw on the heritage of Jock Young, David Garland (now in New York), Robert Reiner, Terence Morris, Paul Rock, Laurie Taylor, David Downes, Ian Taylor and Stan Cohen. Together with a body of influential women academics the accumulated corpus of these UK cohorts is more stimulating and wide-ranging than almost anything coming out of the US. British academics in this area tend to have a much broader and critical orientation to society, politics and the state than their counterparts in the US (Holdaway and Rock, 1998); and this is particularly dominant in Robert’s work. Typically the writings of Robert and others are suffused with issues of class, gender, disadvantage and discriminatory practices in policing and criminal justice with links to political economy and the role of media. At times academic work in the UK has also had a major influence on governmental policy which aims to be evidence based. But ‘law and order’ has become such a battleground in the UK between the two main political parties to see who can be toughest on tackling crime, that policy is sometimes not based on the research findings but more on public opinion and moral panics. This in turn is strongly influenced by populist campaigns in the tabloid newspapers for tougher enforcement and longer prison sentences reflecting punitiveness and the demonisation of out-groups (Reiner, 2007; Tonry, 2004). Second, another development has been around a few key figures from the University of Toronto, which had one of the strongest departments of Criminology

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in North America. A few years ago several of its multicultural staff moved abroad. Janet Chan (originally from Hong Kong) had already moved to Australia and was joined by Clifford Shearing (originally from South Africa); Philip Stenning (originally from the UK) went to New Zealand, returned to the UK and has recently moved to Australia; Richard Ericson, a Canadian, took up a position at Oxford but returned to Canada (where he has since tragically died). The wider significance of this is that these mobile international scholars with backgrounds and experience in more than one society have helped move the disproportionate research attention paid to Anglo-American society and shifted it towards the Southern Hemisphere with particular attention focused on Australia and South Africa. One of the links here has been the move of Shearing from Toronto to Australia and then back to South Africa and the research networks he has created and the work he has stimulated. Indeed, the cross-cultural shifts of these peripatetic ‘wild geese’ emanating from Toronto convey more broadly that scholars of policing and criminal justice are operating globally, study societies other than their own and open up new areas. Importantly, this has acted as a catalyst to foster conceptual and theoretical advances in the field (for example, Garland (2001), Loader and Walker (2007), Bayley and Shearing (2001), with their attention to the fragmentation of public policing, Shearing and Stenning (1987) on the rise of private policing, Ericson and Haggerty (1997) on policing the risk society, and Shearing and Johnston (2003) on the governance of security). Third, police research used to be the monopoly of BWMs – Boring White Males (we grant Robert an exemption on the ‘boring’ count!). But women have been taking a prominent role in police research including Monique Marks (Marks, 2005), Jenny Fleming (Fleming and Wood, 2006) and Jennifer Wood (Wood and Shearing, 2007) who have been linked to Shearing, Chan and others from the Toronto Centre for Criminology and who have conducted research in Australia and South Africa. Following the early work of Cain (1973) – and of Martin (1980) in the US – substantial work has been conducted in the UK by women who have opened up new topics and new perspectives in criminal justice research. Frances Heidensohn (1985) deserves an exceptional mention as an influential early front-runner. In addition to this body of women there has been the emergence of young, ‘transcontinental’ female scholars who readily cross cultures, aided by the ease of travel and the opening of research opportunities. An example of the mobile, multicultural, female scholar is Julia Hornberger (2007). Originally from Germany she completed her PhD in Utrecht, based on fieldwork in South Africa on transplanting a human rights approach to policing. Another example is Mercedes Hinton; an American who gained her PhD at Cambridge, was then based at the LSE before returning to the USA. Researchers like her with language skills are pushing the boundaries of police research away from the preponderance of work in Englishspeaking countries. Mercedes Hinton has studied police reform in Argentina and Brazil (Hinton, 2006); and with Tim Newburn (Hinton and Newburn, 2009) has published a collection of papers on policing ‘developing societies’. Within Europe Paddy Rawlinson (2010), from LSE but now at Monash University in Australia, and



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Penny Green, originally from Australia but now at King’s College London, have studied criminal justice in Russia and state crime respectively (Green and Ward, 2004). Furthermore, a number of women have changed cultures and brought new perspectives to the UK including Susanne Karstedt (Germany), Betsy Stanko (USA), Maggy Lee (Hong Kong) and Sharon Shalev (Israel). Partly through their enriching influence, police and criminal justice research is becoming more feminised but also more transnational and comparative in scope. There is a lesson here for young researchers: ‘Learn languages and go South, or East, young woman!’ Obviously this development regarding mobility holds true for males as well and, as mentioned above, David Bayley conducted comparative research early in his career, as did Michael Banton. Bayley has returned to it with work on policing abroad in peace-keeping missions following armed conflict and/or regime change (Bayley, 2006; 2007). Increasingly law enforcement has become a global industry with ordinary officers – and not just liaison officers, UN contingents and DEA agents (Nadelmann, 1993) – scattered throughout the world in training functions or in support roles for national or international missions. The topic of transnational criminal justice and policing has been opened up especially by Sheptycki (2000) and Bowling and Sheptycki (2012). However, while it is enticing to go to exotic locations, we still know remarkably little of policing in European countries within easy ‘commuting’ distance, including Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Greece. There is, then, a trend towards comparative work and a transnational perspective; but the difficulty remains that most social scientists focus primarily on their own society. Dutch criminal justice academics are brought up with several languages and typically travel widely, yet are nevertheless geared primarily to Dutch society and to writing in Dutch. The latter severely limits the dissemination of their work. Also Dutch academic culture differs from that in most Anglo-American universities and is at times somewhat atomised, parochial and incestuous; and, as outlined above, it has recently become strongly influenced by commercial motives and shifting institutional interests. Part of this limiting perspective is related to ‘small’ societies with a limited number of key actors who produce local knowledge for local consumption. Indeed, it is important to appreciate that academics abroad are not really the ‘same as us’ except they speak another language; anyone who has spent considerable time at a university abroad will appreciate this. Academic institutions vary cross-culturally not only in organisational structure and culture but also in relation to notions of ‘science’ and definitions of valid research; the boundaries of disciplines; the emphasis on the dissemination of knowledge and the weight given to publications; the attention paid to teaching and to students; the interaction between scholars and the sense of creating an academic and cultural community; and the openness to new ideas, critical minds and paradigm shifts. And they vary on humour; on the Continent the pursuit of science can be a pompous and sombre business and, much like a German joke, is not always a laughing matter. The conceptual vocabulary of criminal justice and police studies, moreover, is shaped by

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highly specific national elements which will impact on the unique academic style in this area for each country. We have tried to convey what that looks like for the Netherlands where you see, ironically, internationally oriented scholars who can also be remarkably, if understandably, ‘parochial’. Yet we dare to claim that a measure of parochialism afflicts even some of our esteemed colleagues in London. These are largely focused on policing in Britain; indeed, the UK means for most of them England if not London; Scotland and Northern Ireland are rarely mentioned. Susanne Karstedt, originally from Germany, remarked that the Oxford Handbook of Criminology should be renamed the Oxford Handbook of British Criminology; and that she can do little with it when teaching on the Continent. Moreover, a significant limitation for many British academics is weak foreign language skills. It is often graduate students or junior faculty from different cultures who are able to use their mother tongue or draw on a multilingual background to penetrate to other, less researched societies. Belur (2010), for instance, studied police ‘encounters’ (shoot-outs with criminals) in India for her PhD at LSE based on her experiences as a police officer in India. And in Utrecht Bovenkerk has drawn on students from abroad to study criminal justice issues and policing in their country of origin including Turkish-speaking colleagues and graduate students examining organised crime in Turkey (Bovenkerk and Yesilgöz, 1998). This language ability has been a major advantage to a number of Dutch researchers who can operate in several languages in research, writing and teaching.

IV. Conclusion We have briefly traced the development of police research in the Netherlands, with the UK as our main reference point. There has been a considerable expansion of research in both societies with research on the police, for the police and for the government by university-based academics, commercial consultancy companies and by in-house, government research units. The volume and range of research is impressive and on occasion research findings have influenced policy. What is difficult to ascertain is whether several decades of research have substantially altered the culture and working style of operational policing. Indeed, considerable efforts have been made in the Netherlands to ‘professionalise’ policing by tying all officers into a knowledge-based educational structure; but somehow the institutional differences between ‘practitioners’ and ‘academics’ remain resilient. And it is still the case that many areas of policing remain closed to research, which is predominantly focused on low-level, front-line patrol and detective work. It is rare for researchers to gain access to specialised investigatory units, national agencies or the ‘political policing’ of Special Branch, although Bowling (2010) did manage to gain access to the latter in his research in the Caribbean. Furthermore, there are two factors that would appear to threaten the limited advances that have been made.



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First, government pressure and interference in policing in the UK has been intense and persistent for almost two decades (Savage, 2007). There has been a series of reorganisations fostering a managerial performance culture based on the fetish of quantification. Just when it seemed that the Police Service was emerging from this it has been confronted with the need to economise with the danger of cutting back on educational courses, investment in training and involvement in research. One of us was informed that a very large force in the south of the country had not ordered a new book in three years. Second, the landscape of policing is changing with a move towards nationalisation, centralisation and to tighter links with central government. This structural change is being driven by the new security agenda with organised crime and counter-terrorism as priorities. There is also in the UK the spectre of direct political interference in operational decision-making. It seems that this is being driven by a central control dynamic, by economies of scale geared to ‘Big is Beautiful’, by the creation of national units close to ministerial direction and a policy agenda strongly driven by crime control. The danger here is that for ideological reasons a narrowing of the police mandate will take place which does not require evidence-based policy, while research findings are viewed as superfluous. The irony is that many of us have worked tirelessly on cultivating the ‘smart cop’ only for governments to determine she has little use. For example, in the 1960s an innovative Dutch police officer, Ries Straver, proposed focusing on ‘policy’ given the rapid changes in society. His formal superior, the Mayor, opposed this stating that he was the one who made policy, while the only task of the police was to implement it and certainly not to think about it (Zwart, 2004). Yet similar comments are now being made in the Dutch Parliament and local political circles whenever a police chief makes a comment that either smacks of ‘policy’ or of not fully implementing policy; this is regressing four decades. In both the Netherlands and the UK there has been the emergence of a relatively liberal police elite, while politics and public opinion fed by the media has moved sharply to the right. It as if we are stepping backwards to a time when the police were meant to be servile and deferential – and when researchers were kept at arms-length from police practice. If that is the case, and we may be too sombre, then maybe research will revert to solo, lone-wolf ethnographers revealing to us what the contemporary police really think and do. Perhaps it’s not that much different from what they traditionally did or did not do (Moksos, 2008). Let us hope, however, that this will bring forward a new young Banton, Bittner or Reiner. And that they will be multilingual, crosscultural females! Finally, for much of our careers a constant has been the work and writings of Robert Reiner. Robert has clearly been a towering figure in police research and a dedicated servant to the LSE; he is a top-grade researcher, a productive writer with a nice turn of phrase, a major thinker on criminal justice and a most supportive and dependable colleague. At times the view from behind the Dutch dykes can be somewhat limited and restricted by mist; but there remains within the Dutch academic community respect for Robert and appreciation of his work. We, along with other colleagues in the Netherlands, wish him well in his ‘retirement’.

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References Banton, M (1964) The Policeman in the Community (London, Tavistock). Bayley, D (1976) Forces of Order: Police Behaviour in Japan and the United States (Berkeley CA, University of California Press). —— (2006) Changing the Guard (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Bayley, D and Shearing, C (2001) The New Structure of Policing (Washington DC, National Institute of Justice). Bayley, D and Perito, RM (2010) The Police in War (Boulder/London, Lynne Rienner Publishers). Belur, J (2010) Permission to Shoot (New York, Springer). Bittner, E (1967) ‘The Police on Skid Row: A Study of Peacekeeping’ American Sociological Review 32. Black, DJ (1980) The Manners and Customs of the Police (New York, Academic Press). Bovenkerk, F and Yesilgöz, Y (1988) De Maffia van Turkije (Amsterdam, Meulenhoff). Bowling, B (2010) Policing the Caribbean (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Bowling, B and Sheptycki, J (2012) Global Policing (London, Sage, forthcoming). Brants, C (1999) ‘The Fine Art of Regulated Tolerance: Prostitution in Amsterdam’ Journal of Law and Society 25. Cain, M (1973) Society and the Policeman`s Role (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul). Chambliss, WJ and Seidman, RB (1971) Law, Order and Power (Reading MA, AddisonWesley). Chan, J (2003) Fair Cop: Learning the Art of Policing (Toronto, University of Toronto Press). Chatterton, M (1979) ‘The Supervision of Patrol Work under the Fixed Points System’ in S Holdaway (ed), Inside the British Police (Oxford, Basil Blackwell). Downes, D (1988) Contrasts in Tolerance (Oxford, Clarendon Press). Ericson, RV and Haggerty, KD (1997) Policing the Risk Society (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Fielding, N (1984) ‘Police Socialization and Police Competence’ British Journal of Sociology 35. Fijnaut, C (1979) Opdat de macht een toevlucht zij? Een historische studie van het politieapparaat als een politieke instelling (Antwerp, Kluwer). —— (1983) De zaak Francois (Antwerp, Kluwer). —— C (1985) ‘De toekomst van de politie in Nederland’ Tijdschrift voor de Politie 11. —— (2011) Terugblikken en vooruitblikken op een leven in de wetenschap (AntwerpCambridge, Intersentia). Fleming, J and Wood, J (eds) (2006) Fighting Crime Together (Sydney, NSW, UNSW Press). Garland, D (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Goldstein, H (1979) ‘Improving policing: a problem oriented approach’ Crime and   Delinquency April. Green, P and Ward, T (2004) State Crime (London, Pluto). Heidensohn, F (1985) Women and Crime (London, Macmillan). Hinton, M (2006) The State on the Streets (Boulder CO, Lynne Rienner). Hinton, M and Newburn, T (eds) (2009) Policing Democracies (London/New York, Routledge).



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Hoogenboom, AB (1984) Het repressieve vermogen van het Rotterdamse politiekorps (1880– 1940) (Thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam). —— (1994) Het Politiecomplex. Over de samenwerking tussen politie, bijzondere opsporings­ diensten en particuliere recherche (Arnhem, Gouda Quint). —— (2009) Bringing the police back in. Notes on the lost and found character of the police in police studies (Dordrecht, SMVP). —— (2010) The Governance of policing and security. Ironies, Myths and Paradoxes (Basingstoke, Palgrave McMillan). Holdaway, S (1977) ‘Changes in Urban Policing’ British Journal of Sociology 28. —— (ed) (1979) Inside the British Police (Oxford, Basil Blackwell). Holdaway, S and Rock, P (eds) (1998) Thinking about criminology (London/New York, Routledge). Hornberger, J (2007) Don’t push this constitution down my throat (PhD thesis, University of Utrecht). Lee, M and Punch, M (2005) Policing by Degrees (Groningen, De Hondsrug Pers). Loader, I and Walker, N (2007) Civilizing Security (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Manning, PK (1977) Police Work (Cambridge MA, MIT Press). Marks, M (2005) Transforming the Robocop: Changing Police in South Africa (Scotsville RSA, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press). Martin, SE (1980) Breaking and Entering (Berkeley CA, University of California Press). Marx GT (1988) Undercover (Berkeley CA, University of California Press). Miller, WR (1973) Cops and Bobbies (Chicago, Chicago University Press). Moskos, P (2008) Police in the Hood (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press). Muir, WK (1977), Police: Streetcorner Politicians (Chicago, Chicago University Press). Naeyé, J (1979) De Sterke Arm (Amsterdam, Free University). —— (1995) Het politieël vooronderzoek in strafzaken (Arnhem, Gouda Quint). Nadelman (1993) Cops Across Borders (University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press). Newburn, T (2003) (ed) Handbook of Policing (Cullompton, Willan). —— (2005) (ed) Policing: Key Readings (Cullompton, Willan). Newburn, T and Sparks, R (2004) (eds) Criminal Justice and Political Cultures (Cullompton, Willan). Police Foundation (1974) Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (Washington DC, Police Foundation). POS (Projectgroep Organisatie Structuren) (1977) Politie in Verandering (The Hague, Staatsuitgeverij). Punch, M (1979a) Policing the Inner City (London, Macmillan). —— (1979b) ‘The Secret Social Service’ in S Holdaway (ed), The British Police (London, Edward Arnold). —— (ed) (1983) Control in the Police Organization (Cambridge MA, MIT Press). —— (1985) Conduct Unbecoming (London, Tavistock). —— (2009) Police Corruption (Cullompton, Willan). Punch, M and Naylor, T (1973) ‘The Police: A Social Service’ New Society 24. Punch, M, van der Vijver, C and van Dijk, N (1998) Searching for a Future (Dordrecht, SMVP). Punch, M, Vijver, van der, C and Zoomer, O (2002) ‘Dutch “COP”: developing community policing in The Netherlands’ Policing 25.

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Punch, M, Hoogenboom, B and van der Vijver, C (2008) ‘Community Policing in the Netherlands: Four Generations of Redefinition’ in T Williamson (ed), The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Policing (Chichester, Wiley). Quinney, R (1970) The Social Reality of Crime (Boston MA, Little Brown & Co). Rawlinson, P (2010) From Fear to Fraternity (London, Pluto). Reiner, R (1978) The Blue-coated Worker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (1991) Chief Constable: Bobby or Bureaucrat? (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2007) Law and Order (Cambridge, Polity Press). —— (2010) The Politics of the Police, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press, first published 1984). —— (2007) ‘Neophilia or back to basics? Policing research and the Seductions of Crime Control’ Policing and Society 17. Reiss, AJ Jr (1971) The Police and the Public (Newhaven CT, Yale University Press). Rosenthal, U, Charles, MT and Hart, P (1988) Coping with Crises (Springfield IL, Thomas). Rubinstein, J (1973) City Police (New York, Ballantine). Savage, S (2007) Police Reform (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Shearing, C and Johnston, L (2003) Governing Security (London, Routledge). Shearing, C and Stenning, P (1987) Private Policing (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications). Sheptycki, J (2000) (ed) Issues in Transnational Policing (London, Routledge). Sherman, L (ed) (1964) Police Corruption (New York, Anchor). —— (1978) Scandal and Reform (Berkeley CA, University of California Press). Skolnick, J (1966) Justice without Trial (New York, Wiley). Spapens, T, Groenhuijsen, M and Kooijmans, T (2011) Universalis. Liber Amicorum Cyrille Fijnaut (Antwerp, Intersentia). Timmer, J, Naeyé, J and van der Steeg, M (1996) Onder Schot (Deventer, Gouda Quint). Tonry, M (2004) Punishment and Politics (Cullompton, Willan). Van Maanen, J (1973) ‘Observations on the Making of Policemen’ Human Organization 32. —— (1986) ‘Power in the Bottle: Drinking patterns and social relations in a British police Agency’ in S Srivasta (ed), Executive Power (San Francisco CA, Jossey-Bass). van der Vijver, C (1993) De burger en de zin van de strafrecht (Lelystad, Vermande). van der Vijver, C and Terpstra, J (eds) (2004) Urban Safety (Enschede, University of Twente). van Reenen, P (1979) Overheidsgeweld (Alphen a/d Rijn, Samson). —— (2010) ‘De tanden van de politie’ in J Terpstra, L Gunther Moor and B van Stokkom (eds), De politie en haar opdracht (Apeldoorn/Antwerp, Maklu). van Swaaningen, R (1997) Critical Criminology: Visions from Europe (London, Sage). —— (2004) ‘Public Safety and Management of Fear’ (presentation, European Society of Criminology Conference, Amsterdam). Waddington, PAJ (1991) The Strong Arm of the Law (Oxford, Clarendon Press). Westley, W (1970) Violence and the Police (Cambridge MA, MIT Press). Wilson, JQ (1978) Varieties of Police Behavior (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press). Wood, J and Shearing, C (2007) Imagining Security (Cullompton, Willan Publishing). Young, M (1991) An Inside Job. Policing and Police Culture in Britain (Oxford, Clarendon Press). Zwart, CJ (2004) Over het wezen van de Nederlandse politie: gesprekken met Ries Straver (Den Haag, Elsevier).

5 Cop Culture PAJ WADDINGTON

I. Preamble I first met Robert Reiner in the early 1980s at a meeting called by the Economic and Social Research Council to discuss future prospects for police research, which was then in its infancy, at least in Britain. Policing had suddenly burst onto the political agenda with the ‘inner-city’ riots, the Scarman report and the promotion of ‘community policing’ as a remedy for poor police-race relations (Scarman, 1981). Robert had already achieved prominence as one of a small band of ‘police researchers’ with his book The Blue-Coated Worker (Reiner, 1978), whilst my contribution was limited to a couple of journalistic commentaries in the Police Federation magazine, Police. Nevertheless, he generously encouraged me along my wayward path into research on policing and I feel honoured to have known him as a friend and scholar for most of my academic career. Robert has retained his position of preeminence, cemented by successive editions of his textbook The Politics of the Police (1985; 1992; 2000; 2010), a book that I reviewed for the Times Higher Education Supplement when it was first published. I said, in that review, that I had difficulty ‘restraining my enthusiasm’ for this authoritative survey of police research and have been joined over the years in this appraisal by the expanding community of police researchers. Very recently, I attended a symposium that was followed by a wine reception. Seeing a couple of professorial colleagues in earnest conversation in a corner of the room, I sidled over. They were anxiously awaiting the publication of the fourth edition of The Politics . . . to find out where Robert would stand on one of the great issues of contemporary police research – how inclusive should be our definition of ‘police’ and ‘policing’? They were disappointed that the previous edition had continued to emphasise the position of the state’s police as the epitome of policing. Such is now Robert’s exulted position in police research that professors with international reputations anxiously await his pronouncements! Robert has become primus inter pares and The Politics . . . has become the authoritative statement of the current state of police research. In recognition of his status, this chapter represents a plea to Robert to revise the ‘authorised version’ of ‘cop culture’ and challenge assumptions of how and to what

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extent it influences police officers and the way that policing is done. Robert correctly reflects the weight of opinion amongst police researchers, but my critique is directed at the theoretical foundations and evidential underpinning of that collective weight of opinion. Experience teaches me that the criminological community is far more likely to listen to Robert than they will to me!

II. Introduction So, what is the authorised version of ‘cop culture’? It consists of a set of ‘core characteristics’ (Reiner, 2010: 118–32) that have changed little (save mainly for elaboration) since the first edition of The Politics . . . (Reiner, 1985). • • • • • • •

Mission – action – cynicism – pessimism Suspicion Isolation/solidarity Police conservatism Machismo Racial prejudice Pragmatism

Whilst, as Robert points out, the ‘culture’ is not monolithic, there is nevertheless remarkable and undoubted consistency in ‘cop talk’ across jurisdictions and over time. Loftus (2010a) has recently observed how, despite enormous shifts in policy, cultural climate and social conditions within which English police officers work, these core characteristics remain as discernible as they were 30 years earlier when Simon Holdaway conducted his fieldwork (Holdaway, 1983).

III.  ‘Cop Culture’ as a Target of Reform ‘Cop culture’ is a concept that was established long before Robert and I turned our academic attention to the police (Skolnick, 1966; Wilson, 1969; Westley, 1953) and it continues to influence not only academic discussion about policing, but also policy, politics and popular opinion. Since writing my initial critique of the concept (Waddington, 1999b) the issue of ‘police culture’ has achieved even greater prominence mainly as a result of the conclusion of the Macpherson Report (1999) that accused the police of ‘institutional racism’, reinforced by the undercover journalism of Mark Daly who exposed the racist antics of trainees at a regional training centre (BBC Panorama, 2003). However, this testifies to an equally unchanging feature of the academic concept of ‘police culture’ itself – its normative and political



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utility. This is hardly surprising, given that criminology is intrinsically a normative discipline. As Loader and Sparks observe: It is simply a social fact that criminologists are typically drawn to their chosen field of enquiry at least in part by a reformist impulse (even if they wish only to use their knowledge to reduce levels of crime) and that they generally evince a desire to engage with, and be taken seriously in, the world of practical affairs. (2010: 6)

As Robert has described in his reply to a triplet of appreciative critics of the fourth edition of Policing . . . (2011), the political context within and surrounding criminology and allied disciplines at the time when the first edition was published was deeply politicised. Robert describes this climate as containing an ‘anti-police ultraleftism that then prevailed in radical circles’ (2011: 105) and which Robert did much to oppose. It was not only ‘in radical circles’ that such a posture was adopted (albeit that others were less strident), for there were few criminologists who supported the Thatcher government, or the ‘law and order lobby’ (a favoured bogeyman at that time). It was in this context that the notion of a ‘police culture’ flourished in academic and political circles. It was rarely employed simply as a conceptual device for understanding why officers acted as they did. As Chan was later to note ‘Police culture has become a convenient label for a range of negative values, attitudes, and practice norms among police officers’ (Chan, 1996: 110. Italics added). As such, it is part of a theoretical construction ‘to be placed – if anywhere at all – at the service of pressure groups and new social movements’ (Loader and Sparks, 2010: 3). In this role the concept of ‘police culture’ can be regarded as a significant rhetorical and polemic success. To explain inequalities in police treatment of ethnic minorities, gay men and lesbians, and women generally, one need look no further than ‘police culture’. This political virtue is accompanied by an intellectual vice for ‘police culture’ has become a vehicle for lazy theorising fostered by how the concept is defined. In his role as arbiter of the state of the art of policing research, Robert judiciously defines ‘police culture’ as follows: Cultures are complex ensembles of values, attitudes, symbols, rules, recipes, and practices, emerging as people react to the exigencies and situations they confront, interpreted through the cognitive frames and orientations they carry with them from prior experiences. (Reiner, 2010: 116)

He is quite correct: in anthropology (from whence the concept of ‘culture’, in this sense, emerged), it meant the whole ensemble, extending beyond what is mentioned here to embrace all the artefacts of a society, including material items. However, rhetorically this allowed ‘police culture’ to make connections between these various components without the necessity of establishing any causal processes through which these connections exerted influence. Moreover, since ‘police culture’ is a complex ensemble of elements, it has allowed police researchers to equate ‘culture’ with thought and talk, which is then assumed to reflect ‘practices’. Thus, an officer who expresses racist ‘values, attitudes, symbols, rules, recipes’ can safely be assumed to act in a discriminatory fashion

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towards members of ethnic minorities. Herein lies the connection with police discretion: ‘ The original impulse for much of the early research on police discretion . . . was a civil libertarian concern about the extent and sources of police deviation from due process of law’ (Reiner, 1985: 85). The problem that civil libertarians perceive is that the discretion afforded police officers is such that they are largely unconstrained by the law, or indeed police policies, and thus may fall prey to alternative cognitions derived from their ‘culture’. It is further assumed that since ‘police culture’ contains an ensemble of thought, talk and action, a change in any one of them will be reflected in the others. Hence, the solution is to transform policing in a progressive direction by selecting officers or training them to embrace virtuous alternative cultural cognitions. The many problems that beset the criminal justice system – such as the disproportionality with which ethnic minorities are stopped and searched, arrested, charged, imprisoned – become relatively tractable. Ridding police of what Wilson (1968: 409) called ‘bad men’ or reforming them into ‘good men’ may not be easy, but it is far more manageable than transforming an entire social structure. Better still, if such a transformation proves unsuccessful then it is not the reformers who have failed, but the obduracy of police officers that has prevailed. It is as if Margaret Mead studied adolescents in Samoa in order to deplore and remedy their debauchery! (Mead, 1943). However, as the aftermath of the Macpherson Inquiry and Report testifies, if we do not understand what police culture actually represents and the influence it really has, then any reforms built upon it, can easily dissolve into mere and literal ‘lip service’ (Foster et al, 2005). In the Secret Policeman television documentary viewers heard recruits being officially warned of the dire consequences that would follow any utterance of specific racial slurs. Yet, when the instructor announced later that the solitary Asian trainee was being transferred to another course, there was unrestrained jollity, the racist overtones of which took little discerning. (See also Foster et al, 2005 for other examples where police officers barely disguise their racist inclinations.) Janet Chan (1996; 2003) tells an even more potent cautionary tale about the limits of virtuous thought and talk, for she describes and analyses in detail an almost perfect concatenation of circumstances and personalities conducive to reform, the impact of which was sadly all too superficial and meagre. In the 1990s the New South Wales Police hosted a corruption scandal which utterly discredited the ancien regime, leading to the appointment of a ‘white knight’ Commissioner with a mandate to introduce reform and the installation of ‘community policing’. Reform was focused on the recruitment and training of officers who were to be the vanguard of change. The training process was revamped, officers sympathetic to the Commissioner’s aspirations staffed the training centre and acted as ‘field training officers’ to supervise recruits during their first experience of operational policing. The brightest and best of their generation were recruited: liberally-minded and willing disciples of ‘community policing’, who were representative of diverse ethnicities and gender balanced – a reformer could not wish for better. At the end of their first period of academy-based training, the recruits showed no inkling of



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any reduction in their adherence to liberal attitudes and ‘community policing’. Entrusted to the carefully selected ‘field training officers’ they returned from their first brief encounter with operational policing transformed: their attitudes were now barely distinguishable from those of hard-bitten traditional cops. Chan locates the sources of this transformation in the post–colonial legacy of Australian society – a much more daunting challenge than the ingrained police culture! There is another and obvious alternative explanation for why police resist reform, especially those prompted by liberal values, such as ‘community policing’. It is that the reforms are themselves deeply flawed. The oft-experienced failure of ‘community policing’ initiatives is often attributed to ‘implementation failures’ arising from hostile police culture (eg, Dixon and Stanko, 1995). Yet, ‘community policing’ is replete with conceptual confusion. As Manning explains: The concept of community policing has at least four meanings. On one level, it is an ideological system of beliefs which asserts that communities in previous times were more unitary, that police were a more legitimate and accepted part of communities, that crime and disorder were once better controlled through cooperative effort, and that social control on the whole was tighter, more coherent, and pervasive. A second meaning of community policing is programmatic. . . . [It] entails programs with broad political aims intended to restore police ‘closeness’ to the community, . . . to assuage community fear, and to assure community members by police presence and accessibility. A third meaning of community policing is pragmatic. It contrasts with current police practice. . . . Programs are responses to perceived citizen discontent with police organizations that are bureaucratic, impersonal, focused on specific incidents, ‘professional’, crime–focused and centralized. A fourth meaning of community police is a set of programmatic elements and organizational structures. . . . Note that the emphasis is on working in a given area as a team, participating and communicating with community groups, and attempting to provide organizational and managerial support for the teams, especially by combining patrol and investigative functions. (Manning, 1993: 422–23)

Amid such confusion ‘implementation failure’ seems almost destined to occur, since no-one can be too sure what is they are trying to do.1 Instead of attributing failure to where it belongs – the impoverished conceptualisation of ‘community policing’ – officers are accused of ‘resisting’ such a fine prospectus. ‘Police culture’ is more than a rhetorical device; it also contains empirical suppositions amenable to examination. Its central empirical claim is that ‘police culture’ sets police officers apart from the generality of population and has a determining influence upon their behaviour, often with malign consequences. As Loftus, in her recently published ethnography, puts it: Central to these understandings is the idea that the police hold a distinctive set of norms, beliefs and values, which determine their behaviour, both amongst themselves and operationally out on the street (Loftus, 2010a: 3–4. Italics added) 1   A fate that also befell the notion of ‘institutional racism’, the eradication of which underwrote the Macpherson Inquiry reforms.

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Let us, then, consider these two propositions in turn: are the police distinctive from the wider population? Do their actions mesh with other cultural elements?

IV.  Distinctiveness of Police Culture It is now widely conceded, as Robert acknowledges, that ‘police culture’ is not homogeneous. However there are, nevertheless, the ‘core characteristics’ that Robert identifies (see above), but are those ‘core characteristics’ distinctive from the remainder of the society? Unless they are, then it could hardly be said that this was a police culture, as opposed to a group of people expressing the wider culture of society. The police are not generally liberal-minded, but then on issues connected with ‘law and order’ neither are the public. Apart from the pile of psychometric attitude studies cited in my original critique (Waddington, 1999b), it has become a commonplace of criminological analysis that the British public are punitive and resistant to well-meaning reforms. The electoral success of Tony Blair is often attributed (not least by criminologists) to his wresting from the Conservative Party the mantle of champion of ‘law and order’, which was reinforced by a torrent of illiberal legislation during the New Labour government. In this sense, it seems that police officers are, indeed, ‘citizens in uniform’. Punitive attitudes and lack of confidence in the criminal justice system are attitudes that the police and public share. Public punitiveness has been attributed to the ignorance of the general public regarding the sentences that are actually handed down by the courts. When presented with specific case scenarios, the public’s preferences were often more lenient than the penalties imposed by courts in the cases from which the scenarios were derived (Roberts and Hough, 2005). However, other evidence points to the persistence of reactionary public attitudes despite greater information about the criminal justice process. Munro’s research with Ellison and Finch (Finch and Munro, 2005; Finch and Munro, 2007; Finch and Munro, 2006; Ellison and Munro 2009a, 2009b, 2009c) used ‘mock juries’ who were provided with detailed accounts of the facts of a case of alleged rape. ‘Mock jurors’ demonstrated intransigent adherence to traditional and patriarchal presuppositions about the culpability of the alleged victims in the cases and standards of sexual etiquette (what the authors called ‘normal sex’) which were employed to assess the claims of prosecution and defence. If officers (or prosecutors for that matter) employ the same criteria in assessing the likely truthfulness of allegations of sexual assault, it would seem that they are simply doing what their fellow citizens would do, given the chance. Such punitiveness extends in some countries to the tacit public endorsement of the most serious police wrongdoing. Belur (2010) argues that in Mumbai there is common acceptance that many organised criminals who die in so-called ‘encounters’ with the police, are in fact summarily executed. This is tacitly understood and officers who participate in such ‘encounters’ are not reviled, but



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are celebrated by the news media, and amongst the judiciary, politicians and other opinion leaders. Even human rights activists seem to acquiesce in the inevitability of such a practice. Whilst police officers may not be as distinct from others in the population as the concept of ‘cop culture’ would suggest, what is undoubtedly true is that they feel distinct, indeed isolated (Clark, 1965). There is a very good reason for this: they are isolated. As Bittner (1970) remarked, police are tainted by association with otherwise socially discreditable activities. The police, in the performance of their duties, act in ways that would otherwise be exceptional, exceptionable and downright illegal (Waddington, 1999a). It is not only that they have the capacity lawfully to use force to an extent that far surpasses that available to ordinary citizens, but they are also expected to exercise authority in public places, where even their mere presence (for instance, sitting inside a patrol car on the side of motorway) may dramatically alter the behaviour of fellow citizens, significantly and sometimes dangerously reducing the speed of passing traffic. In England, an officer who is told of some criminal conduct, would be duty-bound not to ignore it. To do otherwise (other than as an exercise of justifiable discretion) would leave the officer liable to prosecution for ‘neglect of duty’ or ‘mal- or misfeasance in public office’. Even students taking the growing number of vocational university courses in policing in England feel isolated from fellow students almost from the outset, since they are not welcome guests at booze and drug-fuelled parties of other undergraduates (Carol Cox, personal communication). Yet, feeling isolated should not be uncritically equated with being distinctive. One of the ways in which it might seem that officers are distinct from the general population is that they are suspicious and cynical – it figures second on Robert’s list. He describes police officers as holding an ‘attitude of constant suspicion that cannot be readily switched off’ that is a ‘product of the need to keep a lookout for signs of trouble, potential danger and clues to offences’ (Reiner, 2000: 91). Police officers also pride themselves on the acuity of the sense of suspicion, detecting signs that the uninitiated might miss. However, is it true that officers possess these distinctive orientations to look out for and capability to detect wrongdoing? When confronted by exactly the same set of circumstances, are police officers any more suspicious than other members of the public? Research that I and my colleagues Kate Williams, Martin Wright and Tim Newburn are currently undertaking2 suggests that almost certainly police are not distinctly more suspicious that their fellow citizens. The fieldwork for this research involved displaying to focus groups representing diverse communities and interests in the ‘Black Country’ region of the West Midlands five video-clips of police–public encounters broadcast by the BBC in the course of documentaries on police work. The focus groups were asked to evaluate the behaviour of the officers depicted in those videos. One video depicted officers 2   This research was funded by Economic and Social Research Council grant RES–000–22–3571. The authors would like to also acknowledge the assistance received from Experian PLC who made available Mosaic data at no cost. Also, the many organisations in the ‘Black Country’ who participated in the research and their members who participated in focus groups.

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responding to an allegation that an elderly man had been robbed of his pension in his own home by a knife-wielding assailant. Upon arrival at the man’s bungalow, it becomes apparent that the elderly man was not alone when robbed, but was in the company of a young woman to whom he was not related and with whom he was drinking beer. Overwhelmingly, focus groups voiced deep suspicions about the role of the young woman in the robbery. They did so on the grounds that it was incongruous for an attractive young woman to seek the company of an elderly man. When compared to police officers who were also shown the video-clips, the suspicions aroused were indistinguishable from each other. These suspicions were not groundless, since the programme from which the clip was taken concluded by informing viewers that the young woman’s boyfriend was convicted of the robbery, albeit that she was not charged with any offence.3 This observation raises a doubt over the assumption that police possess an exaggerated sense of suspicion. What does set police apart from other members of the public is the capacity to act on their suspicions or, indeed, their prejudices. Whether officers are distinctive in the cultural repertoire is less important, perhaps, than the influence those cultural traits have upon their actions.

V.  Determinant Influence It is now widely conceded that ‘police culture’ does not have a simple relationship with the behaviour of police officers, but is more ‘loosely coupled’ than that, but what evidence is there that ‘police culture’ is ‘coupled’ at all to police behaviour? As Robert notes in The Politics . . . (2010), systematic research by Terrill et al (2003) demonstrates a statistical correlation between the traditional police cultural attitudes held by officers and their propensity to use force, independent of other influences. This is an important observation, but it is more complex than it seems initially. First, the effect-size of attitudes towards ‘traditional’ culture, whilst statistically significant, was not large. Certainly, it was dwarfed by situational variables and in this respect is consistent with a substantial literature on police use of force (see, eg: Worden, 1989; Alpert and Dunham, 1999; Alpert et al, 2004; Alpert and MacDonald, 2001; Worden 1996). As Terrill et al remark: situational and encounter–based studies help to disentangle the nuances of police behaviour more than relying merely on broad–based studies of generalized attitudes or descriptions of extraordinary and rare violent events. As this implies, and as our analysis shows, coercion is an interactive matter that takes place in encounters of situations that vary and must be taken into account (2003: 1030).

Amongst those situational influences was the number of officers present at the scene – an observation often made. What is striking about this variable is how it   Focus groups were not aware of this when asked to comment on the clip.

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conflicts with the macho heroism of canteen talk. Neither do cops say much in the canteen about post-traumatic stress disorder, whereas it frequently accompanies the most serious violent encounters. Indeed, police officers share with social workers, mental health professionals and those working in emergency medicine the complaint that colleagues and superiors seem not to want to hear of their violent experiences and how they feel about them (Waddington et al, 2006). If there is a culture, then it may be a culture of denial. This is what Brewer (1990) documents in his research on how police in Northern Ireland during the terrorist emergency dealt cognitively and emotionally with the ubiquitous prospect of being assassinated by terrorists. Whilst this had macho components, they were almost totally divorced from the realities of such a prospect. Another favoured focus of depictions of police culture is the attitude to women, especially in the context of domestic violence. Yet, Hoyle (1998) found that whilst, when asked, officers would often descend into culturally fuelled diatribes about how ‘domestics’ were a waste of time because the abused woman could not be relied upon to support a prosecution, when those same officers were observed dealing with actual ‘domestics’ they often went to considerable lengths to offer help to the abused woman and persuade her to support prosecution. As Hoyle notes, the culturally approved device for reconciling this apparent contradiction is the claim that the specific domestic incident the officer was dealing with when observed ‘was different’. It is not only attitudes to women that display this disconnection between the views and opinions voiced in the canteen – or to an inquisitive researcher – and what officers actually do in the course of their duties. Also disconnected are attitudes and behaviours regarding race and ethnicity. The unsatisfactory police response to, say, ‘race hate crime’ can easily be attributed to the undoubted racism of officers. However, Bowling’s (1998) analysis of how police respond to ‘violent racism’ points to a rather different determining influence. He emphasises how policing is routinely ‘incident driven’ and how this results in officers being unable to deal with the subtleties and nuances in people’s experience of racism. If a member of an ethnic minority lives in an environment in which they experience low-level racial harassment and where friends and acquaintances are known to have suffered much worse, then this amplifies their reaction to what might otherwise appear as a ‘petty’ offence. However, police practice is to focus exclusively upon the incident in isolation: who, did exactly what to whom? Being incident driven is a deeply ingrained feature of police practice, but it is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the canteen; certainly I have yet to see it even remarked upon in the numerous ethnographies on policing. Something else that is rarely, if ever, remarked upon by police officers, is a massively important feature of police experience: the under-enforcement of the law. Terrill and Paoline (2007) observe that even when police officers have ample justification for making an arrest, they do so in only approximately one-quarter of occasions. This echoes Albert Reiss’ pioneering research of 40 years ago (Reiss, 1971), when he found that the only consistent feature of police patrol was that no arrest was made, even though officers had the opportunity to do so. Incident-driven

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policing and under-enforcement are major features of police behaviour and yet ‘police culture’ has little or nothing to say on the matter. Equally, my own research on public order policing in central London revealed that control was exerted by guile rather than force (Waddington, 1994a; 1994b), but ‘negotiated management’ was barely acknowledged by those officers who were most expert in this practice. Indeed, when I offered officers the opportunity to comment on a draft manuscript, the response was one of amazement – they were blissfully unaware of the subtlety with which they conducted themselves! On the other hand, one did not need to search too deeply to discover a profound republicanism amongst many officers. This would be readily proclaimed, but never in my experience did it have the slightest influence on how public order operations involving royalty were conducted. Officers were also generally and volubly homophobic, yet they went to considerable lengths to facilitate gay rights demonstrations and to protect the annual ‘Gay Pride’ march through central London, on one occasion deliberately subverting the intentions of a superior officer (Waddington, 1994b: 177). In other words, on many counts, there were serious disconnections between talk and action. The obvious riposte is to note that policing is subject to many influences, not just the culture of police officers. True. The obvious reason why police officers are incident driven is because that is what the criminal justice process requires of them. Neither a judge, nor prosecutor nor jury would be interested in an alleged victim’s previous experiences at the hands of people other than the accused, or the experiences of racism suffered by others in the victim’s social circle. These matters would not be legally admissible evidence in an adversary trial (as Bowling [1998] makes clear). There is no need to invoke ‘culture’ as an explanation for such a clear pattern of behaviour and Bowling places little explanatory reliance upon it. However, others do rest considerable reliance on it, when systemic influences seem strikingly to offer an alternative and more parsimonious explanation. For instance, in a monograph that influenced the Runciman Royal Commission, McConville, Sanders and Leng (1991) correctly observed how investigating officers ‘built a case’ against suspects rather than neutrally investigating the circumstances in which the alleged offence had occurred; a propensity that was laid squarely at the feet of the ‘police culture’. It seemed not to have occurred to the authors that a criminal justice system based on an asymmetrical adversarial contest between prosecution and defence, where the burden rested entirely on the prosecution and standard of proof required for conviction was very high, was virtually designed to encourage police investigators to ‘build a case’. Neither, would one imagine, was there any need to invoke ‘police culture’ to explain why most of those with whom the police have dealings in the course of their duties are to be numbered amongst the more deprived and disadvantaged sections of society. Since Victorian days the police role has been to control the ‘dangerous classes’ (Taylor, 1997; Miller, 1977; Choongh, 1997; 1998; 2011; Rawlings, 1999; Steedman, 1984; Weinberger, 1995; Dixon and Fishwick, 1984; Emsley, 1994; Brogden, 1983; 1991). Yet Loftus (2010a; 2010b) seeks to attribute this practice to a cultural dislike that police officers have for the ‘scrotes’. The cultural expression



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of antipathy to marginal sections of the population is undesirable and indecorous; but it does not drive officers towards focusing their oppression onto this section of the population. These inequalities derive (as do many others) from ingrained systemic processes and structures. Even legislation born of benign social intentions can result in those who are powerless being further oppressed. Anti-hate offences designed to protect vulnerable individuals and groups ‘unnecessarily [criminalize] significant numbers of already marginalized and relative disadvantaged people whose principal offence may not be any extraordinary commitment to racism, but an inability to control their language in moments of stress and/or when under the influence of alcohol’ (Dixon and Gadd, 2006: 324). The dislike of ‘scrotes’ raises a further issue: do police cognitions dictate their actions, or is it vice versa? As academics spend their professional lives ‘cogitating’ it is tempting to imagine that all action is thoughtful. Yet, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949) long ago pointed out that many actions are ‘executive’ rather than ‘deliberative’; social psychologists have showed how actions could change attitudes (Festinger, 1962); whilst cognitive social psychology (Eiser, 1986) emphasises the lengths to which people will go to make sense, after the fact, of a bewilderingly complex social environment. The famous ‘from Jerusalem to Jericho’ experiment (Darley and Batson, 1984) is a telling reminder of how easily values and actions can become disconnected. Students from a theological seminary were asked to go to a venue to speak on the topic of the ‘Good Samaritan’ and whilst in transit encountered an apparent victim of an attack lying in alley. Those who were under the impression that they were late for the appointment and had to hurry showed the least inclination to stop and help the ‘victim’; whereas those with more time were more helpful. As the authors remark: A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going. Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan. (Darley and Batson, 1984: 49)

The implication of this and many other experiments on altruism is that the reformer cannot rely upon the articulation of virtue – words are cheap, it is deeds that matter! It is as likely that canteen chatter is the collective process of retrospectively making sense of shared experience, as it is to be some form of programming officers to behave in particular ways. It was to this possibility that my article on police culture (1999b) was largely directed, where I entertained the notion that canteen chatter was the cultural ‘repair shop’ for police officers. I believe that this interpretation has received indirect support from Loader and Mulcahy (2003), who concluded that the police occupy a potent symbolic position in popular culture. What is striking about canteen discussion is that it becomes heated usually about much the same symbolic issues4 that animated Loader and Mulcahy’s focus groups, rather than nitty-gritty of everyday police work. Not only do the public see the police as 4   That is when it is devoted to some topic other than soccer or recent television broadcasts, for we should remind ourselves that police officers, like many of their fellows, are mainly preoccupied by the trivia rehearsed in the tabloid press.

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‘symbolic guardians’, but also the police see themselves in that heroic role. Loader and Mulcahy observe that policing: has much to do with the fears and anxieties, and the hopes and fantasies, that the idea of policing evokes at a paleo–symbolic level. To speak of policing is, on the one hand, to conjure a reminder of the existence of the undesirable, criminal Other. As such, it is apt to prompt, or at the very least to reinforce, feelings of hostility, aggression, powerlessness, violation, and vulnerability; a sense that one’s security is contingent, the social world rather fragile and troubling place. Yet the idea of policing also brings to the fore sensations of order, authority, and protection; it makes it possible for people to believe that a powerful force for good stands between them and an anarchic world that the state is willing and able to defend its citizens. Policing, in short, contrived simultaneously to denote both the dangerous Other and the means to deter and, if necessary, apprehend that Other. (2003: 43–44)

They might just as well have been referring to the subjectivities of police themselves, for it is an implication of Tyler’s theory of legitimation that those who exercise authority wish to see their own behaviour as legitimate (Tyler, 2006). Since legitimation rests on ‘legitimating myths’, which may depart significantly from reality, then it is likely that those in authority will go to great lengths to affirm that their actions are congruent with those legitimating myths. The legitimating myth of policing is that the police are society’s bulwark against crime; that the police protect ordinary citizens from the depredations of criminals by deterring crime through the threat of detection and prosecution. Hence the glorification of incidents that epitomise (or can be made to represent) the police as the ‘powerful force for good’ battling with ‘the dangerous Other’. It is striking how officers describing recent stop and searches went to considerable lengths to assure the interviewer that although they could find no hard evidence of, say, drug-taking, there was plenty of circumstantial evidence or informal admissions made by suspects that confirmed their suspicions (an unpublished feature of the research on stop and search published as Waddington et al, 2004). There is another source of the imperative to insist on the righteousness of policing and that is the ambiguity and uncertainty that suffuses policing, whereas the legal process demands clarity and certainty. When police officers stop and search people they should do so on the grounds of ‘reasonable suspicion’ of some wrongdoing. However, this entails interpreting subtleties of behaviour which may have innocent as well as criminal origins. A person who alights from a bus, only to reboard a moment or two later, may have simply changed their mind. However, to a police officer this is classic counter-surveillance behaviour frequently indulged in by pickpockets on London’s Underground. They move between carriages and are attentive to anyone who does likewise for the latter might be a plainclothes police officer engaged in surveillance. Officers who police London’s Underground system sometimes wait on platforms and try to spot anyone involved in such a manoeuvre. They might stop and search such a person in the hope of discovering incriminating evidence of pickpocketing, but even if they do not they are often reluctant to admit that they had made a mistake, however justified in law it might have been



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to stop and search. Mistakes do happen and tragically so on occasions: on 22 July 2005 (the day after a failed attempt to repeat the bombing of London Underground and a London bus two weeks earlier) Jean Charles de Menezes innocently appears to have performed precisely such a manoeuvre at Brixton, when it appears that his intended onward journey by Underground was blocked by a security alert at the Brixton station. Officers relying on their practical knowledge interpreted his actions as confirmation that he was ‘surveillance aware’ and whilst not confirming his identity as the wanted suicide bomber, Hussain Osman, tipped the balance of opinion in that direction with eventually tragically fatal consequences. Yet, mistakes are bound to be a feature of counter-terrorism and the detection of pickpockets, for both groups will do all in their power to make their detection as difficult as possible. Stop and search generally is notoriously imprecise with less than 10 per cent of these interventions yielding evidence of any offences, still less of serious criminality. Yet, officers are obliged to have formed a genuine and honest belief that all those stopped and searched are behaving suspiciously. How, then, do they justify the barrenness of their suspicions? The answer is that they work hard rhetorically to convince themselves and others that whilst the demanding standards of the legal process were not satisfied, the person was really guilty of an offence. Ambiguity and uncertainty is not restricted to forming suspicions about the intention and actions of others. Klinger (2004) documents the experiences of American police officers who have participated in gunfights. Those officers repeatedly recount perceptual distortion, such as time seeming to slow down, tunnel vision, lack of auditory input. Burrows (1992) provides quasi-experimental evidence that confirms that such perceptual distortions are real and goes on to highlight the incompatibility of such experiences with a legal process that demands certainty. For instance, according to the testimony of firearms officers involved in the mistaken killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, they shouted ‘Armed police!’ as they ran along the platform, whereas many passengers testified that they heard no such thing (IPCC, 2007). In view of evidence documenting perceptual distortions in such circumstances, it would not be at all surprising to find such a discrepancy, but it has led some commentators to question the veracity of the officer’s testimony (Squires and Kennison, 2010). Moreover, the legal process requires that such ambiguity and uncertainty must be transformed into unambiguous and certain ‘paper reality’ (Dixon, 1997). This is a classically anomic situation that spawns not only cynicism towards the legal process, in which the pretence of certainty must be avowed, but it also encourages solidarity amongst those who are ‘in the know’ and erect a wall of secrecy around the unstated awareness that the ‘paper reality’ is often a legally prescribed fiction. It may also encourage an insistence that police officers are absolutely sure about their judgements and that suspects who escape conviction were not truly innocent, but contrive to ‘get away with it’. Hence, it creates conditions conducive to ‘noble cause corruption’, for there is precious little difference between translating everyday experience into arcane legal formulations and doing so in a way that casts the suspect and his or her actions in the most negative light. It is but then a small step to embroidering that legal formulation so as to frustrate

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attempts by those who are so obviously guilty of wrongdoing to ‘get away with it’. These are, what Manning described as ‘invitational edges of corruption’ (Manning, 1974; see also Waddington, 1999a; Punch, 2009) It may also lie behind the false certainty with which police officers invest the rectitude of their actions and police policies. Squires and Kennison note how following the forced resignation of a Sussex Police Chief Constable and Assistant Chief Constable after defects were found in how armed Sussex officers had conducted an armed raid on premises that left an innocent man killed, a new policy was introduced on ARVs: it shared one particular characteristic with a number of other aspects of police firearms policy development. Seemingly, whatever the policy at any given time, police spokesman will commit unreservedly to the current policy as the only sensible way to operate. When the policy changes (for whatever reason) the new policy becomes the ‘only way’; assuring an apparently seamless transition. No doubt, however unsatisfactory this may be to a social scientist, there can seemingly be no ‘official space’ for ambiguity in an area as potentially critical and controversial as police armed response. (Squires and Kennison, 2010: 148)

This tendency to unswerving adherence to the latest policy position is not without consequence. As Weatheritt observed, many policy initiatives are ‘doomed to succeed’ (Weatheritt, 1986), thus lessons are not learned and future generations of police officers are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. In the long run, it undermines any aspiration to promote ‘evidence-based policy’. Those who remain outside this community of the knowing are simply denied any legitimate right to comment on such matters.

VI.  Talk and Behaviour Turning away from the canteen to the streets does not mean turning our analytical backs on culture and cognition, for officers are obliged to develop understandings about how to deal with situations they encounter. Some of the earliest studies of police culture drew explicit connections between features of policing, most notably Skolnick’s identification of ‘authority’ and ‘danger’ as the universal problematics that beset the work of officers and how they construct images of ‘symbolic assailants’ to cope with the practical task of performing their role (Skolnick, 1966). Skolnick’s insight was valuable, but given the attention that has been devoted to police culture there has not been a commensurate development of theoretical understanding of police practice, and yet it is not for want of evidence. Consider one of the most enduring features of police culture — the avoidance of ‘trouble’. This was first observed by Chatterton (1983), developed by Norris (1989), before being applied by me to public order policing (Waddington, 1994b). It is clearly a cultural construct: it is a shared understanding of law and procedure, the impli-



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cations and consequences of police action, for instance, the likelihood of ‘comeback’ and how best to prevent or mitigate such an unwelcome outcome. It is also something that only comes to consciousness in operational settings. For instance, I witnessed a small-scale non-violent gay rights demonstration that got ‘out of hand’ and concluded with activists doing nothing more serious than waving placards outside Buckingham Palace. Back at the police station later that afternoon, an Inspector sat down at a computer terminal and dramatically flexing his fingers, announced ‘Now for some creative writing!’. He was implicitly acknowledging the ‘in the job’ trouble that was likely to follow the presence of demonstrators in the Royal Park, let alone outside Buckingham Palace. It was culturally understood by all those routinely involved with the public order in central London, that the Royal Parks were a ‘no-go’ area for protest of any kind. It was culturally anticipated that a letter of complaint would be sent from the Lord Chamberlain to the Home Secretary and thence to the Commissioner, and thereafter it would descend down the Metropolitan Police hierarchy gathering punitive potential as it did so until those directly involved in policing the demonstration were required to account for their actions. It was also culturally understood that a suitably worded account of the incident on the computerised system could be used to erect the necessary defences and deflect blame, framing the incident in a much more positive light. This was an integral part of the culture of public order policing in central London, but also a variant of a wider cultural imperative commonly understood by officers elsewhere in the British police (and elsewhere) who are engaged in very different tasks – ‘cover your back’. Amongst that wider community of police officers may be counted armed officers. Whilst conducting research on the training, policy and practice of armed policing in the late 1980s and early 1990s I was trained as a firearms officer. On one training course, trainees were basking in the sun during a lunch break watching fully qualified officers playing a game of volleyball. One of the officers attending the course was from another force that used a different type of pistol. This unloaded pistol was being handed around amongst other trainees. One officer checked that the pistol was unloaded and pulled the trigger and the hammer fell with a click. The volleyball stopped abruptly, and an experienced officers walked over and sternly observed that we were in the ‘fumble zone’ and that if we wanted to play with guns we had better do so elsewhere. It was a salutary lesson that was not forgotten for the remainder of the course, which lasted three weeks. The message that armed policing is a very serious and hazardous business was repeatedly (indeed, incessantly) communicated not only in formal instruction but in such informal episodes as this. Contrary to the impression given by some autobiographies by former armed officers (Collins, 1997; Hailwood, 2004), the culture of armed officers that I observed was one of the utmost caution, anything else was dismissed as ‘cowboy’ antics – it was a culture of caution. I revisited armed policing about a decade later as part of a six-nations comparative study of how police talk about the use of force (Waddington et al, 2009). This research involved a standardised scenario being presented to focus groups of

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officers in the six jurisdictions: England, Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Venezuela and Brazil. The scenario paused at six predetermined points and the focus groups were asked to appraise the behaviour of the officers depicted in the scenario, predict what was likely to happen next, and so on. It was a comparative examination of normative police cultural understandings about the use of force. In order for the English scenario to retain comparability with those of the other countries an armed confrontation was engineered through the hypothetical intervention of an armed response vehicle (ARV) into the developing incident. Also to have some comparability in the perspective of officers, I held two focus groups of general duties officers and two comprising the crews of ARVs. There was a striking difference in the ‘operational culture’ of these two types of focus groups. In the initial stages of the developing scenario ARV crews were noticeably more assertive and confident than were general duties officers. It was summed up in a remark from an ARV officer who said that young people in a ‘rough area’ like that referred to in the scenario ‘know us and know our cars. They don’t mess with us!’ General duties officers were, by contrast, wary and hesitant about stopping a car occupied by two black youths, late on a warm summer’s evening when there were many bystanders and onlookers. However, as the scenario developed and especially once it turned into an armed confrontation with the occupants of the car running off after it had collided with another car during a high-speed pursuit and apparently in possession of a handgun, the attitudes of the focus groups switched dramatically. Now it was the general duties officers that imagined that the ARV crew would challenge the escapees and open fire if the handgun the youth was carrying was levelled in the direction of the officers. The ARV crews, on the other hand, were much more wary. They rhetorically reminded me that the ‘intelligence’ provided during the imaginary pursuit – to the effect that the car being pursued was connected to a ‘drugs–related shooting’ — was of unknown and possibly dubious provenance. As one officer put it: ‘For all I know, it could have been some bollocks told to a detective by a snout’. They were concerned that in a crowded shopping area in the midst of a housing development any shot they fired might miss the intended target and hit an innocent passer-by (usually depicted as a mother pushing a pram or hanging out washing on a clothes line). They were strongly disinclined to chase the youths because apart from the dangers of pursuing possibly armed men through unfamiliar territory, it would mean abandoning the wrecked car, which had yet to be searched and might contain another firearm. It was better, in their virtually unanimous opinion to remain guarding the car and the unarmed officers, summoning assistance from other armed officers, dogs and their handlers and the force helicopter before commencing a systematic search of the area. If the youths escaped this time, they would doubtless come to police attention again and be apprehended. This was not just the hypothetical talk of armed officers, for the IPCC complained about what they dubbed ‘a culture of caution’ on the part of armed officers (IPCC, 2006), which is strikingly similar to the views expressed by the officers. Perhaps even more surprising is that armed officers in England shared a common ‘culture of caution’ with officers not only in the Netherlands, Germany and



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Australia, but also in South American jurisdictions where the rate of police shootings hugely exceeds that in any of the more developed countries. When the youths in the scenario were described as running off in possession of a gun and turning and opening fire, the officers in the developed countries could not envisage engaging them in an exchange of shots, but preferred to hold back, keeping the youths in view from a distance and summoning as much assistance as they could muster. The South American officers likewise could imagine that only if life was in imminent danger would it be appropriate to open fire. They envisaged that any police shooting would be followed by searching investigation and detailed examination of their justification for firing every shot. Yet, here was the crucial difference: they could readily imagine that their lives might be in jeopardy. They imagined that the youths would have access to automatic weapons, body armour and hand-grenades. They thought it highly probable that shots would be exchanged; something that all focus groups in the developed world consider highly improbable. Differences between police in the developed countries and those in South America did not lie in their cultural understanding of human rights, but in their cultural apprehension of danger (Liska, 1992). This is not fanciful: police officers in South America are frequently killed and injured by armed criminals.

VII. Conclusion I hope that this chapter has succeeded in convincing Robert (if no-one else!) that: the concept of ‘police culture’ has been used mainly as a rhetorical device designed to promote the case for police reform; but which is crude and simplistic in its formulation; more likely to mislead rather than inform policy-making. Instead, we need to understand how the conflicts and contradictions of what Chan calls the ‘field’ of policing (Chan 1997; 1999) prompt officers to make cultural adjustments to maintain the righteousness of their actions. Officers volubly re-affirm that theirs is a noble and heroic calling, and they are blessed with the knowledge and experience to peer beneath surface appearance to reveal malevolence and threat, and thereby intervene to protect society from depredation. However, this is more than simply an academic issue of competing perspectives. It is directly relevant to issues of police reform. The decades in which ‘police culture’ has become a stalwart of the conceptual armoury of criminologists and diffused into the wider lexicon have also witnessed significant attempts at cultural reform of police practice. Whilst some of these reforms have yielded significant results (contra the expectations of ‘New Left pessimists’; Dixon, 1995) policing has resisted attempts at cultural change in respect of the poor relations between police and minorities, the response to ‘hate crime’ and crimes against women. It is hardly surprising, for police in many jurisdictions remain woefully trained. An English probationary constable in the second decade of the new millennium receives almost

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the same amount of training as I did in the mid-1960s, yet the demands made upon the police have mushroomed enormously. However, increasing the amount of time devoted to training is insufficient in itself. What needs to be understood are the realities of the ‘field’ and how it is accommodated by the ‘habitus’. A truly professional education of police officers must commence, not from some romantic conception of ‘community policing’ like that inflicted on the hapless recruits observed by Chan (Chan 1997; 1999), but from a hard-headed analysis of what officers are obliged to do, the demands and pressures that accompany their work, and an education in how to recognise, analyse and adapt to those demands so as to provide the professional service that the public rightly demands. Then, hopefully, we will witness the emergence of a genuinely professional culture of policing.

References Alpert, Geoffrey P and Dunham, R (1999), The force factor: Measuring and assessing police use of force and suspect resistance. Report to the National Institute of Justice: Use of Force by Police: Overview of National and Local Data (Washington, DC, US Department of Justice). Alpert, Geoffrey P, Dunham, Roger G and MacDonald, John M (2004) ‘Interactive PoliceCitizen Encounters that Result in Force’ Police Quarterly 7 (December), 475–88. Alpert, GP and MacDonald, JM (2001) ‘Police use of force: an analysis of organizational characteristics’ Justice Quarterly 18(2), 393–409. Belur, Jyoti (2010) Permission to Shoot? Police Use of Deadly Force in Democracies (London, Springer). Bittner, Egon (1970) The Functions of the Police in a Modern Society (Washington, DC, US Government Printing Office). Bowling, Benjamin (1998) ‘Violent Racism’ Clarendon Studies in Criminology (Oxford, Clarendon) 377. Brewer, John D (1990) ‘Talking about danger: the RUC and the paramilitary threat’ Sociology 24(4), 657–74. Brogden, Michael (1983) ‘The myth of policing by consent’ Police Review XLI, 760–61. —— (1991) On the Mersey Beat (Oxford, Oxford University Press) 184. Burrows, Colin Stanley (1992) ‘The Use of Lethal Force by Police’ M. Phil. (University of Ulster). Chan, Janet (1996) ‘Changing police culture’ British Journal of Criminology 36(1), 109–34. —— (1997) Changing Police Culture: Policing in a Multicultural Society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) 255. —— (1999) ‘Police culture’ in David Dixon (ed), A Culture of Corruption (Annadale, NSW, Hawkins Press) 98–137. —— (2003) Fair Cop: Learning the Art of Policing (Toronto, University of Toronto Press). Chatterton, Michael R (1983) ‘Police work and assault charges’ in M Punch (ed), Control in the Police Organization (Cambridge, Mass, M.I.T. Press) 194–221. Choongh, Satnam (1997) Policing as Social Discipline in Roger Hood (ed), Clarendon Studies in Criminology (Oxford, Clarendon) 262.



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—— (1998) ‘Policing the dross: a social disciplinary model of policing’ British Journal of Criminology 38(4), 623–34. Clark, JP (1965) ‘Isolation of the police: a comparison of the British and American situations’ Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 56(3), 307–19. Collins, Steve (1997) The Good Guys Wear Black: The True-Life Heroes of Britain’s Armed Police (London, Century). Darley, John M and Batson, C David (1984) ‘  “From Jerusalem to Jericho”: a study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behaviour’ in Elliot Aronson (ed), Readings About the Social Animal (New York, W.H. Freeman) 37–51. Dixon, Bill and Gadd, David (2006) ‘Getting the message? “New” Labour and the criminalization of “hate’  ’’ Criminology and Criminal Justice 6(3), 309–28. Dixon, Bill and Stanko, Betsy (1995) ‘Sector policing and public accountability’ Policing and Society 5(4) 171–84. Dixon, David (1995) ‘New left pessimism (Authors meet critics III)’ in Lesley Noaks, Michael Levi and Michael Maguire (eds), Issues in Contemporary Criminology (Cardiff, University of Wales Press) 217–24. —— (1997) ‘Law in Policing: Legal Regulation and Police Practices’ in Roger Hood (ed), Clarendon Studies in Criminology (Oxford, Clarendon) 365. Dixon, D and Fishwick, E (1984) ‘The law and order debate in historical perspective’ in P Norton (ed), Law and Order in British Politics (Aldershot, Gower) 21–37. Eiser, J Richard (1986) Social Psychology: Attitudes, Cognitions and Social Behaviour (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) 400. Ellison, Louise and Munro, Vanessa E (2009a) ‘Turning mirrors into windows? Assessing the impact of (mock) juror education in rape trials’ British Journal of Criminology 49(3), 363–83. —— (2009b) ‘Reacting to rape: exploring mock jurors’ assessments of complainant credibility’ British Journal of Criminology 49(2), 202–19. —— (2009c) ‘Of “normal sex” and “real rape”: exploring the use of socio–sexual scripts in (mock) jury deliberation’ Social and Legal Studies 18(3), 291–312. Emsley, Clive (1994) ‘The history of crime and crime control institutions, c.770–c.1945’ in Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan and Robert Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford, Clarendon) 149–82. —— (2011) Crime and Society in Twentieth–Century England (Harlow, Pearson). Festinger, Leon (1962) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Tavistock Publications, London). Finch, Emily and Munro, Vanessa E (2005), ‘Juror Stereotypes and Blame Attribution in Rape Cases Involving Intoxicants’ British Journal of Criminology 45(1), 25–38. —— and —— (2006) ‘Breaking boundaries? Sexual consent in the jury room’ Legal Studies 26(3), 303–20. —— and —— (2007) ‘The demon drink and the demonized woman: socio-sexual stereotypes and responsibility attribution in rape trials involving intoxicants’ Social and Legal Studies 16(4), 591–614. Foster, Janet, Newburn, Tim and Souhami, Anna (2005) ‘Assessing the impact of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry’ Home Office Research Study 294 (London, Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate). Hailwood, Andy (2004) Gun Law (Wrea Green, Lancashire, Milo Books). Holdaway, Simon (1983) Inside the British Police (Oxford, Blackwell). Hoyle, Carolyn (1998) ‘Negotiating Domestic Violence’ in Roger Hood (ed), Clarendon Studies in Criminology (Oxford, Clarendon) 248.

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IPCC (2006) Report on Highmoor Cross shooting (London, Independent Police Complaints Commission). —— (2007) Stockwell One: Investigation Into the Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Underground Station on 22 July 2005 (London, Independent Police Complaints Commission). Klinger, David (2004) Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force (San Francisco, CA, Jossey–Bass). Liska, Allen J (1992) Social Threat and Social Control (Albany, State University of New York) 240. Loader, Ian and Mulcahy, Aogàn (2003) ‘Policing and the Condition of England: Memory, Politics and Culture’ Clarendon Studies in Criminology (Oxford, Oxford University Press) 381. Loader, Ian and Sparks, Richard (2010) Public Criminology? (London, Routledge). Loftus, Bethan (2010a) ‘Police Culture in a Changing World’ Clarendon Studies in Criminology (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2010b) ‘Police occupational culture: classic themes, altered times’ Policing And Society 20(1), 1–20. Macpherson of Cluny, Sir William et al (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (London, H.M.S.O.). Manning, Peter K (1974) ‘Police lying’ Urban Life 3, 283–306. —— (1993) ‘Community-based policing’ in Roger G Dunham and Geoffrey P Alpert (eds), Critical Issues in Policing: Contemporary Readings, 2nd edn (Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland) 421–31. McConville, Mike, Sanders, Andrew and Leng, Roger (1991) The Case for the Prosecution (London, Routledge) 227. Mead, Margaret (1943) Coming of age in Samoa (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng; New York, Penguin books) vii, 9–185. Miller, WR (1977) Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830–1870 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Norris, Clive (1989) ‘Avoiding trouble: the patrol officer’s perception of encounters with the public’ in Mollie Weatheritt (ed), Police Research: Some Future Prospects (Aldershot, Avebury) 89–106. Punch, Maurice (2009) Police Corruption: Deviance, Accountability and Reform in Policing (Collumpton, Willan). Rawlings, Philip (1999) Crime and Power: A History of Criminal Justice, 1688–1998 in Tim Newburn (ed), Longman Criminology Series (London, Longman) 212. Reiner, R (1978) The Blue-Coated Worker (London, Cambridge University Press). —— (1985) Politics of the Police (London, Wheatsheaf). —— (1992) Politics of the Police, 2nd edn (London, Wheatsheaf). —— (2000) The politics of the police, 3rd edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press) xii, 279. —— (2010) The politics of the police, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press) xii, 279. —— (2011) ‘Response to Review Symposium on The Politics of the Police 4th ed’ Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice 5(2), 105–07. Reiss, AJ (1971) The Police and the Public (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press). Roberts, JV and Hough, M (2005) Understanding Public Attitudes to Criminal Justice (Maidenhead, Open University Press). Ryle, Gilbert (1949) The Concept of Mind (London, Hutchinson).



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Scarman, Leslie, Rt Hon the Lord (1981) The Brixton Disorders 10–12 April 1981: Report of an Inquiry by the Rt. Hon. The Lord Scarman, O.B.E. (Cmnd 8427, London, H.M.S.O.). Skolnick, JH (1966) Justice Without Trial (New York, Wiley). Squires, Peter and Kennison, Peter (2010) Shooting to Kill? Policing, Firearms and Armed Response (Chichester, Wiley–Blackwell). Steedman, Carolyn (1984) Policing the Victorian Community: The Formation of English Provincial Police Forces, 1856–80 (London, Routledge). Taylor, D (1997) The New Police in Nineteenth–Century England: Crime, Conflict and Control (Manchester, Manchester University Press). Terrill, W (2003) ‘Police Use of Force and Suspect Resistance: The Micro Process of the Police–Suspect Encounter’ Police Quarterly 6, 51–83. Terrill, W, Paoline, EA and Manning, PK (2003) ‘Police culture and coercion’ Criminology 41(4), 1003–34. Terrill, William and Paoline, Eugene A, III (2007) ‘Nonarrest decision making in police– citizen encounters’ Police Quarterly 10(3), 308–31. Tyler, TR (2006) ‘Psychological Perspectives on Legitimacy and Legitimation’ Annual Review of Psychology 57, 375–400. Waddington, PAJ (1994a) ‘Coercion and accommodation: policing public order after the Public Order Act’ British Journal of Sociology 45(3), 367–85. —— (1994b) Liberty and Order: Policing Public Order in a Capital City (London, UCL Press). —— (1999a) Policing Citizens (London, UCL) 303. —— (1999b) ‘Police (canteen) sub-culture: an appreciation’ British Journal of Criminology 39(2), 286–308. Waddington, PAJ, Badger, Doug and Bull, Ray (2006) The Violent Workplace (Cullompton, Willan) 204. Waddington, PAJ et al (2009) ‘Singing the same tune? International continuities and discontinuities in how police talk about using force ‘ Crime, Law and Social Change 52 (Special issue on Policing Talk About the Use of Force: A Comparative International Perspective) 111–38. Waddington, P.A.J, Stenson, Kevin and Don, David (2004) ‘In proportion: race, and police stop and search’ British Journal of Criminology 44(6), 889–914. Weatheritt, M (1986) Innovations in Policing (London, Croom Helm/The Police Foundation). Weinberger, Barbara (1995) The Best Police in the World: An Oral History of English Policing From the 1930s to the 1960s (Aldershot, Scolar) 244. Westley, William A (1953) ‘Violence and the police’ American Journal of Sociology 59, 34– 41. Wilson, JQ (1968) ‘Dilemmas in police administration’ Public Administration Review 28, 407–17. —— (1969) Varieties of Police Behaviour (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press). Worden, RE (1989) ‘Situational and attitudinal explanations of police behaviour. A theoretical reappraisal and empirical reassessment’ Law and Society 23(4), 667–711. —— (1996) ‘The causes of police brutality: theory and evidence on police use of force’ in William A Geller and Hans Toch (eds), Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force (New Haven, Conn, Yale University Press) 23–51.

6 From Juliet to Jane: Women Police in TV Cop Shows, Reality, Rank and Careers 1

FRANCES HEIDENSOHN and JENNIFER BROWN

I.  Setting the Scene We have chosen to contribute to this collection in honour of Robert Reiner with a chapter which focuses on the portrayal of female officers in television shows. Robert Reiner is one of our leading scholars commenting on policing but he has also written extensively on crime, media and law enforcement. He has a famously encyclopaedic knowledge of crime films. He was one of the few male scholars in this field to acknowledge the appearance of what he called ‘a new fashion for female cop heroes’ (Reiner, 1992: 280). He observes of Juliet Bravo, The Gentle Touch and Cagney and Lacey, albeit in an end note to a section on community policing, ‘none of these are “community police” in the Dixon sense’, although The Gentle Touch comes closest, with the exception of its emphasis on detective rather than uniform work. Despite the fact that two TV series featuring women officers in lead roles (Cagney and Lacey and Prime Suspect) had already been shown before Robert’s commentary was written and indeed Cagney and Lacey had actually finished its original run on CBS in the USA (from 1982 to 1988), he puts all these very different examples together and then tries to fit them into his categories of ‘law enforcement stories’ where they do not easily sit. In a much later account of the history of cop shows he attempted to periodise the British TV representation of policing as a ‘dialectic development’ starting from the cosily consensual world of Dixon of Dock Green. McLaughlin (2005: 23) noted that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) approved the Dixon version as a ‘faithful picture of the policeman’s [sic] life and work and a valuable means of spreading knowledge of the high traditions and efficiency of the Met’. Robert argues that these images ‘hardened’ into Z Cars, ‘synthesised’ in The 1   The chapter title refers to the BBC series Juliet Bravo and Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. We are aware that the programme Gentle Touch predated Juliet Bravo by four months. Juliet simply works better alliteratively.

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Bill and in the 1990s ‘diversified’ into a range from ‘classic cosy sleuth stories’ (eg Morse, Midsomer Murders) to what he now calls ‘the Dixon-in drag community policing’ of Juliet Bravo and The Gentle Touch (Reiner, 2008: 326). More recently, he suggests, a new dialectic has emerged in which diversity and conflict are recognised and lead to a ‘transitional’ stage of series featuring a range of police types and more political aspects of policing, of which Prime Suspect is emblematic. In sum, Robert Reiner has long recognised the significance of female police shows and where they belong in the history of TV police drama. However they do not readily fit into his framework and analyses of the genre. In this chapter we have therefore tried to explore the subgenre of female cop shows in a way which builds on Robert’s approaches but we extend those and propose some new ones. Our main subjects are the British programmes and the period in which they first appeared, alluded to in our title, which feature women officers in lead roles. We do refer to other examples outside these limits: American series, such as Cagney and Lacey, UK dramas such as New Tricks, which has a female Detective Superintendent in a key role, and Between the Lines which regularly featured a gay woman cop. When we first began to work on this piece and throughout its preparation, we observed what a phenomenal amount of activity there was around our chosen topic. There was the new and game-changing programme, the Danish TV drama The Killing with its morose female detective Sarah Lund which became a huge surprise hit when its first series was shown on BBC 4 in 2011. When it was quickly followed by its second, the Radio Times featured Lund on its cover with the headline ‘The World’s No 1 Woman Detective’ (19 November 2011). In May of the same year, ITV launched Scott and Bailey, another new drama this time starring two women detective constables; it was notable how consciously this new example of the genre referenced the older, classic Cagney and Lacey. Indeed, the article promoting Scott and Bailey (Radio Times, 28 May 2011) is headlined ‘Cagney and Lacey UK’ and suggests that the new programme is ‘in the roughest shorthand Cagney and Lacey in Manchester’. Later, however, the (female) police advisor distances herself from the ‘stereotypically troubled telly detective . . . Jane Tennison’. Curiously, in the background documentary made for the DVD Complete Collection of Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren, who played Tennison, stresses how much advice she had on suitable demeanour from Jackie Malton, the former Metropolitan detective who advised on the drama and how carefully she followed it. It does seem ironic and very interesting that it is fictional depictions of women police which are still the touchstone for other portrayals and are cited by police themselves as models. When one of us (FMH) undertook a research study comparing the careers of women in law enforcement in the UK and the USA in the 1980s, the question of how realistic Cagney and Lacey was came up frequently. Many of those interviewed referred to it although usually they stressed that ‘that precinct is way too busy’ (Heidensohn, 1992). Jackie Malton in the DVD documentary of Prime Suspect states that the films were often used as training videos while she was still working for the Met.



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At the end of 2011, the 30th anniversary of the first screening of Cagney and Lacey was marked by a Question & Answer session at the British Film Institute (BFI, 30 November 2011) plus a major interview with the stars, Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless in The Guardian. While both actors were clearly publicising their current London theatre appearances, the interview centred on Cagney and Lacey as ‘the coolest women on TV’ (Guardian, 8 December 2011). As well as recording all this action, we have made use of the sources they have generated in our analysis for what they tell us about the production values, particularly realism and authenticity and the processes behind these series. The opening episode of the The Killing shows Detective Inspector Sara Lund preparing to leave her station in order to move to Sweden. She is called out to her last murder scene where she descends alone into a warehouse cellar with the door closing behind her and the lights failing. As she follows a trail of blood illuminated by her torch, she comes across a hanging figure which turns out to be a sex doll complete with an erect penis, a joke played on her by her male colleagues. This is perhaps amongst the most extreme demonstrations of sexual harassment in a police procedural drama where the central character is a woman officer. The sexism that Lund endures subsequently is more subtle; she is undermined, disbelieved and her male colleagues praised for her detecting prowess. This overt and covert harassment is symptomatic of the actual experiences of women in policing (Brown and Heidensohn, 2000). A Swedish woman police officer recently told one of us (JB) a story about how her fellow officers, knowing of her ophiophobia, collected a snake from the local zoo and had a confederate bring it into the police station where she was the duty officer. They had previously brought in an injured animal from the road side and were taken aback when she put it out of its misery by killing it, having been brought up on a farm. This chapter then will look at the portrayal of women characters in police dramas and examine what scripts, casting and characterisation have to tell us about the reality of the numbers, rank and role played by real policewomen and their experiences in the male-dominated culture that is policing. O’Sullivan (2005) argues that it is difficult to tell what the real world impact of screen portrayals has had on policing. We posit that there is a relationship between the appearance and dramatisation of women as protagonists in TV drama and the experiences of their real life counterparts. To demonstrate this relationship, firstly we look at the presence of women within the police procedural dramas and the degree they advocated or reflected changes in attitude or status of women in policing. Secondly we look at the plots and settings of women cop procedurals that are suggestive of a contra discourse i.e. looking at equality issues that confront male hegemony of the police and a social causality discourse in which plots feature women’s issues such as sexual victimisation, homophobia and promote a different style of engagement with victims. Indeed Brunsdon (1998) articulates an ‘equal opportunities’ discourse (discrimination and sexual harassment) which prevailed both in women’s real world of policing and its metamorphosis in fiction and discusses the self-reflexivity of media depictions and contemporaneous life experience. There is also a circularity of art mimicking

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life and vice versa whereby women actors and script writers were hemmed in to limit characterisation of their fictional women police officers and in an analogous way women police themselves felt thwarted in developing their careers in the real world of policing. Hurd (1979) argues that the police series on television not only reflects the world of policing but also must construct a coherent version of social reality and that there is an interaction whereby the media images are both produced by and help to produce a version of actuality. They have to be recognisable versions of the real world and to be believable, must incorporate antagonisms and tensions that exist in contemporary society. O’Sullivan (2005: 504) suggests that ‘even if not providing an accurate depiction of policing realities at any given time, such portrayals may reflect dormant ideas about policing, and, indirectly chart the changing standing of the police in society’.

II.  Establishing Shots Fictional representations on television of women in law enforcement are a relatively recent phenomenon (Sydney-Smith, 2009). Hurd (1981: 125) notes that the role for policewomen in an early series, Z Cars, first shown in 1976 (a year after the police in the UK were mandated to integrate women into policing following the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act), was ‘to stand silently by the door of the interview room . . .no more than props that add realism to the scene’. So although Z Cars was a de-bunking, warts and all portrayal of police compared to the ‘superannuated boy scout of George Dixon’ discussed by Robert (Reiner 1994: 304) the roles for women were still minimal. Troy Kennedy Martin, the Z Cars writer, went on patrol with Lancashire police to experience their daily routines and based his characters on actual people, a trend observed in the making of women cop procedurals. In the fourth edition of Robert’s The Politics of the Police (2010: 202), he retains his previous comment that Juliet Bravo symbolises ‘a new fashion for female cop heroes’. Jermyn (2003: 50) declares that when screening this series, the BBC had become somewhat sensitive to accusations of excessive violence in crime dramas and was seeking to ‘soften up’ the genre and present the police in a more compassionate light. FMH notes (Heidensohn, 1992) that the use of women in the real world of policing served much the same function and that when the reputation of the police was under threat, women were the desperate remedies used to offset criticism. Juliet Bravo, and later Prime Suspect, overlaps with a period of transition and tension for women police officers as the forces of England and Wales morphed from gender separation into an integrated service. As Jermyn declares, Prime Suspect critically and consciously engaged with the politics of the glass ceiling and the systematic and insidious discrimination that policewomen experienced (p 50). Some of the most remarkable TV police programmes of all time have featured women in lead roles – notably Cagney and Lacey and Prime Suspect (the latter has



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been listed in the UK and the USA as one of the best ever TV shows). They have been the subjects of a number of scholarly and popular studies, but many of these focus on their depiction of feminist issues or sexuality, rather than how they portray women’s role in policing, eg Cavender, Bond-Maupin and Jurik (1998); Cavender and Jurik (1998). Jermyn (2003) argues that other analyses such as Creeber’s (referred to later), ‘seems to privilege indebtedness to male canons’ (p 47) and instead asks for an analysis of its evocation of gender and realism. In this chapter, we shall relate the presentation of women police officers in TV police procedurals to both existing data and our own research files.

III.  The Real Life Script Systematic study of women in policing is itself, rather a latecomer to academic considerations (Heidensohn, 1992). In a recent review, Brown, Prenzler and van Ewijk (in press) note that whilst now there is a considerable body of analysis available, the conclusions they draw from their review is that as yet there is neither a police force that comprises 50 per cent of women nor one where there is parity in the numbers of men and women holding supervisory or senior rank. Women police officers still suffer sexual harassment and sex discrimination and occupy token numbers at senior level and in areas of specialism such as firearms units or traffic departments. Sigurdsson and Dhani (2010) report the latest distribution of officers by 100 90 80 70 Men 1989

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Women2010

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up

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Figure 1: Present percentage of women serving at different ranks in England and Wales, March 1989 and 2010

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gender serving in England and Wales. The 15 per cent of chief officers converts to 35 individuals and 142 women currently occupying the rank of superintendent. This is certainly an increase since the first television programmes featuring women playing the major character (see Figure 1 previous page). With respect to specialist areas of policing then women are still over-represented in units dealing with sexual crime and, curiously, mounted divisions of the police. They remain under-represented in criminal investigations and departments involving specialised skills or equipment (see Figure 2).

Air Child/sex/domestic CID Ops Dogs Drugs Firearms Marine Mounted Traffic Underwater Vice Special Branch 0

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Figure 2: Percentage of women serving within specialist departments 1989–2009

Research suggests (eg Lonsway, 2006) that there are still impediments for some women in policing notably: sustained negative attitudes towards them by co-workers, performance double standards, whereby women still perceived they have to do better than male colleagues to be seen as equally as competent, and insufficient flexibility to manage maternity breaks in career or care arrangements. She also reports that some women believed they faced no such barriers. Yet other research argues that actually women, by preference, preserve some of the differentiations between them and their male colleagues because they either are not attracted to working in male-dominated departments such as traffic or firearms or that domestic convenience self-limits long working hours (Holdaway and Parker, 1998; Westmarland, 2001; Dick and Cassell, 2002).



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IV.  Law Enforcement Scripts In his discussion of media portrayal of policing, Robert notes that popular literature and journalism has long featured the exploits of detectives and police officers and that there is evidence that the mass media has a role in shaping people’s attitudes towards the police (Reiner, 2010). For some, such as those higher up the social scale, the media are the main source of perceptions about the police. Overall nearly a third of the public mention media fiction as their most likely source of information about the police. So he concludes media representation of policing feeds back into policing practice via its effect on public perceptions in ‘media loops’. He goes on to argue (p 178) that whilst media images do not ‘float free’ of the actualities of policing they are not a ‘mirror reflecting of them’ either, rather media images are a ‘refraction’ of reality dependent on: • organisational imperative of the media industry; • ideological frames of the creative personnel and audience; and • changing balance of political and economic forces. He develops his argument by suggesting that there are two prevailing views about police media portrayals: the first is that the media should responsibly attempt to inculcate respect for law and order and the office of constable and the second, which is said to promote a more subversive view of policing. Robert concludes that the elements of police dramas such as the inevitable solving of the crime through remarkable detecting skills and exercise of scientific expertise are actually the opposite of the pattern of real offending and the bulk of actual police work. When commenting upon news coverage of policing, Robert draws on the work of Wren-Lewis’ analysis of the 1981 Brixton riots, ie the differentiation of distinctive discursive practices – a law-and order discourse which related the riots as hooliganism requiring a firm police response; a contra discourse whereby the riots were anti-police provoked by heavy-handed policing and a social causality discourse emphasising the failure of government economic policy. We develop our argument by bringing these ideas together to suggest a third function for television police procedurals involving women as the lead players i.e. prompting discussion about, presaging change and the settling of images of policewomen being in charge within the public consciousness.

V.  Women in Frame Robert presents a portrait of the early police procedurals such as Dragnet and The Naked City as involving the pursuit of serious criminals, often white men, by

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unattached, economically comfortable, white males in middle adulthood solving crime by experience and skill and increasingly supported by forensic science. Moreover the ‘heroes’ were represented as unglamorous, dutiful cops more or less happy in their domestic life doing their jobs professionally and with dedication but without exceptional talent. Certainly post World War Two, the police procedural drama increasingly presented rule bending and breaking as critical in the complexity of crime fighting. Hale (1998) distinguishes distinct phases of popular culture incorporating women in US police films which we can neatly link to stages in the incorporation of women into policing (see Brown, 1997). Although Title VII had declared equal employment rights for women in the United States in 1964 equality legislation came 10 years later in the UK. Nevertheless there is a surprising synchronicity between Hale’s phases and Brown’s stages. Brown’s model states that women did not enter policing until some 90 years after the formation of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in 1829, ie a period of omission. This was true of films and television shows about police in which women as officers were virtually absent. Sydney-Smith (2009: 46) discusses this omission as ‘the writing out’ of women in cop dramas. In the real world there followed a period of separation from 1916 to 1972 when the UK’s Equal Pay Act heralded the integration of policewomen’s departments into mainstream policing in the MPS. Hale’s time period for the first appearance of women cops coincided with Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, the Civil Rights and the Women’s Movement in the United States, 1963–1973. Films at this time included Fuzz, staring Raquel Welch as Detective Eileen McHenry in a comedic treatment of a search for a bomber. The poster has Welsh clad in her underwear and her co-star Burt Reynolds naked, draped in a sheet. The sexual overtones are very explicit with scenes of Welch in a sleeping bag in a park with a fellow detective acting as decoys in a rape investigation. Sydney-Smith (2009) notes these kinds of portrayals, also exemplified by the Cathy Gale and Emma Peel characters of The Avengers (first screened in 1960), as comic book fantasy discourses. The assimilation stage in Brown’s model (1972–82) when women officers are beginning to encroach into men’s spheres of policing stimulated by the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) of 1975, overlaps with Hale’s next media phase 1973–83. This sees films in which women are moving from subsidiary roles to ones in which they are partnered with the male lead eg Inspector Kate Moore played by Tyne Daly in The Enforcer. In this movie, affirmative action partners Daly with Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan. Harry is rather disparaging of his new partner and the benevolent sexism he displays towards her can be illustrated by the following quote with Callahan concerned that Kate will pass out at an autopsy and Kate trying to hold her own. Harry Callahan: [heading into the Coroner’s office] Tell me, ever been to one of these before? Kate Moore: No. Harry Callahan: In that case. I’d like to suggest that you sit outside here. Kate Moore: Please don’t concern yourself, Inspector.



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This period also saw the first showing of American TV series Police Woman (starring Angie Dickenson as Sergeant Pepper Anderson, 1974–78) and the often skimpily clad Charlie’s Angels (1976–81). Then came Cagney and Lacey (1981–88) with Daly and Sharon Gless. This series broke with the established pattern of the crime genre (Mayerle, 1987), although the TV guide advertising the pilot episode showed Loretta Swit, the first Cagney, lying on her back with a sheet draped over her (rather like the Burt Reynolds poster in Fuzz) showing her to be a conventional object of sexual desire (D’Acci, 1994: 21). Swit was replaced by Meg Foster as Cagney in the series aired in 1982. D’Acci quotes from reviews at the time which explicitly drew contrasts between Cagney and Lacey and previous police series. They were neither the ‘glamour girls’ of Charlie’s Angels nor ‘the clothes horse’ à la Angie Dickenson as Pepper Anderson. Instead of the formulaic and predictable plots and gratuitous violence of male-dominated shows, Mayerle argues that Cagney and Lacey ‘evolved into a hybrid form that significantly expanded the narrative potential of the genre’. Meg Foster was to be replaced by Sharon Gless, largely argues D’Acci, because of the perception that associated Foster with lesbianism, which was thought to create discomfort in the relationship between the two women by the viewing audience. D’Acci (p 31) concluded that homophobia, [and] outright discrimination (at least on the part of the executive who maintained the actress was a dyke) was instrumental in the threat to cancel the programme and then the demand that Foster’s removal was the condition of its reprieve.

She says ‘new and expanded representations of women on TV could not, it seems, include even hints of lesbianism’. Cagney, as played by Gless, underwent a fashion change and additional budget was allocated to provide ‘classier’ outfits. In the new opening titles, Lacey is seen dragging Cagney away from a shop window admiring a display of clothes. Clothes and how they were presented featured largely in the actresses’ reminiscences about the series. Nevertheless there was a roundedness of the characterisation which changed and grew through the series and the interactions between the two, both within the professional and domestic environments, were key to the working through of the crime detection. This emphasis on character i.e. two women who happen to be cops, rather than two cops who happen to be women, presented flawed and often unpredictable human beings. Mayerle analysed 75 episodes and found 25 per cent of screen time was devoted to personal issues of the two women. In addition there are traces of the stereotyping of actual police women in the series. In Gless’ Christine Cagney we have a bright, attractive blonde who is single, sexually active and professionally ambitious. Her personal choices of men are rather disastrous and in later episodes she has a serious drink problem. In other words she is seemingly not allowed to be both feminine and professionally successful. Mary Beth Lacey is overweight, often tired and fractious having to juggle her family life with her professional commitments. Alcock and Robson (1990) however, argue that although at first sight the programme appears to challenge gender boundaries, actually the story line develops to show Christine’s waywardness has its price

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in alcoholism and in the last series she suffers an acquaintance rape. What Alcock and Robson posit is that the series was not as revolutionary as promised and it is the more conventionally acceptable wife and mother who ‘rescues’ the unanchored Cagney. By bringing her back into the fold, they argue, Cagney both pays the price for her freewheeling and loses her potency as a sexually autonomous, ambitious professional woman. These conflicts are mirrored as the professional-feminine incompatibilities that reflect the perceptions of women in actual policing at that time (Brown and Heidensohn, 2000). They show how male officers tend, on the one hand, to dichotomise women into those who put emphasis on their professional policing personas at the expense of their personal lives and those who have a personal life outside of work and, on the other hand, to divide women in policing as being attractive and threatening or frumpish and undesirable. Being ‘one of the boys’ in which women show masculine traits of ambition are what Susan Martin typed as POLICEwomen whereas those wishing for lives more compatible with domestic responsibilities were labelled policeWOMEN (Martin, 1980). Whilst there were some policewomen who occupied the extreme poles of her dichotomy, more occupied the middle ground trying to accommodate both personal and professional lives. What is especially striking, and resonates with an analysis that both of us undertook in our international comparison of policewomen’s experiences (Brown and Heidensohn, 2000), is the apparent simultaneous holding of these conflicting images whereby women are set up to fail in either work or their personal life because their strengths in one domain are neutralised in the other. Additionally, Cagney and Lacey aired storylines that reflected the reality of police women’s experiences and feminist issues including Cagney filing sexual harassment charges against a police department captain and in an episode entitled ‘Cry for Help’ the storyline dealt with a fellow cop beating up his wife. Indeed, D’Acci (1994; 177) notes that the programme received fan mail which identified with ‘the frazzled Lacey trying to juggle both motherhood and a full-time job’ and ‘the work identified Cagney battling the prejudices against unmarried career women’. Silvestri (2003: 8) in her ethnographic study shows these to be ‘irresolvable conflicts’. Yet as will be seen later, as a reflection of changes in the police such as more flexible working and the greater number of women occupying more senior position, the conflict can be resolved as depicted by Caroline Quentin’s character, DCI Janine Lewis in Blue Murder. Brown’s next stage of policewomen’s progression (1983–94) is a period of challenge in which the pace of change in policing is accelerating with women officers litigating under the terms of the SDA for sex discrimination and harassment. In the UK, British police procedurals with women officers having a starring role emerged eg The Gentle Touch (1980–84), which preceded Juliet Bravo (1980–85) by four months. The former has Maggie Forbes leading crime investigations as a Detective Inspector (DI) and the latter Inspector Jean D’Arbley and later Inspector Kate Longton managing a station in Lancashire. DI Forbes’s link to the previous generation of cop shows can be found in her widowed status which resonates with the widower, George Dixon. As in Dixon,



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having a domestic life offered narrative opportunities as DI Forbes is left to bring up her son as a single mother. Inspector D’Arbley in Juliet Bravo faces sexism and hostility from the outset and her role as a professional woman having to balance the tensions of her career with her family life whilst facing sceptical male colleagues featured from the first episode. Inspector D’Arbley is variously called ‘boss’ by Sgt Beck, ‘Jean’ by her Chief Inspector and ‘Mrs D’Arbley’ by the newly appointed Superintendent. She reprimands Sgt Beck for his terminology and requests him to refer to her as Inspector D’Arbley or Ma’am. An exchange between them in the first episode indicates his hostility to working for a woman: Inspector D’Arbley: Are you happy in your work? Sgt Beck: Yep Inspector D’Arbley: I mean with me Sgt Beck: Oh Aye Inspector D’Arbley: I won’t hold it against you if you want to get out from under my skirts Sgt Beck: No boss I’ll give it a try

The desk sergeant just after her arrival at the station explains to a man wishing to see the new inspector that she be given five minutes’ ‘to put on her face’. The man is incredulous that the inspector is ‘a bloody woman’ to which Sgt Beck ripostes ‘then you’re almost as surprised as we are’. The Chief Inspector, dropping in to see her shortly after her appointment says: Yours is a very important appointment Jean, very few women in England are running a town like this. Most of our ladies are hived off to juvenile bureaus, community service or GQ training. There are quite a few around who would be pleased to see you fail.

The normative nature of the casual sexism embedded in the police occupational culture was a fair reflection of the actuality. Clearly, the dramatic purpose of a woman inspector was in part its novelty and also the playing out of police culture intertwined with the detecting plots. In 1979 just before the series started there were five inspectors in Lancashire Police, the setting of Juliet Bravo, with one in charge of a section, the role played by the Inspector D’Arbley character. Anna Carteret took over as the second woman inspector in Juliet Bravo. The actress was interviewed for Police Review (27 February 1987). She said ‘I was invited to speak at Hendon Police College. When I asked why they wanted me they told me that I was exactly the image they are trying to promote’. Inspector Longton is authoritative, knowledgeable and attractive. Indeed the actress was told ‘you’re far too pretty to be a policewoman’. This recurring theme of the apparent inconsistency of being both feminine and professional is referred to by Malcolm Young when providing an ethnographic account of actual policewomen’s experiences and the difficulties of being credible and both professional and feminine (Young, 1991). Hale’s penultimate phase is 1983–93, coincides with Brown’s reformation stage (1983–94). Women in England and Wales were breaking into areas of specialism such as dog handling, mounted branch and underwater diving (Lock, 1979). This overlaps with Juliet Bravo and the screening of The Bill in 1984. Women represented

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about half of Sun Hill’s establishment of officers in The Bill, itself an over-representation of the real-life establishment in MPS police stations. More accurately, more men in The Bill were cast at senior rank. Carolyn Pickles played the role of a Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) and she complained that The Bill’s script writers did not write for women stars.. My introduction was a strong one, but . . . I think they chickened out . . . I think the powers that be at Thames Television said ‘OK’ we’ve done the woman in charge, lets get back to the status quo, let’s not push any boundaries. Previous female actors on The Bill were just as badly served (Soothill, 1993).

An interview FMH and JB conducted with one of Robert’s PhD students, herself a former script writer from the programme, confirmed that her experience was one in which suggested strong storylines for women were discouraged, and the women writers felt very subordinated to the men. Moreover Carolyn Pickles complained some of her male co-stars on The Bill were chauvinist pigs who behaved just like the real-life hard-nut policemen . . . its a very macho show . . . I don’t think they liked taking orders from a woman-even though we were only acting. A lot of them wouldn’t acknowledge me and a couple thought: Let’s show her we’re cleverer than her by giving her a hard time.

The irony of course is that these experiences were a replication of what policewomen themselves were experiencing in the police service. Marianne Colbran, the PhD student referred to above, undertook a study of The Bill, where she had unique access as a former script writer on the show (Colbran, 2012). She suggests that three sets of factors influence the development of storylines: • commercial imperatives • working practices and ideological beliefs of the makers • artistic constraints. She argues that none of these factors can be discussed in isolation in terms of their impact on the storytelling process-each factor is contingent, complex and interacts with all the others-and at certain times in the show’s history, some factors or constraints may be more important than others.

Among the most striking matters raised by Colbran is that, on The Bill, the representation of the police on the show, the fact that characters were so interchangeable meant that although writers were able to tell stories about the business of policing, the format militated against their being able to tell stories for example, about issues such as gender, race & sexual politics (our italics).

She goes on to quote a writer on the show ‘we really did miss a trick there. We had a new young, black female Detective Inspector and we just didn’t tell stories about any problems she might have faced with racism and sexism’.



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VI. Close-ups In 1991 Prime Suspect hit the screens (1991–2006). Based on DI Jackie Malton, who served in the MPS’ Flying Squad, the first episode of Prime Suspect was a vivid portrayal of male discrimination and sexual harassment of women officers. Whereas Juliet Bravo was establishing the presence of women in police leadership roles with a sexism which was more to do with disbelief that woman can do the job as well as men, Prime Suspect was playing out the more aggressive sexism that had more to do with the competition for senior rank. An interesting contrast with Juliet Bravo is when DCI Jane Tennison responds to her male subordinate who insist on calling her sir: ‘listen, I like to be called Governor or the boss. I don’t like Ma’am. I’m not the bloody Queen, so take your pick’ (Creeber, 2001). Tennison is embattled. At the time the programme was screened there was one woman serving as a DCI (outside the MPS) compared to 347 men. There were no women serving as detective superintendent or detective chief superintendent (Brown, 1998). Inspector Jean D’Arbley is married and managing professional and domestic life, a policeWOMAN. Jane Tennison as noted by Creeber (2001: 150) sacrifices her femininity to ‘apparent masculinization’ as the price for her ruthless ambition, very much a POLICEwoman. Interestingly Jackie Malton notes that ‘my experience was certainly affected by my sexuality. I was openly gay. I would be given sex toys as Christmas presents – enough to open a sex shop’ Campbell (2012). This aspect of Malton’s alter ego, Jane Tennison was not explored in the series. Prime Suspect overlapped with research being conducted by FMH (Women in Control, 1992) and JB’s questionnaire survey of women officers (1998). DCI Tennison, the lead character in Prime Suspect, in the establishing episode is overlooked as the duty DCI to take on a case, has to exert pressure to be nominated as senior investigating officer in a subsequent case and has to overcome the prejudices of her largely male murder investigation team and is subjected to overt sexualised comments. Qualitative responses from officers participating in JB’s national survey indicated that the behaviour portrayed in the programme did mirror the experiences of women officers When I went to work in CID it was made clear to me by my DCI that he did not want a second female on his department and life was made so bad for me that after two years of fighting I gave up and returned to uniform duties A specialist job was advertised – I was the only one qualified within the force – 19 male applications and myself applied. I was warned that one of the male officers had virtually been guaranteed the job and he did get it. One of the interviewing panel expressed the view that a woman can’t do this job

Interestingly, Jackie Malton claimed that nothing depicted in the Prime Suspect series had not happened to her (Eaton, 1995: 173). In 1991, coinciding with the programme, DCI Colin Hallinan became head of Harrogate’s CID. He began a relentless drive to improve crime figures creating a successful but divisive working environment that

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particularly affected the women in the office (Bilton, 1998). Wendy Alison, a civilian administrator said of the culture operating it was a terrible culture shock. There would be yells of ‘get your kit off’. I was asked to wear stockings and told not to wear tights to work. It was macho trivia but I was a woman working in their office. These were their rules.

There was a crude initiation ceremony involving the application of heavy bulldog clips to various parts of an officer’s anatomy and they were required to do ‘the bull dog run’ up and down the corridors of the building. The DCI was referred to as ‘Col Boss’ and insisted that the women detectives had to be someone the lads would like. He asked an aspiring woman detective constable if she was going to do the run and told her she was the kind of woman who faked orgasms. The misconduct was to be the subject of several investigations, and lead to an employment sex discrimination case and the disciplining of the Chief Constable. This was also the time of Assistant Chief Constable Alison Halford’s sex discrimination case when she claimed she had been overlooked for promotion on the grounds of her gender. What also emerged in her tribunal were lurid stories of a drunken, sexist and brutish culture (Brunsdon 1998; 226–27). In an exchange in Prime Suspect’s first episode, Sgt Otley believes that Tennison is ‘gunning’ for his previous Senior Investigating Officer SIO (on whose death Tennison took over). Sgt Otley says to a colleague ‘well let her try it. If she bad mouth’s him then I’ll make sure it gets stuffed up that skinny dyke’s arse’. His colleague responds, ‘you don’t think she is one?’, to which Sgt Otley replies, ‘Do me a favour, what bloke would fancy that?’ Interestingly Halford also faced simultaneous claims of being a lesbian and also romping in a jacuzzi with a fellow male officer whilst on duty. Marc Burke, a gay police officer, had written about his experiences and stated ‘recruitment from the gay and lesbian community is perceived as being the most serious kind of contamination and the worst possible threat to the integrity of the police service’ (Burke, 1993: 193). This notion of contamination has been reflected in the occasional gay woman character appearing in police procedurals. In 1995 an episode of A Touch of Frost entitled ‘No Refuge’ featured a gay police detective sergeant, Maureen Lawson. Superintendent Mullet says to Detective Inspector Frost, hypocritically ‘that kind of [homophobic] prejudice has no place in the modern police force’. The storyline has Sgt Lawson falling for the younger of a gay couple resulting in an attack by the jealous older woman on her lost lover. Frost comments to Mullet that since no charges are to be pressed by the attacked woman, ‘DS Lawson’s preferences won’t be displayed in court so disaster [to the force’s reputation] will be averted’. Mullet indicates he has had a hand in transferring DS Lawson to Cornwall. As she is packing her things, Frost says to Lawson ‘Don’t know why [Mullet] is sending you to Cornwall, maybe he thinks it [lesbianism] is contagious’. As discussed earlier there was a whiff of homophobia in the casting decisions of Cagney and Lacey. Sydney-Smith (2009: 151) records that the actress Anna Cartaret suggested her character in Juliet Bravo could be gay, a suggestion greeted by ‘ner-



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vous laughter’ from the production team. In the only series where there is a prominent gay woman main character, Detective Sgt Mo Connell in Between the Lines about the MPS’ internal affairs investigation branch (CIB), it is not until season two episode nine that there is an avowedly gay storyline. In an episode entitled ‘Jumping the Lights’, a male officer confides in Mo. He explains his reluctance to tell the truth about his whereabouts is: David: Because I’m gay Mo: and PC Curles knows this David: I came onto him once. If I shop him the whole Nick will know Mo: Has he tried to blackmail you? David: If they find out you are a puff and a grass. . .you are better off black than gay in this job.

Later in the episode Mo tells her girlfriend Kate ‘I’ve just had a gay copper stepping into the light’ to which Kate queries ‘why is this such a big deal?’ Mo’s response is to say ‘homophobia is very important part of police culture’. She and Kate appear together at a police dance. The following day Chief Superintendent Graves, the head of CIB, discusses with Mo’s boss Detective Superintendent Clark, the ‘floor show’ i.e. Mo and Kate dancing together. He says to Clark ‘I dunno, maybe it’s time we got a new pair of tits in the office’, Clark replies ‘why, she’s a good copper’. Graves’ riposte is ‘Yes, I don’t suppose she is as good as the next man’. Robert’s analysis of police culture (Reiner, 2010) certainly discusses the machismo and sexism, but is rather mute about its homophobia as are the fictionalised cops. The quantitative data from JB’s survey revealed that most women officers had heard sexualised comments about women’s appearance and figures and suggestive jokes about women. About a third of respondents experienced being subjected to unwanted touching and 6 per cent reported being subjected to a serious sexual assault. The Chief Superintendent who chaired the board said ‘why should I invest money in promoting you when you will be leaving to have children in a couple of years?’ At the same time a Superintendent on the same board asked to see me. He stated he would like to give me some guidance in my career and suggested that we meet outside work in order to do so. The officer was firmly but politely put in his place. I was subjected to a sexual assault by my shift where I was held down and my top half stripped

Tennison in the course of the originating Prime Suspect episode is the first female SOI and when appearing on a TV programme within the episode says: ‘I’m going to be the first female DCI on CrimeNight’. Sgt Otley is in a pub watching and getting drunk hoping that she will slip up. These two aspects of being a first and degrees of schadenfreude are also documented as being experienced by real policewomen. Tennison however does progress through the episode from being ‘that bitch’ to well-respected ‘governor’ supported by her male colleagues having successfully negotiated the transformation scenes noted by FMH as rites of passage in gaining acceptance (Heidensohn, 1992).

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Brunsdon (1998: 233) suggest that there is a ‘clear agenda about women in the police force’ within the programme and that this introduces the question ‘who’ can police. Brunsdon (234) says ‘Jane Tennison not only shows that she can police, but that also her policing brings new competencies to the job’. Sydney-Smith (2007: 196) reminds us that it is Tennison who notices the shoe size of the victim, wrongly identified as Della Mornay. Creeber (2001: 157) tells us that it is Tennison’s ability to perceive the victims as ‘real women’ that enables her to glean unique insights into the Marlow case. It is by refusing to stereotype or objectify both the living and the dead prostitutes she encounters that gradually helps her solve the case whereas her deceased predecessor as SIO used the prostitutes for his own sexual purposes. In one scene he is at the autopsy of one of the many prostitutes he regularly visited and he can barely bring himself to look at the corpse. Tennison in contrast is both professional and thorough. It is her difference from the men that enables her to solve the murders. Research by Rabe-Hemp (2008) suggest that women officers themselves believe they bring some distinctive characteristics to the task compared to male colleagues, i.e. greater empathy, communication skills and fewer forceful behaviours. Women she interviewed (in the United States) believed that they were better at serving the needs of women and children, especially those who had been subject to violent or sexual abuse, and that they were more likely to act as advocates to prevent their re-victimisation. Another feature of the first episode of Prime Suspect is the characterisation of the murderer and rapist, George Marlow. He is attractive, charming, married and employed, in fact a ‘normal’ man. This is in contrast to the portrayal of such characters as monsters and sex fiends and was much more in keeping with feminists’ analysis such as Liz Kelly’s of the ordinariness of sexual violence (Kelly, 1980). Finally, the Jane Tennison character offers little solidarity to the other woman featured in the first episode, PC Maureen Havers. It is Havers who draws attention to the connection of nail extensions between the victims that leads to a break in the case which, as Jermyn (2003) points out, has little recognition or acknowledgement from Tennison. This lack of ‘sisterly solidarity’ has been referred to by Marisa Silvestri (2006) in her study of senior police women and how relationships between women may be characterised as sibling rivalry, with high-achieving women pulling the proverbial ladder up behind them rather than offering a helping hand to junior women colleagues. The Gentle Touch and Juliet Bravo were both first screened in 1980 which was, dare we say, only a year or so after Thatcher’s coming to power as Prime Minister in 1979. Cagney and Lacey and Prime Suspect were shows initially conceived and driven by high-powered and successful media figures, who were committed to presenting quality television which represented their values. Barney Rosenzweig, producer of the US series throughout its history, has recounted his conversion to feminism as the origin of the show and his lasting commitment to it, even when it did not have high ratings (he organised a letter-writing campaign in support). During the Q & A session at the BFI in 2011, he revealed how there were pressures from the network to have a storyline where Harvey, Mary Beth’s husband, had an affair, which he firmly



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resisted, retorting that the dramatic tension in the Lacey household would be about making their wills, not Harvey’s infidelity. Gless and Daly demonstrated equal concern for the authenticity of their respective characters, even, in the BFI session and the interview in The Guardian, after 30 years, focusing on how the women dressed, groomed themselves and behaved. Mirren reveals too, in the DVD interviews for Prime Suspect, how Jackie Malton gave her very precise advice about appropriate demeanour for a senior female officer and that Lynda La Plante enjoined her never to smile. Actors do expect notes about their performances, but we are struck by the degree which these admonitions resemble the very conscious ways in which women observed and interviewed by one of us, composed their presentation of self when dealing with public order, allegedly the most unsuitable job for a woman (FMH, 1994)

VII. Typecasting Robert places Prime Suspect into one of his 12 types of cop programmes: police deviance (good apple in rotten barrel) and Juliet Bravo is placed in the community police type. Interestingly there are no series in which the chief protagonist is a lead woman character in his other types: classic sleuth; private eye; police procedural; vigilante; civil rights; undercover; deviant police; let ‘em have it; and Fort apache. The dimensions he looks at include a pen portrait of the hero, the focus of the story, the villain and victim, the setting and nature of the police organisation portrayed and the plots. Series involving women as the central character do not readily sit within Robert’s classification as the descriptive dimensions associated with the types do not really work. We would classify the earlier ground-breaking Juliet Bravo and The Gentle Touch as ‘ma’am’ types because these reflected women breaking into senior rank, being in command and insisting on their due deference as a senior officer. Both lead characters in the series had domestic responsibilities which intruded into their professional lives. Prime Suspect and subsequent series portrayed women wanting a degree of equality in the male world of detecting and to be seen as doing the job as well as the men. Male detectives are often referred to as Boss or Guv (Governor) indicative of their status within the occupational culture. Then there are the buddy series reminiscent of Cagney and Lacey (see table 1 overleaf). Within the Boss type of dramas there are two versions. Hybrid 1 is the overweight, older woman SIO trying to juggle care responsibilities with her job, the setting is a provincial force with an organisational police culture which is insubordinate rather than overtly discriminatory. Hybrid 2 is the attractive, single, ambitious, high-ranked woman with disastrous personal relationships in the MPS. Detective Superintendent Sandra Pulman and Commander Clare Blake are both heads of specialist serious crime units with staff made up mostly of men. As seen from the data presented earlier, women in specialist crime units are still relatively

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rare, let alone being in charge. Both have demanding and ambitious senior officers who gain kudos from the success of the unit’s investigations. Hybrid 1 draws more from the legacy of Robert’s sleuth, where the embattled investigator is trying to find out who dunnit but the novelty is the background of detection amidst domestic chaos. Hybrid 2’s novelty is in the heading up by women of specialist crime units and whose romantic entanglements are in danger sometimes of compromising the case. This theme has resonance with past concerns about women’s earliest incursions into detective work. A writer in the 1930s asked: torn between love and duty how will she [the lady detective] act? Will she bite the bullet and reach for the handcuffs with a low choking sob? Or will she throw honour to the winds and urge her surprised but gratified prisoner to beat it? (Brown and Heidensohn, 2000: 56).

The buddy types of drama draw on the Cagney and Lacey motif of women as partners with the oppositions of the ambitious, often single sexually freewheeling partner with the more responsible, conventional partner. In MIT (Murder Investigation Team) for example, DI Vivienne Friend is the polished, professional type with a highly organised lifestyle, with side-kick DC Rosie MacManus having the chaotic family life juggling husband, career and kids.  Table 1: Exemplar police procedural programmes on British television Series

Dates

Rank of female lead

Type of drama

Gentle Touch

1980–84

DI

Ma’ams

Juliet Bravo

1980–85

Inspector/chief Inspector

Ma’ams

Dempsey and Makepeace

1985–86

DSgt

Fluff

Prime Suspect

1998–2006

DCI/Det Supt

Boss

Maisie Raine

1998–99

DI

Boss

New Tricks

2003–

Det Supt

Boss

Blue Murder

2003–09

DCI

Boss

MIT

2003–05

DI and DC

Buddy

The Commander

2003–08

Commander

Boss

Murder in Suburbia

2004–05

DI and DSgt

Buddy

Vera

2011

DCI

Boss

Scott and Bailey

2011

DI and DC

Buddy



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VIII.  Closing Credits How do we fare in our analytic task of showing a relationship between the fictional portrayals and the reality of policewomen’s lives? Colbran originally began her project with the aims of exploring the role of police advisors to The Bill and of finding how ‘authentic’ a police procedural it was. In fact, she soon discovered, when she undertook her research in the 2000s, that the imperatives she listed made that very difficult since ‘under the old regime there was an emphasis on representing police procedures as accurately as possible . . .. the role of the police advisor was accordingly to advise on this’ (Colbran, 2011). But under the new regime, of financial stringency ‘they weren’t concerned about getting it right, they were concerned about getting audiences’ (Colbran, 2011). The Bill ran for much longer than any of the series we are considering, so its evolution is not surprising. In its final phase, it too featured, as did all the female cop shows, the personal lives of the Sunhill officers, making it more soap opera than crime story. This crime drama meets soap opera creates a slippage between realism and fantasy (Sydney-Smith, 2009). Perhaps we were reckless in listing ‘reality’ as one of our key benchmarks in our title for measuring the ways in which female officers have been portrayed in television series. Clearly, all these shows are fiction, that is, they are an imagined version of characters and events. Further they, like all such dramatisations of aspects of crime and the criminal justice system, slant their pictures in particular ways. Robert has shown, summarising the results of empirical analysis, how white, male, middleclass offenders are over-represented in much of twentieth century TV as is violent crime (Reiner, 2008). It could be argued that the early cop shows featuring women in lead roles – The Gentle Touch, Juliet Bravo, Cagney and Lacey – anticipated real life. It is striking that over time in police procedurals, the portrayed women officers rise in rank from Sgt Anderson in the mid-70s to The Commander by the 20 noughties, mirroring the proportionate increase in women’s share of senior rank within the police service, but in real terms, the numbers are still very low, so senior women remain unusual. Although one of us (FMH) observed female partners working as a patrol team for the Police Department of Dallas, Texas in the summer of 1988, this was still a relatively novel and controversial development with the officers themselves reporting the difficulties they had encountered in achieving this pairing. Their male colleagues had reacted in overly protective ways, often tailing their car to ensure they came to no harm. The title of one of the papers based on this study, ‘We can handle it out here’, was the assertion of one of the women in response to the over-anxious attitudes of men from the Department. From records of the same project, it seems much less likely that the Cagney and Lacey scenario could have existed in the NYPD at this stage; whereas Dallas was then a boom town and had ample funds for hiring additional police, resulting in increased numbers of women, minorities and out of state recruits, New York City had been close to bankruptcy and had not held

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sergeants’ exams for many years, so Cagney could not have gained her promotion (Heidensohn, 1994). We do recognise many ‘war stories’ we have heard over the years while involved in research or in informal settings from women in law enforcement that appear as cameos in TV dramas. Thus an episode of Juliet Bravo, where the search of an arrested ‘woman’ discloses that ‘she’ is really a ‘he’, repeats a tale we have been told in Britain, the US and elsewhere. A scene from Prime Suspect, when Tennison is talking to prostitutes in a bar in Manchester and is accosted by a punter again reflects real events recounted by women officers who have gone undercover in clubs; in some of these, male colleagues were the would-be clients. As well as the specific episodes just reviewed, findings from our own analyses, in two separate comparative studies (FMH, 1992; JB and FMH, 2000) key aspects of the careers of women in law enforcement are confirmed. As well as the ‘transformation scenes’ mentioned previously, we found in both our studies that ‘real’ police women emphasise their own professionalism and applied it to their tasks with zeal. While this was more significant in the first (FMH, 1992) we also observed it as a salient feature in our later project. Detective Superintendent Pulman’s insistence on professional standards from her male staff, now civilians, but all former ‘traditional’ police officers, is at the core of New Tricks and provides its dramatic tension. Tennison makes her mark in Prime Suspect 1 when she insists that her team reinterview all the witnesses in the case to ensure nothing has been missed. DI Vivien Friend in MIT plays it by the book whilst Lund, in The Killing 2, gets results by her implacable pursuit of crucial evidence in a hostile and dangerous setting. The crassness of sexualised language displayed in Between the Lines and Prime Suspect finds its counterpart in real life. The real jokes and pranks are gross. When JB was conducting a survey into sex discrimination and sexual harassment a questionnaire was returned and within its covers, hard-core porn images had been substituted for the questionnaire pages. JB was told a story that a team investigating a rape had a picture of a naked woman with her vagina on display which the men had put onto a dart board and had a competition as to who could throw their dart closest to the point of penetration. If anything, the media depictions are tamer than those experienced by women for real. There are implausible features of the dramas too. In one Prime Suspect story Tennison visits a school as a school liaison officer, a role typically undertaken by rookie constables and often, as recorded in FMH’s study, unwillingly as too gender stereotyped a task. Pulman, in New Tricks, has remained in her post for far too long; she would have been moved or promoted years ago. Mo and Kate would never have come out at a police dance and Commander Clare Blake’s lack of judgement over her involvement with a potential suspect both under-estimates her intelligence at having risen to the rank in the first place and would have had her on a discipline charge. These are obviously, as are holes in the plots, determined by the requirements of drama and other practical considerations which have over-ridden adherence to procedural accuracy. Prime Suspect was originally a Granada TV production and, while based in London, filmed in Manchester, where Tennison is transferred,



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in an unlikely move for that one story; as actors interviewed for the DVD remake, an Evening Standard van and a Routemaster bus were repeatedly driven around to create establishing shots for the series. The faint presence of gay women in police procedurals is an interesting omission. Alcock and Robson (1990) note this and D’Acci (1994) discusses the intrigues around Meg Foster’s playing of Christine Cagney in the first season to be replaced by Sharon Gless because CBS deemed Foster too aggressive and too likely to be perceived as a lesbian by the viewers. Siobhan Redman’s character in Between the Lines was probably the first gay woman cop to be presented on TV. There is also an absence of more complex intersectionality i.e. the representation of the dualities of being both a woman and gay or black. Wootton and Brown (2000) looked at the experiences of officers who were gay and found different problems and coming out stories for gay women compared to gay men. Thus the intersection of gender was critical in the experiences of the gay officer. Brown and Harleston (2003) examined the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity. They found that there was a racialised sexism and a sexist racism that thus far has not been explored in police procedural dramas. As we noted above, Reiner has analysed images of the police in terms of periods which are characterised by contrasting dialectically opposed key features; McLaughlin (2007) and others have followed him in this, all stressing that the most recent phase is remarkable for its dark emphasis and reflection of corruption, decay and distrust. By and large women have not been represented as corrupt within police dramas – that is the province of men. Certainly there are ethical climate surveys to suggest women are not necessarily more ethical in their attitudes or more likely to report wrongdoing by other officers; however, the research shows clearly that women attract fewer complaints from the public, including fewer complaints regarding assaults and excessive force (Brown, Prenzler and van Ewijk, in press). They also cite research to show that women police appear to be less ‘trigger happy’ and much less likely than male officers to fatally shoot offenders. Thus DI Lund’s use of her weapon is unusual for women police officers. What very few commentators consider are the processes by which such major changes in images of the police are achieved: who decides, selects, rejects alternatives, commissions, casts, cancels, what are their motives and values? Perhaps this gap is because these are hard issues to research, but for all media output, and maybe especially cop shows, they are highly relevant matters. The best documented of our dramas, Cagney and Lacey and Prime Suspect, clearly owe their origins to key figures in television and their drive and commitment. Almost all the lead figures have troubled private lives; indeed, the notion that policing is an unsuitable job for a woman seems to be implicit in many of the storylines. Even in New Tricks, which is essentially a comedy, Pulman has no stable partner, no children, a dreadful relationship with her mother, and her adored late father turns out to have killed himself over a scandal. This characterisation finds its progenitor in Christine Cagney. DI Lund is not only unsmiling, but has a similarly disastrous private life – she leaves her mother’s wedding to do some work, her partners both

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get killed, one of them by her, and Copenhagen is seen as permanently gloomy in both series of The Killing. It is worth recalling as Colbran observes that ‘story’ is what drives such dramas and hence tension, generated by unhappy love lives, dysfunctional families and deviant behaviour create much more interest than mundane calm. Cagney and Lacey does deliberately contrast the married, family-focused Lacey with the single, childfree Cagney, but Lacey was diagnosed with breast cancer and Cagney became an alcoholic, so neither escaped what might be termed their dues for daring to be who they were. The history of the fictional depiction of police women is already a long one: we illustrated our first joint project (JB and FMH, 2000) on this subject with cartoons which chart the progress of the idea of women in law enforcement as a popular notion. Our first example came from the Illustrated London News of 1852 (sic) and shows two types of women officers dealing with an unruly street mob, one lot are pretty, the others ugly, but all are ineffectual and represent, decades before there was any female presence in policing, the objections to women in this role. As we then observed, this was an early example of the ‘use of imagery to deprofessionalize and/or to defeminize women police officers (which) was to recur and prevail to the present day’ (JB and FMH, 2000: 44). The media, policing and the roles of women have all changed in the past 150 years, but the interest in this topic, its dramatic and socially critical potential remain and continue to be exploited; the representations are, and have been since the first of our series, much closer to reality, but the fantasy and the deeper elements found in almost all depictions of law and order persist and have not yet been fully mined.

References Alcock, B and Robson, J (1990) ‘Cagney and Lacey revisited’ 35 Feminist Review 42. Bilton, M (1998) ‘NYPD Blues’ Sunday Times Magazine, 2 August, 14. Brown, JM (1997) ‘European policewomen; a comparative research perspective’ 25 International Journal of the Sociology of Law 1. —— (1998) ‘Aspects of discriminatory treatment of women police officers serving in forces in England and Wales’ 38 British Journal of Criminology 265. Brown, JM and Harleston, D (2003) ‘Being black or Asian and a woman in the police service’ 1 Policing Futures 19. Brown, JM and Heidensohn, F (2000) Gender and Policing (London, Macmillan). Brown, JM, Prenzler, T, and van Ewijk, A, ‘Still just for the boys? Policewomen across the world’. Brunsdon, C (1998) ‘Structure of anxiety; recent British television crime fiction’ Screen Autumn 223. Please provide full publication details. Campbell, D (2012) ‘The cop and the robber’ The Observer Magazine 22 January, 28. Cavender, G Bond-Maupin, L and Jurik, N ‘The construction of gender reality crime TV’ 13 Gender and Society 643.



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Cavender, G and Jurik, N (1998) ‘Jane Tennison and the Feminist Police Procedural’ 4 Violence Against Women 10. —— and —— (2007) ‘Scene Composition and Justice for Women: An Analysis of the Portrayal of Detective Tennison in the British Television Program Prime Suspect’ 2 Feminist Criminology 277. Clark, D (1990) ‘Cagney and Lacey; Feminists Strategies of Detection’ in ME Brown (ed), Television and Women’s Culture the Politics of the Popular (London, Sage) 117–33. Colbran, M (2012) Watching the cops; production processes on the Bill (PhD thesis, London School of Economics). Creeber, G (2001) ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol: Investigating Gender, Genre, and Gratification in Prime Suspect’ 2 Television and New Media 149. D’Acci, J (1994) Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney and Lacey (Chapel Hill, University of North Caroline Press). Dick, P and Cassell, C (2002) ‘Barriers to Managing Diversity in a UK Constabulary: The Role of Discourse’ 39 Journal of Management Studies 953. Eaton, M (1995) ‘A Fair Cop? Viewing the Effects of the Canteen Culture’ in D KiddHewitt and R Osborne Crime and the Media; the post modern spectacle (London, Pluto) 164–84. Hale, D (1998) ‘Keeping Women in Their Place: An Analysis of Policewomen in Videos 1972–1996’ in FY Bailey and D Hale (eds), Popular Culture, Crime and Justice (Belmont CA, West/Wadsworth) 159–79. Heidensohn, F (1992) Women in control (Oxford, Clarendon). —— (1994) ‘We Can Handle it Out Here; Women Officers in Britain and the USA and The Policing Of Public Order’ 4 Policing & Society 293. Holdaway, S and Parker, S (1998) ‘Policing Women Police; Uniform Patrol, Promotion and Representation in the CID’ 38 British Journal of Criminology 40. Hurd, G (1981) ‘The Television Presentation of the Police’ in S Holdaway (ed), The British Police (London, Edward Arnold) 118–34. Jermyn, D (2003) ‘Women with a Mission Lynda La Plante, DCI Jane Tennison and the Reconfiguration of TV Crime Drama’ 6 International Journal of Cultural Studies 46. Kelly, L (1988) Surviving Sexual Violence (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press). Lock, J (1979) The British Policewoman; Her Story (London, Robert Hale). Lonsway, K (2006) ‘Are We There Yet? The Progress of Women in One Large Law Enforcement Agency’ 18 Women & Criminal Justice 1. Martin, S (1980) Breaking and Entering; Policewomen on Patrol (Berkeley CA, University of California Press). Mayerle, J ‘Character Shaping Genre in Cagney and Lacey’ (1987) 31 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 133. McLaughlin, E (2005) ‘From Reel to Ideal; The Blue Lamp and the Popular Cultural Construction of the English “Bobby”  ’ 1 Crime Media Culture 11. O’Sullivan, S (2005) ‘UK Policing and its Television Portrayal: Law and Order Ideology or Modernising Agenda’ 44 Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 504. Rabe-Hemp, C (2008) ‘Female Officers and the Ethics of Care: Does Officer Gender Impact Police Behaviours?’ Journal of Criminal Justice 36, 426–34. Reiner, R (1992) The Politics of the Police, 1st edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (1994) ‘The Dialectics of Dixon; the Changing Image of the TV Cop’ in C Greer (ed), Crime and Media; a Reader (London, Routledge Student Reader) 302–10. —— (2000) The Politics of the Police, 3rd edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

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Reiner, R (2008) ‘Policing and the Media’ in T Newburn (ed), Handbook of Policing, 2nd edn (Cullompton, Willan). —— (2010) The Politics of the Police, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Sigurdsson, J and Dhani, A (2010) Police Service Strength England and Wales. 2010 (London, Home Office Statistical Bulletin). Silvestri, M (2003) Women in Charge: Policing, Gender and Leadership (Cullompton, Willan). Soothill, K (1993), ‘Policewomen in the News’ 66 Police Journal 25. Sydney-Smith, S (2007) ‘Endless Interrogation’ 7 Feminist Media Studies 189. —— (2009) ‘Buddies, Bitches, Broads: the British Female Cop Show’ 38 Film International 46. Westmarland, L (2001) Gender and Policing; Sex Power and Police Culture (Cullompton, Willan). Wootton, I and Brown, J (2000) ‘Balancing Occupational and Personal Identities; the Experiences of Lesbian and Gay Officers’ 4 BPS Lesbian and Gay Psychology Section Newsletter 6. Young, M (1991) Inside job (Oxford, Clarendon).

7 Trial by Media: Riots, Looting, Gangs and Mediatised Police Chiefs CHRIS GREER and EUGENE MCLAUGHLIN

I. Introduction This chapter seeks to bring together two of Robert Reiner’s key contributions to police studies – his research on chief constables and news media representation of policing. Chief Constables (1991) presented a typology of chief officers, ‘a powerful elite group of growing importance’, which took account of prevailing sociopolitical and law and order conditions at the time. This was the moment when the heated public debate on policing produced the first ‘celebrity cops’. He constructed four ideal types of police chief: the baron; the bobby; the boss and the bureaucrat, all with distinct ideological orientations. He concluded that the ‘bureaucratic’ mode was the future, displacing the other types. In this chapter, we propose an addition to Reiner’s typology – the mediatised police chief, who is subject to unprecedented 24/7 news media scrutiny, criticism and, if deemed necessary by an increasingly adversarial press, ‘trial by media’. There is surprisingly little research on the relations between the news media and police chiefs. It is possible, however, to extrapolate from more general studies of news media-police relationships, and to adapt and develop the theoretical frameworks they employed. Two concepts have featured to varying degrees across the existing research: ‘inferential structures’ (Lang and Lang, 1955) and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker, 1967). Lang and Lang (1955) developed the concept of ‘inferential structures’ to explain how the same political news content could be constructed into multiple configurations, establishing selectively representative frameworks of understanding that shaped how both newsmakers and audience interpreted the story. Ultimately, what they viewed as journalists’ ‘unwitting bias’ could ‘influence public definitions in a particular direction’ (Lang and Lang, 1955: 171). Whilst Lang and Lang (1955) did not consider the unequal influence of news sources in establishing and maintaining ‘inferential structures’, Becker’s (1967) ‘hierarchy of credibility’ facilitated a more ideological reading of definitional power. His model proposes that in any society it is taken for granted that governing elites have the right ‘to define the way things really are’ (1967: 240). Since the attribution of

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credibility and authority are intimately connected with the mores of a society, this belief has a ‘moral quality’ (Becker, 1967: 240). These concepts influenced a few key studies in the 1970s concerned with how the unequal distribution of news media access and attention, the ideological orientation of journalists and sources, and the politicisation of law and order all contributed to the reproduction of ‘dominant ideology’ (Chibnall, 1977; Hall et al, 1978; see also Halloran et al, 1970). For Hall et al (1978), news reporting of crime and justice was shaped by elite sources who collectively represent and command institutional power – those at the top of Becker’s (1967) ‘hierarchy of credibility’. The police were viewed as structurally and culturally advantaged in establishing the dominant ‘inferential structure’ – or ‘primary definition’ in Hall et al’s (1978) terms – that subsequently set the agenda for future debate. Contemporaneous evidence suggested that, whilst the police perspective might be contested, the asymmetry of power in the communication process meant that it could rarely be meaningfully challenged, still less altered fundamentally. Subsequent studies confirmed, albeit less deterministically, the police as the key definitional force in setting the crime news agenda (Ericson et al, 1989, 1991; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994). Chief police officers, as ‘authorised knowers’, were found to have an especially privileged position within the ‘hierarchy of credibility’. ‘Inferential structures’ and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ have all but disappeared from research on news media and policing, though they remain entirely pertinent given the conceptual trajectory of much recent work. In the US context, for example, Manning (2001) has noted the tendency for the news media to allocate celebrity status to ‘big city’ police chiefs. He goes on to demonstrate how, in a culture infatuated with scandal and ‘spectacle politics’, headline-grabbing ‘celebrity’ police chiefs can be built-up and knocked-down by the news media in dramatic and newsworthy fashion. William Bratton is probably the paradigmatic example, not just in the USA but globally, of the celebrity police chief (see Bratton, 1998). In the UK context, Loader and Mulcahy (2001a: 42) have conceptualised chief police officers as ‘cultural agents’ with the symbolic power to ‘own’, ‘frame’ or ‘control’ particular issues in the ‘public interest’ (see also Reiner, 2000). However, as Loader and Mulcahy (2001a, b) also recognise, contemporary UK police chiefs face an altogether more complicated task when engaging with a multi-mediated public realm. Two notable consequences have resulted. First, increased awareness that negative media coverage can undermine public confidence in policing has driven extensive investment in risk communication strategies designed to advantage the police perspective in news coverage (Mawby, 2002; Chermak and Weiss, 2005; McLaughlin, 2007). Second, a generation of British chief police officers has traded public prominence for political power. The ‘elite police voice’ in the UK has been corporatised (Loader and Mulcahy, 2001b: 259). As a result, the outspoken, opinionated police chief has, in theory, been replaced by the politically cautious, managerialist CEO. We would suggest that these professional and political transformations have been paralleled by equally significant shifts within the news media. The combined



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influence of these shifts has been to increase the likelihood that the police institution and police chiefs will be subject to intense and critical journalistic scrutiny. In the following sections, we map out some of these key transformations, and both revive and resituate the classic concepts of ‘inferential structures’ and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ within the context of an evolving 24/7 global news mediasphere. The aim is to construct a theoretical framework within which contemporary news media-police relations can be researched, and the ‘trial by media’ of chief police officers can be understood.

II.  New Contexts: Re-theorising News Media-Police Chief Relations Contemporary police chiefs must operate within an information-communications environment that differs radically from the more stable and predictable conditions conceptualised in previous research by Robert Reiner. The most important dimension of this multi-faceted environment is the emergence of the 24/7 news mediasphere. A proliferation of news platforms, sites and formats has precipitated a digitised convergence of moving images, text, sound and archive. This shift has been paralleled by ‘an exploding array of news sources, or producers of content’ (Pavlik, 2008: 79, emphasis in original; Deuze, 2008; Fenton, 2009). Heightened competition places a premium on quick-fire news, personalisation and exclusivity, which ruptures distinctions between: ‘mainstream’ and ‘tabloid’; ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news; ‘news’ and ‘entertainment’; and can disrupt the traditional news media orientation toward the established ‘hierarchies of credibility’. Second, the pluralisation and professionalisation of possible sources of ‘policing news’ has created a multiplicity of alternative ‘knowledge workers’ (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997: 19) with access to potentially ‘newsworthy’ information that may or may not correspond with an ‘official’ police perspective. The diversification of ‘police voices’ makes it harder to communicate a coherent and authoritative police viewpoint and, therefore, more difficult to establish a dominant police-driven ‘inferential structure’ in the news media. Third, whilst news commentaries on the police historically came from a small group of specialist journalists (Chibnall, 1977; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994; Reiner, 2000), today political editors, features writers, columnists and commentators are all enthusiastic in venturing their opinions. This expansion and diversification can partly be explained by the slashing of news budgets and the requirement for senior staff and lead commentators to develop their portfolios across a broader range of topics (Mawby, 2010). But it is also, we would suggest, connected with wider cultural change. The widely cited decline in confidence and trust in institutional authority (Beck, 2006; Fukuyama, 2000; Dogan and Seid, 2005) is manifested in the emergence of

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what we term a cynical ‘politics of outrage’ (Greer and McLaughlin, 2011b). This ‘politics of outrage’ is simultaneously expressed and amplified in an increasingly adversarial news media. Market-driven newspapers, particularly in the UK, are inclined to initiate and support anti-establishment campaigns and protests, and can draw from an unprecedented array of both professional and amateur news sources to do so. Adherence to a deferential ‘inferential structure’, reinforcing established ‘hierarchies of credibility’, does not boost readership sales. The promotion of adversarial ‘inferential structures’ and the manufacture of dissent does (Milne, 2005; Protess et al, 1991; Sabato, 1993; Sabato et al, 2000; Lloyd, 2004; Barnett, 2002). When news media adversarialism and the ‘politics of outrage’ coalesce in a sufficiently coherent and collective manner, routine ‘attack journalism’ can evolve into full-blown ‘trial by media’.

III.  Trial by Media In previous research we have defined ‘trial by media’ as a dynamic, impact-driven, news media-led process by which individuals – who may or may not be publicly known – are tried and sentenced in the ‘court of public opinion’ (Greer and McLaughlin, 2011a, 2011b) . The targets and processes of ‘trial by media’ can be diverse, and may range from pre-judging the outcome of formal criminal proceedings against ‘unknowns’ to the relentless pursuit of high-profile celebrity personalities and public figures deemed to have offended in some way against an assumed common morality. We have suggested, however, that despite their diversity, such ‘trials’ share certain core characteristics. In each case, the news media behave as a proxy for ‘public opinion’ and seek to exercise parallel functions of ‘justice’ to fulfil a role perceived to lie beyond the interests or capabilities of formal institutional authority. Due process and journalistic objectivity can give way to sensationalist, moralising speculation about the actions and motives of those who stand accused in the news media spotlight. Judicial scrutiny of ‘hard evidence’ yields ground to ‘real time’ dissemination of disclosures from paid informants and hearsay and conjecture from ‘well placed sources’. Since the news media substitute for the prosecution, judge and jury, the target may find themselves rendered defenceless. The default ‘inferential structure’ is ‘guilty until proven innocent’. Once crystallised, this inferential structure ensures that the ‘guilty’ will be subjected to righteous ‘naming and shaming’ followed by carnivalesque condemnation and ridicule (cf Bahktin, 1968). The result, as our analysis of former Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Commissioner Sir Ian Blair’s ‘trial by media’ clearly demonstrated (Greer and McLaughlin, 2011a), can be deep and lasting reputational damage. This form of mediatised punishment is characterised by ‘grotesque realism’ and ‘relentless savagery’ (Hutton, 2000: 30). It amounts to a public execution in the ‘society of the spectacle’ (Debord, 1970). The public appeal of ‘trial by media’ is evidenced by



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increased circulation and web traffic. Our central argument, then, is that the transformations outlined above have coalesced to create a highly adversarial, volatile and interactive news mediasphere within which authorities and elites must increasingly struggle against the flow of news media opinion to maintain a positive public profile. In this climate, the ‘elite police voice’ must continually compete to be heard above the clamour of myriad other ‘credible’ voices, each vying to assert their own versions of reality or positions on crime, justice and policing issues. Past research indicated that, because of their privileged position in the ‘hierarchy of credibility’, the police were advantaged in establishing the dominant ‘inferential structure’ in crime and justice reporting: in short, the police routinely set the crime news agenda. Today, we would suggest that the official police position is often one of reaction, attempting to regain the initiative and respond to information flows that are simply beyond their control. Where once the police were crime news ‘gatekeepers’ (Ericson et al, 1991), ‘patrolling the facts’, they are now ‘crime news stakeholders’, just one group among many – and a fragmented one at that – involved in an ongoing and uncertain process of ‘negotiating the facts’. Where once the police were the key players in a process of ‘agenda setting’, they are now part players in an altogether more complex and unpredictable process of ‘agenda building’ (Lang and Lang, 1983). In the following sections, we shed further analytical light on the changing nature of news media-police chief relations, and the rising news media ‘politics of outrage’, by analysing the ‘trial by media’ that defined Sir Hugh Orde’s attempt to become Commissioner of the MPS in August/September 2011.

IV.  The Poisoned Chalice: the Commissionership of Scotland Yard Sir Ian Blair was the first MPS Commissioner to contend with the transformed political and news media environment discussed above. Like his predecessors, Blair had to transact the politics of policing with the Home Office, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), national and force-specific police pressure groups, as well as Downing Street, London’s political establishment and public pressure groups. However, the constitutional landscape that Blair encountered was further complicated by the creation of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) – which in turn augmented the role of the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority – and the establishment of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). Blair thus had to navigate a largely uncharted and unpredictable politicised network of complex, mediatised interests. After two years of a relentless, increasingly personalised ‘trial by media’, Sir Ian Blair’s resignation finally came on 2 October 2008.

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Our research indicated that Sir Ian Blair’s ‘trial by media’ did more than delegitimise one particular Commissioner (Greer and McLaughlin, 2011a). It laid down a clear symbolic marker about what ‘type’ of Commissioner and policing philosophy is acceptable in contemporary Britain, and demonstrated the power of the rising news media ‘politics of outrage’. Sections of the press were antagonistic towards Blair because of what he represented – a particular brand of ‘politically correct’ (New Labour) policing at a time when conservative and tabloid commentators were demanding a tougher ‘law and order’ response to ‘Broken Britain’. Ultimately, however, even Blair’s media supporters found his position indefensible. For his critics, the ‘good riddance’ departure of ‘New Labour’s favourite policeman’ was a victory. But a successful ‘trial by media’ required more than a resignation: to demonstrate unequivocally the news media’s supremacy in the court of public opinion, Blair had to be publicly humiliated. Newspapers used the same striking cropped image of a defeated and deflated Commissioner forced to announce his resignation in civilian clothing: stripped of office, stripped of uniform, and, in the eyes of his news media critics, stripped of dignity. ‘Unfit for office’ was the collective news media verdict, evidenced by a self-reinforcing loop of time-lines and slide shows that will illustrate in perpetuity his ‘gaffe-prone’ Commissionership. Before his appointment as Blair’s successor was confirmed in January 2009, Sir Paul Stephenson underwent intense news media-vetting. In the end, and in sharp contrast to one of the other leading candidates, Sir Hugh Orde, Stephenson received the conditional endorsement of the Conservative and tabloid press as a welcome alternative to Blair, and a proven champion of ‘common sense’ policing. On taking over as MPS Commissioner in January 2009, Stephenson had to do two things: assert his independence from a complex and volatile political environment, and distance himself from his predecessor’s policing philosophy and media predilections (Evening Standard, 28 January 2009: 12): Sir Ian Blair did it his way and I was his loyal deputy. Now I will do it my way. I don’t want to be boring. I don’t want to be exciting. And I don’t want to be a celebrity. I don’t want to be a police leader who people will follow out of a mere sense of curiosity. It is my aim to be a top police leader in charge of one of the most important police services in the world.

Sir Paul Stephenson’s leadership was tested early on with two high-profile scandals, both of which he survived. First, the MPS was accused by the Conservative Party of heavy-handedness and political policing in its investigation of alleged security leaks from the Home Office. On 28 November 2008, while Stephenson was Acting Commissioner, Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green was arrested on suspicion of ‘aiding and abetting misconduct in public office’ and ‘conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office’ – the allegation was that Green had not simply received leaked information, but had actively ‘groomed’ a civil servant to procure it (Guardian, 28 November 2008). The arrest was viewed by conservatives and also some liberal commentators as politically motivated, and prompted speculation about why such a high-profile collar should be authorised on the last day in office



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of outgoing MPS Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, dubbed by conservatives as ‘New Labour’s favourite policeman’. On 21 December 2008, tensions heightened when Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick accused the Conservative Party of trying to undermine the investigation. Quick retracted his statements and apologised. On 9 April 2009, in a highly embarrassing gaffe for the MPS and for Sir Paul Stephenson, Quick was forced to resign over his own security leak: he was photographed carrying ‘secret’ documents containing details of a major counter-terrorism operation, clearly visible to press photographers with telephoto lenses, into the Prime Minister’s Downing Street residence. On 16 April 2009, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee criticised Home Office civil servants for prompting the MPS investigation by giving ‘an exaggerated impression of the damage done by the leaks that could reasonably be presumed to have emanated from the Home Office’ (Home Affairs Committee, 2009). That same day, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it was not going to bring a case against Damian Green or the civil servant who had allegedly leaked the information. Second, there was intense news media and political criticism of MPS public order policing tactics under Stephenson. The heavy-handed policing of the G20 protests on 1 April 2009, resulting in the death of civilian bystander Ian Tomlinson after he was filmed being struck by a police officer, turned into a public relations disaster and a serious political problem for the MPS (Greer and McLaughlin, 2010, 2011b). In November 2010 the force faced further criticism, this time because a ‘light touch’ policing strategy – partly brought about by fears of another highly mediatised, fatal incident like Tomlinson – had under-estimated the risk of public disorder associated with the student-fees protests. The police failed to halt student protestors attacking the Conservative party headquarters. Sir Paul Stephenson described that police response as ‘embarrassing’, issued an apology to office workers and informed his officers ‘I do not want this to happen again’. Then in December 2010, the MPS was criticised for security breaches which allowed student protesters to break into a Treasury building on Whitehall and attack a royal limousine carrying Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall through London’s West End. Sir Paul Stephenson was forced to issue another apology, this time to Prince Charles, for the breakdown in communications. He also offered his resignation.

V.  Phone-hacking and Institutionalised Corruption: the De-Legitimation of Sir Paul Stephenson In August 2006 MPS detectives working on Operation Caryatid arrested the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, and private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, over allegations that they hacked into the mobile phones of members of the royal household. In January 2007, Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed. Both defendants admitted conspiring to intercept communications, and Mulcaire also

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pleaded guilty to five other charges of intercepting voicemail messages. In July 2009 it emerged that News of the World reporters had illegally accessed messages from the mobile phones of celebrities and politicians. Assistant Commissioner John Yates, Bob Quick’s successor, said the MPS would not re-open the investigation into the allegations. However, in January 2011 the MPS was pressurised into establishing ‘Operation Weeting’ to re-investigate the phone hacking scandal after celebrities and politicians continued to insist, with sustained and high-profile news media coverage, that scores of phones had been hacked. As the story rolled on, questions were asked about why the MPS had not been more thorough in its pursuit of complaints against the News of the World. The phone-hacking story exploded into a full-blown scandal during the first week of July 2011 when it emerged that it was not just celebrities, but ordinary members of the public – including crime victims – whose phones had been hacked. The Guardian (4 July) revealed that Glen Mulcaire had allegedly hacked into the mobile phone of Millie Dowler in 2002, before her body was found, and had both eavesdropped on messages left by her family and deleted messages. Deleting old messages had created space in Millie’s voicemail for new messages, which had given the family, who never stopped calling the number, false hope that she was still alive. It may also have hampered the police investigation by deleting potential evidence. This was already a sensitive case because of the callous manner in which the Dowler family had been treated by sections of the press during the trial of Levi Bellfield, who was convicted for murdering Millie Dowler in June 2011. The police had also had to apologise for blunders around this murder investigation. On 5 July the MPS revealed that the phones of other crime victims, including those involved in the July 2005 London Bombings, may also have been hacked. It became clear that the News of the World had been engaged in covert surveillance on an industrial scale. The storm of criticism triggered an emergency House of Commons debate on 6 July, which called for a public inquiry into the extent and nature of journalistic phone hacking. News International stood accused of not only ignoring, but fostering a climate of normalised deviance and systematic illegality. Equally significantly, the questionable conduct and role of the MPS was highlighted. During the parliamentary debate three questions materialised: • Why did the first MPS investigation accept News International’s position that phone-hacking was limited to one ‘rogue reporter’, given that they had in their possession 11,000 pages of evidence indicating that phone hacking was routinised? • Were bribes taken by only a handful of rogue officers or were corrupt relationships institutionalised? • How extensive and corrupt was the nature of the relationship between senior MPS officers and News International? We do not have space in this chapter to narrate the remarkable twists and turns as the unfolding News International phone-hacking scandal and corruption allegations implicated Scotland Yard’s highest ranks. Under increasing pressure to step



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down, and with a rapidly deteriorating position in the news media ‘hierarchy of credibility’, Sir Paul Stephenson was presented by liberal and conservative commentators alike as ‘resigned in post’. On 17 July, he announced his resignation. For Stephenson the ‘everyday heroism and bravery’ of MPS officers was ‘in danger of being eclipsed by the on-going debate about relationships between senior officers and the media. This can never be right’ (Guardian, 18 July 2011). The next day Assistant Commissioner John Yates resigned, following the decision of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) to suspend him pending a referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). Yates was due to reappear before an exceptional meeting of the Home Affairs Select Committee on the 19 July, along with Stephenson and Dick Fedorcio, Director of Public Affairs at MPS. On 18 July, the IPCC received four referrals relating to the MPS phonehacking investigation involving Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, Mr Yates, former Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman, and former Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke. A fifth referral related to the alleged involvement of Mr Yates in inappropriately securing a job at the MPS for the daughter of a friend. On 19 July 2011, the IPCC received a referral from the MPS regarding the relationship between Mr Neil Wallis and Dick Fedorcio, focusing on the circumstances under which the contract for senior level media advice and support was contracted to Chamy Media. On 18 July the Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced that she had appointed Elizabeth Filkin to examine relationships between the police and the news media. This would be backed up by a separate inquiry by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC). At the same time she confirmed that the management board of the MPS had agreed a new set of guidelines relating to police relationships with the news media. On 20 July, Prime Minister David Cameron made a statement to Parliament detailing what would be done in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal. One priority was the need to rebuild the leadership of the MPS and to root out police corruption. He argued that the police system was (Daily Telegraph, 24 July 2011) too closed. There is only one point of entry into the force. There are too few – and arguably too similar – candidates for the top jobs. I want to see radical proposals for how we open our police force and bring in fresh leadership. We need to see if we can extend that openness to the operational side too. Why should all police officers have to start at the same level? Why should someone with a different skill set not be able to join the police force in a senior role? Why shouldn’t someone, who has been a proven success overseas, be able to help turn around a force at home?

What is significant here is that the phone-hacking scandal and its relentless coverage in the news media removed not only the Commissioner, but also an experienced senior officer who would have been a serious contender to replace him. In addition,thedisclosureofthepossibilityofhighlevelcollusionwithNewsInternational and the failure to recognise institutionalised corruption reinforced the need for an outsider to be appointed as the new Commissioner. The Prime Minister’s

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statement generated well-sourced speculation that Cameron wanted to bypass the normal Home Office appointment process and employ American ‘supercop’ Bill Bratton to reform the MPS. On 22 July 2011, the Metropolitan Police Authority placed an advertisement for Stephenson’s replacement. This triggered intense news media conjecture regarding who the next Commissioner should/would be. Those profiled included: Tim Godwin, the Acting Commissioner; Bernard HoganHowe, the Deputy Commissioner; Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick; Sara Thornton, Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police; and Sir Hugh Orde, head of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

VI.  Riots and Looting: the Legitimation of Bill Bratton – ‘Supercop’ The issue of the vacant commissionership took an unexpected and dramatic turn as a result of the inquest into the appropriateness of the MPS response to the antipolice rioting and looting in London during 6–9 August 2011. As a result of an emergency Cobra meeting on 9 August, David Cameron said the number of police officers on the streets of London would ‘surge’ from 6000 to 16000. The following day he took a ‘zero tolerance’ approach, declaring that water cannon would be available to the police ‘within 24 hours’, should they be needed to quell rioters, and said that the police were already authorised to use baton rounds. During an emergency ‘Law and Order’ session of Parliament on 11 August, the sense that the MPS had lost control of the streets in parts of London generated heavy political criticism of a humiliated force that was perceived as tactically incompetent and strategically leaderless. Because of poor management and poor decision-making, the Prime Minister had in effect been required to instruct the MPS to re-impose law and order. It was in the context of a debate about the power of London’s ‘gang culture’, the need for resolute policing methods, and the importance of demonstrating strong police leadership, that Bill Bratton’s name re-emerged in the news media as Downing Street’s preferred candidate for the MPS Commissionership. Bratton, as the ‘supercop’ who had presided over the New York ‘crime miracle’ and ‘tamed’ the LA gangs, now had the enthusiastic backing of the conservative press. The selfmythologising ‘supercop’ angle was amplified by Bratton’s willingness to give interviews to the UK and US news media, stating that, if approached, he would seriously consider the position, and at least be prepared to act as a ‘gang buster’ advisor to the British government. Conservative commentators urged the Prime Minister to overrule the Home office and police insistence that only British citizens could apply for the vacant Commissionership.



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VII.  Riots, Looting and Police Reform: the De-legitimation of Sir Hugh Orde In early July 2011 Sir Hugh Orde, as head of ACPO, had attempted to mobilise public opposition to the government’s proposed cuts in police budgets. He was derailed by the phone-hacking scandal and needed to focus his attention on defending police integrity to a hostile and frenzied news media. Orde also became embroiled in a rancorous exchange of views over the policing of the riots, insisting on police primacy in the determination of tactics and dismissing the ‘supercop option’ as ‘stupid’. The message Orde sent to Downing Street was uncompromising: the British police had nothing to learn from the United States, with its entrenched violent gang culture and very different approach to public order policing. Orde wrote a piece in the Independent (11 August 2011), arguing that riot tactics must be determined by chief constables rather than politicians, and that calls for the deployment of water cannon and plastic bullets was not necessary and would be counter-productive. At this moment it was rumoured that a senior panel of Home Office officials were backing the appointment of the most visible, vocal and newsworthy police chief in England and Wales. Over the weekend of 12–14 August the row between the government and the police intensified over a series of controversial and pressing questions: who was to blame for the police’s apparent loss of control over the streets; who deserved credit for bringing the riots to an end; and what impact would the proposed cuts on the police budget have on the police capacity to maintain public order? This weekend was also a critical turning point in the ‘race for the commissionership’, when Sir Hugh Orde had an interview and profile in the Independent (13 August). Orde insisted that there was no connection between ministerial statements at the time of the riots and on-the-ground operational policing decisions, since politicians cannot instruct police chiefs in that way. ‘The fact that politicians chose to come back [from holiday]’, he argued, was ‘an irrelevance in terms of the tactics that were by then developing. The more robust policing tactics you saw were not a function of political interference; they were a function of the numbers being available to allow the chief constables to change their tactics’. Orde dismissed ‘ill-informed’ political comments and downplayed the importance of the riots and looting. He reiterated his criticism of the Prime Minister’s decision to float the name of Bill Bratton as a possible MPS Commissioner or government advisor on anti-gang initiatives, and warned about the risks associated with the Coalition’s spending cuts. At the same time, however, Bill Bratton was giving British press interviews in which he was criticising ‘over-cautious’ police tactics, and re-affirming his willingness to be considered as Commissioner and/or act as a government advisor. At the core of the disagreement between Orde and the government was the issue of operational independence of chief constables. In interviews given across the news media on 14 August, the Home Secretary reiterated her

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obligation to direct the police if it was deemed necessary. By 15 August, Bernard Hogan-Howe, MPS Deputy Commissioner, and Steve House, Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police, were emerging from the shadows as the frontrunners to be the new MPS Commissioner. On 17 August 2011, the job applicant deadline to fill the vacancy for the UK’s most demanding police job expired. After the deadline had passed, the IPCC announced that there was no verifiable evidence of misconduct against Stephenson, Yates, Clarke and Haymen. Though the IPCC did register concerns about their professional judgement, neither Stephenson nor his senior colleagues would have been required to resign had they chosen to wait out the IPCC inquiry. What is remarkable about the search for Stephenson’s replacement is that the news media had immediate access to the names, and possibly also the applications, of those who had applied: Sir Hugh Orde; Bernard Hogan-Howe; Tim Godwin; and Stephen House. In light of Orde’s liberal policing philosophy and his outspoken criticism of government, and despite vociferous support from the liberal press, the unanimous news media position was that either House or Hogan-Howe would succeed in being appointed. The inferential structure that was crystallising around Orde, and that was now being reproduced across tabloid and broadsheet, liberal and conservative newspapers alike, was that he had talked himself out of the position. That weekend the conservative press consolidated this inferential structure by subjecting Orde to a ‘trial by media’ and publicly passing judgement on his prospects. The other applicants in the contest for the MPS Commissionership were not subject to the same levels of media scrutiny, negative or otherwise. The Times (18 August: 2) began with an editorial arguing that the government should re-advertise the post if none of the candidates were deemed appropriate. The selection of a candidate with verve, imagination and willingness to change the organisation that he or she finds must be regarded as the objective. Among the applicants there may be many officers with a fine record and a reasonable expectation of selection. But if they do not possess the ability to combine this with an outsider’s sensibility and an openness to revisit policing strategies and leadership then they should not be selected. It should not be regarded as an embarrassment or called ‘chaos’ or ‘fiasco’ if it is determined that none of the original candidates is quite right. The government should not be afraid of re-advertising the post if it needs to’

In the same edition Sir Hugh Orde had a letter published under the title ‘Tension between politicians and police is healthy’, in which he clarified his position (Times, 18 August: 18): One of the foundation stones of British policing is Robert Peel’s doctrine of constabulary independence. This insulates the police from political control and allows them to rely on their expertise, judgment and experience in their operations. But the essential counterpoint to this is public accountability – through the law, through the Home Secretary [at a national level] and through local representatives. But I am convinced there should be a healthy tension for these relationships to work. At the Cobra meetings last week to counter the riots, the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary ensured that there was strong oversight but that senior officers made the clear



Trial by Media 147 operational decisions. At no point did I say politicians were irrelevant: my point was that the more robust tactics we adopted did not come about through ministerial intervention but because chief constables had mobilised enough officers to change tactics. Both David Cameron and Theresa May were enormously supportive, and the Home Secretary clearly understands the complexity of policing and appreciates that we cannot get it right all the time. I think politicians would want it to be clear that they too understand the importance of a police service free of political interference Equally, the Government has an absolute right to reform accountability, which it aims to do through replacing police authorities with locally elected commissioners. But the police need clarity on how this will work, complete with effective checks and balances to keep the service free of interference, as Peel intended. The impression has also been given that British policing believes it is immune to learning from outside or abroad. Neither is true. US policing has strong links with forces in the UK. I am a friend of Bill Bratton, I spent time with him in LA and invited him to speak at a conference in Northern Ireland in 2008. British policing has many strengths admired abroad: Peter Fahy, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, has been in demand in America to share the lessons of his force’s success in tackling gangs. That is partly why police chiefs were surprised that they were not asked for their views before advice was sought from overseas. It is disappointing to see a mounting attack on British policing. We should be proud of our tried and tested model of policing – a largely unarmed service based on minimum force and minimum interference with citizens’ rights – and we are determined to preserve it. But let no one think we are not open to challenge and change.

The Guardian, Independent, New Statesman and Daily Mirror all lined up to support Orde’s appointment. The Sunday Mirror summed up Orde’s position: the story headlined, ‘Met Boss?: Anyone But Hugh’, was followed with a pondering but pointed editorial: ‘It is hard to know which is more embarrassing for the government – with hours to go only one person had applied to be Britain’s top police officer, or that the sole applicant was someone David Cameron desperately doesn’t want’ (Sunday Mirror, 21 August: 14). None of the alternative candidates at this point received either unanimous or particularly vocal support across the conservative press. Conservative consensus was established around the unsuitability of Orde. It was this aggressively antiOrde stance that set the tone for debate, and sought systematically to undermine the highly experienced police chief’s credibility as a potential Commissioner. The Sunday Telegraph (21 August) ran an exclusive on the chaotic nature of the application process, and quoted a Home Office source stating: People were panicking a lot at the lack of applicants and there was a fair bit of ‘chivvying up’ taking place. No-one likes Hugh Orde, even though he’s probably the best copper out of the lot of them. The initial indication was that there would be just one applicant and that was Hugh Orde. By all accounts that did cause concern, shared by No 10.

The Sunday Telegraph’s editorial highlighted the need for radical change, and explicitly challenged Orde’s suitability for the Commissionership by portraying him as change-averse. The Mail on Sunday personalised its attack by focusing on Orde’s

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television appearances in a ‘fake’ uniform with a ‘made up’ plastic badge. The story disclosed the views of a ‘senior police source’ (Mail on Sunday, 21 August: 17): The sight of Sir Hugh on TV wearing the made-up uniform has bewildered and puzzled senior officers. This uniform does not belong to any police force. It has no constitutional or legal basis, especially the hat he wears. Instead of the traditional crest, he’s put an ACPO badge on it. It looks made up, like a traffic warden’s uniform.

Former MPS Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Brian Paddick, was also quoted: ‘He is sending a clear signal: How would I look in the Met Commissioner’s uniform?’ (ibid). The article ended by reminding readers that Orde was not an operational officer but the head of ACPO, an already discredited organisation. Attacks on Orde continued throughout the following weeks. The London Evening Standard further ridiculed Orde’s professional attire with a story headlined ‘Oh, how we love a man in a fake uniform’ (23 August: 20): ‘Some are suggesting that Sir Hugh’s decision to wear his Gadaffi style pretend uniform on television is a subliminal pitch for the next Met Commissioner’s job’. On 2 September, the Times reported Hugh Orde’s decision to wed as a cynical attempt to make him acceptable to the Home Office. Two days later September the Sunday Times (4 September 2011) accused him of running a blatant media campaign to be elected that included exaggerating his competence and experience. The following weekend the news media continued to publish leaks and gossip about the candidates who, as a result of last minute changes, would be interviewed by Mayor of London Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Theresa May on Monday 12 September. The appointment process was judged to be completely politicised. It was confirmed that the candidates had already been interviewed twice, by a Home Office panel comprising civil servants and advisors (2 September 2011) and by a panel of the Metropolitan Police Authority (6 September 2011). It should now have been left to the Home Secretary to decide. However, given that the previous two Commissioners had resigned in controversial circumstances, the Mayor was determined to have the final say on Sir Paul Stephenson’s successor. The inferential structure that Orde could not be the next Commissioner, reinforced by his ‘trial by media’ over several weeks in the conservative press, was now fully crystallised. Even his press supporters were resigned to debating why he would not be successful in his application. The Independent on Sunday (11 September) focused on the political reasons why Sir Hugh Orde would not be appointed, despite a ‘consensus’ that he was the ‘stand out candidate’ for the commissionership. In addition to the now well-rehearsed problems of Orde’s clashing with the Home Secretary over the riots, and his outspoken criticisms of David Cameron for supporting Bill Bratton, Orde’s close association with Northern Ireland now also emerged as a problem. An un-named Home Office source explained: They now say that, while he was effective over there, giving the job to someone who made his name in charge of a force engaged in handling public disturbances every day would look like panic. It would send out the wrong message – that the Met was now some paramilitary organisation and it needed an experienced hand in charge. It’s a pretty lame



Trial by Media 149 excuse, but when you would prefer to give the job to almost anyone else, it is the sort of reasoning that helps your case (Independent on Sunday, 11 September: 20).

For the Sunday Times there was a power struggle in play. The MPA had supported Orde and Hogan-Howe, the Mayor was supporting Hogan-Howe, whilst the Home Secretary was supporting House. The Sunday Times (11 September 2011) profile of the candidates was as follows: • Hogan-Howe: ‘A blunt-talking Yorkshireman, many see him as an ideal choice to steady the Met, which has been criticised over the London riots and phone hacking’. • House: ‘An expert on gangs, he is considered a front-runner because the Home Office invited him to apply’. • Orde: ‘is said to have told colleagues he does not expect to win the job. He is considered by many to be the most experienced, having served as chief constable in Northern Ireland for seven years. However, as president of ACPO, the chief constables’ ‘union’, he has clashed with [Home Secretary, Theresa] May over last month’s riots’. • Godwin: ‘He would normally be expected to be a certainty for the post, but many Tories have been critical of his handling of the disorder in London’. The Mail on Sunday (11 September 2011) identified Hogan-Howe, the ‘former gang-busting police chief nicknamed “Eliot Ness” for his zero-tolerance on gun and knife crime’, as the Home Secretary’s preferred candidate. Tucked away in an article in the Sunday Telegraph (11 September 2011) on the budgetary challenges facing the Chancellor of the Exchequer was a passing negative reference to the fact that police chiefs such as Sir Hugh Orde had ‘joined Labour in using the riots to justify asking the government to cancel cuts to police budgets’. On Monday 12 September, the day of the interviews, both the Times and the Guardian ran pieces on the likely outcome of the deliberations. The Times confirmed that the Home Secretary was in favour of Stephen House, while the Lord Mayor was impressed by Bernard Hogan-Howe. It reiterated that Sir Hugh Orde, ‘the most experienced’ candidate, had ‘angered senior government figures by speaking out over cuts and other policing issues’. Tim Godwin’s application had been seriously ‘tarnished’ by criticisms of the ineffective policing of the riots, and his association with Sir Paul Stephenson. The Guardian ran an exclusive maintaining that, although Sir Hugh Orde had been ranked as number one by both panels, he would not be appointed Commissioner because of ‘his vocal opposition to the government’s desire to radically reform policing’. It confirmed that Bernard Hogan-Howe was the firm favourite with Stephen House in second place. The Guardian quoted an unnamed source as saying, ‘He is the chief spokesman for the way things have been, and the government wants to shake things up’. On the afternoon of Monday 12 September 2011 the Home Office confirmed that Bernard Hogan-Howe would be the new Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police.

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VIII.  Conclusion: The Legitimation of Bernard Hogan-Howe? During his first interview as Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe was flanked – and interpellated – by the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London as he faced a pack of reporters outside New Scotland Yard. The Home Secretary commended the new Commissioner for his ‘excellent track record as a tough, single minded crime fighter. He showed that in his time as Chief Constable of Merseyside. And I am sure that he is going to bring those skills and that ability to fight crime to the Metropolitan Police’ (Daily Telegraph, 12 September 2011). The Mayor concurred that Hogan-Howe had been appointed because of his ‘relentless focus’ on ‘driving down crime’ while he was Chief Constable of Merseyside. In effect he was being characterised by the Home Secretary and Mayor as the British Bill Bratton. Hogan-Howe did not depart from the ‘crime fighting’ script (BBC News, 12 September): I intend to lead the Metropolitan Police so that it makes criminals fear, that it keeps the trust of the public of London in the Metropolitan Police, and finally the Metropolitan Police that Metropolitan police officers and staff are proud of. . . And now I would like to go and start work but particularly to remember that the idea is to make the criminals fear the police and what they are doing now and make sure that they are stopping increased crime and reduce crime over the coming year. . . My job is to get crime down, arrest criminals and support victims. That’s exactly what we’re paid to do and that’s what I intend to do.

The following day’s newspaper headlines reproduced the ‘crime-fighter’ narrative in an uncritical manner: ‘Met goes ‘back to basics’ with new commissioner’, Times, 13 September, p 6 ‘New Top Cop: I will strike fear in Crims’, Sun, 13 September, p 14 ‘On his Met-tle’, Daily Mirror, 13 September, p 10 ‘Total war on crime made him Tory favourite’, Guardian, 13 September, p 12 ‘New Met chief: We’ll get Tough’, Daily Express, 13 September, p 18. ‘Criminals must fear the police again vows the Yard’s new chief’, Daily Mail, 13 September, p 7 ‘I’ll make the Met a force that criminals fear, pledges new Commissioner’, Daily Telegraph, 13 September, p 2 ‘Merseyside gangbuster gets a new beat as head of Met’, Independent, 13 September, p 2.

Despite similar headlines there was a clear political split in the press editorial response to the appointment. The selection of a self-declared, unequivocal ‘crime fighter’ was positively received across the centre-right press. The Sun gave him the most enthusiastic endorsement: Be afraid, criminals. Be very afraid. That is the message from new Met Police chief Bernard Hogan-Howe. As Merseyside chief constable, he cut crime by 40 per cent. He



Trial by Media 151 promises similar action to clean up London. The Sun will be on his side. Give ’em hell, guv (13 September: 9).

However, for the Independent, Guardian and Daily Mirror (13 September) the decision not to appoint Orde was reprehensible because, for these newspapers, it had been based on party political machinations rather than merit and ability. Sir Hugh Orde should have been appointed because of his unmatched operational and managerial experience and professional resolve to resist the politicisation of policing. The Independent’s position was that the most sophisticated senior police officer of his generation had, in effect, been publicly humiliated by the Conservative Party. For the Guardian the constitutionally unwarranted politicisation of the selection process had not only trashed Orde’s standing, but also placed Hogan-Howe in ‘an unenviable position. Through no fault of his own, he will be labelled the Tories’ placeman. No Met commissioner in modern times has come to the job with less authority or legitimacy. All this makes the new commissioner’s job even more difficult than it would have been anyway... Mr Hogan-Howe has our best wishes, but he has been handed a poisoned chalice’ (Guardian, 13 September 2011). The Daily Mirror’s (13 September 2011) opinion was that the new Commissioner would have ‘his work cut out restoring the authority of the Commissioner’s office he will occupy. And to do that, he must resist political interference. . . Parliament makes the laws. The police, not political amateurs, must enforce them’. Bernard Hogan-Howe’s commissionership will be lived out in an exacting highrisk policing domain of profound political and socio-economic transformations and a rapidly evolving news mediascape. He has to rebuild morale in a police force whose public credibility has been further destabilised by a series of high-profile public order policing mistakes that culminated in the controversial handling of the summer riots of 2011. ‘Losing by appearing to lose’ is not a politically viable public order policing philosophy. In addition, the issue of the extent and nature of MPS relationships with News International will be subject to intense news media and political and possibly court scrutiny during 2012. Extending Reiner’s (1991) classic typology of police chiefs, Hogan-Howe is, as his recent predecessors have been, a ‘mediatised police chief’. And of course the news media will be quick to judge Hogan-Howe’s ability to deliver on his ‘crime fighting’ pledge to Londoners, in addition to his adeptness in managing the roll out of a radical police reform programme and resisting government cuts in the MPS budget. Sir Bernard HoganHowe will be aware that his position in the news media ‘hierarchy of credibility’ is contingent, and that a career-wrecking ‘trial by media’ could begin at any moment. He will no doubt also be aware of Sir Hugh Orde’s prophetic words: ‘You are truly, as a chief officer, only as good as your last five minutes’.

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Hall, S Critcher, C Jefferson, T Clarke, J and Roberts, B (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London, Macmillan). Halloran, J, Elliott, P and Murdock, G (1970) Demonstrations and Communication: A Case Study (Harmondsworth, Penguin). Home Affairs Committee (2009) Fourth Report – Policing Process of Home Office Leaks Enquiry (London, The Stationery Office Limited). Independent on Sunday (2011) ‘So, just what has David Cameron got against the copper’s copper?’ [B Brady and K Dutta] 11 September, 20. Katz, J (1987) ‘What Makes Crime News’ Media, Culture and Society 9(1), 47–76. Lang, G and Lang, K (1983) The Battle for Public Opinion (New York, Columbia University Press). Lang, K and Lang, G (1955) ‘The Inferential Structure of Political Communications: A Study in Unwitting Bias’ Public Opinion Quarterly 19(2), 168–83. Lloyd, J (2004) What the media are doing to our politics, London: Constable. Loader, I and Mulcahy, A (2001a) ‘The Power of Legitimate Naming Part I – Chief Constables as Social Commentators in Post-War England’ British Journal of Criminology 41(1), 41–55. —— and —— (2001b) ‘The Power of Legitimate Naming part II – Making Sense of the Elite Police Voice’ British Journal of Criminology 41(2), 252–65. Mail on Sunday (2011) ‘Man they call “Elliot Ness” is tipped as Met chief’ [C Leake] 11 September, 43. Manning, PK (2001) ‘Theorising Policing: Drama and Myth of Crime Control in the NYPD’ Theoretical Criminology 5(3), 315–44. Mawby, RC (2002) ‘Continuity and Change, Convergence and Divergence: the Policy and Practice of Police-Media Relations’ Criminal Justice 2(3), 303–24. —— (2010) ‘Chibnall Revisited: Crime Reporters, the Police and ‘Law-and-Order News’’ British Journal of Criminology 50(6), 1060–76. McLaughlin, E (2007) The New Policing (London, Sage). Milne, K (2005) Manufacturing Dissent: Single-issue Protest, the Public and the Press (London, Demos). Observer (2000) ‘Never Mind the Facts, Let’s Have a Scandal’ [W Hutton] 15 October, 30. Pavlik, J (2008) Media in the Digital Age (New York, New York University Press). Protess, D, Cook, F, Doppelt, J, Eterma, J, Gordon, M, Leff, D and Miller, P (1991) The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America (New York, Guildhall Press). Reiner, R (1991) Chief Constables: Bobbies, Bosses or Bureaucrats? (Oxford, Clarendon). —— (2000) The Politics of the Police, 3rd edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Sabato, L (1993) Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism has transformed American Politics (New York, Free Press). Sabato, L, Stencel, M and Lichter, S (2000) Peep Show: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal (New York, Rowman and Littlefield). Schlesinger, P and Tumber, H (1994) Reporting Crime: the Politics of Criminal Justice (Oxford, Clarendon). Spectator (2011) ‘Cameron mustn’t let the police top brass bully him into silence’ [J Forsyth] 14 August. Sunday Times (2011) ‘Boris and May tussle over Met chief’ [D Leppard] 11 September, 12. Times (2011) ‘Riots role could decide Met job’ [F Hamilton] 12 September, 24.

8 ‘The Anvil’ in the Information Age: Police, Politics and Media MARTIN INNES and ROGER GRAEF

We who are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation. (Mark, 1977: 118)

Introduction According to Sir Robert Mark, former Commissioner of ‘the Met’ Police, police are fated to be on the bow wave of social change. As the agency endowed with a general authority of the state to deliver coercive force, they are frequently involved in trying to manage conflicts that arise as social order evolves. This understanding that the police function is ineluctably tied to wider social currents is a theme that reverberates deeply in the scholarship of Robert Reiner. It was also a feature that was much in evidence in the summer of 2011 when two very different police dramas were brought to the centre of national debates. Although different in their tenor and substance, that both issues happened so close to one another served to induce a sense of crisis in British policing that, in terms of its scale and intensity, has probably not been seen for a generation. The first of these trickled out of the accusations that journalists at the News of the World ‘hacked’ the phones of a large number of newsworthy individuals. As part of the general scandal provoked, two specific allegations were made against police. First, that a number of as yet unidentified, police staff were paid by journalists for personal information relating to people in the public eye. Second, and linked to this, it was asserted that several senior officers specifically, and the upper echelons of the Metropolitan Police in general, were subject to undue influence by News International (and other corporate interests) and that this contributed to the failure to rigorously investigate the original suspicions of phone hacking in 2006. The second element of the crisis centred upon the riots in a number of English towns and cities during August 2011. Initially sparked by the police shooting of

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a young man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham suspected of carrying a firearm, the public disorder proved contagious. Spreading across London, it gained traction in areas as far afield as Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester. Explanations for how and why the riots gained initial momentum and then ‘travelled’ in this way ranged from deep structural socio-economic issues, to failures in and hostility to policing, especially among black and minority ethnic youths. Viewed in this way, it can be seen that the 2011 policing crisis pivoted around three key themes that have been at the core of Robert Reiner’s scholarly interests: police; the politics of criminal justice; and mass media representations of crime and social control. Informed by some of Reiner’s ideas developed through a career spent engaging with these issues, in this chapter we want to develop an account of the causes and consequences of the crisis in policing. Our argument is that there have been fundamental changes in the information environment for policing, resulting from the increasing penetration of mass and social media into all aspects of social life. The concept of the information environment is intended to be conceptually analogous with the idea of the operating environment that is well established in the police vernacular. But whereas the operating environment shapes and moulds police actions and interventions, the information environment influences how police come to know about the distribution of vulnerability, harm, risk and threat across social space. In attending to changes in the information environment we are interested in the ways that these conditions are inducing new forms of transparency for public services such as the police and new problems to be solved. And how, as a consequence, as society’s ‘anvil’, controversies around police activities are liable to become more commonplace. The chapter starts by exploring developments in the information environment of policing. This feeds into an assessment of the phone-hacking scandal and the implications for the political position of the police. There follows consideration of the series of mass public disorder events in August 2011 and how these compounded concerns about policing. We then examine their implications in relation to a wider package of police reforms being introduced by the Coalition government. The Conclusion seeks to connect these issues with Reiner’s work to show how his scholarship helps illuminate some recurrent truths about the police function in liberal democratic societies.

I.  Policing and its Information Environment Arguably the central theme of Reiner’s magisterial Politics of the Police, that has remained consistent across its now several editions, is that the development of policing is ineluctably and inevitably tied to wider social, political, cultural and economic currents in society (see Reiner, 1992; 2000; 2010). In contrast to other accounts and analyses that seek to reduce the police function to law enforcement



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or crime control, Reiner’s position is that both the institutional and interactional aspects of policing refract these broader trajectories of development. One of the most persuasive schools of thought mapping these trajectories in recent years has been provided by scholars focusing upon the ‘information age’. They maintain that just as in ‘the industrial age’ key facets of social life were configured by the mode of industrial production, contemporary patterns of social organisation and social order are fundamentally defined by the production, circulation and consumption of information. Proponents of this position maintain that the vast flows of information routinely communicated via institutions and new interaction orders have, amongst other things: induced a tendency to ‘flatter’, less hierarchical, more networked, forms of social organisation (Castells, 1997); altered our conceptions of belonging and social identity (Meyrowitz, 1988); and through the diffusion of surveillance opportunities, altered the means for social control (Lyon, 1994). Such analyses point to significant changes in how social life is conceptualised and practised. It is unsurprising that they have influenced how some scholars and policy-makers have seen policing. Our understandings of how and why the police do what they do have been significantly enriched by a number of accounts attending to what we might term police information work (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997; Williamson, 2008). This has included studies of crime detection (Brodeur, 2010); homicide investigation (Innes, 2003) and regulating disorder (O’Malley, 2010). Connected but distinct currents can also be seen in relation to policy and practice. The attention paid to intelligence-led policing and its conceptual cousin ‘hotspots policing’ evidence a strong belief in some sections of the police that they can improve their effectiveness and efficiency by making better use of information, data and intelligence (Maguire, 2000). The issue that has arguably received less attention is how policing should be configured in an environment where vast flows of information are easily accessible. For at its core, intelligence-led policing retains a fairly orthodox conception of the key problem to be solved for police information work: how to access scarce or protected information? So for example, how do you identify an unknown criminal who is seeking to cover their tracks? Or, what are the best ways to understand how a serious organised crime group operates? Obtaining information about the activities of people motivated to not want this to be known will remain a perennial problem for policing. But it is not the only informational challenge policing must confront. Over the past decade, the operations of 24/7/365 mass media, together with the spread of social media, mobile data and web 2.0 (and more latterly 3.0) technologies have vastly increased the amount of data and information about all kinds of events and occurrences. Albeit Reiner has focused more closely on the mass media than social media, his work on mediated representations of crime and criminality still provides two critical insights into the social consequences of the kinds of change outlined above (see Reiner, 2007a; Reiner et al, 2003). First, that how policing is depicted and represented culturally has become progressively more complicated. Across both fictional

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and factual representations he detects an increasing ambivalence about police and their conduct. There is far greater recognition of the potential for police deviance. His second point is that mediated representations of crime and policing are never just passive reports or portrayals. Rather they interact with and help to order social reality. By supplying definitions of the situation in relation to troubling and problematic events, mass media and peer-to-peer social media communications, shape and influence the ways in which we collectively think, feel and act in relation to matters of crime and social control. Moreover, it has been shown that these fictional images and narratives are often adopted and adapted by police themselves in terms of their presentations of self, and how they account for their work (Graef, 1990; Doyle, 2003). These representations have also shaped how the public, media and politicians view and judge police activity. For policing, the significant increase in the number of mass and social media sources and the quantity of information they communicate has had two principal consequences. First, it has created a processing problem. There is far more data to be monitored and assessed regarding new information about anti-social and illegal behaviours of many kinds. This establishes a risk or threat selection problem for the police. Greater awareness of a whole range of issues resulting from abundant information makes it harder to decide which should be attended to and which ignored. Second, the changed information environment has made it far harder for police to control reputationdamaging information about their own activities and stop it becoming publicly known via user-generated content – for example, as occurred in the G20 protests in London where images of Ian Tomlinson being struck from behind by a police baton before dying spread virally via the internet. The policing scandals in the summer of 2011 resonate with all of these concerns and issues. The revelations about possible police collusion in phone-hacking by staff at News International demonstrate how discreditable information will out. The riots illuminated the challenges for police of having to quickly process and select intelligence from an abundance of data about rioters’ plans and movements.

II.  Early Summer 2011: Phone-hacking Studies of the social impacts of crime show that public perceptions gravitate around, and are powerfully influenced by, a relatively small number of ‘signal crimes’. Signal crimes are incidents that alter or influence how people think, feel or behave in relation to their individual or collective security (Innes, 2004). Such incidents serve to condense public sentiments and concerns, channelling these, like lightning rods, in particular directions. Fieldwork-based studies have shown that profound cognitive, affective or behavioural reactions can be induced at a local level



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by anti-social behaviour and more routine offences (Bottoms, 2012). As well as by infrequent, dramatic, high-profile crimes where the social reaction ‘travels’ more widely across social space (Innes, 2004; 2006). There is every indication that the revelations about phone-hacking acted in a manner akin to a signal crime, negatively impacting upon public confidence in the police. In the deluge of claims and counter-claims, recriminations and speculation, two specific accusations have been made. There has been a tendency to conflate these. They are, however, distinct in terms of their respective causes and consequences. The first allegation is that individual police officers acted corruptly. This is a different order of problem to the second concern that, as an institution, police are subject to undue influence from the media. Indeed, by separating and clarifying the issues, it is easier to see how they are infused with deeper concerns about the police function that have emerged in recent years. Police history is scarred by periodic corruption crises. The Knapp Commission in the 1970s asserted that the New York Police Department was systematically corrupt from its inception. With officers routinely engaged in taking payoffs from brothels and gambling dens, ‘shaking down’ small businesses, and receiving bribes from those involved in drugs and vice. In Australia, a series of official inquiries since the 1970s investigated organised police corruption in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Upon appointment as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London, Robert Mark tersely opined that it failed the test of catching more criminals than it employed. The current concerns in the UK centre on the fact that officers may have passed information from ‘secure’ police databases to journalists for financial gain.1 The popular adage holds that knowledge is power. But it also has cash value – particularly when it can be commodified as a front-page scoop. These allegations provide a new twist on an established theme. Information access and control have been a recurring cause of police corruption. But earlier examples tended to be based upon police concealing, rather than revealing secret information. For example, detective tradecraft in cultivating ‘informants’ involves developing knowledge about an individual’s role in criminal activities. Not passing this to the other institutions of the criminal justice system ‘encourages’ them to inform on their associates (Hobbs, 1988). As numerous cases attest, it is only a short step from this to police soliciting favours or money to act in a similar way. Problems around wilfully destructive information management were also present in several of the most notorious miscarriages of justice. Here the corrupt practices involved inventing information to construct a compelling case for the prosecution: known colloquially as ‘fitting people up’. Officers engaging in this kind of activity often justified their actions on the basis that they ‘knew’ the suspect was factually guilty, but the strictures of the criminal justice process inhibited them from proving this. They claimed it was ‘noble cause’ corruption. In homage to 1   In her report into relationships between the police and journalists, Filkin (2012) identified several additional motivations for police passing secret information to media contacts.

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Sartre’s formulation, in the policing world this is known as ‘the Dirty Harry’ problem. Reflecting the methods of Clint Eastwood’s iconic detective Harry Callaghan, it holds that the ‘realpolitik’ of policing means securing ‘justice’ sometimes requires a corrupt intervention (Klockars, 1980). Of course, police corruption is not limited to motivations of financial gain relating to information control. As much consternation attaches itself to the use of violence to secure ‘street justice’ against perceived wrongdoers. But both forms of corrupted police conduct have similar roots. They are facilitated by the ‘low visibility’ of much routine policing that limits what is observable by the general public or police management (Reiner, 1978). When corruption is detected, one of three competing explanations tends to be invoked: ‘rotten apples’; ‘rotten barrels’; or ‘rotten orchards’ (Punch, 2009). Blaming errant behaviour on a few rotten apples is often the preferred response of policing agencies, because it individualises and isolates the causes of the problem to a few bad officers. When groups of officers, or particular squads or units have been found to be collectively engaged in corrupt practices, such as happened with the West Midlands Crime Squad in the 1970s, and the Vice Squads and Flying Squads in the Met, then there is recourse to the ‘rotten barrel’ account. This contends that certain forms of police work (drugs, vice and organised crime) are especially susceptible to invitations to corruption, but the reach of this does not pervade the overall institution. Contrastingly, the ‘rotten orchard’ account points to the presence of systemic and pervasive problems. Whilst sometimes applicable to developing countries, few would nowadays seriously contend that police in most Western states are institutionally corrupt. But where this institutional level of analysis may have more purchase is in keying into more subtle and potentially insidious forms of ‘undue influence’. The second allegation against police following the phone-hacking scandal was that senior police have become subject to undue influence from powerful interests. During his tenure, it was repeatedly claimed that Sir Ian Blair overly, and overtly, identified with the New Labour government. Although less obviously political, Sir Paul Stephenson was tainted by the fact that some of his officers were too close for comfort to journalists working for News International. That police and journalists have close working relationships is widely known and well documented (Reiner, 1992; Mawby, 2002). In the days when newspapers and television stations employed specialist crime correspondents relations were probably closer than anything that News International achieved (Chibnall, 1977). This notwithstanding, in an era of 24/7/365 rolling news, police remain an important source of a steady stream of interesting stories for journalists and thus worth cultivating. From the police perspective, cooperating with journalists can afford multiple benefits. Media coverage of specific cases can generate information and intelligence about what happened, and where suspects might be located. It is also important in securing the overall legitimacy of police and their work, and in securing public con-



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fidence. Many officers contend, quite correctly, that by cooperating with journalists they increase their operational effectiveness (Innes, 1999). Of course there are tensions. The media often acts as a critic of police, uncovering corruption (from the Times uncovering the rhino whip, through Granada’s revelations about endemic Met corruption in the 1970s, to recent films like The Secret Policeman). And whilst there is a general trend towards less deference to the police, research shows that the aggregate content of media crime stories is overwhelmingly supportive (Reiner, 2007). As such, the relevant question is not whether police and journalists should or do work closely, but under what conditions and in what circumstances such arrangements are benign or malign? In the case of News International, it has been strongly asserted that the degree of influence was corrosive of police integrity and independence. The problem of how to secure police integrity and independence by preventing corruption and undue influence – without degrading operational effectiveness and efficiency – is a tension traceable to the origins of the modern police. When Sir Robert Peel was configuring his 1829 proposals for the Metropolitan Police, he worked on the basis of pragmatism rather than principle. Through a method of triangulation, he defined the core elements of his approach by identifying the failings of other nascent policing systems of the time. He sought an approach sharply distinguished from the French system of plain clothed spies, collecting intelligence for the state. Neither were the police to be a domestic military force. Through the application of visible uniformed patrol the ‘new’ police were to be different also from their immediate predecessors, the Bow Street Runners and other ‘thief-takers’, who would track down and return stolen goods for a fee (Emsley, 1996). Peel’s model crafted a delicate balance between liberty and order, accountability and independence. Just how delicate the balance was is evidenced by the fact that only a sixth of the 3000 officers originally employed in 1829 remained in post by 1833, with many leaving because of integrity issues (Reiner, 1992). But Peel, and the first two Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, Rowan and Mayne, recognised that any ‘distancing’ between the police and policed could not go too far. Operational effectiveness and efficiency required an understanding of, and connections with, the communities where police activity was routinely located. It is for this reason, as much as securing popular legitimacy, that Peel’s adage that ‘the police are the people, and the people are the police’ achieved such resonance. This issue of how to appropriately reconcile and balance relations between police and community so as to limit the potential for undue influence, whilst maintaining operational effectiveness, has continued to shape the evolution of policing. The past 50 years have been marked by a sequence of oscillations in police strategy as attempts to implement forms of community policing, shifting the police closer and more responsive to community concerns, have been followed by counter-reactions seeking to mitigate any such influence. Indeed, one reason why the current allegations of undue media influence may be so significant is because we have been in a period where the political direction

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of travel has been towards rendering the police more compliant with the influence of communities. For example, in 2008, the Labour government introduced neighbourhood policing across all areas of England and Wales. It was founded on a community engagement system whereby citizens could shape local policing priorities. This movement towards increasing citizen influence over the delivery of policing has been drastically accentuated by the Coalition government’s police reform programme. Its proposal to introduce directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) has been couched in a rhetoric that police leaders have become too insulated from the public and need to be subject to more direct influence to drive improvements in the quality of service delivery. Likewise, the publication of online neighbourhood crime maps is presented as a tool for empowering citizens to be more effective in getting local police focused on their needs. However, given that the prototype for PCCs has been the Mayor of London’s control of the Met, which has resulted in the resignation of two Commissioners and an Assistant Commissioner in the space of a few years because of political expediency, concerns about the overall viability of such arrangements are now surfacing. These innovations are though ‘surface’ manifestations of a ‘deeper’ politics of police reform that has been subtly reconfiguring the delivery of policing over the past decade. The key principles can be distilled into three master narratives: ‘seeing like a citizen’; ‘participative policing’; and ‘see through services’. It is these that have been guiding the broad trajectory of police reform in recent years. The notion of ‘seeing like a citizen’ contends that police should find ways to view the world through the eyes of the public, rather than focusing upon issues to which the criminal justice system attaches value (Innes et al, 2008). It is for this reason that anti-social behaviour has become such a key focus for policing. The imperative is to better understand what things look and feel like for communities, and to ensure that the public’s problems become police priorities. This is clearly evident in how the work of Neighbourhood Policing teams has been explicitly steered towards publicly defined concerns – frequently the quality of life issues such as vandalism and youth disorder that have been traditionally de-valued by cop culture and police key performance indicators (Reiner, 2010). Allied to the above, a key trend has been to find ways to do policing ‘with’ rather than ‘to’ people. The introduction of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships was an early instance of this, as has been the increasing presence of private policing providers (Jones and Newburn, 1998). Fundamentally, this is about finding ways to involve those beyond police in the conduct of policing for solving problems. For the present government, this connects to ‘big society’ thinking (Downes and Morgan, 2012). The third component of this ‘deep’ politics of police reform is about rendering police services more accountable and transparent or ‘see through’. The introduction of PCCs is a dramatic expression of this, with powers to control budgets and the hiring and firing of Chiefs. But just as radically, it has been mooted that raw crime data should be made available to the public in order that it can be ‘mashed’ and ‘crowdsourced’ by citizen activists to produce new insights into local police performance.



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This quest for transparency, which is at the heart of the recent phone-hacking scandal, is itself a reflection of how the ‘information environment’ for policing has profoundly changed. In an age of information permeated by social media channels enabling constant peer-to-peer communication, it is becoming increasingly difficult for institutions to assume they can hide issues or decisions from the public detrimental to their reputation. Indeed, as illuminated by the treatment of Paul Stephenson and John Yates, in such an environment, the appearance of having something to hide, whatever the reality, can be enough to sow the seeds for a scandal. The revelations about the police role in the phone-hacking scandal damaged public confidence. Any such concerns were compounded in August 2011 when a contagion of public disorder occurred across a number of English towns and cities. With history as a guide, it had been anticipated for some time, that the severity of the contraction in the economy would induce pressure upon crime rates. The expectation was though that this would manifest in the form of ‘slow riots’, where escalating levels of acquisitive crime and expressive violence would incrementally shred the social fabric of a number of deprived inner-city neighbourhoods (Young 1999; Reiner, 2007b). Instead, there was a far more intense convulsion.

III.  Late Summer 2011: Riots On the 4 August 2011 police from Operation Trident in Tottenham London shot Mark Duggan, a young black man dead in the street. Initial information provided by police, reported by journalists across most national outlets suggested the victim had shot at police. This claim was later shown to be false. Shortly after his death, the victim’s family supported by a coalition of local political activists, began to mobilise for a demonstration to be held outside Tottenham police station. The precise sequence of events that followed is disputed, but as the Independent Police Complaints Commission took over the investigation, the flow of information was contradictory, confusing and very limited. The day after the shooting, protests began to move towards violence, and social media were alive with plans to congregate at certain flashpoints in different parts of London. Police sought to respond to this localised disorder, but failed to quell it In the days that followed, serious outbreaks of public disorder occurred across various parts of London, and spread to Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and many other towns and cities. In the wake of the violence, there was the typical amalgam of claim, counter-claim, speculation, recrimination and rumour that trails all crises. Two central questions have subsequently emerged: ‘How and why did the violence emerge out of a local protest?’; and, ‘why did the police appear to struggle so much to bring the outbreak under control?’ The answers offered to these two questions have largely followed established political perspectives. In respect of the former question, initial speculation focused

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upon a significant organising role for street gangs. As more information has emerged, such accounts have receded. It appears that, as shown by research into many previous outbreaks of public disorder, this one was the product of a coalition of motivations amongst those who became involved.2 Some were involved because it provided an opportunity to ‘get back at the police’ and the perceived discriminatory police practices locally. This was especially potent in Tottenham itself, where individual and collective memories of the 1986 Broadwater Farm disturbances triggered by the accidental death of Mrs Cherry Groce in a police search for her son, were still alive. And the new team at Tottenham police station had yet to establish good local links to counteract such deeply held impressions. Many other participants were convicted criminal opportunists, who went ‘shopping’ because they could. The Home Secretary and Prime Minister were quick to dismiss them all as simply greedy uncaring criminals. But the majority however, were probably in it ‘for kicks’. For alienated and marginalised young people, a riot affords an opportunity for excitement and action, and to showcase their bravado and daring to their peers. In a landmark study of violence within and across different settings and situations, the American sociologist Randall Collins (2008) found that contrary to fictional media depictions, rather than ‘cold’ and calculating, most violence is emotionally ‘hot’ and chaotic. Those engaging in such acts more often than not find themselves wrapped up in an emotional moment that later on they will find hard to account for. It seems highly probable this will be the case when we get to unpack what happened and why in the English riots. Collins’ key point is that competent and controlled violence is actually quite hard to do, even for professionals in the delivery of violence – such as police. Just as the accounting for how and why the violence occurred was organised along broadly party political lines, so too were the explanations of why the police struggled to ‘grip’ the initial occurrence. For example, Prime Minister David Cameron’s analysis of the initial police response in Tottenham was that it was ‘Too few, too slow, too timid’. Whilst this may describe what happened, it fails to account for why. For this, we must turn to a more in-depth examination of the policing of public order. To cope with the difficulty of managing mass public violence and the sorts of pressures and tensions highlighted by Collins, the police have, since the 1980s, increasingly sought to cast their public order role as a specialist policing discipline (Waddington, 1994). This is part and parcel of a broader shift in the internal social organisation of many police departments which has seen a shift away from generalist police officers, to an array of individuated and specialised policing disciplines (Roberts and Innes, 2009). The majority of public order policing work is undertaken by officers receiving specialised training and is nominally at least, regulated by specific guidance manuals. And while police routinely and successfully deal with hundreds of public order 2   See the ‘Reading the Riots’ analysis led by Tim Newburn at www.guardian.co.uk/uk/series/readingthe-riots.



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events each year, it appears that their entire conceptual and resource apparatus has been geared to deal with certain kinds of public order – largely predictable, mass public gatherings. In the particular instance of the events of August 2011, this conceptual limitation showed in two particular ways. First, in terms of the police’s situational awareness and the kinds of information and intelligence they were collecting to predict risks of mass disorder events. Second, ‘on the ground’ in terms of tactics (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, 2011). Addressing the latter issue first, within the policing world there have, in recent years, been conversations that the nature and dynamics of protest might change and adapt. But it is clear from what happened on the streets of London, this prediction had failed to be translated into new operational procedures. The kind of ‘asymmetric rioting’ that was the signature of what was seen across England was effectively foreshadowed in aspects of the student fees protests that occurred in 2010. Since the 2005 May Day riots, the increasingly controversial police ‘kettle’ had become the preferred operational tactic for dealing with protests where violence was occurring or threatened. In an attempt to circumvent it, groups of students seeking a confrontation with police had organised themselves into highly mobile ‘satellite cells’ around the main march. The idea was that having several of these satellites in motion at the same time could be used to ‘pull’ police resources around in different directions, thus inhibiting their overall ability to control the ground and crowd. Thus for both the student fees protest and the August 2011 disturbances, police effectively turned up with twentieth century public order tactics, for a twenty-first century riot. In diagnosing what went wrong it is important to separate out the initial errors from those that served to compound the situation. It is clear that the Metropolitan Police did not expect the political protest in Tottenham to move to violent disorder. Thus they were unable to mobilise sufficient officers and resources to constrain and limit the effects (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, 2011). For once the contagion had started to leak out to other areas, with multiple violent incursions by separate groups, the task to regain control became much harder. A number of commentators have criticised police for failing to stop groups of youths looting. But it is worth remembering that competent and controlled violence is difficult to accomplish and, in policing terms, requires having sufficient officers on the ground trained in public order in a particular area to suppress the opposition. Faced with a mobile and agile set of troublemakers, organised into satellite groups engaging in an asymmetric riot, the police could not gain purchase upon the problem. Moreover, the fallout from the criticism of aggressive policing of the 2009 G20 protests (see the 2009 report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary) further constrained officers from moving in heavily at an early stage. Perhaps more troubling though is what the events of summer 2011 reveal about the practical realities of police information work. The ability to predict the potential for disorder and thus to mobilise police resources to potential trouble spots depends on collecting information and analysing it to become intelligence. It is

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clear that the practical realities of acquiring, processing and understanding large volumes of intelligence depart somewhat from the conceptual models found in doctrinal statements associated with National Intelligence Model systems (see Cope, 2004; Innes, Fielding and Cope, 2005). There have been few empirical studies of police information and intelligence work, particularly in the last few years. This is pertinent because, as outlined above, there has been a significant increase in the amount of publicly available information in circulation. It is a shift that one might plausibly infer has altered the fundamental issues for police intelligence systems. The challenge is not just one of securing ‘rare’ information by utilising covert methods, but scanning across vast quantities of data to detect and select relevant bits. In an unpublished study that examined the operations of a police intelligence unit in London, it was found that about 60 per cent of all intelligence submissions were graded ‘non-actionable’. This categorisation covered a range of specific decisions, but fundamentally resulted in nothing being done with the information defined in this way. This approach was necessary given the vast amount of information that was flowing into the unit. The volume of material was effectively being managed by focusing only upon those items directly relevant to the organisation’s established crime priorities at that point in time. A variant of this approach seems to be replicated across different levels of the police service. There is an over-supply of potentially relevant information dealt with by focusing only upon a select number of strategic priorities. For example, in terms of knowing where the potential for mass public disorder exists, the national police intelligence requirement is set by the National Community Tensions Team (NCTT). All forces are required to submit regular updates to the NCTT about any locally incoming information or intelligence relating to a range of issues that, on the basis of past experience, are viewed as potential early warning indicators for inter- and intra-community tensions. Looking across the sorts of issues that the NCTT requests information on it is clear they are focused upon the potential for ethnic and racial tensions. Of course, the problem with this is, that when the triggers for conflict are not ethnically based, as happened in many English towns and cities during the summer of 2011, the police do not have a developed intelligence picture to draw upon. Risk-based principles, such as those that underpin how police establish their national and local intelligence requirements and analyse the resulting data, contend that past experience is a good guide for the identification of future vulnerabilities, risks and threats (Maguire, 2000; Innes, Fielding and Cope, 2005). However, situated in a social order that is changing rapidly and profoundly, such an approach inherently risks missing the emergence of unexpected spontaneous events. It has been suggested that the police information deficit could and possibly should have been addressed via more sophisticated analysis of social media data as many in the riots were using social media technologies such as Twitter, Blackberry Messenger, Facebook pages etc to coordinate their activities. The argument goes that police could have used this to better interdict events. However, this belies



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the complexities involved and misunderstands the nature of the informational problem. Police were attempting to monitor and analyse social media data. Their internal analyses reveal though that there were myriad problems in translating this from potentially interesting information into actionable intelligence (see Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, 2011). Most notable was the difficulty of distinguishing between things that would actually happen, and rumours and deliberate mis-directions. As events were unfolding police were confronted with multiple locations being named in social media data as potential locations for the rioters at any one time. They would dispatch teams to all these locations and find that actually there was only one location with a crowd gathered. But because they had dispersed their resources across the possible sites, they did not have sufficient force mustered in the key location to stop the disorder. It is possible to see how the specific issues associated with the riots connect to the broader themes introduced previously about changes to policing’s information environment. The police failures to intercept the initial problem were not just about the failure to apply sufficient force. It was also about a failure to understand what was going on. Not just because they lacked information, but because they were being overwhelmed by the amount of information in the operating environment and the need to distinguish quickly between the relevant and irrelevant.

IV.  Revolution, Evolution and Involution: A ‘New’ Politics of Policing The near co-occurrence of the riots in London and elsewhere, and the accusations of connivance by police in the activities of ‘rogue’ journalists, have served to dramatically demarcate some important concerns about the future of police and policing. These cases shine light on some of the pressing current challenges confronting the police, and some eternally recurring truths of the police function in society. They illuminate how as an institution that is the state’s main repository for implementing legitimate coercive force in the domestic setting, the police institution is both ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ (Manning, 1997). Police are charged with protecting and securing the key principles of liberal, democratic, capitalist societies. But in so doing, they regularly subvert them. The policing of the riots and police involvement in phone-hacking have keyed directly into the contemporary political debates about the necessity of reforming the police that were outlined previously. Since its election, the Coalition government has been pursuing a reform agenda that has significant implications for the future conduct of policing. In part, this has been driven by a need to reduce spending on public services in general. But it has also incorporated some distinctive

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ideological tenets. The national policing budget has been reduced, but at the same time significant changes to the accountability structures for policing have been set in train by (expensive) plans to introduce Police and Crime Commissioners, alongside several other measures. Space limitations mean it is not appropriate here to comment on the detail of the reforms being brought forward. However, there is a broad pattern suggesting that, in future, the politics of policing may be differently oriented. In effect, the Coalition’s strategy for police reform can be understood as invoking revolution, hoping for evolution and practising involution. Coherent with its agenda for a number of other public services, the Coalition approach to police reform has focused upon pushing responsibility ‘down and outwards’ from central government. This will, it posits, result in enhancements to the ‘democratic’, rather than ‘bureaucratic’ accountability of the police. At the level of rhetoric this is presented as instigating a ‘revolution’. If the past is any guide though, the reality of change ‘on the ground’ will be more akin to evolution. Grand theoretical visions tend to be circumscribed and moderated when they come into contact with the cold hard realities of intervening in real life situations with all their intricacies and nuances. This is particularly so in the case of policing that is often grappling with difficult and complex social problems with multi-faceted causes, where interventions have the potential for harmful unintended consequences – such as the riots of the 1980s, 1990s and 2011 all triggered by police actions. This inbuilt resistance is compounded by a general reluctance to change on the part of those engaged in tackling these problems. Imposed reforms tend to be perceived as unnecessary, distracting and difficult. Particularly at the level of practice, getting change to acquire traction takes time and is aided by precedent. It is for this reason that the history of policing tends to suggest that potentially revolutionary ideas typically require phased implementation, and depend upon a process of progressive implementation if they are to become fully formed. Pragmatically then, while Ministers in the Home Office may want to induce revolution and talk in such terms, more often than not they have to settle for evolution. This pragmatism can be applied to the current situation. The Coalition’s signature innovation is the replacement of police authorities with directly elected PCCs. On the surface this appears quite radical and has been presented as such. However, if one looks below the surface at the ‘deep politics’ of police reform, the move towards PCCs is part of the longer trend summarised by the three master-narratives of ‘seeing like a citizen’, ‘participative policing’ and ‘see through services’, that were described earlier on. There is though something new in the Coalition’s approach to public policy – a tendency to ‘involution’. The idea of involution is less well known than its conceptual cousins ‘revolution’ and ‘evolution’. It refers to a process of progressively increasing internal complexity and intricacy. Applied to the politics of police reform, it captures how the Coalition is disposed to map out its reforms in ‘sweeping broad brush strokes’, and only at a later point in time fill in the details of what



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is to happen in practice. This is precisely the approach enacted in the introduction of PCCs. But it applies equally well to its other keynote reforms in education and health. This tendency to involution is induced by several factors. The first is the fact of coalition itself. While the partners may have agreed the principles that they want to pursue under the auspices of The Coalition Agreement, there is more space for disagreements about the details of practical implementation. Second, is learning from the failure of the first Blair administration to progress their public service reforms at the necessary pace to embed them. As a consequence, key figures within the current government have proclaimed themselves less concerned with micro-managing the detail than just getting the basis of key reforms in place. The final factor is the drive for greater localism in public services. As a consequence, central government institutions cannot be seen to be determining the detail of policy implementation. Rather, they frame the issues, and wait for the details to be filled in by others at a more local level. It is certainly a different approach to police performance management from the ‘command and control’ centralising apparatus favoured by the Blair/Brown administrations. However, it is vulnerable in two ways. First, it involves carrying risk when scandals arise as they inevitably do in policing. The ‘remote control’ approach has the potential to imbue an air of a government ‘out of touch’ and ill-placed to ‘grip’ the presenting problem. This may be a relevant problem as the macro-economic situation persists and the associated likelihood of public disorder increases. The second vulnerability stems from the fact that, because the specifics of policy initiatives are not programmed in, there is potential for what is actually delivered on the ground by police not being what was intended by government. The local operating environment for a service may act to ‘bend’ service provision in ways not foreseen by the authors of reform, particularly given the well documented intransigence of police culture (Loftus, 2009; Chan, 1997).

V. Conclusion The title of this chapter deliberately invokes a jarring juxtaposition of an item that is an indexical expression of a past social order – the anvil – with the contemporary focus upon the role of information in configuring new orders of reality. It is a pairing that resonates with the current position of the police. The police, at an institutional level, is constituted of dispositions, structures of feeling and organisation, and modes of intervention rooted in a different era, but required to deal with the harms, risks, threats and vulnerabilities associated with rapidly developing institutional and interactional orders. In the most recent edition of Politics of the Police, Reiner (2010) concludes his analysis with a discussion of the seemingly ‘permanent crisis’ of policing. In this

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chapter we have sought to examine a particular moment of this enduring crisis that has occurred in Britain, together with its causes and consequences. Stepping back from the detail of the current scene though, what is intriguing is that, to a significant extent, such crises seem to be a necessary condition for the development of policing. As an intrinsically conservative social institution engaged in the preservation of social order, policing is not inherently disposed towards significant innovation. And yet it does so – but usually only when challenged by a moment of crisis. The particular crisis in policing that has been the focus of our attention herein is interesting because its manufacture was propelled by the independently acting forces of mediated communication and neo-liberal economics. As such, it is a moment that illuminates the three abiding concerns of Robert Reiner’s scholarship. For his work shows how the police function in society and the ways it interfaces with wider social, political, economic and cultural currents in society have been defined by the difficulties of balancing principles essentially in tension with each other. These tensions have been present since the inception of the ‘new’ police and continue to shape our history of the present.

References Bottoms, A (2012) ‘Developing socio-spatial criminology’ in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 5th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Brodeur, JP (2010) The Policing Web (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Castells, M (1996) The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, Blackwell). —— (1997) The Power of Identity (Oxford, Blackwell). Chan, J (1997) Changing Police Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Chibnall, S (1977) Law and Order News (London, Tavistock Press). Collins, R (2008) Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press). Cope, N (2004) ‘Intelligence-led policing or policing-led intelligence? Integrating volume crime analysis into policing’ British Journal of Criminology 44(2), 188–203. Downes, D and Morgan R (2012) ‘Overtaking on the left? The politics of law and order in the “Big Society’’’, in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 5th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Doyle, A (2003) Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in Front of the Television Camera (Toronto, University of Toronto Press). Emsley, C (1996) The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf). Ericson, R and Haggerty, K (1997) Policing the Risk Society (Oxford, Clarendon Press). Filkin, E (2012) The Ethical Issues Arising From the Relationship Between Police and Media (London, Metropolitan Police). Graef, R (1990) Talking Blues: Police in Their Own Words (London, Harper Collins). Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (2009) Adapting to Protest and Nurturing the British Model of Policing (London, HMIC).



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—— (2011) The Rules of Engagement: A Review of the August 2011 Disorders (London, HMIC). Hobbs, D (1988) Doing the Business (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Innes, M (1999) ‘The media as an investigative resource in murder enquiries’ The British Journal of Criminology 39(2), 268–86. —— (2003) Investigating Murder: Detective Work and the Police Response to Criminal Homicide (Oxford, Clarendon Press). —— (2004) ‘Signal crimes and signal disorders: notes on deviance as communicative action’ British Journal of Sociology 55(3), 335–55. —— (2006) ‘Policing uncertainty: countering terror through community intelligence and democratic policing’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 605, 222–41. Innes, M, Abbott, L, Lowe, T and Roberts, C (2008) ‘Seeing like a citizen: field experiments in community intelligence-led policing’ Police Practice and Research 10(2), 99–114. Innes, M, Fielding, N and Cope, N (2005) ‘The appliance of science: the theory and practice of crime intelligence analysis’ British Journal of Criminology 45(1), 39–57. Jones, T and Newburn, T (1998) Private Security and Public Policing (Oxford, Clarendon Press). Klockars, C (1980) ‘The Dirty Harry problem’ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 452(1), 33–47. Loftus, B (2009) Police Culture in a Changing World (Oxford, Clarendon Press). Lyon, D (1994) The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press). Maguire, M (2000) ‘Policing by risks and targets: some implications of intelligence-led crime control’ Policing and Society 9(2), 315–36. Manning, P (1997) Police Work, 2nd edn (Prospect Heights, Il., Waveland Press). Mark, R (1977) Policing a Perplexed Society (London, George Allen and Unwin). Mawby, R (2002) Policing Images (Cullompton, Willan). Meyrowitz, J (1985) No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (Oxford, Oxford University Press). O’Malley, P (2010) ‘Simulated justice: risk, money and telemetric policing’ British Journal of Criminology 50(5), 795–807. Punch, M (2009) ‘Rotten orchards: “pestilence”, police misconduct and system failure’ Policing and Society 13(2), 171–96. Reiner, R (1978) The Blue-Coated Worker: A Sociological Study of Police Unionism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). —— (1992) The Politics of the Police, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf ). —— (2000) The Politics of the Police, 3rd edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2007a) ‘Media made criminality’ in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2007b) ‘Political Economy, Crime and Criminal Justice’ in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press) 341–80. —— (2010) The Politics of the Police, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Reiner, R, Livingstone, S and Allen, J (2003) ‘From law and order to lynch mobs: crime news since the Second World War’ in P Mason (ed), Criminal Visions (Cullompton, Willan).

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Roberts, C and Innes, M (2009) ‘The “Death” of Dixon? Policing gun crime and the end of the generalist police constable in England and Wales’ Criminology and Criminal Justice 9(3), 337–57. Waddington, PAJ (1994) Liberty and Order: Policing Public Order in a Capital City (London, UCL Press). Williamson, T (ed) (2008) The Handbook of Knowledge Based Policing (Chichester, Wiley). Young, J (1999) The Exclusive Society (London, Sage).

9 Drama, the Police and the Sacred PETER K MANNING*

I. Introduction Clearly, Robert Reiner has contributed not only original ideas about policing – notions about the culture, the changes in the foci and political role of the police, and the careers of chief constables – but he has drawn together concisely an abundance of material in his widely admired book, The Politics of the Police (2010). In many respects, his work has been synthetic and integrative: a scholar whose works have shaped the field now called police studies. I recall a 1972 meeting in Bristol with Robert and Michael Banton, who I had met at Michigan State. Robert gave me a masterful overview of the contemporary nascent field of police studies. As a newcomer, struggling with developing a framework, a dramaturgical theory of policing, I was intrigued by Robert’s keen interest in the ‘blue coated worker’. When next we met, in some distant Northern holiday hotel, we exchanged notes about the ‘occupational culture’ and the changing role of the police in politics. Robert by this time was engaged in a broad-based overview of policing and I had done additional fieldwork in the West Midlands and Manchester. While I was trying to articulate the notion that the police were sacred, Robert had begun to interrogate the growing role of government and the Home Office in policing and the role(s) of the chief constable. Perhaps he pursued the ‘secular side’ of policing and I continued to explore the ‘sacred side’. This sacred/secular opposition is the basis for something of a modern dialectic. In what follows, I want to acknowledge the important role Robert has played in stimulating research, critical thinking in the public at large through his reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere, and his exploration of the secular side of policing as governments sought to shape, transform, refinance and make efficient British policing. Modern bureaucracies filter, shape and manage directly and indirectly much of post-modern life and of everyday experiences. Yet, much of what passes for theory of formal organisations can be described as a series of footnotes to Weber. Police organisations, prominent and increasingly powerful in Anglo-American societies, *  I am grateful to Nigel Fielding, Ian Loader, Jeff Martin and Jill Peay for incisive comments and suggestions on a previous draft.

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are major forces in public policy and play a major role in politics, governance and social control (Loader and Sparks, this volume). They are, as Reiner has shown, widely featured in the modern media. Unfortunately, there is little consensus on the questions that should drive a kind of exercise called ‘theorising policing’, and attempts are either too tight in their focus on class repression (Jefferson, 1990) or view the police as just another institution. Recent debates, framed by Reiner in the Politics of the Police (and Loader and Sparks in this volume) raise questions about the relative importance of police in the web of policing (including private security, regulatory bodies, the military and semi-legitimate extensions of the ‘police family’) that now is accepted as present in the Anglo-American world. Yet without an understanding of the role of the police in democratic processes and the criteria by which they might be judged we are engaging in a frivolous debate (Manning, 2010: ch 2). It is important to note that although Egon Bittner’s work (1972, 1990), his phenomenological framework, his definitions of police and policing, all elegantly based upon his detailed and informative fieldwork, are often cited, they are presented without an understanding of the radical character of his argument (Brodeur, 2007) i.e., his focus on the demand condition for policing in the post-modern world: something for which ‘calling the cops’ is seen as needed. His is an explanation of why the application of force is the core skill of officers, and an extension of the notion of law as governmental social control (Black, 2011). This is not a theory of the nature and function of the police organisation. Rather, it is a conceptuallygrounded rendering of the situated nature of police work and its rationale within the organisation. These observations taken together speak to the need to cast policing in a theoretical framework. Arguably, a theory of police in the Anglo-American world would take into account their anomalous and rather independent position in regard to the law and the courts. They are often protected and shielded. They maintain, like the military and other emergency services, a connection in public opinion with honour, respect and even patriotism. They hold volatile status in public opinion assessments of their trustworthiness – swinging up and down as a result of media events. The use of force as core skill in a world of decreasing violence sets them apart. They maintain a potential to act: their role as crisis managers compels a degree of inefficiency and leads them to be more concerned with responsiveness than with efficiency and effectiveness. They are old-fashioned as seen in their ambivalence about information technology, its use, development and application; the absence of modern rational administration, assessment and performance monitoring in the United States and their capacity to cling to a troubled mix of patrimonial and rationallegal bureaucracy internally and to wrap themselves in protective ritual and myth (confer Meyer and Rowan, 1977, DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Admittedly, while policing is being modified recently by ‘rationalisation’, a concern for connections between goals, objectives and resources; planning and policy; information technology; budgeting and ‘management’ they are still well-insulated, unlike the English National Health Service or secondary schools, from most of the neo-liberal attacks



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on public service organisations. There exists a recognisable and increasing impact of the media on the culture of policing as Reiner has so well shown us (Loader and Mulcahy, 2003).1 They are indeed an unusual actor, often in their own dramas, but they are also vulnerable to tragic alternations in their status and respectability. In an important fashion, the imagery and presentation of the police now share a common factor with other institutions: reflection and reflexivity. While all societies reflect upon themselves through collective symbolism, and set moral boundaries, modern societies reflect, in part through mass communications and information technology, and then reflect upon their reflections. This reflective capacity is a distinguishing feature of post-industrial societies. This reflection is not all of a piece, and it affects groups – class-based, ethnically-based and gender-based – differentially. The net effect seems striking, and to have been escalating in the last 20 years. Reflection is abundant: we see ourselves on screens now proliferating. Imagery is a product of the past and future meanings of our conduct and the responses of others. Memory is in part visual history, or replays of past scenes. Images, once produced and distributed, are reflected, and this process is profoundly social. The concept, ‘reflection’ and ‘reflexivity’, suggests a realisable substance or grounding; but modern reflection seems notoriously elusive, resembling more a revolving set of mirrors than a matter of perspectival representation. Perspective, or standpoint, rather than reality representation, is the way into understanding images. Social mirrors and representational processes, that which yields perspective, combine both subjective and objective factors. The police in their many varieties, public and private, are formally organised control agencies with the legitimate capacity for intervention in situations in which trust and mutual dependency have gone awry. Police act and work in order to ‘to keep breakdowns of the interactional order within certain limits’ (Goffman, 1983). One might add that the ordering of the middle classes and above is indirect except in disasters and that of the lower classes direct.2� Evidence for this assertion is drawn primarily from my fieldwork in the United States, Ireland and the UK. My primary focus in the following analysis is on the public dramatisations of public police organisations, their visible functions in Anglo-American society and the ways these activities establish the mandate of the organisation as both highly valued and associated with symbols of government. In effect, these questions are posed: why are they viewed as sacred? How have they sustained their status as a 1   Interposing visual media alters the relationship between an audience, an other, and a performer once bound by known, mutually shared expressive burdens (Manning, 2003). This has political implications. Local knowledge and transitory, or visual, knowledge compete. The nature, location and social identity of the significant and generalised other of Mead become moot. Arguably, as societies become more differentiated and complex, numbers, quantification and measurement arise as a surrogate for order, control and predictability (Porter, 1995). Media, often trivialising science and research, frames new social realities (definitions of the real and the significant) and other surrogates for understandingat-a-distance. Images flash on screens and these images then can create erstwhile social reality driven by that which is viewed (Edelman, 1988:7). Politics is shaped by these changes. Declining interest in politics, shrinking voter turnout and politicians’ increased use of the electronic media, indicates a public politics of the spectacle. 2   I am grateful to Nigel Fielding for this observation.

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quasi-sacred organisation in a secular world? How does this contribute to a theory of policing? The first task of the chapter is to outline in summary form the features of a sociological-dramaturgical framework, its strengths and limitations. An analysis of police as a dramaturgical actor with quasi-sacred features follows this outline.

II.  A Dramaturgical Analytical Perspective Here, it is necessary to outline a definition, the origins of dramaturgy; its ‘fit’ with the nature of modern society, its assumptions and themes. As a metaphoric approach, seeing one thing in terms of another, it has limits. Let us begin with a definition. A dictionary definition of dramaturgy is ‘The art of theatre, especially the writing of plays’ (Houghton-Mifflin, 2000). Roget’s Thesaurus lists it under drama (599.2), and supplies the synonyms of theatrics, histrionics, acting, play-acting, melodramatics, stagecraft, mise en scene and stage setting. This definition turns attention to the literal process of creating for others a scripted text in advance for its effects. It applies literally to texts, poems, plays and musical performances and other systematic, text-based enterprises. Dramaturgy points to a family of words associated with the idea of identifying, analysing, and being sensitive to selective performance to emphasise features of symbolic action whether textual, prose or poetry, or performances. My focus here is in the sociological pertinence of dramaturgy as applied to social action.3� There is a ‘fit’ between the contours of post-modern life and the dramaturgical perspective (Manning, 1976; Vester, 1989). As it is currently practised, dramaturgy is best seen as a perspective, or way of seeing, using a theatrical metaphor to explore how the communication of messages to an audience conveys information and creates impressions that shape social interaction. Drama, it might be said, in various forms, along with business, war and sport, is the dominant metaphor of our time, and reflects and refracts concerns for appearances, power, negotiation, merger and acquisition in the political and business arena. It both captures and reflects life in contemporary Anglo-American societies. It is likely that the power and appeal of dramaturgy rests in its applicability to the increasing number of situations in complex, differentiated societies in which strangers must negotiate, relating in the absence of shared values, beliefs, kin or ethnic ties. In these societies, as an ideal type, a circulation of symbols swirls and confounds easy status claims and validation (Goffman, 1951). The broad contours of modern interactions induce superficial relations adopted to people from heterogeneous and unknown backgrounds based on limited scope of knowledge and little experience with the particular others 3   The limits of dramaturgy and related perspectives have been debated, sometimes quite well, and it is important to see where the blurred edges lie (Brisett, Bensman, Edgley and Lillienfeld, 1990; Jacobsen, 2010).



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encountered. While it is an empirical question, the degree to which biography, kin and locality are known to be shared appears to be decreasing. Style, or how one performs, and substance or social values and interests are disconnected in art, architecture and social relations because deep knowledge is unavailable and performance and appearances are the most useful and salient clues to meaning. All performance representations are also re-representations, and are paradoxical, partial, misleading and open to interpretation and response. Dramaturgy, like all social theory, is based on assumptions. It neither assumes that we know much more than what we see, nor assumes that we understand what lies behind the eyes of actors. The meaning of the symbol comes as result of the response to an action. Thus, a means to grasp the enduring character of order must begin with assumptions or quasi-axioms about the connections between symbols and society. In this sense, dramaturgy is a second order abstraction that does not base its findings on the perspective of the individual actor, but rather of an actor (taking on relevance as applied by analogy to groups, organisations and societies) in performance.4� It explicates both dramas of control (encounters), featuring apologies, repairs and remedies of interactional slips as well as control dramas in which large entities, corporations, agencies and even states negotiate. The ideas shaping this perspective in brief are the following. The interaction between actors, acts and performance before an audience is the sine qua non of sociological analysis. It implies an audience to which such performances are directed, an audience that must frame messages, judge the credibility of the performance (its equivocality), provide feedback and determine its communicative ‘core’. The concern of a sociological dramaturgy is symbolic action, or simply put, actions that represent something to somebody in a context. Social interaction is a communicative dance usually based on trust and reciprocity. It is the representation process, symbols and their interpretation – what is represented – that is critical. Symbols provide a context for review of past and imagined future action. The function of gestures, postures, words and other ritualised actions is to mark and sustain order. Patterns of communication selectively sustain definitions of situations and make it possible for actors to carry off performances. Unanticipated consequences, positive and negative, also accompany interactions. In this way, the symbolisation spiral arising in interactions, one symbol pointing to another and yet another, and so on and so on, without resolution, is noted but constrained by limits of time, energy, patience and trust.5� As such, it emphasises the importance of contingencies or unanticipated outcomes, managed performance of situated interactions, now richly mixed with images and memories of such performances. This mutuality and duality constitutes the ‘promissory, evidential character’ (Goffman, 1983: 3) of social life. Mutual obligations require sustaining the performance – if not, the person at risk. There are costs as well, for not attending to these obligations is dreadful: 4   I am employing the terms ‘actor’ and ‘self ’ as does Garfinkel – they are social objects constituted over the course of an interaction (Rawls, 2006: 107–17). 5   This is a term used by Pierce and Morris to create a system of elements producing action: actor symbol and interpretant (Morris, 1938).

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‘Not to do so, one could hardly get on with the business at hand; one could hardly have any business at hand’ (1983: 6). Turning now to the police in this framework, we can begin with the division of labour and rehearse the argument of this chapter. The division of labour produces a variety of specialists practising the arts of the drama of work, seeking both a licence, or approval to work and a mandate (Hughes, 1958) or right to define the proper attitude toward the work. Modern occupational groups are largely self-regulating, and as a result the police become more like referees than final judges. All occupations are engaged in some forms of realisation, mystification, and idealisation of their work (Goffman, 1959: 17–70), but the police, like few other trades, are: wonderfully adapted, from the point of view of communication, as means of vividly conveying the qualities ad attributes claimed by the performer. The roles of prizefighter, surgeons, violinists and police men are cases in point. These activities allow for so much dramatic self-expression that exemplary practitioners –whether real or functionalbecome famous and are given a special place in the commercially organized fantasies of the nation (Goffman, 1959: 31).

The police as actors act in situated encounters to control and monitor the response of others to produce compliance. They aim by manner, front (their props and costumes) and rhetoric to perform in a way that induces compliance. Dramaturgy implies control because performances must be validated (positively or negatively sanctioned) if they are to be sustained, and the obligation to interact and in some sense share social life, remains a constant, but the police carry an authority that must be performed. They assess trustworthiness and in turn are to be trusted. They possess routines, or sets of performances that are practised, mannered and systematic eg think of traffic stop, serving a warrant, making an arrest, testifying in court, carrying out an investigation. They are expected to deal with contingencies, things that might get worse if they progress (Bittner), they monitor and patrol order. This is the interactional side of patrol work. But the police organisation is also an actor in the role drama of work and the interactions that sustain it. A dramaturgical perspective asks how the social environment can be so scanned and constituted that governmental social control, the face of which is the police, is understood as real, constraining, and lasting in spite of repeated evidence of its frailty. The police, as symbolised, play a powerful role (Loader, 1997) notwithstanding their direct, material and objective effects. In this sense they are the recipients of the sentiment and emotion attached to the post-modern state as an odd combination of law, morality and expediency. If the focus of policing is maintaining through a working consensus the illusion of order, they must be seen as focused in their work and trusted. Three concepts, working consensus, contingency and trust, are an essential part of an organisationaldramaturgical analysis. If through negotiation, even in the messy world of the politics of nation states, a ‘working consensus’ (Goffman, 1959: 10) emerges, and attributions of motives and intentions of others are ‘read’ as clues to response and the validity of the impression, impressions are validated. Such modestly shared



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worlds, often laminated with multiple meanings, are produced and reproduced by acting out roles, protecting and displaying various organisational selves, and sustaining, mutually useful, fictions. Interaction is rarely explicitly rule-guided, but has a poetic, momentary, aesthetic quality. This working consensus in postindustrial society bows in the direction of structures, norms, rules, values and sentiments, but these remain often opaque, and there is no obvious agreement (Douglas, 1971; Goffman, 1983: 5). Social differentiation and integration arise through concrete interactions leading to a division of labour while the collective consciousness is strengthened by symbolic representations that both reflect and express society indirectly (Durkheim, [1915] 1961). It is the source and manipulation of these organisational images that now confounds easy analysis. Concrete, embodied and visible presence is the touchstone of pre-literate and pre-industrial societies and activates self-control (Turner, 1967; Turner and Schechner,1988; Nadel, 1953), even as representations of the collective conscience are salient. Social reality in less differentiated societies is grounded in a fundamental epistemological basis – personal experience and symbols carry much of the burden of represented mutuality. Modern society is a reflective society in which people live in part in the media, through the internet, Facebook and the world of virtual play, and in part in a contingent world of problematic contours. Direct face-to face communication shrinks in proportion to other mediated forms of communication. Both contingency and trust are salient in such a world. Trust plays an important role in policing. It is central to police functions and is central to their occupational culture. The police must assess others’ trustworthiness, and the trust-capacity of others in brief encounters, yet they are distrustful, cynical and watchful. Trust is a subtle matter in policing since most interactions undertaken are with strangers with no history with the officer, the officer seeks control and restricted outcomes, yet must do this quickly. In this sense, policing is an exercise in assessing trust. Trust-assessment requires a degree of shrewdness in judging people – their affect, speech, non-linguistic cues such as postures and gestures, biographies and past histories, and their present performances. Shrewdness and distrust, a degree of suspicion, become interwoven in practice, so perhaps ‘suspicion’ is a police posture, an orientation to the world. While police are not trusting people, they must assess trust, deal with interactions or cope with requests for help, fend off aggressive and rude intrusions, cultivate compliance with requests and maintain civility. It is this trust-testing function that is the basis for the higher standards of constraint that are placed on police patrol officers.

III.  The Functions of the Anglo-American Police The police are linked, even in modern societies, with the sacred, the powerful, mysterious, distant and awesome as Durkheim (1961: 243) argued, yet it is unclear

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what ‘sacred’ in regard to the police indicates and why it should be so. How do their functions contribute to this attribution? It is not ‘authority’ in the Weberian sense. ‘Beliefs in authority are not abstractions, but dramatic rules of conduct’ (Duncan, 1968: 204). To paraphrase Duncan, basic functions in society, including the police, must be dramatised and enacted if they are to work to sustain order. In many ways, the symbolisation of governmental power is more important than the actual behaviour of government agencies and their agents (Edelman, 1985, 1988). This fact is in part due to the wide range of views and values in a complex society, the conflict between public and private morality, and the contested nature of ‘culture’ in the past 30 years in America. The sacred is that which a society honours with visible representations (totems, images, icons, emblems) that produce sentiments and collective celebrations. That which is sacred stands in contrast to the secular or profane. Active representation, the display of these symbols of order, is connected with the notion of authority in general because they produce social distance, awe and compliance. The police certainly sustain a personal front, ‘. . .the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unintentionally employed by the individual during his performance’ (Goffman, 1959: 22) this front (22–24) includes the settings or ‘stage props’ that the actor employs. In this case, the police must act in many varied settings they do not control with the exception of the vehicle and the station and the personal front, appearance, indexes of social status, and manner, indexes or role signs that sustain their role. Clearly the uniform communicates both, and presents a clear front. Their routines are played sufficiently frequently to produce roles (Goffman, 1959: 16) and sustain teamwork. The question, as stated above is: how do the police as an organisational actor perform in such a way that sustains their sacred status? It is clear that they stand apart, and there is obviously a ‘ritual value’ in their performances that can be observed in the effects that they have rather than in correspondence to the expected, or formulaic versions of a ritual (Radcliffe-Brown, p 186 cited in Duncan, 1968). All communication has ritualised and formulaic aspects. In effect, as Goffman, in his final brilliant paper (1983: 10) argues, it is very difficult to show that anything macroscopically significant results from ceremony in contemporary society and he goes on to state flatly that ‘sentiments about structural ties serve more to carry a celebrative occasion-than such affairs serve to strengthen what they draw from’. Yet, in the moment, ‘in so far as the expressive bias of performances comes to be accepted as reality, then at that which is accepted at the moment as reality will have some characteristics of a celebration’ (1959: 35). In other words, the occasion is a moment of celebration of sentiments rather more than the matters the symbols refer to. A collective representation is real, external, constraining and relatively durable, even in a media-saturated era. How is the imagery of policing and associated sentiments dramatised and sustained? Through what functions? Consider two kinds of functions: petite functions, those which are visible, role-based, concretely recognisable and common experiences of the public, and mini-dramas that connote iconically structural issues. Petite functions denote policing and its functions, while the mini-dramas in which they



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participate are seen as representative of broader occupational and state-sourced authority. These last kinds of scenes and related functions have extensive connotative powers that flow away from the particular scene. While these are interlaced in social reality, the claims and connections made in the second set of functions suggest more than immediate here-and-now authority. First, consider the petite functions.

A.  The Visible: Petite Police Functions The police display themselves visibly, routinely and predictably while acting out their roles. The most visible of all police functions, their mundane core tasks, are realised through and by their strategies of random patrol, answering calls for service and investigating crime. These are ways of penetrating everyday life, even private spaces, and entail traffic coordination stops, tickets, fines, searches, crackdowns, roadblocks) moving presence and stopping and detaining people, keeping them in jail, escorting them to court, serving warrants and producing crime in the form of proactive investigations eg, in terrorism and anti-terrorism, drugs and cybercrime. The idea of a very visible presence arose from the concern of Peel and the English people with secret policing, and the dramatising of accessible visible officers was reinforced by the use of uniforms, large and elongated helmets and by hiring large men. These features of early policing were shaped in part by a belief in the Benthamite view of deterrence. It could be argued, then that the visible connotes and represents the stability in relationships and ritualises such communication. The police receive, act upon and process facts, then transform them by putting them in context. They emit these facts-in-context as information. The police challenge is managing information both externally and internally. This involves several interrelated functions. While the police control vast amounts of information, they are nevertheless dependent upon the public for information about crime and disorder. At the most general level, they are in receipt of calls and requests for service: they receive, encode and decode ‘demand’ and turn facts into information (facts in an organisational context) in order to render ‘service’ (Manning, 1988). These are called in management language ‘calls for service’, but they are a very odd ensemble tied together primarily as ‘calling the cops’ as Bittner has shown us. This process, while it fact it is nuanced, involves elaborate and powerful screening and differential response (defined informally and done by officers on the ground and not by policy), is maintained as ‘you call, we haul’, and defined as a democratic, equally available and dispensed public service.6 The police must manage, segregate and perform in different dramaturgical fashion before different audiences. This is true at the officer and organisational level. This means concealing and or 6   In fact it is democratic only as measured by the police in respect to response time. These tend to be similar across equally distant points in a district. The screening, avoidance of call, the refusal to come at all or accept a call, the quality of service provided and the nature of the content of the interactions vary largely in terms of the class and level of disadvantage of the neighbourhood.

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downplaying and de-emphasising the untoward, the violent, messy, dirty, unsanitary and blameworthy actions they undertake. They may lie or tell half-truths in the interest of secrecy to cover investigations or their failures. They must suppress or conceal the untoward within the organisation and project a unity of purpose, loyalty and dogged determinism in order to carry out their duties as they define them. Their actions of marking, excluding, jailing, arresting and containing threats maintains the illusion of moral certainty and consensus in a post-modern society that lacks a firm core of known and accepted moral values eg, the dissensus concerning marriage, drug use, acceptable sex partners, gambling. Internally, as Bittner notes, there is more information in the heads and notes of police officers than can be found in their files. They guard and protect information as it is property. There are abundant files, in several forms, in several places within the organisation and they are not connected systematically (Manning, 2010). Thus a dilemma arises; the police have vast amounts of information from surveillance, tracking, computer surveillance/searches, and now from warrantless searches under the Patriot Act, but must present themselves as guardians of civil liberties and procedures associated with this. The police actively visibly mobilise themselves in active social control in a variety of places, times and circumstances consistent with the current political notions of ‘what needs doing’. This is consistent with Lemert’s notion (1972) of active social control, indicating the changing targets, problems, persons or places foci of control agents and agencies. These are shaped somewhat by the current concerns of the media, the various publics served and politicians. The police undertake and manage contingencies. They have a broad horizon and elastic capacity to exercise targeting, monitoring and intervention. Policing in action is something of an active, complex multi-game or meta-game of control, or risk distribution, rather than a rigid, rulebound, enforcement practice. The unfolding of policing interventions is guided, but not guided by formal explicit, enforcement and institutional linkages that are consistent and predictable. Applying the game metaphor to police actions and explicating their role in dramas of control in which honour and face are involved conceives of the strategic dimensions of social control as ‘game-like’. Actors’ choices, albeit shaped and controlled by external constraints, are a part of the emerging regulation of the interaction order. The consequences of actions are unknowable in any precise sense; the responses of others, especially when will is being imposed on them, varies. The tactical dimension of policing always looms large as it represents the social dynamics by which honour and shame are distributed within and across groups. In this way, the police dramatically use selective amplification to underscore the reality of crimes and disorderly behaviour. They thus re-affirm rankings in the multiple moral hierarchies of an industrialised society. The notion of order, its constitutive parts and meanings, remains a context-dependent word left in the hands of the powerful to define, and is often applied notionally after the fact to interactions of such complexity and nuance that they shall never be fully understood. The presentational strategies and tactics of the police pattern the nature and quality of the visible distribution of their dramaturgical resources. These are seen at



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the interactional level by patrol officers and investigators. These are sources of display and affirmation of the presence of the police in everyday life. The police organise and allocate resources in line with tacit means ‘routine patrol’ (concentrating on disadvantaged neighbourhoods), explicit means (arrests to be made in domestic violence disputes) and rhetorical strategies (‘we practice community policing in this community’). By the distribution of order-keeping resources, including applying sanctions such as arrest, stops, tickets and cautions, they create differential risks to population groups. What is called racial profiling is a gloss on such complicated processing of sanctioning. Tactics, the more explicit and proximal means to act in line with strategies, are shorter term, changing, and easily altered activities. In community policing, many tactics, foot patrol, attending neighbourhood meetings and opening mini-stations, are employed. In discussing tactics, I have reference primarily to the uniformed personnel and how many, where and how they are positioned. Concretely, ‘tactics’ refers to where and how often officers patrol; whether they ride bicycles, walk, ride horses or motorcycles and how many officers are actually patrolling during a given shift.7� Tactics are shaped by tradition and to a lesser degree by departmental policies. These shape the pattern of patrol work eg, four 10-hour days and then time off or five 8-hour days, each with possible overtime, ‘details’ (work in uniform paid from private sources) and second and third jobs eg, acting as uniformed security, or ‘bouncers’. There is also the matter of the materiel possessed-weapons, other technology, vehicles and the deployment of special units and their missions, eg SWAT teams and their armament. Any control strategy is profoundly moral because their operation reflects social resources, the norms and values available and applicable to a situation, as well as the intention of the participants to maintain the appearance of moral conformity. Specialised units when in action connote security and danger much more than routine patrol activities, because of their abundant, powerful and diverse weaponry and support (helicopters, boats, armoured trucks and vans), their potential for rapid and destructive violence, and unpredictable appearance.

B.  Mini-dramas: Police as Representatives of State Authority Police collectively represent the appearance of civil society or governance in everyday life. They display powerful and recognisable symbols on public celebrations occasions. In America, the police appear in their finery on ceremonial occasions such as parades, funerals, weddings (of their own), wakes and holiday celebrations such as Veterans’ Day, the Fourth of July, St. Patrick’s Day and local commemorations of 7   By virtue of their association with police, beasts, horses, dogs, and robots entering and returning images via visual feeds from dark and dangerous places, are sacred. They are given human names, anthropomorphised, cared for and loved in sickness and in health, in poverty and wealth, and are given awards for bravery and service, proper retirements and retirement parties and often grand funerals. Robots are now included as quasi-sacred social objects as they are extensions of police, as are their weapons, vehicles and other personal equipment. They are given names and are in effect miniature officers.

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cities and states. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have a special touring road show called ‘The Musical Ride’ in which scarlet-tunic-wearing, Stetson-hatted horsemen enact a colourful equestrian ballet. In these events, their ceremonial role coincides with their setting, scene and action: a powerful combination. These events, often combining uniformed marching, weapons, displays of coordinated movement such as weaving motorcycles, prancing horses, colourful banners, flags, bands and loud martial music, also serve to display uniformity of action, purpose and intention.8 They call out memories of past performances in the audience and among the performers. Police as performers display their mutual identification and loyalty to the organisation, to each other and the local polity. They elevate their own status while excluding others from the active side of the performance. Funerals honouring departed officers, notably those dying in the line of duty, echo the concern of society at its loss, the fragility of life and of distant enemies, and the recoating of moral bonds (see Manning, 1997: 19–24). The police in modern democracies symbolise governmental presence by attending, monitoring and protecting valued distinct functions of governing itself: elections, courts, inaugurations, and at massive events that celebrate the society itself such as professional and collegiate football, basketball and baseball games. They represent order and its capacity. They provide material for oppositional symbolism, for tensions and contradictions that can be seized upon by movements opposing the status quo. In elections and courts, the symbolisation is that of stating ready to protect the ministrations of government and guard against prevention of voting, impersonation, or voting fraud, intimidation of voters, and at least implicitly to protect the ballots and their counting. The courts are the premier setting for the display of the congruence of law, morality and governmental authority, and the guardians of order and the setting as they protect the court personnel, the prisoners, public and the juries. They clear the way for celebrities and the important; create liminal passage ways to and from the field of play and formal settings, and mark the boundaries of what is considered play, playful and serious. Through these appearances, the social setting, scene, the action or the performance are made congruent (Burke, 1962). The police as a collectivity define and redefine in action the mandate and also attempt to expand it. This mandate or right to define the proper attitude toward the work must be projected, sustained, expanded and elaborated. It must be renewed constantly as audiences, significant symbols, and that which the police are expected to manage, change. This can be distinguished from the link to governance and governmental social control because private police claim and also receive validation of their authority. The police must evolve and manage rhetorical presentational strategies which conflate the law, morality and policing so that they are seen as foundational to what the police do. This involves several conjoint functions. It requires the use of consistent, formulaic mantras concerning that which the police 8   Nigel Fielding has pointed out these displays are more common in North America than in the UK and also remarks that even the traditional ‘passing out’ ceremony has been abandoned in English police training schools.



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take responsibility for: collecting, presenting and interpreting official statistics on reported crime; issuing of bulletins, news releases, videos and holding press conferences to frame, define and make recognisable that which is disruptive or a crisis – natural, man-made or political (Mawby, 2002); proactively defining the nature of an impending crisis if possible eg hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes; and providing feedback to various audiences eg victims, the media, politicians and citizens with complaints. Absence of comment or ‘no comment’ maintains the necessary secrecy of the organisation given its investigations, matters under consideration at court and obligations to the body politic. In this sense, the police can never be made fully accountable or transparent. Rituals and public events re-affirm some aspects of order and suppress counter-balancing ideas and values. The lines of action displayed in a gathering contain rituals as ‘guides to perception’, while the vulnerabilities of participants are sustained through exchanges of deference and demeanour. Organisational analysis of this sort requires linking conduct, or behaviour oriented to the others’ judgments, subjective collective representations (of organisational action) that represent selves as subjects and objects, and organisations as constraint. Symbolisations of organisational action, because of limitations upon time, resources and memory, must be severely edited versions of reality. They are dramaturgically shaped or context-specific communications. Their value lies in their ambiguity and simplicity. Policing is a major player in dramas closely linked to both high and low politics in a locality and in a larger society. High politics in the police context deals with efforts to define the nature social order generally and relevant political beliefs and actions rather than the incidence and prevalence or disorder or illegality. Low politics, on the other hand, deals with individuals and proximal local issues of crime (Brodeur, 1983, 2000, 2007). Within a police department, high (questions of power, authority and careers) and low politics (everyday gossip) also operate and often divide the lower participants from the top command. ‘Politics’, the distribution of goods and services, who gets what, when and how, is shaped by socio-economic and structural changes and individual experience and are now mediated or processed, edited and shown by the mass media. The resultant dramas of control are situated as well as macro-sociological, and the police act in both the little (relatively private and backstage) and big theatres (public scenes, some with massive audiences) of control. In large part, this activity of dramatising risk and threat evolves as police stipulate their target groups (with ex post facto labels); play to their audiences; control information, both concealing and revealing it; and deploy rhetorics of control that sharpen their image and broaden the meanings of their mandate. Police act as players in BIG theatre and little theatre. If one thinks of local politics as little theatre, then events that are amplified and virally explode across the world are big theatre. Increasingly, it now seems, little theatres of framing interpersonal conduct, punctuated with failures, apologies, redemption and little conferrals of grace, were nested in institutional protections. Occupational mandates, including the discretion of the journalists, sustained a polite distance from private conduct. While the police in practice rarely respect the common law restrictions on restricted

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access to private spaces and private ‘personal information’, they are loath to have their practices, on street or in the jail, revealed. The backstage protects many things, not least of which is police probity and reputation (Holdaway, 1983; Young, 1991). Local dramas resonate only regionally. Less explosive little dramas of control – arrests, traffic stops, community meetings, trials, hearings, bookings and interrogations for example, also occasionally become public matters. Core dramas arouse sensibilities, fears and sentiments, direct attention of both the participants and audiences to selective sanctioning by control agents, and convey encoded (complex and multi-faceted) messages to mass audiences. While most core dramas9� engage individuals interacting together or in ‘embodied co-presence’, many dramas are products of media transformations of natural events, some of which are created by the media and framed for the audience in the absence of any direct lived experience. Mass media increasingly shape the meanings of social action. The primary or first ground of experience is re-grounded by the media in what might be called ‘mediated and transformed reality’ or simply, ‘media unreality’ (Mitroff and Bennis, 1993). Much of the media dwells on reflections on their own creations – celebrities, sports figures, sources of gossip and scandal, and its own mini-celebrities, ‘anchors’ and other talking heads such as ex-athletes passing as sports commentators and announcers. The police, by habit and practice, reproduce notions and images of social control characteristic of the police field, a field occupied by many policing organisations – federal, state, local, as well as private security and at times the military, strategically and tactically. Because actions of agents of formal control, those vested with governmental authority, are selective, invidious, differentially visible and consequential, they are chief players in, and often proactive initiators of, communicative dramas, dramas in which social control features. The police operate in an environment that includes differentially organised sources of communication, different audiences they serve, and they claim the ability to control and modify this environment. The consequences of policing are real and real in their imagined effects, but the social worlds in which these experiences reside differ. The police use mystification or play on their secrecy and unknown back stage planning and actions; they idealise their own role in social order and in containing and managing crime, and they realise their potential in crises. In this way, their ‘natural dramatic potential’ is enacted. Police systematically produce their own versions of dramas of control. These dramas arise as a result of scenes in which social norms are re-affirmed, either elevating or depressing their significance. Through dramas of control, vertical and horizontal hierarchies such as those of gender, class and ethnicity, whether the scenes entail reward or punishment, is affirmed. Other countervailing forces exist, but dramas of control stabilise society in the face of factual anomalies – if Americans are essentially good, innocent and blessed by God, why do religious fanatics attack us? God bless America, united we stand. We now envision and perhaps remember such scenes, or are reminded of them via icons, filmed vignettes, or other aides memoire. 9   I consider the core dramas of the police those which amplify, reduce or at least maintain the mystification of the role essential to sustaining compliance.



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Flags, a portmanteau sign of vast and ambiguous meaning, appeared everywhere following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Control work is also accomplished through the rational strategic interaction that characterises organisations such as the police, the rituals of control and etiquette of public intercourse, and the grand spectacles by which the big theatres of control, those with national and international scope, arise. This connection, the connection between imagery and action, is partially drawn out through memory and individual experience, and partially through external and constraining collective representations of which the police are one. They represent themselves and are represented for us. Socio-visual space is a relatively new and ominous political arena for the police. They have always preferred to operate backstage if possible, to conceal information and selectively reveal it to their advantage. Police produce punctuated and sharp meanings for vague, unclear, distant yet worrying events. The police and policing is a signal (signs that are conventionally understood as denotative such as a siren indicating police cars or ambulances in action) as and symbol (arbitrary connections made between and among signs and between expression and content to form a sign). Policing – as a sign and symbol producer – is at least in part a representation to which we look to for the meaning of events. It is thus a transducer or translating device, a means to both amplify and/ or reduce our sense of the fearful, the safe, the orderly, the risky and the attractive. It defines or frames the relationships among and between the matters that constitute the immediate ‘business at hand’, as Goffman terms it and the mass-produced media images and collective representations that guide our reflections. Reflections, in turn create the possibility of change, disruption, accommodations and new forms of rationality, or rationalities. Police shape and produce a special kind of controlling communication, even in democratic societies, that serves to mark moral boundaries. Operating as governmental social control and loosely coupled to the economy, law and local government, the police carry out moral, instrumental and ritualistic functions. These functions are situated in contexts that vary in their dramaturgical and communicational potential. Organisational communication is performative, the selective display of symbols, some of which are suppressed and concealed, others elevated and amplified in importance, often conventionalised, stylised and formulaic, conveying messages to audiences. What is taken to be true about the work of control – keeping the peace, marking the thin blue line, controlling crime, ‘doing the job’ – are clustered symbols that serve internally as shorthand codes for loyalty amongst officers. They are used externally as a gloss to identify for trustworthy and non-trustworthy citizens. This marking is sometimes quite concrete: arrests, beatings, tickets, arrest records, warrants served and stops, not to mention systematic, legitimate and illegitimate violence directed primarily to the young, people of colour, and other marginal populations. Police attention in the form of repeated stops, searches and questioning is a kind of status degradation ceremony (Garfinkel, 1956). Police name, blame and publically constrain. They also reward high status groups by their inattention and collusion. Like the interactional situation which

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links person, role and audience in an unfolding and emergent process, all formal, third-party interventions possess form and content and are grounded in communication. The naming and identification function of social control, categorisation and classification of the social world, and labelling people, is undertaken in the name of the state, and police authority reveals differentially their interests and brings to attention behaviours worthy of merit, condemnation, celebration and stigmatisation. The police undertake and manage other people’s contingencies as well as their own, attempting to negotiate control. The police shape the uncertainty they manage, but they also reduce it by producing and then marking consequential outcomes – police officers make arrests, stops, lay charges, serve warrants, collect money and seizures and intervene to settle disputes. Sanctioning marks social norms and borders. These interventions are both instrumental and expressive, and because they are consequential, they sustain the mystical illusion of control, or the sense that intervention in a contingent situation is forthcoming or might unfold. Because the police actively and selectively produce messages seen as dramatic, and can sustain their definitions of the situation up to and including using fatal force, they have power to mark and define contingencies. On the other hand, class, ethnic and other social interests, stabilise behaviour, and insulate people from attending to rapid changes and being mobilised. Status anxieties, based in lifestyle preferences such as religiosity (the fundamentalist right versus Unitarianism), patterns of consumption (SUV’s versus small economical cars) and single issues (abortion, gay rights, social security) resonate culturally and are easily tied up in contests over morality, righteousness and matters of status anxiety. In other words, small matters of everyday life take on larger political significance when they are linked to ideologies, or broader canopies of belief. As much as the imagery is quaint, issues of order rise and fall, sin, salvation, redemption and the afterlife remain as subtexts even in a secularised, commodified and complexly configured society (Burke, 1962, 1965; Gusfield, 1989). The police play on the fear of crime and their accessibility, raising status anxieties and in their eyes at least, increasing sources and strength of public support. Police have acquired and sometimes use massive means of technological surveillance as well as an infrastructure of electronic communication, data storage and analysis. The information technology (IT) of police has potential, a source of their power and authority and as a source of failures and scandals. The structure and function of the police in Anglo-American societies has little changed in 173 plus years, but there is sufficient evidence that information technologies and mobility capacities of the police have vastly improved (Manning, 2010). While most of the IT used has been means-oriented, and decreases the time needed to process incidents, such as computer-assisted dispatch, some has been transformative (such as scientific laboratories and evidence-processing) and increasingly is analytic, such as crime analysis and crime prevention strategies. The latter have the potential to anticipate the incidence and prevalence of crime rather than merely reacting to it. The police mark populations. Policing selectively marks that which is notable, sustains it by repeatedly marking the same types of behaviours, and makes the



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marked visible to others. They also re-mark on the sustainability of such conventions. The institution provides the language within which the risk or contingency is described. The clientele, customers, suspects or targets are educated to format their questions and respond, verbally and bodily to commands, requests and suggestions. The interaction between audience and controllers is in many respects a ritualised expression of compliance, dislike, resentment and other generalised sentiments. Through and by the police, society disvalues, scorns and avoids. The police do not miss these messages, yet they are fundamentally ambiguous in that interpretation is always required to make sense of events. Performances, images and traces (the results of policing that are left on the bodies, selves and surfaces of communities) are a selectively orchestrated drama in which the police have at best a marking role, sometimes a controlling role, and at times, a directing role. The idea that policing is also communicated (about) suggests the role of the media in representing policing. The communications at issue may be mediated by technology, be face to face, or involve groups or aggregates affected at some distance from the source. Communication may heighten or underplay a given effect, and can be either intended or directed, ‘given off’ or emitted. Expressive action, communication about selves, and instrumental action, designed to achieve an end, are both conveyed by social actors, but sustaining a consistent performance is not equivalent to goal-seeking or organisational efficiency. Police organisations, seen in context of dramaturgical organisational analysis, are themselves a rich source of individual and collective dramas of control, represent or signify action, using conventional symbols of authority – costumes, settings, equipment and technology – and take action where violence, hierarchy (domination and subordination) and struggle are likely. This metaphor highlights the execution of successful communicative action as well as failures, errors or delicts that reveal the absence of preferred modes of being (Brissett et al, 1990: 1–12), and previously developed remedies. Control dramas well and truly display the dialectic between audiences and performers in that cycles of ‘crack-downs’ and tolerance, traffic law enforcement ‘blitzes’ and ‘turning a blind eye’, zero-tolerance policies and ‘chitchats’ with the homeless, reduce social distance and then increase it for different groups. These actions and encounters obviate democratic processes of equality, justice and security, and suggest that only minor reforms are needed to rectify the identified problem. Thus, while overtly critical, the media sustain the status quo, fragment social structure and decontextualise the here and now. These images of political events may indeed change, their content may be modified, and the ‘story’ grown over time. As such, a dance or struggle of images may ensue. In a loosely bonded and bounded culture (Merelman, 1998), an interpenetration of media effects shapes group relations. As a result, the core ideology of control, images of the police and ‘criminals’, crime and disorder are sustained quite apart from debate, discussion, interpersonal acquaintance and politics. The internal conflict within institutions remains to be played on as a source of new ‘stories’, absent a context.

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IV.  Theorising Policing The framework of the sacred as developed here, a focus in the work of Durkheim and Goffman amongst others, illuminates policing and its configuration of functions. The status of the police in post-modern society has on the one hand been increasing in recent years, and on the other hand is somewhat anomalous. They are insulated by law and tradition for all but their most egregious, overt, known and publicised excesses; they are viewed as mysterious, distant, powerful and dangerous – and they are. They are trusted on the one hand and a lightning rod for discontent on the other. And of course they are called upon to police political dissent, demonstrations, parades and riots. Their front, manner and rhetoric are in many ways quaint and stylised. They are permitted to operate secretly and are rarely called upon to account for their general strategies and tactics. Media-amplified, well-filmed events become axial, or turning points (Manning, 1996). Examples of criminal charges and trials of police officers are rare in the Anglo-American societies, the Rodney King and the Charles de Menezes shooting being very significant exceptions to this generalisation. It also is true that the police are insulated from penetration. Their public management of the 2011 riots in England and the ‘phone-hacking’ scandal suggest a deeper public resentment of police power and a failure to exemplify the now traditional ‘policing by consent’ notion. Still, they use force with impunity and by and large define the level of force necessary (if after the fact called upon to explain to justify the force used). They are an old-fashioned organisation. These features cohere; they form a pattern or configuration that suggests the denotation and connotation of ritualised communication of the sacred. The argument presented here asserts that the police function in two dramaturgical domains: that of petite visible functions and mini-dramas or functions that connote or tap into the power and authority associated with the modern state. The elasticity of both means they overlap and complement each other over time. The police thus play a role in the dramas that display the secularised religion of a civil society (Bellah et al, 2007).

V. Summary Dramaturgy is a perspective that employs a theatrical metaphor, seeing life as a kind of mini-theatre, to explore the performances, the communication of messages, and symbolic representations, to an audience conveying impressions that shape subsequent interactions. It concerns symbolic action that refers to what is represented as well as other matters, and is predicated on trust. An encounter with a police officer initially is problematic, since the experience of groups with the police, whether as the recipient of a service a victim, or as a potential offender, varies widely in quality and in frequency by gender, race, age and class. Such interactions hinge



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on trust but they also echo and rely upon what is known and shared by groups, their experiences, stories and memories about ‘police’ and being policed. Because action itself can convey a rich texture of ambiguous messages, some method is needed to pin down meaning, or see how it is framed and encoded. The problem of meaning is acute in societies that work with snapshot interactions, and where strangerstranger communication or mediated communication (that which is conveyed by electronic means rather than in face–to-face encounters) is cheap, abundantly and virtually omnipresent. A mediated society that lives in the present and only marginally lives in the future is condemned to suffer the pains and joys of the present. In many ways, the collective representations of our time are mediated; and it is through the ‘mediation’ of dramas of control, little and big, that we ‘know about policing’. Policing, in turn, is communication about contingencies and uncertainties, and marks the meaning of events. A radical axial media event such as the beating of Rodney King changes the attitudes of the white majority about policing. They remain most unpopular with those who see them most regularly as victims or villains. The police, unlike other producers of drama, are trusted: their accounts or versions of events are rarely questioned or challenged by the public. The potential for police dramas, dramas of control, to become spectacles and change the meaning of policing has increased because of the vast speed and voraciousness of television. The police functions reviewed above are both petite in the sense of being visible, local and immediate while the larger dramas connote the broader contours of social order. It is these functions and the ordering they display that connects the police repeatedly to that which is valued. This, Goffman might argue, is the mutuality of obligations that the police stand for.

References Bellah, RN, Madsen, R et al (2007) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life: with a new preface (Berkeley, University of California Press). Bittner, E (1972) The Functions of the Police in Modern Society: A Review of Background Factors, Current Practices, and Possible Role Models (Washington, DC, National Institute of Mental Health). —— (1990) Aspects of Police Work (Boston, Northeastern University Press). Black, D (2011) Moral Time (New York, Oxford University Press). Brissett, DJ et al (1990) Life as Theater: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook (Hawthrone, NY, Aldine de Gruyter). Brodeur, JP (1983) ‘High Policing and Low Policing: Remarks about the Policing of Political Activities’ Social Problems 30(5), 507–20. —— (2000) ‘Cops and Spooks the Uneasy Partnership’ Police Practice and Research 1, 299–322. —— (2007) ‘An encounter with Egon Bittner’ Crime, Law and Social Change 48(3), 105–32. Burke, K (1962) A grammar of motives and A rhetoric of motives (Cleveland, World Pub Co). —— (1965) Permanence and change (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill).

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Burke, K and Gusfield, JR (1989) On Symbols and Society (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). DiMaggio, PJ and Powell, WW (1983) ‘The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality’ American Sociological Review 48(2), 147–60. Douglas, JD (1971) American social order: social rules in a pluralistic society (New York, Free Press). Duncan, HD (1968) Communication and social order (New Brunswick, Transaction Books). Durkheim, E (1961) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London, MacMillan). Edelman, MJ (1985) The symbolic uses of politics (Urbana, University of Illinois Press). —— (1988) Constructing the political spectacle (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Garfinkel, H (1956) ‘Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies’ American Journal of Sociology 61, 420–24. Goffman, EM (1951) ‘Symbols of Class Status’ British Journal of Sociology 11, 294–304. —— (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, Doubleday Anchor). —— (1983) ‘The Interaction Order’ American Sociological Review 48, 1–17. Gusfield, Joseph (1989) Symbolic Crusade (Urbana, University of Illinois Press). Holdaway, S (1983) Inside the British Police: A Force at Work (Oxford, Blackwell). Hughes, EC (1958) Men and Their Work (New York, Free Press). Jacobsen, MH (ed) (2010) The Contemporary Goffman (London, Routledge). Jefferson, T (1990) The case against paramilitary policing (Philadelphia, Open University Press). Lemert, EM (1972) Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall). Loader, I (1997) ‘Policing and the social: questions of symbolic power’ The British Journal of Sociology 48(1), 1–18. Loader, I and Mulcahy, A (2003) Policing and the Condition of England: Memory, Politics and Culture (New York, Oxford University Press). Manning, PK (1976) ‘The decline of civility: a comment on Erving Goffman’s sociology’ Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie 13(1), 13–25. —— (1988) Symbolic communication: Signifying calls and the police response (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press). —— (1996) ‘Dramaturgy, Politics and the Axial Media Event’ Sociological Quarterly 37(2), 261–78. —— (1997) Police Work: The Social Organization of Policing (Prospect Heights, Illinois, Waveland Press). —— (2003) Policing Contingencies (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). —— (2010) Democratic Policing in a Changing World (Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publishers). Mawby, RC (2002) Policing Images: Police communication and legitimacy (Cullompton, Willan). Merelman, R (1998) ‘On legitimalaise in the United States: A Weberian analysis’ Sociological Quarterly 39, 351–68. Meyer, JW and Rowan, B (1977) ‘Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony’ American Journal of Sociology 83(2), 340–63. Mitroff, II and Bennis, WG (1993) The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What it is Doing to our Lives (New York, Oxford University Press). Morris, C (1938) Foundations of the theory of signs Vol I(2) (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Nadel, SF (1952) ‘Social control and self-regulation’ Social Forces 31, 265.



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Porter, T (1995) Trust in Numbers (Princeton, Princeton University Press). Rawls, Anne W (2006) Seeing Sociologically (Boulder, Paradigm). Turner, VW (1967) The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press). Turner, VW and Schechner, R (1988) The Anthropology of Performance (New York, PAJ Publications). Vester, HG (1989) ‘Erving Goffman’s sociology as a semiotics of postmodern culture’ Semiotica 76(3–4), 191–204. Young, M (1991) An Inside Job (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

10 Something Old, Something New; Something Not Entirely Blue: Uneven and Shifting Modes of Crime Control MICHAEL LEVI and MIKE MAGUIRE

I. Introduction When Robert Reiner undertook his initial ground-breaking research in the 1970s and early 1980s, crime control in the UK was widely seen as virtually the sole domain and responsibility of the organisation he explored, the (public) police service. Outside the traditional, allegedly preventative police patrols in the Peelian tradition (Reiner, 2010: chs 2 and 3), crime control was also understood largely in terms of the investigation of individual crimes reported to the police by members of the public, and the subsequent prosecution of the alleged offenders. Police officers, especially detectives, had a considerable degree of discretion about how much time and energy to put into specific investigations, and in many cases one officer would personally undertake most of the necessary tasks ‘from the cradle to the grave’ – that is, from the examination of the scene, through questioning of suspects and collation of the evidence, to appearance as a witness in court.1 He (and it mostly was male), would even prosecute cases in the magistrates’ court, or at least press the ‘Force’ solicitor’s department to pursue particular charges. On the surface, at least, the situation has since changed markedly in a number of ways. Crime control – and, indeed, the broader task of ‘policing’ – is now portrayed as much more of a joint exercise, involving partnership and information-sharing with a variety of agencies. Responses to crime – and its now almost automatic suffix, ‘and anti-social behaviour’ – are regularly framed in terms of prevention and reduction, with additional and alternative aims to that of simply ‘clearing up’ reported crimes by bringing individual offenders before a court. Terms such as ‘problem-solving’, 1   It should be added that, prior to the regulatory framework imposed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a fair percentage of crimes were ‘solved’ – and, indeed, came to official notice for the first time – through speculative detention and questioning of ‘the usual suspects’ (or, to use one of Reiner’s terms, regular offenders viewed as ‘police property’) to see what they might admit to.

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‘crime management’, ‘risk management’ and, increasingly, ‘offender management’ have become a familiar part of police language. Importantly, too, decisions about which crimes or offenders to focus on appear to be more strongly influenced by explicit policies, strategies or ‘policing plans’ – themselves ostensibly the result of careful analyses of crime patterns and trends, as well as taking account of the priorities of central and local government, other agencies and local communities. Indeed, if one believed all the rhetoric, one might get the impression that crime control had become a highly planned and rationalised activity, encapsulated in the often mentioned SARA cycle (Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment) or the flow diagrams of the National Intelligence Model (NIM; see John and Maguire, 2003, 2004, 2007). Indeed, back in 2000, one of the authors of this chapter (Maguire) argued that this was fast becoming the case. Reflecting broader trends in criminal justice thinking and practice – encapsulated in Garland’s term, ‘risk penality’ and in the concept of ‘governance’, signifying the dispersion of responsibility for crime control across a wide range of organisations and individuals (Garland, 1996, 2001) – traditional reactive investigation of individual reported offences was giving way to a riskbased, preventive, problem-solving mode of policing, in which analysis of crime patterns and intelligence material led to the identification of people, places and activities associated with a high risk of future crime, and the coordinated mobilisation of resources to manage these risks (both through police activities such as surveillance or disruption of criminal groups, and through collaborative arrangements with other agencies to modify the environment or protect potential victims). Such approaches, Maguire emphasised, were by no means new, but until then had been associated principally with the policing of serious organised crime: what was new was their extension to routine use at a local level for all kinds of criminal behaviour (and, indeed, low level anti-social behaviour). In the UK, the development of the NIM was the main driver for the setting of police priorities and allocation of resources, a key element in this shift in policy and practice. Revisiting these issues a few years later, Maguire and John (2006) argued that, although the NIM had been comprehensively ‘rolled out’, with strong support from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), its adoption as a central driver of police ‘business’ was beginning to look less whole-hearted than originally planned and, more generally, the development of ‘intelligence-led policing’ as a mainstream approach to crime control was coming under threat in the face of competing priorities, especially the growing focus on community cohesion and neighbourhood policing. This chapter takes a further look at these topics, in the light of later experience. It will be argued that, while it may be fair to say that the influence of new thinking about crime control is to be found throughout the police service, and indeed that there are specific areas of criminal behaviour and specific types of offender in relation to which it can reasonably be claimed that policing responses have been transformed, overall the picture remains much patchier than anticipated by the early advocates of NIM and of other attempts to cement in more proactive and strategic thinking and practice. In this sense, the brave new world of risk polic-



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ing ushered in conceptually by Ericson and Haggerty (1997) from some technological developments they observed plus interviews with highly selected Canadian police remains as unrepresentative of daily policing now as it was then. We begin with some comments about the faltering and patchy progress of ‘intelligence-led policing’, even in the context of responses to organised crime, where internationally, it is used less rigorously and less often than one might expect. In part III we give examples of areas in which, by contrast, more innovative, proactive and partnership-based approaches are becoming well-established. First, we look at the monitoring and ‘risk management’ of sexual and violent offenders through Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) and of ‘prolific’ property offenders through Integrated Offender Management. Finally, we provide a more detailed account of a variety of current responses to ‘economic’ or ‘financial’ crime, some of which (in contrast to much policing of ‘organised crime’) provide excellent examples of systematic ‘scanning’ to identify and respond to likely criminal activity. However we also note that that the policing of financial crime in general (again in contrast to that of organised crime as conventionally understood) is handicapped by relative lack of interest, knowledge and concern among the public, media or crime control agencies.

II.  Faltering Steps? Intelligence-led Policing and Beyond One of the key features of contemporary policing theory has been the advocacy of ‘intelligence-led policing’ as a more effective approach to crime control than that of the traditional ‘reactive’ model (Maguire and John, 2006; Grieve, 2009; Ratcliffe, 20102; Favarel-Garrigues et al, 2011). Developed initially in the context of specialist detective squads, it was for some time associated mainly with the targeting of resourceful and well-organised criminals involved in serious crime, often across police force boundaries or international borders. It was also associated with a set of ‘proactive’ investigative techniques, including covert surveillance, the use of informants (including participating informants) and the systematic collection, storage and analysis of criminal intelligence. However, championed particularly by Sir David Phillips, former Chief Constable of Kent, and supported by the Audit Commission (1993) with its often quoted recommendation to ‘target the criminal, not just the crime’, its basic principles became increasingly seen as applicable to less serious and more local forms of offending: for example, by briefing all officers and tasking informants in a particular police area to gather information about a ‘top 40’ list of local offenders, employing analysts to collate intelligence and evidence about their activities, and setting up targeted surveillance operations ideally to catch them in the act (Maguire, 2008). 2  www.jratcliffe.net/papers/Ratcliffe%20(draft)%20ILP-Anticipating%20risk%20and%20 influencing%20action.pdf .

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The development of the NIM broadened these ideas to include analysis not just of individual offenders’ or criminal groups’ activities, but identification and analysis of particular ‘hot spots’ of crime, or of recurring patterns of crime or anti-social behaviour. Particularly in areas that adopted the closely related Problem Oriented Policing (POP) approach, officers were encouraged to design solutions aimed not just at one-off arrests and convictions but at finding more lasting solutions to the ‘problem’ (Leigh et al, 1996). This might involve, for example, blocking the entrance to a track frequently used for burning stolen cars, or – a flexibly interpreted construct – ‘disrupting’ drugs markets rather than simply arresting individual dealers. In many cases, the most effective solutions would incorporate cooperation from other agencies (such as housing associations or environmental health authorities) with different powers or responsibilities from those of the police: this could be achieved principally through local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs) (latterly Community Safety Partnerships – CSPs). Analogous approaches could also be found in relation to the policing of serious organised crime, through innovations such as Serious Crime Prevention Orders and Financial Reporting Orders under the Serious Crime Act 2007.3 While in some areas these kinds of approaches to crime control became commonplace and relatively successful during the early 2000s, in many others they remained largely at the level of rhetoric and good intentions. In terms of internal police implementation of the NIM, most forces set up the requisite systems and dutifully produced strategic assessments of local crime problems and plans to deliver solutions, but in many cases these were ignored by senior officers who had to respond to centrally set priorities and to meet targets such as increasing the numbers of offenders ‘brought to justice’ – whether or not this was important to locally defined needs (John and Maguire, 2007). Many junior officers found the NIM rigid and overly-complex, and cultural resistance has played a part in reducing its effective use (see generally, Reiner, 2010: ch 4). Recent discussions we have held with police managers also suggest that effective use of the NIM – already competing for resources with newer kids on the block such as neighbourhood policing – is likely to decline further as reductions in police funding place greater pressure on the organisation, and the ever-present need to respond to immediate and unpredictable demands gradually squeezes out the ‘luxury’ of longer-term, evidence-based planning and the civilian analyst jobs that underpin it. Equally important, in many cases the extent of effective partnership work actually taking place through CDRPs and CSPs remained low, creating government impatience at the slow pace of change (Crawford, 2007). The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but in addition to the conservatism of police culture, they include excessive bureaucracy in the setting up and running of CDRPs/CSPs; widespread inability of agencies to produce timely and relevant information (and in some cases reluctance to share it); ‘silo’ thinking, exacerbated by pressure to deliver targets and

  See www.soca.gov.uk/about-soca/how-we-work/new-approaches.

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performance indicators set for individual agencies, rather than for partnerships; and reluctance of police forces to involve partners in NIM structures, seeing the latter as to do with operational police work rather than the devising of joint crime reduction strategies. In reality, then, the bulk of police responses to crime at a local level have continued to be reactive in character. This may be qualified by noting that such responses tend to be ‘managed’ more efficiently than in the past – for example, through variants of the Volume Crime Management Model, which entails processing the daily flow of recorded offences through something akin to a production line, with officers each allocated routine tasks to be completed within a set period of time (see Maguire, 2008). However, such systems are essentially bureaucratic in character and have been developed primarily in order to increase cost-effectiveness in the use of resources and to meet government targets, rather than as attempts to analyse crime problems and devise strategic responses. They thus have little in common with the ideas and principles underpinning the NIM. In short, in spite of the promise offered by broader constructions of policing around reshaping situational/ social crime prevention, and the pervasiveness of the rhetoric of harm reduction in the UK, the tanker of policing has not changed course as rapidly as the new thinking led us to anticipate.

A.  Intelligence-led Policing and ‘Organised Crime’ Where the policing of ‘organised crime’ (as most commonly perceived) is concerned, one might expect to find intelligence-led policing at the heart of the approaches adopted. However in many countries, even here it is less frequently and systematically applied than might be expected. For example, an international survey of agencies involved in combating organised crime (Levi and Maguire, 2004), in which respondents were asked to give concrete examples of preventive or proactive approaches that they had employed, produced surprisingly few such examples, the majority describing what were essentially conventional reactive investigations aimed at early arrest and conviction (sometimes involving a limited amount of surveillance to gather extra evidence). Since then, dating from the UK Presidency of the EU in 2005, Europol has been seeking to drive a European Criminal Intelligence Model (ECIM), lightly adapted from the NIM, throughout the EU – so far with only partial success, due in large part to differences in police cultures and the kinds of resistance to change that Reiner and others have identified in their more general work. The EU has limited financial inducements or accountability control mechanisms through which to give ECIM and the Europol Organised Crime Threat Assessments (OCTA) greater effect. There is only modest resource for persuading Member States to change their practices in the direction of intelligence-led policing and strategic harm reduction, despite their enthusiastic espousal by the European Commission and the Hague and Stockholm programmes, and (via the Belgian Presidency of the EU in 2010) enshrinement within the EU policy cycle on serious and organised crime. This new policy cycle provides the process for

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Europol’s production of the OCTA4, for the conversion of its conclusions into a political determination of the top priority crime areas, and for the coordination of actions (under plans endorsed by the Committee on Operational Cooperation on Internal Security) in response to those priorities. We will have to await the impact of the post-Lisbon political arrangements to see if there is a step change in this, but the spreading of the Intelligence-led Policing (ILP) message plainly is a long-term process at the national and international level. Following the UK’s lead, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden currently have their own national OCTAs, but recent interviews suggest that there is as yet little enthusiasm elsewhere in Europe for these (see Potpariˇc and Dvoršek, 20115, for some comments on ILP development in Slovenia). The aim here is to meld upwards and downwards-flowing intelligence and strategy. So these high-level strategic intelligence plans might be described as the High Policing component of ILP (Brodeur, 1983). The closest parallels outside Europe are to be found in annual threat assessments in Australia and in Canada, where methodological issues have been published (CISC, 2007). The US State Department publishes an annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, but this is a collation of opinions and evidence about the adequacy of measures around the world that influence (or reflect) political policy and funding rather than an intelligence assessment that plausibly could lead to concrete policing and non-police interventions. In addition, there has been to date (2012) one global Organised Crime Threat Assessment by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2010), an embryonic global Money Laundering Threat Assessment (Financial Action Task Force, 2011) and a multi-national Mass Marketing Fraud Threat Assessment (SOCA, 2011a). The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB, 2011) also produces an annual report on the drugs situation which claims to be a threat assessment, but is quite woolly in its methodology and evidence base. Whatever other political problems there are surrounding the compilation of published threat assessments, they can only be as good as the intelligence that goes into them. The production of these threat assessments has been subjected to vigorous criticism (see inter alia van Duyne and vander Beken, 2009; Zoutendijk, 2010) and though there have been advances in quality and rigour in some since the early days, it is fair to state that these are all in a process of development, making difficult and seldom transparent evidential and political compromises (Edwards and Levi, 2008; Greenfield and Paoli, 2012; Shaw, 2011). Some greater level of conceptual and methodological work needs to be done before these can be taken as seriously as the authors intend, but one should not under-estimate the difficulty of working out a huge range of target vulnerabilities, and existing and potential offender capabilities, over a range of geographic and activity areas. The more total the awareness possessed by ‘the state’, the easier this process becomes. In more operational terms, the Serious Organised Crime Agency – soon to be merged into the National Crime Agency (Home Office, 2011) – has plainly adopted   Now called the Serious Organised Crime Threat Assessment, or SOCTA.   www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/Mesko/235122.pdf .

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an intelligence-led approach, as have US equivalents (Andreas and Nadelmann, 2007) and similar bodies elsewhere (eg the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Crime Commission). The UK (HM Government, 2011) has sought to make this a graduated but integrated strategy from local to global, though HMIC (2009) has noted the considerable discontinuities and knowledge gaps that exist, especially between the local (Level 1) and the international (Level 3) of NIM. Thus collating information about a range of possible violations of individuals and networks in order to develop an intervention strategy for harm reduction plainly makes more sense than arresting people and seizing products and assets and believing that this will reduce levels of offending and reduce harm. This model partly reflects the nature of the crimes and criminal groups they are investigating, but it also reflects how different police groups in different countries are set up to gather intelligence in different ‘communities’ and for different sorts of crime. Historic routines of policing were more plugged into drugs and the usual criminal suspects than into fraud and money laundering, especially not more elite forms of fraud such as insider trading and corporate accounting frauds. Thus it is not surprising that the front page of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) website (www.soca.gov.uk/) notes: ‘SOCA prioritises tackling Class A drugs and organised immigration crime. Other targeted criminal activities include firearms, armed robbery, fraud, money laundering and identity crime’. Even beyond SOCA, the Organised Crime Mapping exercise is developing throughout England and Wales (and separately in Scotland – see Hamilton-Smith and Mackenzie, 2010, for a thoughtful critique based on research there), and though the threshold for calling one or (in nearly all cases) more people engaged in crime for gain an ‘organised crime group’ offers much flexibility of interpretation, this at least focuses attention on gathering intelligence on interconnections of networked offenders. Over the longer run of policing transformations, changes of these kinds are likely to be significant, though they require close monitoring in an era stressing ‘localism’ and the preservation of ‘front-line’ policing. As we shall see later, the situation is rather different in relation to ‘economic’ or ‘financial’ crime, which involves a mix of what are sometimes still referred to as ‘white-collar’ offenders and ‘organised criminals’ who have moved into fraud and/ or who need to launder money from their more conventional criminal activities such as drugs and people trafficking (or, less emotively, transporting) (Levi, 2012a).

III.  The ‘New’ Policing in Action? Arenas where Change May Be More Robust It was asserted at the beginning of the chapter that the advent of ‘new’ forms of crime control, involving analytical, proactive, preventive and collaborative approaches, has been patchy and uneven. So far we have focused on areas of policing activity

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in which these have been generally slow to take a hold, but in this part III we draw attention to some in which they appear to be more strongly embedded. These areas are characterised by various combinations of, for example: • • • • •

close collaboration and information-sharing with other agencies; regular use of analysts; surveillance of potential offenders or high-risk locations; ‘scanning’ of routine activities for signs of criminal activity; and problem-solving interventions rather than immediate individual arrests.

We look first at the examples of Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) and Integrated Offender Management (IOM), followed by a more detailed discussion of developments in an area often ignored by criminologists, including those writing on organised crime: the policing of ‘financial’ or ‘economic’ crime.

A.  MAPPA and IOM Two important areas of local policing which include several of the above features are the now well-established MAPPA, aimed at risk management of known sexual and violent offenders (mainly those on the sex offenders register, together with others assessed as posing a significant risk of harm) and the more recent and fastexpanding system of IOM, which provides a multi-agency response mainly to people with a record of frequent property offending (Senior et al, 2011). These two systems have in common police involvement in the routine and relatively longterm monitoring of groups of potential offenders – an activity quite different both to the reactive investigation of known offences, and to more usual forms of police surveillance, which tend to focus intensively for short periods on offenders thought to be currently active. In this respect, it is arguably closer to the kind of role undertaken by probation officers than to traditional police crime control practice. In both cases, the ‘surveillance’ is more often carried out through open visits to the subjects’ homes than through covert observation. Such visits often involve an element of deterrence, conveying the message that the individual is on the police ‘radar’, but are also used for intelligence-gathering. For example, in the case of known paedophiles managed under MAPPA, visiting police officers regularly look out for signs of heightened risk, such as the presence of toys in the home which might be used to attract children. Inter-agency information sharing is also at the heart of both these systems, with partners such as probation officers and even independent drugs or housing agencies routinely passing on to the police any concerns about the recent behaviour of those being ‘managed’. In the case of IOM, co-location of representatives from different agencies is fast becoming the norm. This tends to enhance inter-agency trust and both expand and accelerate the sharing of information (Senior et al, 2010). From informal discussions and observation, we speculate that it may also produce



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eventually some interesting effects on the values and beliefs of those working in the multi-agency teams, perhaps even the beginnings of new ‘professional cultures’. Indeed, research of the kind that Reiner helped pioneer in his early studies of police culture, is likely to pay dividends. Albeit only from anecdotal evidence and informal observation, there are indications that police priorities and goals tend to overshadow the traditionally more welfare-oriented aims and values of most of the other co-located agencies. One sign of this may be an observation that recent experimentation in some IOM offices with 24-hour GPS tracking of potential offenders by satellite (albeit, as yet, only with the latter’s consent) appears to have aroused few concerns among non-police staff. Where MAPPA are concerned, the growing development of ‘Circles of Support’, in which volunteers from the local community undertake to act as surrogate friends and family to sex offenders (many of whom lead an isolated existence) but at the same time observe their behaviour and share any relevant information or concerns with the authorities, has added to the ‘natural’ surveillance – and hence risk management – of such individuals (for further discussion, see Wood and Kemshall, 2007; Armstrong et al, 20086; Brayford et al, 2012). Related to the above comments, a third important feature of the systems described is that they produce something of a ‘stick and carrot’ situation in which, in essence, access to welfare services is offered in return for acceptance of more intensive monitoring for evidence of actual or possibly imminent criminal behaviour. Police officers also tend to emphasise to those monitored that they are part of a multi-agency team, and hence interested in helping them as well as watching them: this makes it easier for the officers to develop ostensibly friendly relations with them and, for example, to gain access to their homes through invitation rather than through official procedures. In some cases, indeed – especially where sex offenders are concerned – overt efforts are made to persuade offenders to play a ‘self-policing’ role: at the extreme, to monitor their own thoughts and behaviour and to report to members of the team any feelings that they may be drifting towards offending. Where this is achieved by police officers, it represents a very different approach to crime control than conventional methods of investigation, or even of intelligence-led policing.

B.  Financial crimes A rather different area of criminal activity in which preventive and proactive approaches to policing are prominent is that of ‘economic’ or ‘financial’ crime, a flexible construct that includes 1. frauds of different types with different sorts of victims; 2. ‘market abuse’ such as insider dealing/trading; 3. money laundering (of all crimes, increasingly including tax fraud);   www.sccjr.ac.uk/documents/circles.pdf .

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4. financing of terrorism (mostly since 2001) and (since 2008) of nuclear proliferation; and 5. transnational bribery. Here it is commonplace to use regulatory mechanisms, and to involve agencies other than the ‘normal’ policing agencies like police and customs. In other words, preventive strategies (or, to be more precise, strategies that have harm reduction as their goal) are the norm where the offenders are not seen as morally bad enough to ‘need’ to be dealt with by criminal justice desert mechanisms. At the same time, their potential effectiveness at prevention is handicapped by the fact that terms like ‘economic’ or ‘financial’ crime – like the concept of ‘white-collar crime’, with which they are often associated – attract much less attention from politicians, police, journalists and academics than the emotive phenomenon of ‘organised crime’, and hence – even after the global financial crisis caused by reckless and at times dishonest banking – do not command anything like the immense political and bureaucratic power of the latter to attract publicity, powers and resources, nor indeed to generate a sense of urgency or commitment in the ‘fight’ against it. The extent to which this relative impunity is intentional and strategised, at one extreme, or is ‘just’ the result of culture and unintended outcomes, at the other, remains an important but difficult set of questions to address. The methodologies by which one might determine the answer are themselves deeply problematic. Most crime control procedures can be conceptually divided into two broad phases, the intelligence and the investigation phase, although in practice they are often blurred and overlapping. However, the distinction between them is more important and better defined in civil law than in common law jurisdictions, and hence tends to be clearer in responses to financial crime than to more ‘conventional’ forms of criminal behaviour. i.  The Intelligence Phase How do the authorities know about financial crimes of different kinds? While they vary widely in type and scale, and while they come to official attention across the full spectrum of ways in which other crimes come to police notice, a particularly important factor in their discovery is the routine ‘scanning’ by private companies and regulatory agencies of business transactions and those involved in them. In the shadow of legal risk created by anti-money laundering legislation as well as – sometimes – self-protection against fraud, a substantial industry has been developed in investigating identities and business/personal credit histories of people opening accounts and starting business relationships with professionals. Thus the services sector has spawned information databases which in turn may contain the open source seeds of a ‘criminal intelligence’ sector, to be supplemented within law enforcement and private sectors by more closed source data if there is both motivation and practical supply to enhance their knowledge of financial criminals and crime. (Such supplementation costs resources and thus requires commitment.) For anti-money laundering (AML) purposes, firms would not be expected to collect



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more than open source data and the information (like passports) they are required to obtain (and retain) from clients to ‘prove’ their identity. Banks and payment card schemes collect and sometimes share information about cyber-attacks and other risks, and sometimes pass these onto the police or other bodies, and there is some public-private bi-directional intelligence-sharing with GCHQ, encouraged formally as part of the national cyber-security strategy (Cabinet Office, 2011; Levi and Williams, forthcoming). However, those industry associations aiming to reduce copyright violations (eg in the UK, the Federation Against Copyright Theft and the British Phonographic Industry), or counterfeiting/smuggling of tobacco (in the UK, the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association, formerly the Tobacco Advisory Council), aim to collect more serious intelligence about illicit operations, via developing informants and undercover operations, as well as collection plans such as testing for their chemical composition cigarette butts discarded in different geographic areas. An area of significant investigative attention is gambling and sports. Bodies concerned with reducing fraud against gambling firms and with money laundering via online and off-line gambling are in a special position. Some have a focus on particular sports, while others represent the gaming industry and others still gambling regulators. Thus, for example, FIFA, UEFA and the International Cricket Council (and some national Cricket Councils and Football Associations) have Anti-Corruption Councils or similar compliance units, though there has been serious questioning about how proactive or intelligence-led some or all of them are. Some look for (and pay) inside informants in criminal syndicates, while others do little. Regulators such as the Gambling Commission and the British Horseracing Authority monitor not only the fitness of owners of licences but also suspected corruption among licensed operators; and the rise of spread betting and spot betting have generated significant risks to betting firms globally because of the ease with which individual actions can be ‘fixed’. In the online gaming environment, the firms themselves actively monitor not just money laundering risks but also – for self-interest in maintaining an image of system integrity among players – cheating and collusion at online poker and other games of chance and skill: however, the extent to which they make reports on detected or suspected cases to the authorities is variable (Levi, 2009). Securities regulators look for evidence of ‘market abuse’, normally without searching actively for ‘criminal informants’. Market sources may provide some information to financial regulators, but the analysis of price movements on exchanges in the period prior to price-sensitive market announcements or media stories often based on leaks are the main triggers for investigation of those transactions deemed suspicious. In addition, there has developed a global industry in private sector technology (1) to look for anomalous transactions inconsistent with the nature of legitimate business; (2) to match account names against sanctions lists for persons designated as terrorists by the UN Security Council, the EU and other bodies; and (3) to search for broad data matches within large aggregate data files in order to prevent fraudulent claims by multiple identities. Thus intelligent software can produce social

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network portraits based on interactions between fuzzy matched persons (including altered name ordering), mobile and landline phone numbers, dates of birth and other identifiers to pick out previously unidentified interactions between parties in separate claims. This is used in a variety of fraud prevention models in the public (tax and social security) and the private (credit applications, motor insurance and securities dealings in advance of price-sensitive announcements) sectors. Where the technology throws out precise matches with people on UN, EU and other sanctions lists, reporting to the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) is or should be automatic, on threat of individual and corporate liability. Where there is anomalous conduct of accounts, human judgement is required to decide whether indeed the behaviour is ‘suspicious’ and should be passed onto the Financial Intelligence Unit. However as in other areas where intelligence packages are prepared, there readily develops an under-capacity to transmute intelligence into action, especially criminal justice action. To give some idea of the volume of reports internationally, in 2009, the total number of all Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by US financial institutions was 1.28 million, while Currency Transaction Report (CTR) filings totalled 13.7 million (FinCEN, 2011). To these might be added the international wire transfers controversially supplied to the US by Belgian-based SWIFT (Amicelle, 2011; 7 de Goede, 2012). From a few informal tip-offs from bankers to police in 1986, the number of SARs filed in the UK rose to 20,000 in 2000 and then to 240,582 in the year to October 2010, easily outnumbering total reports from the rest of the EU (Tavares et al, 2010): these still receive very inconsistent police attention (as Gold and Levi, 1994, noted in research two decades ago), though they are now used by HMRC and DWP to check against tax and social security declarations for inconsistency, and tax claims – though seldom prosecutions – may be made against those who have not declared income thus revealed. UK reporting is uneven, focused on large banks, one large money transmitter and one gaming firm: about half of all SARs are submitted by four firms and 20 reporters submitted 75 per cent of all SARs. Significant rises have occurred throughout the 41 countries of the Council of Europe (not just the EU), reflecting the increased training and number of bodies covered by anti-laundering legislation, plus political pressures of the EU acquis communautaire – the detailed criteria with which countries must comply before they are admitted to the EU. These data represent a significant expansion of the surveillance state globally, though despite the presence in 2012 of the Egmont Group of 127 Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) and the EC-funded fiu.net, only highly controlled, data protection-sensitive cross-border data sharing is permitted in the intelligence phase, and administrative/regulatory agency records are not accessible. Nonetheless the totals still vary enormously between countries, even within Europe: by contrast with the very large US and UK figures, the number of reports made in 2010 for suspicion of money laundering in Switzerland hit an all-time high of 1159 (a rise in nearly a third over 2009), with the value of assets implicated   www.ceri-sciences-po.org/publica/qdr.htm .

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being 849 million Swiss francs. The banking sector accounted for two-thirds of all reports. Fraud accounted for two-fifths of all suspected predicate crimes, with other property crimes (including corruption) accounting for a further 16 per cent. What are the implications of this? At first sight, the data suggest that the Swiss authorities are doing little about money laundering. However, a suspicious transaction report has much graver consequences in Switzerland than in all but a few countries. When an account is reported as suspicious there, it is automatically frozen for up to five days pending investigation of whether or not a formal criminal investigation should be opened, placing a premium on having few ill-founded suspicions. If 1 million Americans and 200,000 Britons – there are fewer customers than SARs, since some attract multiple filings – had their accounts frozen, there would be a significant outcry and vastly increased investigative resource would be needed to process the reports within a few days! Takats (2006) has developed a model that suggests the government can be flooded and rendered less effective by an overly broad reporting system. UK professionals make easily the largest number of SARs in the world among lawyers and accountants (Levi interviews, 2011), though there were few public case studies from them. Other countries have implemented what is supposed to be a ‘level playing field’ very poorly. Box 1  The UK reporting regime 2010/11 (2008/09 totals in brackets) Source: SOCA (2011b) •  4255 SARs from solicitors 2010/11 (4772)   -  11,300 in 2007 before relaxation of rules on low-level reporting •  6053 SARs from accountants (6390) •  96 SARs from tax advisors (96) •  4 SARs from barristers (6) •  123 SARs from company formation agents (73) •  151 SARs from licensed conveyancers (160) •  123 SARs from estate agents (135)

In short, under the AML regime, financial institutions are required to pass on information about clients where they suspect that they are laundering the proceeds of serious crime (including any offences, not just drugs): van Duyne and Levi (2005) have demonstrated that hitherto, most of those reports that trigger criminal investigations and prosecutions relate to fraud and other property crimes rather than drugs (though ‘enterprise criminals’ may also be involved in drugs trafficking). In all cases, unless there is a leak – which itself is a criminal offence – the suspected person will be unaware of law enforcement interest in them. Depending on data retention rules, such data may be kept for years on Financial Intelligence Unit records without leading to the apprehension of any offender. The extent to which this financial intelligence drives police and non-police interventions, however, is quite variable though typically modest. It is more common to supplement existing investigations with knowledge of financial assets and

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transactions, perhaps for proceeds of crime confiscation. What the technology will not normally do, moreover, is to pick out possible accounting frauds by senior management using their status and power to overpay their friends or nominees for consultancy services or real products, or corrupt cartel agreements between suppliers, or favoured contractor expenditures for products ‘urgently needed’ in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan – though forensic tools may be used to examine these transactions if they are exposed and if an investigation is authorised. And forensic computing tools usually can be used (though see counter-measures of cyber-geeks discussed by Glenny, 2011) to capture and image all data that has ever existed on computers, whether or not it has been erased, provided that the raid is authorised and the computers/storage media are seized. Such issues properly belong in the next phase of the criminalisation cycle: the investigation phase. ii.  The Formal Investigation Phase In the UK, the authorities have the opportunity to collect information from banks and other financial institutions by production orders issued by judges, without the knowledge or legal representation of the suspect or account-holder. In the case of the UK Serious Fraud Office, the information can be required on the authority of the Director alone, without the need for a judicial order, and both witnesses and suspects can be required to answer questions, though answers obtained by compulsion cannot be used against them in criminal prosecutions. Securities regulators may launch formal investigations on the basis of suspicious price movements, and can require market participants – especially directors who buy or sell shares directly – to divulge information about their reasons for action. Discovering beneficial ownership of nominee transactions is always difficult, but in some cases, transactions can be frozen pending clarification of ownership. In the US, investigators sometimes go further, rolling up defendants in plea bargains and getting them to wear covert wires to generate verifiable evidence to make it easier to prove the case against co-participants. This is an example of using against more elite offenders methodologies developed against ‘organised crime’. As long ago as the 1980s, prosecutors actively used discretionary sentencing and plea bargaining to get incriminated persons to wear ‘wires’ and sometimes to infiltrate commodity exchanges (Levi, 1987; Mann, 1985) – an approach that has continued to the present in the raft of insider dealing prosecutions that have occurred around Wall Street (Morgenson and Story, 2011). However none of these intelligence-led tactics appear to have been used against elite executives in the recent financial crisis, perhaps partly out of ideology during the Bush administration but also because many of the actions that gave rise to serious economic harm had happened long before and thus were not amenable to this kind of tactic. Differences in legal regimes between countries are likely to have a much greater effect on fraud and money laundering than on drugs cases, because there are far greater disparities in substantive legislation, and different government departments and reporting agencies may be entrusted with money laundering and



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economic crime enforcement. Typically, the Treasury or Ministry of Finance is in charge of money laundering compliance, and special FIUs to handle reports have to be established. However, the liaison between the FIU and enforcement groups can be quite tense: in particular, unless the groups handling the reports are cooperative, there may be confusion as to which specialist agency – drugs, fraud, other organised crime – should investigate the case. The position is more complicated still in those developing countries where politicians, their families and cronies may dominate the licit and also the illicit economies, and there is usually no-one to whom financial intelligence can be passed on with any prospect of action (Levi, 2012b; Willebois et al, 2011). iii.  The Public-Private Policing Interface A key question is how close can and should the police get to private sector organisations (which commonly possess more intelligence on fraud than do the public authorities)? The UK has established a National Fraud Authority and a National Fraud Intelligence Bureau aimed at closer integration of public and private sectors (NFA, 2011), and is aiming at expansion of private funding of public policing. At the same time, there are tensions in coordination between public sector investigators, as well as with the private sector, and lines of accountability are obscure (Doig and Levi, 2009; Levi, 2010). In the US, inter-agency and intra-agency tensions are commonplace, but law firms also play a key role as mediators between business organisations and agencies, seeking to reduce the risk of prosecution in exchange for agreed statements of contrition, fines and sometimes organisational monitoring (Mann, 1985; Morgenson and Story, 2011). This is a trend which has been embraced by the Director of the UK Serious Fraud Office (Alderman, 20118). In a sense, the human and financial resource costs of investigation are outsourced to firms paid for by the suspects. The UK is merely an extreme form of a more general tendency to create intermediate bodies, because of its willingness to blur the division between public and private policing (author interviews, 2004–11). Since 2002, the payment card industry has chosen to pay for a specialist squad – the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit – to deal with ‘organised payment card fraud’ because the police forces in most of the UK refused to prioritise such offences, and de facto would not handle them: they are too labour-intensive for local constabulary forces to deal with, and not high-profile enough for central ‘organised crime’ police units to deal with. After much deliberation and initial unwillingness to pay twice for policing, the motor insurance industry agreed to follow on the same lines from 2012. It is establishing a 40-strong police intelligence and operational unit in order to ensure a greater level of action against ‘crash for cash’ and other ‘organised’ insurance frauds than can be relied upon via the constant negotiation of support for its cases among 43 English and Welsh police forces (Levi author interviews, 2008–11). In the case of some 8  www.sfo.gov.uk/about-us/our-views/director’s-speeches/speeches-2011/british-bankersassociation.aspx .

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(though not many) ‘crash for cash’ cases which involve deliberate accidents with innocent victims, individual police officers were motivated to act for ‘public protection’ (author interviews), but this was always too uncertain a basis for insurers or their collective intelligence body – the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB) – to rely on. It was common for investigators to experience severe difficulties in gaining resources (including their own time) to follow up suspicions or even cases presented to them on a plate by the IFB or other commercial bodies staffed by ex-police who prepare cases according to normal CID criteria.

C.  Contrasts with other areas of ‘organised crime’ The history of responses to organised crime suggests a need to see an enemy, preferably an alien implant that has nothing to do with either domestic economic policy or the criminalisation of popular commodities. Policing of organised crime implicitly contains the imagery of a highly structured hierarchy that has to be penetrated, and critical academic research on street and uniformed policing may have assisted in the momentum towards a proactive, offender-oriented style of intelligence-led policing that promises more. The risks of this – in terms of who chooses the individual targets and the sorts of crimes that will be proactively investigated, and how do we judge (or even find out about) the propriety of who gets ‘disrupted’ – are issues of great public importance. How one judges the value of ‘intelligence’ that has no outlet in a criminal prosecution remains frequently mysterious. On populist grounds, the ‘respectable poor’ and the middle-class individuals who are victims of fraud receive more attention from the media and from the police, and this was so at least in the post-war period (Levi, 2006, 2008). One could account for this in terms of overall system-maintaining legitimacy, but that would be tautological. A greater difficulty would be explaining why the US and UK (but not other) financial services authorities have become obsessed with combating insider dealing networks. Although the proclaimed goal is to enhance the reputation of the market and objective ‘market cleanliness’, this seems to have little to do with the financial crisis and its causes: to that extent, it is ‘bread and circuses’, though some members of corporate elites have been caught up in dramatic insider dealing cases such as that of the Galleon Group in 2011. There are inherent limits to the proactive policing of white-collar cases, inasmuch as (a) major corporate collapses and insolvency frauds are seldom predictable in advance, and (b) the gestation times of many white-collar crimes make surveillance more expensive and more difficult to get authorised than typically is found in most other areas of crime (though the latter is a hypothesis rather than a fact). However, this does not mean that covert methods cannot be used: (i) to lure vulnerable individuals to warn them of the sort of methods that can be practised against them, eg ‘get rich quick’ or ‘advance fee’ type scams operated commonly by Nigerians;



Uneven & Shifting Modes of Crime Control 211 (ii) to test employee integrity in fake money laundering investigations; (iii) to test willingness of firms to sell liquor or tobacco to minors; (iv) to test willingness of firms to ‘fudge’ integrity of motor car roadworthiness and pollution tests which they are authorised to conduct, or to validate propriety of work they claim to have done on vehicles, or to dump toxic waste unlawfully; (v) to keep surveillance on high-frequency offenders, though the notion of ‘high frequency’ is different for white-collar offenders than for others, except perhaps in the case of ‘plastic card’, cheque and counterfeit money teams. For example, it may take months for a bankruptcy fraud to be planned, though ‘serial offenders’ may be perpetually engaged in them: this creates severe finance problems for police managers.

Covert methods may also be used more reactively, in, for example, public and/or private sector attempts to recover stolen art works such as ‘The Scream’, which was returned to Norway and the offenders tried by Norwegian judges in England: an excellent example of cross-border covert work by the Metropolitan Police. Given that many cross-border and domestic major criminals are – as far as we know – generalist ‘enterprise criminals’ who will turn their hand to anything within their spheres of competence, those committing white-collar crimes may be stumbled upon by investigators looking at drugs or other sorts of crime. Even in a sphere seldom connected to general enterprise crime, insider dealing investigations in the US in 2010–11 have involved ‘supergrass’ deals with insiders to wear covert wires to provide proof against their collaborators: a process that works more easily in the US than in the UK, where it has never been attempted in elite cases.

IV.  Concluding Comments The overall picture to emerge from these very brief and broad-brush musings about recent trends in crime control is one of complexity, uncertainty and unevenness. What can be said with some confidence is that in the UK and in Europe generally, the ‘new dawn’ heralded in the late 1990s and early 2000s by advocates of intelligence-led policing and later the NIM and the ECIM, has failed to mature into the sunny day they anticipated. At a broad level, although crime management systems have speeded up and made more efficient the processing of routine investigations, the basic shape of police responses to crime has changed rather less than once seemed likely. On the one hand, there is this uber-rational evidence-based policing thinking embodied in the UK Coalition government’s phrase ‘from local to global’, seeking to permeate wider EU government thinking and action; but on the other hand a localism running through the (far from local but only voluntarily coordinated) Police and Crime Commissioners and the unintended effects of combined local authority and police cuts and the rhetoric of preserving ‘front-line’

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policing, which may in practice mean that the facade of rational policing is undermined by under-resourcing of the intelligence functions below National Crime Agency level. Whether in fact this means that ‘criminal upcomers’ will be neglected until they reach NCA levels of interest is something that ACPO and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) are concerned about but may be powerless to resist. The counter-indications are the rise of Regional Asset Recovery Teams, new Regional eCrime Hubs, and proposed Regional Economic Crime teams, combined with an effort to address the ‘enablers’ of serious crime for gain via criminal law and professional regulation. The interplay between these in an Age of Austere Policing, not just in the UK but in Europe generally, remains an absorbing arena of policing theory and practice. Though much policing remains reactive, we have identified important pockets of policing activity which are characterised by careful analysis of crime patterns and criminal intelligence, the creation of and adherence to strategic plans, information-sharing and coordinated actions with non-police agencies, and attention to the possibility of longer-term ‘solutions’ instead of (or as well as) the pursuit of immediate arrests and charges. These are most prominent in areas of crime control in which non-police agencies have become involved as genuine partners, including situations in which police officers are co-located with staff from other agencies and share information freely: notably the new IOM units which are spreading rapidly around the country. It remains to be seen how these will develop over time. The advent of local Police and Crime Commissioners, who are likely to be charged with promoting more effective partnership work, may lead to innovative variations on this theme. On the other hand, we note an emerging trend of reduced community safety personnel and civilian analysts in response to cuts not just in police but in local authority budgets, while many of the public and voluntary sector agencies which provide complementary welfare services (such as drug treatment and housing advice) are also experiencing significant reductions in funding. A further question is whether multi-agency units of this kind will themselves move beyond the joint monitoring and rehabilitation of individual offenders and combine it with broader preventive work of the kind hitherto undertaken by CSPs (albeit with limited success) – more specifically, whether they can exploit their exceptionally strong inter-agency relationships to break down barriers between the entrenched ‘silos’ of offender management and community-based crime prevention. At any rate, present indications appear to be that if one is looking for areas in which innovative approaches to crime control are on the horizon, it is in these kinds of arrangements, rather than within police forces alone, that they are more likely to be found. We have also considered the policing of a very different type of criminal activity, so-called ‘financial crime’, where more genuine public-private partnerships are emerging in some areas of sensitive and volume crime activity. The business financing of special ‘organised crime’ police units still under police command is a response to poor or haphazard police willingness to take on private intelligence packages, even when prepared by ex-police officers in accordance with the NIM. Governmental awareness of the threat of cyber-crime (and, especially, economic



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cyber-warfare) to ‘UK plc’ has stimulated a rethinking and formalisation of relationships between GCHQ, police (SOCA and the Metropolitan Police eCrime Unit) and hi-tech industry and financial services to share both threat information and multi-stakeholder responses. The National Fraud Authority has shifted from the Attorney-General’s Department to the Home Office, where it will be incorporated into the Economic Crime Command of the National Crime Agency from 2012. The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau – housed currently in the City of London police, which is the national ‘lead force’ for economic crime – contains industry as well as police analysts, and receives public and institutional reports which it seeks to develop into actionable intelligence. It is not easy to explain why new forms of policing have become more prominent in some areas of criminal activity and not in others. Proactive and analytical approaches may be more ‘naturally’ suited to the control of some types of behaviour and some types of offender than others, but this can be only part of any explanation. A more important factor may be contrasting public and political attitudes towards different crimes and criminals. Clearly, sex offenders and recidivist burglars cause widespread concern and are promoted by government as priority targets, making it easier to attract resources and gain cross-agency support for initiatives such as MAPPA and IOM. However, the case of financial crime does not appear to fit with this, as attitudes to ‘white-collar crime’ have traditionally been characterised by relative disinterest and indifference, except for ‘identity theft’ and ‘widows and orphans’ investment frauds/thefts. The increasing use in this field of sophisticated methods of intelligence-led policing may reflect something of a change in such attitudes, but so far seems to reflect principally the drift by ‘the usual suspects’ into fraud and intellectual property crimes and their tracking by police using financial investigations and other recent techniques, rather than a radical shift towards reprioritising frauds over ‘the usual crimes’. It also reflects the growth of collective data-gathering in the payment card, insurance and tax sectors, and software that develops criminal network analysis from the data warehouses. Whether a greater social threat is posed by drugs traffickers or corrupt sports gambling syndicates or by investment bankers behaving recklessly, if not criminally, remains an issue outside the scope of normal intelligence-led policing (and of this chapter). Be that as it may, it is clear that these kinds of response to crime remain the exception rather than the rule. While we have at times been lured by impressive ‘pilots’ and pockets of innovative practice into willingness to believe that major shifts in the dominant mode of crime control may be on the horizon, we find ourselves increasingly reminded of Robert Reiner’s (2011) argument ‘in praise of fire brigade policing’, that the police are primarily there as a first line response to people in distress, and that such responses should be valued and celebrated: and hence, by extension, we are ready to conclude that mainstream responses to crime may always be primarily reactive in character. It is nevertheless important to consider what should be done with some policing resources to sustain the basis for intelligent preventative policing of risks and social harms. There is no reason to suppose that frauds and other forms of well-organised or networked crime will go away of their

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own accord, and such offending is better dealt with by strategic interventions to reduce the number of fires rather than by calling out the fire brigade in their aftermath. In short, in addition to brigades to put the fires out, we need social scienceinfluenced approaches to reduce the number of reckless and malicious arsonists, and intelligence-led policing to deal with professional arsonists-for-profit and the enablers of insurance fraud.

References Alderman, R (2011) Speech at British Bankers’ Association Financial Crime Conference. Amicelle, A (2011) ‘The Great (Data) Bank Robbery: Terrorist Finance Tracking Program and the “SWIFT Affair”  ’ Research Questions – n°36 – May 2011. Andreas, P (2010) ‘The Politics of Measuring Illicit Flows and Policy Effectiveness’ in Peter Andreas and Kelly M Greenhill (eds), Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press). Andreas, P and Nadelmann, E (2007) Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations (New York, Oxford University Press). Armstrong, S, Chistyakova, Y, Mackenzie, S and Malloch, M (2008) Circles of Support & Accountability: Consideration of the Feasibility of Pilots in Scotland (Glasgow, Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research). Audit Commission (1993) Helping with Enquiries: Tackling Crime Effectively (London, Audit Commission). Brayford, J, Cowe, F and Deering, J (eds) (2012) Sex Offenders: Punish, Help, Change or Control? (London, Routledge). Brodeur, J-P (1983) ‘High policing and low policing: Remarks about the policing of political activities’ Social Problems 30(5), 507–20. Cabinet Office (2011) The UK Cyber Security Strategy: Protecting and promoting the UK in a digital world (London, Cabinet Office). CISC (2007) Strategic Early Warning for Criminal Intelligence (Ottawa, Criminal Intelligence Service Canada). Crawford, A (2007) ‘Crime Prevention and Community Safety’ in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds), Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 4th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). de Goede, M (2012) ‘The SWIFT Affair and the Global Politics of European Security’ Journal of Common Market Studies 50(2), 214–30. de Willebois, E, Halter, E, Harrison, R, Park, J and Sharman, J (2011) The Puppet Masters: How the Corrupt Use Legal Structures to Hide Stolen Assets and What to Do About It (Washington DC, The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank). Doig, A and Levi, M (2009) ‘Inter-agency work and the UK public sector investigation of fraud, 1996–2006: joined up rhetoric and disjointed reality’ Policing and Society 19(3), 199–215. Edwards, A and Levi, M (2008) ‘Researching the Organisation of Serious Crimes’ Criminology and Criminal Justice 8(4), 363–88.



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Ericson, R and Haggerty, K (1997) Policing the Risk Society, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Favarel-Garrigues, G, Godefroy, T and Lascoumes, P (2011) ‘Reluctant partners? Banks in the fight against money laundering and terrorism financing in France’ Security Dialogue 42(2), 179–96. Financial Action Task Force (2011) Global Money Laundering & Terrorist Financing Threat Assessment 2010 (Paris, FATF). FinCEN (2011) Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2010 (Washington DC, Government Printing Office). Garland, D (1996) ‘The limits of the sovereign state: Strategies of crime control in contemporary society’ British Journal of Criminology 36(4), 445–71. —— (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Control in Contemporary Society (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Glenny, M (2011) DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You (London, Bodley Head). Gold, M and Levi, M (1994) Money-Laundering in the UK: an Appraisal of Suspicion-Based Reporting (London, Police Foundation). Greenfield, V and Paoli, L (2012) ‘If supply-oriented drug policy is broken, can harm reduction help fix it? Melding disciplines and methods to advance international drugcontrol policy’ International Journal of Drug Policy 23, 6–15. Grieve, J (2009) ‘Developments in UK criminal intelligence’ in JH Ratcliffe (ed), Strategic Thinking in Criminal Intelligence, 2nd edn (Sydney, Federation Press). Hamilton-Smith, N and Mackenzie, S (2010) ‘The geometry of shadows: a critical review of organised crime risk assessments’ Policing and Society 20(3), 257–79. HM Government (2011) Local to Global: Reducing the Risk from Organised Crime (London, Home Office). HMIC (2009) Getting organised: A thematic report on the police service’s response to serious and organised crime (London, HMIC). Home Office (2011) The National Crime Agency: A plan for the creation of a national crimefighting capability (London, Home Office). INCB (2011) Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 2010 (Vienna, United Nations). John, T and Maguire, M (2003) ‘Rolling out the National Intelligence Model: key challenges’ in K Bullock and N Tilley (eds), Crime Reduction and Problem Oriented Policing (Cullompton, Willan). —— and —— (2004) The National Intelligence Model: Key Lessons from Early Research Home Office Online Report 30/04. —— and —— (2007) ‘Criminal Intelligence and the National Intelligence Model’ in T Newburn (ed), Handbook of Criminal Investigation (Cullompton, Willan). Leigh, A, Read, T and Tilley, N (1996) Problem Oriented Policing: Brit POP Crime Detection and Prevention Series 75 (London, Home Office). Levi, M (1987) Regulating Fraud: White-collar crime and the criminal process (London, Routledge). —— (2006) ‘The media construction of financial white-collar crimes’ British Journal of Criminology 46, 1037–57. —— (2008) ‘White-collar, organised and cyber crimes in the media: some contrasts and similarities’ Crime, Law and Social Change 49, 365–77. —— (2009) Money-Laundering Risks and E-gaming: A European Overview and Assessment (Brussels, European Gaming and Betting Association). —— (2010) ‘Public and Private Policing of Financial Crimes: the Struggle for Coordination’ Journal of Criminal Justice and Security 4, 343–57.

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Levi, M (2012a) ‘The organisation of serious crimes for gain’ in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 5th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2012b) ‘Money Laundering and the Impact of Anti-Money Laundering Measures Within Developing Countries’ in P Reuter (ed), Draining Development? Controlling Illicit flows from developing countries (Washington DC, World Bank Press). Levi, M and Maguire, M (2004) ‘Reducing and Preventing Organised crime: An Evidencebased Critique’ Crime, Law and Social Change 41, 397–469. Levi, M and Williams, M (forthcoming) The cost of cybercrime and public-private partnerships in the UK: eCrime Reduction Partnership Mapping Study (Cardiff School of Social Sciences). Maguire, M (2000) ‘Policing By Risks and Targets: Some Dimensions and Implications of Intelligence-Led Crime Control’ Policing and Society 9, 315–36. —— (2008) ‘Criminal Investigation and Crime Control’ in T Newburn (ed), Handbook of Policing (Cullompton, Willan). Maguire, M and John, T (2006) ‘Intelligence-led Policing, Managerialism and Community Engagement: Competing Priorities and the Role of the National Intelligence Model in the UK’ Policing and Society 16(1), 67–85. Mann, K (1985) Defending White-Collar Crime (New Haven, Yale University Press). Morgenson, G and Story, L (2011) ‘As Wall St. Polices Itself, Prosecutors Use Softer Approach’ New York Times, 8 July. NFA (2011) Fighting Fraud Together: The strategic plan to reduce fraud (London, Home Office). Potpariˇc, D and Dvoršek, A (2011) ‘Critical success factors in establishing a national criminal intelligence model in Slovenia’ in G Meško, A Sotlar, and J Winterdyk (eds), Policing in Central and Eastern Europe – Social Control of Unconventional Deviance, Conference Proceedings, 259–82. (Ljubljana, University of Maribor). Ratcliffe, J (2010) ‘Intelligence led policing: Anticipating risk and influencing action’, www. jratcliffe.net/papers/Ratcliffe%20(draft)%20ILP-Anticipating%20risk%20and%20 influencing%20action.pdf. Reiner, R (2010) The Politics of the Police, 4th edn. Fourth edition. (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (2011) In Praise of Fire Brigade Policing: Challenging the Police Role (London, Howard League for Penal Reform). Senior, P, Wong, K, Culshaw, A, Ellingworth, D, O’Keefe, C and Meadows, L (2011) Process Evaluation of Five Integrated Offender Management Pioneer Areas Research Series 4/11 (London, Ministry of Justice). Shaw, M (2011) Know Your Enemy: An Overview of Organized Crime Threat Assessments (New York, International Peace Institute). SOCA (2010) Mass-Marketing Fraud: A Threat Assessment, International Mass-Marketing Fraud Working Group (London, SOCA). —— (2011a) The United Kingdom Threat Assessment of Organised Crime 2009/10 (London, SOCA). —— (2011b) Suspicious Activity Reports Regime: Annual Report 2011 (London, SOCA). Takats, E (2006) ‘A Theory of ‘Crying Wolf ”: The Economics of Money Laundering Enforcement’ International Monetary Fund Working Papers (Washington, DC, IMF). Tavares, C, Thomas, G and Roudaut, M (2010) Money laundering in Europe: Report of work carried out by Eurostat and DG Home Affairs (Luxembourg, Eurostat).



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van Duyne, P and Levi, M (2005) Drugs and Money: Managing the Drug Trade and CrimeMoney in Europe (London, Routledge). van Duyne, P and Vander Beken, T (2009) ‘The incantations of the EU organised crime policy making’ Crime, Law and Social Change 51, 261–81. Wood, J and Kemshall, H (2007) The Operation and Experience of Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) Research Findings 285 (London, Home Office). UNODC (2010) The Globalization of Crime – A Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment (Vienna, United Nations). Zoutendijk, A (2010) ‘Organised crime threat assessments: a critical review’ Crime Law and Social Change 54, 63–86.

11 Democracy and Police and Crime Commissioners TREVOR JONES, TIM NEWBURN and DAVID J SMITH

In January 2012, we find ourselves on the cusp of a reform of the system for the governance of the police that promises to be the most far-reaching for half a century. Parliament has passed legislation deriving from the Conservative Party manifesto that will remove police authorities from all police force areas in England and Wales, replacing them with directly elected ‘Police and Crime Commissioners’.1 These reforms amount to an important change in the relationship between policing and democratic institutions. As Robert Reiner (1993: 1) has observed, how the police utilise the state’s monopoly of legitimate force ‘speaks to the very heart of the condition of a political order’. Advocates of the reforms argue that directly elected Commissioners equal more and better democracy and a police service that is at once more effective and more attuned to the needs and wishes of citizens. Yet it is easy enough to construct a contrary argument that the reforms will force the police to play to the priorities of the Sun, the Star and the Daily Mail, and that far from producing more effective policing, they will lead to a focus on newsworthy matters that have little relevance to the wellbeing of most of the population, and a race to the bottom in policing standards. It follows both from Robert Reiner’s work and from our own writings on this subject that both of these positions involve gross distortions and over-simplifications. Democracy consists of a set of values and principles expressed in a range of complex institutions. A change in just one of a number of accountability mechanisms for just one of the key state institutions is potentially significant, but has to be carefully interpreted in the context of the larger pattern. We therefore begin by examining democracy and policing through an exploration of key themes in Robert Reiner’s work. We then outline the emerging policing reforms – as they are currently understood – before going on to assess the likely impact of the new Police and Crime Commissioners in terms of a framework of values implicit in contemporary ideas of democracy.

1   Similar measures have not yet been introduced in Scotland, where recent discussion has focused on the possibility of merging the eight police forces into a single national one. Elected Police and Crime Commissioners are more likely to be considered after a decision about mergers has been taken.

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I.  Democracy and Policing: Key Themes in Reiner’s Work As might be expected in a writing career of 40 years or so, the theoretical and empirical substance of Robert Reiner’s work have changed and developed over the years. Yet there are key threads running through all of his work that speak in contrasting ways to current proposals for reform of police governance in England and Wales.

A.  The Tragic Necessity of Public Policing The first theme is Reiner’s pragmatic endorsement of the necessity of a public police organisation in a complex modern liberal democratic society. This is made clear in his compelling account of how his intellectual project was shaped by his own personal biography and family history. He recounts the unease he felt, even at a very early stage in his career, with the ‘wilder extremes of police bashing common on the left from the 1960s to the 1980s’ (1998: 92). As the child of Holocaust survivors who had subsequently fled Stalinist totalitarianism, he had a deep-seated suspicion of utopianism, whether of the left or the right, and embraced pragmatically the ideals of liberal democracy. A realist acknowledgement of the importance of public policing as a vital component of such democracy has been an enduring theme of Reiner’s work. All his writings on policing have recognised ‘the inevitable requirement in a complex society for a body capable of regulating emergency conflicts with the use of legitimate force’ (1998: 87). This charts a middle way in a field that has often been polarised, politically and intellectually. Such polarisation reached a high point during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the radical left raged about the authoritarian tendencies of public policing in capitalist societies (Hall et al, 1978; Scraton, 1985, 1987), whilst neo-liberal commentators argued for the privatisation of policing (Adam Smith Institute, 1980). However, the intellectual and political legacies of such polarisation remain, with radical left analysis of policing sometimes chiming in bizarre ways with those of ‘nodal governance’ theorists in the academic world (and perhaps proponents of the ‘Big Society’ in the political arena). Radical Left analysts still emphasise the partisan role of policing institutions in supporting the repressive capitalist system of class domination (Harman, 2006). Such approaches can imply the impossibility of progressive reform without a transformation of the existing system of property relations. On the other hand, nodal governance theorists claim that ‘state-centred’ conceptions of public policing are on the wane as a conceptual framework, and no longer describe the reality of policing on the ground. At the same time these theorists make the normative judgement that non-state nodal governance offers the potential for more equitable and democratic security provision (Johnston and Shearing, 2003). Notwithstanding his concerns about the ways in which the police can be (and have been) deployed to protect the interests of the



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powerful, Reiner has always presented the public police as a ‘quintessential’ public service having the capacity to provide necessary protection for the basic democratic liberties of all citizens. The ‘tragic’ nature of this necessity springs from the inevitability that democratic social authority must at times be underpinned by force, or the threat of force. Also, that ‘tragic necessity’ is inseparable from the uncomfortable paradox that the powers that are given to the police to protect fundamental freedoms can themselves be abused to undermine such freedoms. Neither radical police-bashing nor neo-liberal proposals for market-based provision provide realistic concrete policy programmes to deal with this paradox.

B.  The Police Function in Democratic Societies The second theme concerns Reiner’s arguments about the nature of the police role in contemporary democracies. On the evidence of his comprehensive reviews of the ever-expanding body of sociological research on policing (1984, 1992, 2000, 2010), Reiner has repeatedly underlined the importance of order maintenance as the central policing function. This contradicts the central assumption of politicians, the general public and many front-line police officers, who remain wedded to the idea of the police as primarily crime-fighters. This account of policing has most recently been re-affirmed in the political arena by the current Home Secretary in a speech to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) conference in 2010 when she announced the immediate abolition of the nationally-set public confidence target and the other targets associated with the ‘Policing Pledge’. What explains the enduring nature of such mistaken cultural and political assumptions about the relationship between policing and crime? Reiner’s work has helped provide some general answers to this question through his wide-ranging analysis of factual and fictional media (mis)representations of the role of the police. This misunderstanding of the police role has important political connotations, he has argued. It pushes governments and the police into chasing a hopeless cause – seeking the magic copper bullet that will in itself cut crime. However politically attractive may be the prospect of solving the crime problem through more or different or better policing, the search for a policing solution is bound to fail. This is because most of the causes of crime are inevitably beyond the control of the police, as they are located in the wider social and economic structures of societies. Policing can, of course, reinforce and exacerbate existing patterns of social and economic inequality, but it does not cause them (Reiner, 2007). An explicitly social democratic analysis of crime and its causes thus informs Reiner’s views about the limitations of the police crime control function in contemporary democracies. Not only has it been demonstrated by numerous empirical research studies that policing solutions in practice only have a marginal impact on overall crime rates, but also Reiner presents arguments as to why this is inevitably the case. It is government policies outside the realm of policing and criminal justice that have the greatest impact on aggregate rates of crime. These include the degree to which government

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macroeconomic policies provide employment and other economic opportunities, the success with which fiscal policy can bring about a more equal distribution of wealth without producing damaging disincentives, and a range of other social, educational and welfare interventions to promote equality of opportunity and social protection for the worst-off in society (Reiner, 2007). Policing can never be the solution to deeper social pathologies. In Reiner’s view the neo-liberal social and economic policies of recent decades have undermined the prospects for an inclusive society, and the most that we can expect of the police is to attempt to contain some of the more unpleasant manifestations of this context of increasing inequality and competitive individualism. The austerity programme of the Coalition government in combination with its ‘crime fighting’ view of policing embodies this contradiction even more than the programmes of other recent governments, which have shared the same myopia about the limits of policing (Reiner, 2008).

C.  Democratically Accountable Police Governance The final key theme concerns Reiner’s proposals for reform of police governance. Although holding to the democratic necessity of a public police service, he considers that threats to civil liberties inherent in such an institution make the framework of accountability of absolutely vital importance. And it is here that we find some interesting paradoxes with regard to the current proposals. For many years, Reiner has been an explicit critic of the system of police governance that evolved in England and Wales from the Victorian period up to the 1970s. In particular, he has argued that the doctrine of ‘constabulary independence’ lacks legal basis and provides a democratically flawed means of protecting chief constables from proper scrutiny. As he and Sarah Spencer put it in a publication for the left-leaning think tank IPPR in the early 1990s: questions about the directions and methods of policing are not just technical ones but also political ones about the limits of state power and the nature of a society. Such questions must, like the law itself, ultimately be decided in a democracy by the electoral process (Reiner and Spencer, 1993: 175)

Reiner goes on to make clear that since policing has both national and local functions, national and local politicians should have a say in its accountability arrangements. However, he has been a robust critic of the growing degree of centralisation of control over policing that has developed in the UK for many decades. In particular, for over two decades now he has expressed concerns that such centralisation has effectively neutered local government as an effective influence over policing policy and practice, and created what amounts to a de facto national police force (Reiner, 1991). This system provides national politicians with power over policing without corresponding levels of political responsibility within an ineffectual formal system of ‘local’ police accountability. Reiner has thus been a steadfast supporter of greater local electoral involvement in the setting of policing policy priorities long



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before New Labour or Conservative politicians themselves approached such a position (or re-approached such a position in the case of Jack Straw). In the same IPPR volume quoted above, Reiner and Spencer argued that since most crime and disorder issues are essentially local, it is elected local government that should be at the heart of any system of police accountability.2 When, during the 1990s, Conservative governments diluted the elected element on local police authorities, Reiner argued strongly for fully elected bodies with enhanced powers to set priorities for their chief constables and hold them fully to account for implementing them (Reiner, 1993). The progressive undermining of the locally elected element of police accountability in England and Wales has been accompanied by (and to a great degree caused by) the complementary expansion of the influence of the Home Office. Reiner (1991, 2010) has detailed the various levers of Home Office influence, but over the past decade the most powerful of these has been an increasingly dominant ‘performance management’ model of policing, based on nationally set objectives and local targets enforced by the Inspectorate of Constabulary. These policies have their roots in the ‘value for money’ reforms introduced across the public sector by Conservative administrations in the 1980s and 1990s. ‘Management by targets’ hit the police service with a particular force following the Police and Magistrates’ Courts Act 1994, which introduced national performance objectives for policing along with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). But it was the New Labour administrations of 1997–2010 that became most associated with this radical centralisation based upon a managerialist model of businesslike performance management. Reiner has argued that this performance framework has done more to curtail and control the policy-making autonomy of chief constables than any 1980s radical could have dreamed of. Although no friend of ‘constabulary independence’, Reiner has deep concerns about this way of controlling it. Performance management systems aim to take the politics (and thus the democracy) out of policing, presenting it instead as a matter of neutral ‘technical’ expertise. Whilst Reiner’s most recent edition of the Politics of the Police recognised recent attempts to introduce a ‘new localism’ (McLauglin, 2005) into police governance in England and Wales, he remained pessimistic about the potential for a significant re-balancing of control, arguing that ‘[w]hether in practice any party in office would reverse the centralizing managerialist trajectory of recent years, so long as the politics of law and order remain as heated as in recent decades, must be doubtful’ (2010: 237). Of course, this was written before the election in May 2010 of the current Coalition Government, with its radical proposals to sweep away centrally imposed performance targets and to introduce directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners. The potential of these reforms for re-establishing local police accountability in terms that Reiner might welcome will be considered in a later section. 2   Of course, at the time Reiner and Spencer made this argument there were already growing pressures upon the police to respond more effectively to national and supra-national forms of crime, which have arguably accelerated further in the past decade. This clearly raises tensions for a system of democratic accountability that puts primacy on ‘the local’, and we discuss this further in the final section of the chapter.

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One further aspect of Reiner’s writing on policing should be mentioned. Although an enthusiastic supporter of greater local accountability, Reiner has always argued, against those who propose one-dimensional and over-simple solutions to complex problems, that there is a need for a range of overlapping and interlocking accountability mechanisms. In various editions of the Politics of the Police, he has highlighted the paradoxical position of radical critics who adopt structural explanations of the deviance of young working class men but resist such structural explanations in their analysis of the deviance of police officers. Typically their model of police accountability is underpinned by punishment of individual wrongdoers within the police service and its deterrent effects – whereas they argue against using punishment and deterrence as the main plank of policy to combat crime outside the police service. Reiner’s analysis of the problem of police accountability has always emphasised the multi-faceted nature of the accountability problem, and the need for individual police officers to share the values that are implicit in accountability mechanisms, if they are to have any effect on police behaviour. This is because much front-line police work takes place away from the eyes of supervisors and the general public and therefore remains socially invisible (though see recent work on ‘sousveillance’, see Monahan, 2006). Reiner concludes that enhanced local electoral control is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a democratically accountable police service. In addition to locally elected representatives, a democracy requires a range of complementary accountability mechanisms, including support for the legal regulation of police powers through the criminal and civil law and through codes underwritten by law which regulate police conduct in criminal investigation. It also needs other effective institutions of ‘individual’ accountability such as an independent and properly resourced police complaints system, and a functioning system of internal discipline and management within the police organisation itself. Will the current reforms strengthen the links between the police and the network of democratic institutions in a way that Reiner would recognise, will they enable people to influence policing in a productive way, and will they facilitate the development of the kind of democratic discussion and values that Reiner advocates? In trying to answer such questions, we first need to sketch the system of police governance as it was in 2011 after a long period of development through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to outline the changes that are to be implemented from 2012.

II.  The Current Proposals for Reforming Police Governance A.  The System Prior to Reform The pre-2012 system for police governance was established by the Police Act 1964, amended subsequently by the Police and Magistrates’ Courts Act 1994 and con-



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solidated by the Police Act 1996. Under the Police Act 1964, and as amended, there were intended to be three main parties involved in police governance: the Home Secretary; the chief constable; and, the local police authority. The 1964 Act gave particular responsibilities to each of the parties in this tripartite structure. The main duty of a police authority was to ‘secure the maintenance of an adequate and efficient police force for the area’. To this end, police authorities, subject to the Secretary of State’s agreement, were to have the power to appoint the chief constable, with the support of the Secretary of State to call upon a chief constable to retire, and to determine the number of persons of each rank that would constitute the establishment of the force. Henceforward, police authorities were to consist of a mix of locally elected councillors (two-thirds) and magistrates (one-third). Chief constables were to be responsible for the ‘direction and control’ of their force and were to submit to the police authority an annual report on the policing of the area. Finally, the Act required Secretaries of State to exercise their powers in a manner and to the extent ‘best calculated to promote the efficiency of the police’. The Home Secretary could call on a chief constable to submit reports on the policing of the area and could require local police authorities under specific circumstances to use their power to call upon the chief constable to retire in the interests of efficiency. The Police and Magistrates’ Courts Act 1994 made a number of significant changes to the system of police governance. First, the general duty of a police authority to maintain ‘an adequate and efficient’ police force for its area (1964) was amended to the duty to maintain, ‘an efficient and effective’ police force (1994). Second, the Act empowered the Home Secretary to set national objectives for the police, and required police authorities to have regard to these when promoting the efficiency and effectiveness of the force. On top of these national objectives, police authorities were required to determine local objectives for the police force area for the coming year and to issue a plan setting out police arrangements for the area. Finally both police authority size and membership were amended. The majority was to be limited to 17 members only, of whom nine would be local councillors, three would be magistrates and the remaining five local ‘appointees’. A proposal that these appointments be made by the Home Secretary was defeated in Parliament, with the consequence that both the Secretary of State and the local police authority had a hand in the selection process (Jones and Newburn, 1997). There are two further aspects of police governance and change that are worthy of mention in this context. The first concerns police-public consultation; the second, the broader managerialist reforms that took root in the 1990s. Thus far we have focused on the three primary partners to the tripartite system of police governance – the Secretary of State, the police and the local police authority. In the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton riot, Lord Scarman had been critical of the lack of consultation between the Metropolitan Police and the local community and highlighted this as a critical factor in the deteriorating police-public relations in the area. Scarman favoured the introduction of local consultation mechanisms at police divisional or sub-divisional level. Such forums quickly began to emerge – being generally known as Police Community Consultative Groups – and were put on a statutory

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footing by section 106 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1994 (later section 96 of the Police Act 1996). The other major development was the growing emphasis on economy, efficiency and effectiveness and performance management, beginning in the early 1980s and developing throughout that decade and especially in the 1990s. A series of Home Office circulars and the increasing influence of the Audit Commission on local police performance all reflected a growing concern with the effective use of resources, so much so that Robert Reiner argued that it was indicative of a fundamental shift toward a new form of ‘calculative and contractual’ police governance (Reiner, 1993). It is against this very general backdrop that the most recent changes have emerged.

B.  The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act and Related Reforms In 2010 a Coalition government White Paper highlighted what it promised would be the most radical reform of police governance in half a century, in particular through the introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs). Although something similar was first mooted by the think-tank Policy Exchange in 2003, it was only with the publication of the Conservative Party 2010 Election Manifesto (Conservative Party, 2010) that it took on the appearance of formal policy. The manifesto promised to ‘introduce measures to make the police more accountable through oversight by a directly elected individual, who will be subject to strict checks and balances by locally elected representatives’. This was one of the proposals that survived the Coalition negotiations and, using the precise wording of the Conservative manifesto, the policy found its way into the formal Coalition Agreement3 (HM Government, 2010). More detailed plans were then outlined in a consultation document, Policing in the 21st century: reconnecting police and the people (Home Office, 2010), published in July 2010. The document began with the government’s stated aim of empowering the public, in particular by ‘increasing local accountability and giving the public a direct say on how their streets are policed’. At the heart of the reforms was the proposed abolition of local police authorities and their replacement by what were referred to for the first time as ‘Police and Crime Commissioners’ (PCCs). The Commissioners were described as ‘powerful representatives of the public’ who will ensure that: • the public can better hold police forces and senior officers to account; • there is greater public engagement in policing both in terms of priority setting and active citizenship; • there is greater public – rather than Whitehall – ownership of force performance; and

3   The Coalition Agreement can be found at webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100526084809/ http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/crime-and-policing/ .



Democracy, Police & Crime Commissioners 227 • the public have someone ‘on their side’ in the fight against crime and ASB [anti-social behaviour].

In due course provisions were included in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, which was introduced on 30 November 2010. As suggested above, it contains the most radical policing reforms attempted for some time. In the Act, which received Royal Assent on 15 September 2011, there are provisions for the election of Police and Crime Commissioners (one for each local area for a four-year term, apart from the Metropolitan and City of London forces) as a replacement for police authorities. These first elections, outside London, will occur in November 2012. The PCC responsibilities include securing the maintenance of the police force, ensuring that it is efficient and effective, as well as holding the chief constable to account for the exercise of a range of duties. The Commissioner is also responsible for appointing and dismissing the chief constable and for agreeing the appointments of deputy and assistant chief constables. They will have a duty to issue Police and Crime Plans which would which will set out: • the elected local policing body’s police and crime objectives (including the policing of the local area, crime and disorder reduction in that area and the discharge by the relevant police force of its national or international functions); • the policing of the police area which the chief officer of police is to provide; • the financial and other resources which the elected local policing body is to provide to the chief officer of police for the chief officer to exercise the functions of chief officer; • the means by which the chief officer of police will report to the elected local policing body on the chief officer’s provision of policing; • the means by which the chief officer of police’s performance in providing policing will be measured; • the crime and disorder reduction grants which the elected local policing body is to make, and the conditions (if any) to which such grants are to be made. Crucially, the chief constable will be appointed by the PCC and, under specific circumstances, the PCC may suspend the chief constable from duty and may call upon them to resign or retire. This is one of a number of ways in which the new Act removes a small number of the Home Secretary’s powers. In addition, one of new Home Secretary Theresa May’s first acts was to abolish national targets. The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act allows that the Secretary of State may give guidance about the matters to be dealt with in police and crime plans, to which the Police and Crime Commissioner must have regard, but goes no further. Although the pre-legislation consultation paper said that the government would ‘continue to have a role in setting the national strategic direction for the police’ (Home Office, 2010: 19) in particular in relation to ‘issues of sufficient risk or national importance to warrant national oversight and requirement’ with the Home Secretary retaining powers to ensure that these were dealt with effectively

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(Home Office, 2010: 17) it is as yet unclear how the balance between national interests and local concerns will be managed under the emergent system. In England, outside London, it will be the responsibility of the local authority, or authorities, in a police force area to establish a Police and Crime Panel (PCP). PCPs will have a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 20 members. All local authorities will have at least one councillor representative on the PCP. Where there are fewer than 10 councils in the area, it will be up them collectively to agree how the minimum figure of 10 is to be reached. In addition to local councillors, at least two other members may be co-opted to join the PCP. Indeed, the number of co-opted members may exceed two, so long as the Secretary of State is in agreement with the number involved and that the maximum membership size of 20 is not breached. The PCP will act as a committee of the local authority, or a joint committee of all relevant local authorities.4 Unlike in England, PCPs in Wales will not be committees of local authorities and will instead be freestanding bodies established by the Home Secretary. However, Home Office guidance suggests that local authorities and councillors within Wales are nevertheless anticipated to play a leading role in this reform (Home Office, 2011). In Wales, and also in England in cases where the number of members of a PCP falls below the number required by legislation, the Home Secretary has the power to appoint additional members. Its functions will be exercised in support of the PCC, and will involve the review of the draft Police and Crime Plan. The role of the PCP will be to review, scrutinise and make reports on the activities of the PCP. In doing so, it may hold public meetings at which it may require the attendance of the PCC and any staff employed by the PCC. It may also request written reports from the PCC.

i.  The situation in London The position in London is somewhat different from the rest of the country. As the capital already has an elected Mayor it will not need to elect a Police and Crime Commissioner. Nor did it need to wait until late 2012 before beginning to make new arrangements for police governance. In January 2012, London Mayor Boris Johnson appointed the deputy mayor Kit Malthouse (his Deputy) as head of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPC). Malthouse thus became responsible publicly for the performance of the police in the capital, for setting the strategic direction of the Metropolitan Police and for allocating its resources. Interestingly, of course, and unlike PCCs outside of London, Malthouse has not been directly elected to this position. As other areas will do subsequently, a Police and Crime Panel (PCP) has been established.5 This panel, though working alongside the MOPC, will enable a degree of independent oversight of the MOPC and will therefore be one means by which the London Assembly can hold the Mayor to account in his ‘PCC’ role. Currently the Metropolitan Police Authority employs approxi  See Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, sch 6.  Details of the PCP can be found at www.london.gov.uk/moderngov/mgCommitteeDetails. aspx?ID=240 . 4 5



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mately 112 people, of whom over 30 are involved in internal audit activities. It is also open to the Mayor to establish an advisory board to support the work of the Mayor and Deputy. As yet, no decision has been taken – or made public – as to whether such a board will be established.

III.  The Aims and Objectives of the Reform Proposals In its consultation document, Policing in the 21st Century: Reconnecting police and the people, the Coalition government set out a number of strands of police reform. The first, signalled in its title, was to reconnect the police with the public. To do this, it proposed to transfer power back to the public, primarily through the introduction of directly elected Commissioners, but also through the abolition of national targets and the devolution of responsibility for the bulk of planning and target-setting to the local area. The introduction of PCCs is part of a wider process of reform aimed at the police – albeit that this is the most significant of them all. The reform of police governance is part of a narrowing of vision of what policing, fundamentally, is about. As the Home Secretary put it in her speech to the party conference: I’ve been clear from the beginning that the test of the effectiveness of the police, the sole objective against which they will be judged, the way in which communities should be able to hold them to account, is their success in cutting crime. I haven’t asked the police to be social workers, I haven’t set them any performance indicators, and I haven’t given them a thirty point plan, I’ve told them to cut crime.6

All current reform proposals have to be understood within the wider context of financial restriction and budget cuts. The 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review cut central government police funding by 20 per cent in real terms by 2014–15. It signalled that the overall budget restrictions could be less than this if local police authorities opted to increase the precept at the level forecast by the Office of Budget Responsibility, though they would still reduce by approximately 14 per cent. It was in this context that the government outlined a second reform strand: the reduction of police bureaucracy. To this end, it said that in order to protect key priorities, police forces will need to focus on driving out wasteful spending, reducing back office costs and improving productivity. The Government will support this by ending central targets and cutting out time-wasting bureaucracy that hampers police operations.7

This built on work undertaken initially by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and subsequently by the Reducing Bureaucracy in Policing Advocate, Jan Berry.8 Perhaps the most controversial of the reductions in ‘form-filling’ has been the  www.newstatesman.com/2011/08/police-officers-crime-policing .   Spending Review 2010, Cm 7942, London: The Stationery Office. 8   See www.policesupers.com/uploads/news/reducing-bureaucracy-policing.pdf . 6 7

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cutting of requirements for recording stops and searches and in relation to stop and account. In March 2011, section 1 of the Crime and Security Act 2010 came into force, reducing the number of items recorded during a stop and search from 12 to 7. In addition this removed the national requirement to record stop and account. Police forces thereafter were allowed to take local decisions about whether they feel that recording stop and account is necessary.9 A further set of changes, again designed to bring policing closer to the people, has concerned the public availability of crime statistics and crime maps. In the Coalition Agreement, published in 2010, the new government said that it would ‘oblige the police to publish detailed local crime data statistics every month, so the public can get proper information about crime in their neighbourhoods and hold the police to account for their performance’.10 Announced as heralding greater transparency in crime, policing and justice, a new website was launched in February 2011. Discussing the launch of an enhanced version of the website more recently, the Minister for Policing, Nick Herbert, said, ‘ahead of the introduction of elected police and crime commissioners, crime mapping is just one way in which the government is empowering communities and strengthening the link between the police and the public’.11 Police reform, it was anticipated, would pose a series of dramatic challenges for police leadership, and in August 2010 the Home Office also set in train a review, by Peter Neyroud, former Chief Executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency, of how police leadership and training might themselves be reformed. Neyroud’s final report recommended a ‘Police Professional Body, supported by a Charter, which would be responsible for the key national standards, both individual and organisational, qualification frameworks, leadership and training approaches for the service’.12 Such changes would result in the ‘repositioning’ of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), with some of its responsibilities being undertaken by the new professional body, and others being located in a new Council of Chief Constables.

IV.  Assessing the Reform Proposals What are we to make of the emergent reforms to police governance, and how should we assess them? Many claims have been made for the introduction of PCCs, not least that they will help ‘reconnect’ police and public; indeed, that they should empower the public to hold the police to account. These and linked claims all speak to the idea of ‘democratic policing’. The introduction of PCCs and associated reforms,   www.homeoffice.gov.uk/police/powers/stop-and-search/ .  www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/coalition_programme_for_government. pdf, at p 16. 11   At www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/28/police-launch-crime-map-2. 12  www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/consultations/rev-police-leadership-training/report?view =Binary, at p 11 9

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according the Home Secretary, are a core element in a ‘new model of democratic accountability’ in which there will be ‘a massive transfer of power from the government, to the people. They will be in charge, and every police officer – from chief constables, to the officer on the street – will have to answer to them’.13 Following our previous work in this area, it is against ideals of democracy that are compatible with the social democratic approach championed by Robert Reiner that we want to offer some initial thoughts on the most recent raft of police reforms. Corcoran (1983: 15) described democracy as ‘the world’s new univesal religion’. As if to prove him right, calls for more or better democratic cotrol of policing have come from commentators belonging to widely different politcal and ideological traditions. In the 1980s, the debate was dominated by conflict over the policing of the miners’ strike and inner-city civil disorder. Labourcontrolled police authorities that were sympathetic to the miners’ cause argued for more local ‘democratic’ control of policing and resisted the Conservative government’s demands that they contribute to policing the strike outside their own police areas. In the currency of this debate, socialism became identified with local democracy resisting central government control – even though socialism in postwar Britain had been far more closely associated with centralism. In that context, it was Jefferson and Grimshaw (1984) – sociologists belonging to a broadly socialist tradition – who were the first to propose directly elected local police commissions that would replace the police authority, appoint the chief constable and issue instructions to the local police chief on matters of policy. Two decades later, it was a right of centre think-tank, Policy Exchange, that was promoting a very similar set of reform proposals. In essence, it is these proposals that have now been implemented by a Conservative Home Secretary and a Conservative Justice Minister in a coalition government. An intriguing puzzle is why both the left and the right have found more democracy in policing attractive. Following Corcoran (1983), this could just reflect the universal glamour that the idea of democracy has achieved. Yet, shading their eyes from the dazzle, politicians and ideologues must presumably try to discern the concrete results that new democratic structures are likely to produce both for the people at large and, more particularly, for their own supporters. Whereas Jefferson and Grimshaw (1984) expected their proposed commissions to redress the injustices of a system biased against the poor and dispossessed, the Coalition government seems to expect these same commissioners to motivate the police to combat locally visible crimes more effectively. Our earlier study of Democracy and Policing (Jones et al, 1994; 1996) was based on research carried out between 1990 and 1992 in England, later supplemented by research in the Netherlands (Jones, 1995) and in France (Horton, 1995). In our analysis of the idea of democracy and its application to policing, we adopted, like Reiner, a broadly social democratic approach. On this view, democracy is a complex set of interrelated institutions and values, but its defining characteristics are 13   Theresa May, ‘The deal – one year on’, 9 May 2011, www.homeoffice.gov.uk/media-centre/speeches/ one-year-on .

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values rather than particular practices or institutional structures. We identified seven valued principles that act as criteria of democracy in the case of policing. These were: widespread participation in political decisions; responsiveness of policy to representative bodies; information to form a basis for decision-making by representatives; an even distribution of power between different actors in the system; the possibility of redress for example through removal of the chief constable; effective delivery of outputs, such as order maintenance, crime prevention, and prosecution. Finally we argued that all of these principles spring from a more fundamental concern with equity. A convenient way of assessing the government’s proposals is to consider how far they strengthen these principles and values. Will the directly elected commissioners along with the Police and Crime Panels deliver more and better democracy defined in these terms? Who will benefit most from the reforms, and will the beneficiaries be mainly supporters of the left or of the right? We have argued that democracy should not be defined in terms of particular institutional structures, but it is worth noting that the directly elected commissioners constitute a type of institution that has never up to now formed any part of the democratic system as it exists in Britain. Prima facie, therefore, it does not look like a development or enhancement of democracy on the British model. Members of Parliament and local councillors are elected to represent their constituents on all matters that may be discussed and decided by Parliament or the local council, or by central or local government. Voters may be attracted by candidates’ views overall, or by the general orientation of the policies they advocate, or even by a more specific programme they present, but in any such programme there are bound to be different elements that have to be balanced against each other. A candidate may emphasise helping the unemployed, but everyone understands that unemployment benefit has to compete for funds with primary education. What is new about PCCs is that their remit covers a specific and narrow field. By creating PCCs, Parliament gives birth to a multitude of dogs that didn’t bark. Where is the directly elected commissioner for primary schools, for example? For health services? For children’s services? To pose the question is to show that this new structure directs attention to one specific field of policy at the expense of others. It encourages people to assume that there are particular and exceptional problems with crime and policing: that there is public anxiety about crime, dissatisfaction with the police response, and conflict and controversy about public policy on these matters. In this respect, the reform proposals continue a process that began in the late 1970s, when the political parties began to compete in the field of criminal justice policy (Downes and Morgan, 1994). Party competition in this field makes fear, anxiety and insecurity a political commodity. Even when the parties do not explicitly argue that crime and insecurity are increasing, competing proposals to deal with them more effectively convey the message that they must be getting worse. The consequence is that after 15 years of substantial decline in crime, most people are still convinced that crime is going up (Chaplin et al, 2011). PCCs may add to the process of stoking the engine of crime and insecurity, but they could turn out to be its culmination, if they can act as the valve that lets off the steam built up as political competition ran out of control.



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Whether or not this can happen may depend on how the new institutional structures work out in detail. One important detail is how the mandate of the commissioners is defined in law and how it will be interpreted in practice. In three respects, the PCCs’ mandate has been narrowly defined in contrast with the broadly defined functions of the modern British police as they have evolved since the early nineteenth century. First, it does not give priority to crime prevention. Second, it does not cover the core function of maintaining public order. Third, it takes little account of police activities other than dealing with locally visible crime. By calling them ‘Police and Crime Commissioners’ Parliament makes it clear that PCCs are to guide the police in their role in dealing with crime. The policing plan, issued by the PCC, is to include a statement of the aims of the elected local policing body (the Policing and Crime Panel outside London) including their crime and disorder reduction targets, but there is no specific mention of crime prevention. By default, therefore, the new provisions emphasise catching offenders; by contrast, as outlined above, the prevention of crime was one of three core functions of the police set out by Rowan and Mayne in 1829, an objective that was regularly reiterated until the early 1990s when the politics of policing began rapidly to change. Equally important, preventing crime must inevitably involve a range of agencies beyond the police. The legislation does not establish any structures that would enable PCCs to control or facilitate crime prevention policy and practice by organisations other than the police. They differ from extant police authorities, for example, in that they will not be ‘responsible authorities’ under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Consequently, they will not formally be members of Community Safety Partnerships. In order to counteract the danger that PCCs could become something of a misnomer, referring narrowly to policing responsibilities, rather than broader policing and crime responsibilities, the 2011 Act places a mutual duty on PCCs and Community Safety Partnerships to cooperate to reduce crime and disorder, and re-offending. Of course, the designation ‘Police and Crime Commissioner’ ignores the large body of research which shows that much of what the police actually do (and always have done) has no direct relation with crime. As noted earlier, this has been a central feature of Reiner’s analysis of policing. Rowan and Mayne in 1829 made ‘the maintenance of public tranquillity’ the first duty of the police, and Reiner has always argued that resolving conflicts and preserving public order with minimum use of force are the primary functions of police in Britain. There is no explicit recognition of these functions in the definition of the mandate of the PCCs. If interpreted literally, this mandate could therefore lead to crime fighting (validated by an anxious electorate) at the expense of the more fundamental aim of keeping the peace. Equally important, there seems to be no recognition in the title that the electorate should have an influence on methods of public order policing, even though this is the most politicised form of policing and the one which most polarises public opinion. Although policing plans are to cover ‘the discharge by the relevant police force of its national or international functions’ locally elected commissioners do

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nothing to help with problems of accountability arising from levels above and beyond the local (see Bowling and Sheptycki, 2012). The miners’ strike of 1984–85 highlighted the need for the human resources and hardware to shift across police force boundaries to deal with major incidents, as indeed did the more recent English riots. Since then the growth of international terrorism and of organised crimes such as credit card fraud and of transnational crimes such as people smuggling, drug smuggling and money laundering have been matched by changes in patterns of policing, including a growth of secret police, expansion of electronic surveillance and undercover policing and closer links between police forces in different countries (Brodeur, 2010). National organisations have been created to deal with serious and organised crime (SOCA), with large-scale fraud (SFO) and with terrorism (counter-terrorism command at Scotland Yard). The new structures merely articulate local demands for policing as a response to ‘ordinary’ visible crime, and provide no mechanisms for regulating the response to serious, organised or transnational crimes or the forms of policing and the national police organisations that are arising in this context. Also, they provide no means of reconciling demands for resources arising from the various forms of policing. Direct elections are designed to convey the impression that the police are being made more accountable. However, it is only the most local and visible police that fall within the PCCs’ remit, whereas the police who were already least accountable continue to grow in importance with no increase in scrutiny. In short, because of the exceptional nature, in the context of the British system, of an elected office with a specific function like policing and crime, and because of the narrow way in which the mandate has been drawn, there is a risk that PCCs will lead to a focus on fighting (rather than preventing) crime and nuisance that is immediately visible to individuals at neighbourhood level. Although that can be justified as a response to public demand, as expressed through the new elections, such demand is largely shaped by the narrow definitions of policing that are built into the mandate of the PCC. What this analysis leaves out so far is the wider context in which the PCCs will be set. In many respects, this context remains the same as in 1990–92, when we carried out the research for Democracy and Policing. The introduction of PCCs complicates what was already a complicated system. The tripartite system of police governance (Home Office, chief constable, police authority) becomes quadripartite with the addition of the PCC and with the PCP taking the place of the former police authority. In our research, we found that police authorities had little or no influence on policy change. We might expect this small influence to wane still further as the PCPs replace the former police authorities, since the PCPs lose the limited role of the police authorities in the appointment of the chief constable. We might expect the PCC to have more power than the former police authorities because the PCC appoints and can dismiss the chief constable, whereas the police authorities had limited powers in this respect. Otherwise, the formal powers of the Panel and Commissioner seem to be evenly balanced: the Panel votes the funding and other resources (including crime and disorder reduction grants) and determines aims



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and objectives, whereas the Commissioner sets out a crime and policing plan. It is unclear how conflicts between the Commissioner and the Panel will be resolved, except that the Commissioner, being directly elected on a programme for crime and policing, may appear to have more legitimate authority than the Panel which will mainly consist of members co-opted from the constituent local authorities. In our earlier study, we analysed the institutional network that shapes policing by focusing on three examples of policy change in the 1980s: crime prevention; the police response to rape, domestic violence and child abuse; and civilianisation. Illustrating the complexity of the institutional networks, we considered the influence of 11 structures: central government, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, The Association of Chief Police Officers, the local authority associations, staff associations and trade unions, the Audit Commission and the National Audit Office, Parliament, police authorities, pressure groups and voluntary organisations, the media and individual police forces (generally arising from the views of their chief constables). In addition, we considered the effects of diffused cultural shift. Central government had much the strongest influence on change in all three areas of policy, although government initiatives all originated from the civil service rather than from ministers. Neither Parliament nor local police authorities had significant influence on the major policy changes in these areas, although Parliament of course had originally established the framework of governance within which the history unfolded. Each of the remaining eight structures had a significant influence on change in at least one area of policy, and diffused cultural shift was probably decisive in the case of the response to rape, domestic violence and child abuse. This is a picture of a system that was largely driven by civil servants at the centre, who had to negotiate a complex network of checks and balances to get anything done. The new PCCs may significantly tip the balance towards local influence, because they combine the power to appoint the chief constable with the legitimacy conferred by an election that relates only to crime and policing and to nothing else. We now examine the amended system of police governance in the light of the seven democratic values set out in our earlier study.

A. Participation In our earlier work (Jones et al, 1995), we placed the principle of participation last because ‘experience has shown . . . that getting together groups of people to discuss policing policy is an uphill struggle’. While agreeing that any kind of democratic process requires participation in some sense, we argued that ‘widening that participation beyond a fairly narrow circle may not always be possible or necessary, and other democratic objectives are substantially more important, because they can have a greater impact on the quality of life of the majority’ (Jones et al, 1994: 45). The kind of experience we had in mind was lack of popular enthusiasm for Police Community Consultative Groups and the finding by all observers that their discussions were mainly about trivial matters (Morgan, 1992). Clearly the decision

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to introduce elected PCCs runs counter to this logic. It makes (electoral) participation the top priority and justifies itself on the argument that more participation of this kind will produce a better quality of democracy and policing that is more suited to local needs. An important part of the background to this discussion is the decline of local government in Britain over the past 100 years: a decline in active participation, with very low turn-out at local elections and fewer people of local influence coming forward as candidates; a decline in respect along with the symbols and gestures that once made local government a source of identity – no twenty-first century Manchester Town Halls in the north of England; and a decline in real power as a result of the relentless attacks of central government on local authorities’ functions, for example in the fields of education and housing (White, 2005). The structure of police funding nicely illustrates the fiction of local influence and the reality of central power. Formally the Home Office contributes 51 per cent and the police authority 49 per cent – the fiction of local influence. In reality, most of the 49 per cent is raised through a block grant from the Home Office – the reality of central power. Furthermore, the Home Office tries to exercise direct control on how the money is spent, for example, it has until now specified the number of police posts. Whenever there is a need for action that can only be organised at a local level, central government is stymied by its own refusal to grant powers or influence to local authorities. For example, most forms of crime prevention – say, to reduce burglary and vandalism of schools – require collaboration between a range of local agencies, many of which are directly run or funded by local government. Yet central government has consistently declined to give local authorities the clear responsibility for crime prevention, with legally defined powers and a budget line. Instead it has used an assortment of tactics to stimulate local activity, such as working through ‘voluntary’ organisations or creating crime prevention coordinators on short-term contracts who have to bid for funds from a pot controlled by the Home Office. The sole advantage of this approach – pursued at the cost of coherence, consistency and effective implementation – is that it avoids giving strength to local government. PCCs continue the project of diminishing the influence of established structures of local government, this time by creating a rival focus of democratic legitimacy. In the nineteenth century, police forces (both in the towns and the counties) were controlled by a committee of the local authority. Because of force amalgamations, that structure is no longer possible, since many of the larger forces do not correspond with single local authority areas. Also, the earlier police committees were changed in several stages by the addition of non-elected members. The upshot is police authorities (now to be replaced by the similar Policing and Crime Panels) that have only a tenuous connection with local representation through the ballot box. The PCC, being elected to represent the whole police force area, cuts through these difficulties, but at the expense of a further erosion of coherent local government. The classic argument for participation in the democratic process – that it is something of intrinsic value for the self-development of the citizen – will hardly be advanced now in favour of PCCs. It is debateable that the opportunity to vote



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for a PCC once every four years or so will amount to a meaningful participation in the process of local police policy-making. Against this, however, it may be that the candidates’ competing programmes will crystallise ideas about local needs, that electoral campaigns will stimulate debate, and that the whole process will improve the quality of discussion about ways of preventing and responding to crime. There is some precedent to look to here in terms of the experience of elected mayors in England and Wales. Since the Local Government Act 2000, it has been possible, dependent on the requisite number of supporting signatures, to bring about a referendum in a local authority area about adopting different forms of local representative governance, including directly elected mayors. Although the idea has attracted significant support on both sides of the political spectrum, so far the appetite for directly elected mayors does appear to have been patchy to say the least14. In May 2010, however, the Coalition set out its commitment to creating directly elected mayors in the 12 largest English cities outside London, subject to confirmatory referendums and full scrutiny by elected councillors, and a number of referenda are due to take place in 2012. To date, the evidence about the impact of turnout in local mayoral elections has been mixed, but there has been little evidence of the dramatic positive influence suggested by the supporters of directly elected mayors (Elcock and Fenwick, 2007). This is not to say, however, that PCC elections will simply follow this pattern. It may be that a combination of the novelty of the position, continued high levels of public concern about crime and policing issues, and perhaps even the association of PCCs with a ‘US model’ of direct democratic influence may all combine to stimulate the interest of voters and signal a reverse in apathy amongst local electors. The turnout rate in elections for PCCs will be a crude test of whether the aim of enhanced electoral participation has been achieved. More telling will be the quality of the candidates and their programmes, especially whether they cover the full range of policing issues and activities, or instead drum up fear and indignation about a few narrowly defined local problems.

B. Equity Our argument is that equity is the first principle of democracy, because the other elements derive from it: ‘For example, the argument for universal suffrage is that it is fair for every adult to have an equal vote’ (Jones et al, 1994: 46). Most decisions about the use of police resources and the choice of policing methods can be interpreted as attempts to strike a balance between the legitimate claims of different groups: for example, harms to suspects, as in widespread stop and search campaigns, have to be balanced against benefits to victims. Two of the policy changes that we studied could be seen as shifts towards greater equity. The improved response to rape, domestic violence and child abuse, could be seen ‘as an attempt to equalise the treatment of different of different sorts of victim, and to open up access to justice to certain 14   At the time of writing, there have been 37 referenda about whether to establish a directly elected mayor, and in only 12 of these has there been a vote in favour.

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disadvantaged groups’. The growth of crime prevention could also be seen as helping the weaker sections of society, who suffer disproportionately from crime, especially since much crime prevention activity is targeted on high-crime areas where disadvantaged people tend to live. Interestingly for the current discussion, our study demonstrated the key importance of central unelected influences in driving changes in these areas – in particular, senior civil servants, chief constables and campaigning groups at the national level – in contrast to the relative inertia of the local ‘democratic’ institutions who appeared to have little role in bringing about change. Whereas policing always involves striking a balance between competing and often conflicting demands, in the post-war period up to about 1980 this was done implicitly, discreetly and largely without public discussion. Chief officers, who took most of the decisions, routinely used the concept of constabulary independence to dampen public debate. The urban riots of 1981 and the miners’ strike of 1984/85 triggered a seismic shift in this whole landscape, and the push first by Conservative then by Labour governments towards effectiveness and efficiency as assessed by new performance indicators continued the process of change. Nevertheless, there is still little mature public discussion of the emphasis that should be given to different policing objectives (eg preventing serious fraud versus preventing burglary) or policing methods (eg covert surveillance and intelligence-gathering versus patrol). A likely effect of Police and Crime Commissioners could be to bring out into the open the tensions and contradictions between different objectives of policing and between the contrasting interests and demands of different clienteles of the police service. This may be helpful if it eventually raises the standard of public debate. A danger is that the elected commissioner could turn out to be the spokesperson for one (possibly large) section of the population at the expense of others, that the debate becomes over-simplified, and that the principle of equity is lost in the mêlée. On this view, the PCC system risks introducing a crude ‘majoritarian’ approach in which the police are pressured to respond to the punitive demands of the ‘respectable’ voting public who wish to see harsher enforcement action targets against particular groups, or place little weight on the importance of protecting particular kinds of victim. The relatively recent successes of extremist parties such as the BNP in local elections do pose a stark warning about the dangers of putting too much faith in direct democracy as a protector of the democratic value of equity. Against this viewpoint, some commentators have argued that the PCC system holds out the possibility for progressive reform of policing. Muir and Loader (2011), for example, have argued that Labour PCCs could use their electoral mandate to ‘hard wire’ social justice into local policing (among other things). This analysis echoes the arguments of the left during the 1980s, when it appeared that the police had little legitimacy in many disadvantaged local communities. Increased local democratic control over the police offered the hope of a more accountable police service that would be sensitive to the needs of its local populace. Some analyses of the English urban disorders of summer 2011 have resonated with earlier accounts of toxic police-community relations, and have placed a lack of trust and legitimacy of the police at the centre of explanations of the riots.



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C.  Delivery of Service We accorded second priority to delivery of service because every citizen benefits if policing is effectively and efficiently delivered, and we pointed out that the principle of effective service delivery flows from the principle of equity, since a well-policed society is more just than a badly-policed one. In fact, the principle of effective service delivery is widely accepted, whereas there is widespread disagreement about how it can best be achieved. First Conservative and later Labour governments became convinced that detailed targets and performance indicators were the key, whereas Hough (2007) and others have argued that such attempts to micro-manage policing from the centre create perverse incentives and encourage the police to concentrate on activities that have little positive impact and that tend to erode public confidence. The PCCs will be a new source of pressure on the police to show that they are achieving results in ways that matter to the electorate, and one that probably pushes back from an emphasis on ‘technocratic’ performance targets, which are more to the taste of unelected centralising bureaucrats. In this sense, it is quite possible to envisage improved delivery of service at the local level, if the PCC is more closely attuned to the needs and desires of the local voting population and clearly has an interest in ensuring that the police service meets these as far as is possible. At the same time, what ‘counts’ as good performance will be key here. There is a temptation for politicians, all-too-often witnessed at the level of national elections, to play to the gallery on matters of crime, policing and punishment. Whilst direct local control by PCCs will undoubtedly place the police under pressure to ‘perform’ better in visible ways, it will be easier to demonstrate such performance with reference to the traditional ‘measurables’ of arrests, detections and prosecutions, especially in the context of national politicians promoting an avowedly enforcement-oriented model of policing.

D. Responsiveness We gave third place to responsiveness, which had to be placed lower than equity since it would, for example, be undemocratic for the police to discriminate in law enforcement against an ethnic minority even if a local majority were to favour such a policy. Elected commissioners are clearly intended to make the police more responsive, but as pointed out in Democracy and Policing there is an equally good case for using surveys of the general public and of people who have come into contact with the police. Also, as earlier argued in Police and People in London (Smith and Gray, 1983) much of policing is a direct response to immediate demands from members of the public, so that public expectations directly shape the pattern of policing from day to day. At the same time, the police service actively propagates an image of itself through a myriad of specific actions by individual officers, but also through the organised policing of major events and through large symbolic gestures. This image

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in turn has a fundamental influence in helping to shape the demands on the police that come from the general public. This process can sometimes amount to a closed loop that excludes some kinds of crime from serious police attention, as happened for example in the case of rape and domestic violence until there was an energetic counter-move. It seems doubtful that the election of commissioners in itself can do much to search out submerged demands, such as the demand for a proper response to rape and domestic violence. Surveys in combination with elected commissioners could help, yet surveys run into the problem that much of the landscape of crime and policing is invisible to the general public. For example, people observe and hear about local burglaries, theft from the person and drunken brawls. They are less likely to hear about frauds and organised crimes which nevertheless can have a major impact on people living in their neighbourhood. Hence a deliberative process is needed to understand people’s views and preferences after interacting with some of the relevant information and arguments. The election of the commissioner in itself is unlikely to constitute a deliberative process of the kind that is needed.

E.  Distribution of Power An important democratic value is avoiding concentration of power among a few individuals or groups. However, our earlier research suggested that key commentators tended to have contrasting views about where the power was concentrated. Some critics on the left thought the power balance excluded the dispossessed and disadvantaged, others thought it had shifted too far to the Centre, whereas free market critics thought the monopoly supplier had too much power. Whatever else it does, the introduction of the elected commissioners complicates the situation still further, and it must shift at least some power away from central government, police chiefs and the police authorities (re-born as Policing and Crime Panels). This, at least, goes some of the way to meeting the objective of distributing power. How it will play out in practice, including the role of party politics in determining the manifesto platforms of PCCs, will be interesting to observe. As we noted earlier, Reiner (among others) has repeatedly expressed major concerns about the seemingly relentless tide of centralisation of control over policing in England and Wales during the past few decades. Despite the concerns about the specific nature of the reforms then, it does seem that the principle of greater local control is one that will find favour with critics of the former system. Considered in the context of the abolition of national league tables and performance targets, the PCC reforms do present a real attempt to shift the locus of power over policing away from the centre. Having said this, the question remains how ‘local’ the PCCs really will be. PCCs will be responsible for the large geographical areas currently covered by provincial police forces, often containing a number of cities, towns and neighbourhoods. In the absence of substantial devolution of budgetary and policy-making powers within police forces themselves, it is not immediately apparent that the election of



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a PCC at the top will necessarily enhance ‘local’ influence at the level of the neighbourhood, town or city.

F. Information We noted that there was wide agreement across the political spectrum that good information was needed for the achievement of all other democratic objectives. We also noted, however, that the framework of any set of measures of performance springs from a set of political objectives. ‘The democratic criterion cannot therefore be met by the provision of routine information alone. It is important, in addition, that somebody should be able to interrogate the police service and find out more through a sequence of interactions’ (Jones et al, 1994: 48). The elected commissioner should be able to perform that function and should therefore give more impetus to the demand for more and better information. The introduction and enhancement15 of local ‘crime maps’ referred to earlier is clearly part of a wider attempt to improve the access to information about local crime and disorder (and the police responses to these). In democratic terms, these are welcome developments, although in recent years very considerable amounts of information about local patterns of crime and disorder have already been available via published local policing plans and community safety audits and plans.

G. Redress The notion of redress is integral to democracy, but is certainly capacious. We interpreted it as the capacity to remove an incompetent or malevolent police management, but also the capacity to reverse policies that unfairly target particular groups and to right wrongs done to individuals by the police. The Police and Crime Commissioners will be the first local representatives to have the power to dismiss the chief officer, and this clearly strengthens the capacity for a local power with democratic legitimacy to remove an incompetent or malevolent police management. Although the analogy is not exact, it is notable that since the Mayor of London has had responsibility for policing the rate of turnover of chief officers of the Metropolitan Police has markedly increased – although there is room for debate as to whether this has improved the quality of policing in London. As to righting wrongs done to individuals and groups, it is less clear that the Police and Crime Commissioners will make an important difference. There is no particular mechanism for redress through the commissioner, and groups or individuals who have been wronged may not have any significant influence on the outcome of elections.

  See www.homeoffice.gov.uk/media-centre/news/crime-maps-extended .

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V.  Concluding Thoughts Returning to the three core themes of Reiner’s work that we outlined at the start, the current reforms of the system of police accountability present a mixed picture. On the one hand, there is clear potential for an enhancement of democratic input into policing in England and Wales. Reiner has for many years called for a stronger influence over policing by locally elected representatives in line with democratic ideals, and any attempt to reverse the long-term centralisation of influence over policing in England and Wales would surely meet his approval. At the same time, there is a range of strong reasons for remaining somewhat sceptical about the extent to which Police and Crime Commissioners, in the context of the whole set of interlocking systems of police accountability, itself set within the wider political context, may enhance ‘democratic policing’. PCCs add one more element to an already over-complicated and deliberately ambiguous system. While they tip the balance towards more local influence, particularly since the PCC has the power to appoint and dismiss the chief officer, this increase in local voter power comes at the expense of coherence in local administration. The creation of elected representatives with a limited and specific responsibility for policing and crime, and who are entirely separate from local councillors, is the latest in a long sequence of attacks on local government. The flaw in this system is that tackling crime requires coordinated actions by a range of local agencies. A local authority with responsibility for a range of local services, rather than a representative having specific responsibility for policing alone, is arguably in the better position to do this. This mistake flows directly from the political misconception so clearly identified by Robert Reiner that the police alone can be the magic copper bullet that puts an end to crime. Reinforcing and re-emphasising the mistake, the Act gives no specific responsibility for crime prevention to the PCC, although crime prevention has historically been seen (at least ideologically) as the first aim of the police service. More generally, the new provisions reflect a narrowing view of the functions of the police. Directly contrary to Reiner’s view that most basic police function is order maintenance (Reiner, 2011), the Act hardly refers to this function at all. Given that order maintenance occasionally requires decisions that are among the most controversial of all those taken by the police, this function is one that particularly requires a democratic input. The Act also narrows attention to a parochial view of what is of legitimate local concern, ignoring the increasing influence of national and cross-national crime, surveillance, investigation and enforcement mechanisms on what happens locally. Perhaps the greatest concern for those, like Reiner, who favour a more ‘social democratic’ analysis of crime and its causes, these reforms are being implemented in the context of savage cuts in public expenditure and growing social and economic inequality. Whilst the police will clearly have to be more directly responsible to local electoral pressures, there is a growing possibility that these local debates will take the form of the emotive ‘crime politics’ that characterised national politics during the 1980s and 1990s.



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The years since the late 1970s have seen ever-increasing competition between political parties on ‘law and order’ issues, with a continuing ratcheting up of political rhetoric, to the point where the public is convinced that crime is rising when in fact it has been falling for 18 years. The current reforms are the latest outcome of this political process. Perhaps the most important question to be asked about the reforms is whether they will ultimately contribute to the feedback loop that increases insecurity, making crime seem a more and more serious problem, and available solutions less and less convincing, or whether they will open a window onto a wider view and offer the prospect of a more deliberative and constructive debate. Unfortunately, because of the way that PCCs have been structured and defined, a positive outcome seems rather unlikely. When offered the opportunity to participate in democratic structures concerned with narrowly defined issues, most people decline, as shown by the experience of the Police Community Consultative Groups set up following the recommendations of the Scarman Report on the riots of 1981. Given that turnout in local elections is low – disastrously so in areas of deprivation – it seems likely that turnout in elections of PCCs will be even lower. More important, the wider context of political competition over fighting crime, the narrow definition of local policing that underpins the new provisions, and the separation between the PCCs and the structures and services of local government, will all make it difficult for the new democratic process to stimulate useful, wellinformed and constructive debate that is grounded in a mature appreciation of the real issues.

References Adam Smith Institute (1980) The Omega File: Local Government Policy (London, Adam Smith Institute). Bowling, B and Sheptycki, J (2012) Global Policing, (London, Sage). Brodeur, J-P (2010) The Policing Web, (New York, Oxford University Press). Chaplin, R, Flatley, J and Smith, K (2011) Crime in England and Wales, 2010–11, Home Office Statistical Bulletin 10/11 (London, Home Office). Conservative Party (2010) Invitation to Join the Government of Britain: The Conservative Manifesto 2010. Corcoran, P (1983) ‘The limits of democratic theory’ in G Duncan (ed), Democratic Theory and Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Downes, D and Morgan, R (1994) ‘Hostages to Fortune? The politics of law and order in post-war Britain’ in M Maguire, R Morgan and R Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Elcock, H and Fenwick, J (2007) ‘Comparing Elected Mayors’ International Journal of Public Sector Management 20(3), 226–38. Hall, S, Critcher, C, Jefferson, T, Clarke, J and Roberts, B (1978) Policing the Crisis (Basingstoke, Macmillan). Harman, R (2006) ‘The ruling class, its police, and the left’ Socialist Review, July.

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HM Government (2010) The Coalition: Our Programme for Government (London, Cabinet Office). Home Office (2010) Policing in the 21st Century: Reconnecting the Police and the People (London, Home Office). —— (2011) Police and Crime Commissioners Update No 2 September 2011 (London, Home Office). Horton, C (1995) Policing in France (London, Policy Studies Institute). Hough, M (2007) ‘Policing, new public management, and legitimacy in Britain’ in TR Tyler (ed), Legitimacy and Criminal Justice (New York, Russell Sage Foundation) 63–83. Jefferson, T and Grimshaw, R (1984) Controlling the Constable (London, Frederick Muller/ The Cobden Trust). Johnston, L and Shearing, C (2003) Governing Security (London, Routledge). Jones, T (1995) Policing in the Netherlands (London, Policy Studies Institute). Jones, T and Newburn, T (1997) Policing After the Act (London, Policy Studies Institute). Jones, T, Newburn, T and Smith, DJ (1994) Democracy and Policing (London, Policy Studies Institute). ——, —— and —— (1996) ‘Policing and the idea of democracy’ British Journal of Criminology 36(2), 182–98. McLaughlin, E (2005) ‘Forcing the Issue: New Labour, New Localism and the Democratic Renewal of Police Accountability’ Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 44(5), 473–89. Monahan, T (ed) (2006) Surveillance and Security: Technology, Power and Politics in Everyday Life (London, Routledge). Morgan, R (1992) ‘Talking about policing’ in D Downes (ed), Coming to Terms with Policing (Basingstoke, Macmillan). Muir, R and Loader, I (2011) Progressive Police and Crime Commissioners: An Opportunity for the Centre-Left (London, Institute for Public Policy Research). Reiner, R (1991) Chief Constables, (Oxford, Oxford University Press). —— (1993) ‘Police accountability: Principles, patterns and practices’ in R Reiner and S Spencer (eds), Accountable Policing (London, IPPR). —— (1998) ‘British criminology and the state’ British Journal of Criminology 29(1), 138–58. —— (2007) Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime Control (Cambridge, Polity). —— (2008) ‘The law and order trap’ Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 40, 123–34. —— (2011) In praise of fire brigade policing: Challenging the police role (London, Howard League for Penal Reform/LSE). Reiner, R and Spencer, S (1993) ‘Conclusions and recommendations’ in R Reiner and S Spencer (eds), Accountable Policing (London, IPPR). Scraton, P (1985) The State of the Police (London, Pluto). —— (ed) (1987) Law, Order and the Authoritarian State: Readings in Critical Criminology (Buckingham, Open University Press). Smith, DJ and Gray, J (1983) Police and People in London: IV The Police in Action (London, Policy Studies Institute). White, J (2005) ‘From Herbert Morrison to Command and Control: The decline of local democracy and its impact on public services’ History Workshop Journal 59( 1), 73–82.

12 Waiting for Ingleby: the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility – a Red Line Issue? DAVID DOWNES and ROD MORGAN

I. Introduction The topic about which we have chosen to write in honour of Robert Reiner is not one immediately associated with his, or indeed any of our names. But over the past two decades, the significance of the concept of the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) has come to have renewed relevance not only in relation to juvenile justice, its natural locus, but to developments in criminal justice and the politics of crime control more generally (see, for example, Cavadino and Dignan, 2006: ch 15). It is on this ground that we see the point of contact with Robert’s seminal contribution to the analysis of the political economy of ‘law and order’, most markedly in his Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control (2007). A more coincidental link is to the Law Department at the LSE and the postgraduate course seminars in Criminology run by Eryl Hall Williams, in which one of us took part on arriving at the LSE in 1959. The seminar was thinly attended. A fellow participant was Maureen Cain, and two visiting American scholars, one a New York probation officer on leave, made up a slender total of four. There were few signs of the coming upsurge in criminology. A Sociology Department seminar was run in parallel by Terence Morris, who was to enthuse a whole generation of British criminologists about the work of the ‘Chicago School’. Eryl, however, preferred to focus on socio-legal topics. He was clearly looking forward to the publication of the Ingleby Report on Children and Young Persons, but it was subject to delay. ‘We’re still waiting for Ingleby’ became something of a refrain in settling on seminar topics. When published in 1960, it recommended no great change in the juvenile court structure for dealing with juvenile offenders. But it did recommend, perhaps radically given that 8 of its 14 members were magistrates (Ravenscroft, 2011: 83), raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 8 to 12. More influentially, it also recommended far more inter-agency cooperation, as it would now be called,

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in relation to juvenile law-breaking. In 1963, the Conservative government compromised by raising the MACR to 10. Almost half a century on, that is where the MACR remains. We are still ‘waiting for Ingleby’, despite, as we shall see, a good deal of international criticism about our law and practice and a certain reluctance on the part of leading youth justice commentators to press the case for the MACR being raised. Why? We think Robert Reiner’s analysis in Law and Order illuminates this question.

II.  Robert Reiner’s ‘Law and Order’ Thesis Robert Reiner’s Law and Order provides a magisterial, subtly nuanced account of the relationship between neo-liberal thinking and ‘law and order’ government discourse since the late 1970s. In his analysis in Chapter Five, ‘A New Leviathan?’, he refers to the murder in 1993 of three year-old Jamie Bulger by two 10 year-old boys who, perhaps out of the delicacy he wished had been exercised by the court which tried them, he does not identify, but whose names, both at the time and following disturbing events since Robert wrote his book, must today be known to practically everyone. Robert cites the Bulger case because it is iconic for both his narrative and analysis. The manner in which the case was dealt with by the authorities and spoken about by politicians at the time is illustrative of the way in which individual victims are given prominence in media stories to highlight the need to protect those judged conspicuously innocent from evil wrongdoers, what Reiner describes as two out of five contemporary law and order themes emblematic of neo-liberal law and order policy – the Manichean foregrounding of victims versus offenders and the highlighting of individual not social responsibility for crime. In the Bulger case the judge described the offenders, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, as ‘cunning and wicked’, their offence ‘an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity’. Their trial – at Preston Crown Court, with the child defendants placed in the dock apart from their parents, with legal professionals bewigged and robed, heard by a jury – made no concessions to the defendants’ age and fell under the gaze of the world’s media (Morrison, 1997). The children were publicly identified and their photographs published. The details of the case were pored over in literally hundreds of newspaper articles and hours of television coverage (Newburn, 1997: 648), coverage made particularly harrowing because it included the Merseyside shopping centre CCTV footage showing James Bulger being led away to what became his death. Little, three year-old Jamie was the quintessential innocent, his taller, preadolescent abductors the personification of everything evil. Politicians quickly joined in what Young (1996: 113) described as the ‘national collective agony’ which the case inspired. Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, set the tone by contributing what one of his biographers described as a ‘speech-cum-sermon’ in which he spoke of ‘the moral chaos that engulfs us all’ (Sopel, 1995: 155).



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The Bulger case was also the crime par excellence which exemplified another of Reiner’s analytic themes, namely, that crime was made ‘public enemy number one’. For it was the case on which Tony Blair seized to signify that Labour would henceforward give high priority to law and order issues. It is too much to say that the case sparked the ‘popular punitiveness’ (Bottoms, 1995) which thereafter is said to have characterised the period. Jamie Bulger’s murder was but one of several highly publicised youth crime-related panics (young ‘joy riders’, ‘bail bandits’ and ‘persistent offenders’) which attracted media and political comment in the early 1990s. But Blair’s response to Bulger ratcheted up an inter-political party, generalised ‘law and order’ arms race which heralded the ascendancy of New Labour, culminating in their 1997 electoral victory and subsequent three terms of office. Labour had been widely expected to win the 1992 General Election but in the event narrowly lost it. Though the Party had shown signs of shaping up to attack the Conservative administration for the sharply rising crime rate and penal troubles which included the largest prison disturbances (at Strangeways Prison, Manchester and elsewhere in spring 1990) in British penal history, when it came to the election Labour chose not to do so and were derided by the Conservatives as ‘soft on crime’. The Tories deployed an election poster portraying their opponents as a police officer with one hand tied behind his back (Downes and Morgan, 1997: 99). But Blair’s post-election response to the Bulger case represented the law and order dog that would in future bark, and this aspect of New Labour’s strategy was not seen off by Michael Howard’s notorious ‘Prison Works’ speech to the Tory Party Conference of September 1993. New Labour became the exemplar of toughness, ‘tough on crime’ coming before ‘tough on the causes of crime’ (Dunbar and Langdon, 1998). ‘Zero tolerance’ was embraced and the Tories lambasted for promoting ‘lenient sentencing’. Kenneth Clarke and Michael Howard became the prisoners of Tony Blair and Jack Straw’s agenda rather than – as is conventionally assumed – the reverse (Downes, 1998; Downes and Morgan, 2002). New Labour’s stance as it developed from the early 1990s onwards exhibited the two other major characteristics of neo-liberal law and order policy according to Reiner: the high crime society normalised yet the view that crime control works. From 1997–2010 the Labour Party ‘governed through crime’ (Simon, 2007). As Prime Minister Blair emphasised in regular, carefully crafted, well-publicised speeches on the issue, the liberal ‘1960s revolution’ had had its benefits. There had been ‘a huge breakthrough in terms of freedom of expression’. Progress had been made against discrimination. Women’s equality had advanced. ‘Deference’ had declined and ‘rigid class divisions’ been rejected. This was all to the good. But a high price had been paid. ‘A society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline’. The public did not want a return to ‘old prejudices and ugly discrimination’. But they did want ‘rules, order and proper behaviour’, a society in which the ‘decent law-abiding majority are in charge; where those that play by the rules do well; and those that don’t get punished’ (see Morgan, 2006: 92–93). Thus, New Labour proclaimed, the ‘1960s liberal social consensus on law and order’ was over (Blair, 2004). And the fact that it was over was reflected in those

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achievements in which the Party took pride in its election manifestos after the millennium. There were now more police officers, equipped with more powers to deal with anti-social behaviour and crime. There were now more prison places. And there were more offenders in prison, locked up for longer. As a result, it was claimed, the incidence of police and British Crime Survey-recorded crime was significantly down. If the freedoms inherent in individualism and market deregulation had given rise to a more risky society, New Labour claimed it had through policing and criminal justice measures ensured a more respectful and safer environment than would otherwise have been the case. Use of the law had promoted order. Labour had proved itself the political party best capable of managing crime. Thus when the Labour Party lost the 2010 General Election and the incoming Coalition Government, led within the Ministry of Justice by former Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke, indicated that the ‘governing through crime’ policy had been overplayed and was possibly counter-productive (Clarke, 2010; Ministry of Justice, 2010), it was ex Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw who stood in the vanguard of those who protested that this would be to undo Labour’s achievements and put the public at risk (Straw, 2010). The Coalition’s proposed parsimony on the law and order front – cuts to the police budget, reform of sentencing policy and fewer offenders in prison – would, Straw and the critics claimed, jeopardise public safety. The record high prison population had, they argued, been a major factor in the reduction in the incidence of crime achieved since the mid-1990s. At the time of writing, summer 2011, it is impossible to say to what extent the Coalition will deliver their projected cuts to the ‘law and order’ budget, implement their radical programme of ‘payment by results’, ‘justice reinvestment’, devolution of responsibility for decision-making to the localities and resuscitation of decisionmaking discretion to the police, youth justice workers and probation officers and install directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners. Other, radical aspects of their programme – health service reform, the sale of Forestry Commission lands, the scrapping of free school meals and the housing benefit cap – have already witnessed major reversals, though the impetus behind the health service reform programme may mean that reversal amounts to little more than a delay in their implementation by other means. Resistance is building within the police and other criminal justice services to the cuts and the resignation, under pressure from Boris Johnston, Mayor of London, of Sir Paul Stephenson, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, is likely to exacerbate existing doubts about further politicising policing policy which the creation of Police and Crime Commissioners is widely thought to pose. Yet cutting public expenditure lies at the heart of government policy and there seems little doubt that ‘law and order services’ will be pressed into accepting their share, which inevitably implies shrinking resort to criminalisation and incarceration – less ‘governing through crime’. If that policy is to be pursued without fundamentally unscrambling the neoliberal policies that were pioneered during the Thatcher years, and taken up with enthusiasm and pushed further by New Labour, then we can reasonably hypothesise that alongside all the talk of the ‘Big Society’ there will be staunchly defended



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certain symbolically important, tough-sounding ‘red line’ policy stances of which, we suggest, not raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility is one. We may be forced to wait still longer for Ingleby.

III.  The Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility: A Brief History and the Case for Amendment A separate system of juvenile justice has existed for a little over a century in England and Wales though English law has always recognised that children cannot, by virtue of their immaturity and vulnerability, be held responsible for their actions in the same sense as adults. In modern times the age set for criminal responsibility was seven years. This was raised in 1933 to eight years and when, after four years of deliberation, the Ingleby Report was published in 1961, it recommended that the MACR be raised to 12 years with the ‘possibility’ of a further rise to 13 or 14 years ‘at some future date’. The age of 14, when a child is held to become a young person, had legal significance because there was a rebuttable presumption that children aged 8–14 years do not understand that of which they stand accused to be wrong (the origins of this so-called doli incapax rule are lost in the mists of time). The government bill drafted to enact the Ingleby recommendations omitted any clause to raise the MACR but Barbara Wootton, that doughty penal reformer, proposed an amendment in the Lords, which was carried by one vote, that the MACR be raised to 12. ‘The exclusive ritual of the Court was one reason why Barbara held the radical view that the treatment of children committing unlawful acts should not be the business of the courts at all’ (Oakley, 2011: 255). Back in the Commons a further amendment was carried that the MACR be 10 years (Wootton 1978: 161–62) and there, following the Children and Young Persons Act 1963, it remains to this day. Except that in 1998 the Crime and Disorder Act put back the clock by abolishing the doli incapax rule, thereby making children aged 10–14 unequivocally responsible in criminal law for their actions. We return to this change in the law below. The point at which the MACR is set is to some extent arbitrary, not least because, self-evidently, the state has a duty to do something in response to the behaviour of any child or young person, however old, which may be harmful to others or themselves. It follows that the acceptability of the point at which jurisdictions set their MACR depends heavily on the nature and quality of interventions with regard to the harmful behaviour of children and young people both younger and older than the MACR. The fact that the MACR is to some extent arbitrary is reflected in the fact that comparative study, of which the most comprehensive and authoritative has been undertaken by Cipriani (2009), reveals wide variation. The median MACR worldwide is 12/13 years but there are large differences in law and practice which a few examples will serve to illustrate. In France and Malaysia there is no MACR. In

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France criminal responsibility is a matter of the child’s discernement, which it is for the court to establish, though this has not inhibited procedural rules of thumb being applied (which means that 13 years is often taken to be the effective MACR) nor much politically driven toughening of sanctions in recent years for children held to have discernement. In Malaysia any person accused of a security offence is tried regardless of age though nothing is an offence if committed by a child who is not baligh, meaning not having attained puberty and, in the case of rape, it is assumed that a boy younger than 13 is incapable. In Guinea-Bissau, a narcostate, the MACR is officially 16, which renders children under that age vulnerable to exploitation by drug-trafficker Fagins. Many countries with high MACRs or doli incapax-type provisions suffer this problem: Cipriani (2009: 152–53) cites South American and Indian sub-continent evidence of under-age children being used for drug trafficking and revenge killings respectively. There is nonetheless some agreement as to where, on child development grounds. MACRs should rationally be pitched and this is reflected in United Nations guidance. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Human Rights Committee, which monitors the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the UN Committee Against Torture and the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice (commonly known as the Beijing Rules) all advise that an MACR below 12 years is too low. This soft law international position rests on the proposition that the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection (UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child)

and in all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, Article 3(1)).

These propositions in turn rest on assumptions concerning three questions: the culpability of children for any unlawful behaviour; the competence of children to engage in criminal justice proceedings; and the impact of involving children in criminal justice proceedings (Steinberg, 2008). With regard to culpability it is not argued that children bear no responsibility for their behaviour but that their cognitive and emotional development below a certain age is such that it is inappropriate (unreasonable) to apply what Packer (1968: 74–75) has described as the ‘convenient fiction’ of free will and capacity to choose whether or not to obey the law. With regard to competence, it is considered that children below a certain age generally lack sufficient understanding for it to be reasonable, even with the benefit of legal support, to participate in the criminal process (deciding how to plead, give evidence, etc.), a factor that weighed heavily with Barbara Wootton on the basis of her considerable experience chairing a juvenile court (Wootton, 1978: ch 9). With regard to the consequences of involving children



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in criminal proceedings, the suggestion is that their relative vulnerability is such that there is a substantial risk that their development will be impaired (Steinberg, 2009; Farmer, 2011). Childhood is a social construct the content of which has changed over time and varies considerably from culture to culture which is why, as Cipriani’s (2009) survey and analysis underlines, there is such variation in MACR’s between jurisdictions. Yet one thing is clear. For an advanced, post-industrial democracy which prides itself on the acquisition and application of scientific knowledge, the UK is out of step with most of the countries with which it typically likes to be compared in having a very low MACR (Scotland effectively raised its MACR from 8 to 12 in 2011), a fact for which it has in recent years been repeatedly criticised by international human rights bodies. Children vary in their cognitive and emotional development but the best available research evidence suggests that ‘the age range 11–13 is critical for developing the abilities necessary for trial participation (Cipriani 2009: 145). A major American study of 1400 young people aged 11–24 years drawn from four US locations found that one-third of children aged 11–13 were generally incompetent to stand trial (Grisso et al, 2003). Yet the evidence suggests that in England and Wales there is so fundamental a political reluctance to change our MACR that the children’s lobby and penal reform groups are generally reluctant to press the issue. Why? At this point it is necessary to demonstrate how central have been youth justice measures in the toughened neo-liberal law and order climate about which Robert Reiner has written.

IV.  Youth Justice in a Neo-Liberal Climate Criminal justice systems involve a tension between the objectives of punishment and welfare (Garland, 1985). Juvenile justice systems exhibit those tensions acutely and the MACR represents the point, in theory at least, at which the punishment paradigm comes into play. The punishment paradigm treats the child as a responsible person exercising choice, the bearer of rights which must be respected through legal due process, but ultimately deserving of punishment proportionate to culpability. The welfare paradigm views the child as having limited responsibility because his or her capacity has yet to be realised, is deserving of protection and has needs which should be met as a duty owed the child by society. All juvenile justice systems embody a compromise between these two paradigms and McAra (2010) argues that contemporary juvenile justice systems tend to accommodate elements of two additional ones, the restorative and the actuarial. The former recognises both the child’s responsibilities and entitlements, aims to make good the harm caused by the offence and, by bringing the offender and victim together, build a more inclusive society. The latter sees the child in terms of a capacity for wrongdoing with interventions justified on preventive grounds proportionate to the risk of future harms posed.

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What is generally agreed is that the balance between competing paradigms changes over time and it is possible, with a fair level of agreement, to periodise those changes. In England and Wales the twentieth century, up to the late 1960s, marked the gradual ascendancy of a welfarist approach to juvenile justice, support for which gathered pace in the post-war period, culminating in the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, ‘the most developed application of welfare principles to criminal justice ever seen in an English statute’ (Bottoms and Stevenson, 1992: 36). The Act provided, inter alia, for the abolition of prosecution of any child under 14 for all criminal offences except homicide. In the event the 1969 Act was only partly implemented and its radically welfarist vision never realised. Nonetheless, the ‘69 Act, simply because it was on the statute book, tended to be scapegoated for all the youth crime and justice ills of the 1970s. There was a significant backlash against welfarism, the criticisms coming from all points on the political spectrum. Commentators on the right were critical of what they took to be the insufficiently tough approach characteristic of contemporary juvenile justice. Those on the left felt that behind all the talk of ‘treatment’, restrictive and potentially punitive forms of intervention were on the increase which required a renewed emphasis on due process rights. The Thatcher years witnessed countervailing tendencies. The talk about juvenile justice was tough but practice was surprisingly liberal (Farrall and Hay, 2010). Talk of raising the MACR was abandoned but use of police cautions for children aged 10 and over greatly increased and there was a significant fall in the number of children and young people in custody. So successful was this policy believed to be that in 1988 the government signaled its intention to transfer the lessons learnt in juvenile justice to policies for offenders generally: Most young offenders grow out of crime as they become more mature and responsible. They need encouragement and help to become law abiding. Even a short period of custody is quite likely to confirm them as criminals, particularly as they acquire new criminal skills from the more sophisticated offenders. They see themselves labelled as criminals and behave accordingly (Home Office, 1988: paras 2.17–2.19).

Yet despite the emphasis on diversion from custody and court proceedings the Children Act 1989 removed civil care proceedings from the juvenile court and the Criminal Justice Act 1991 extended the court’s remit to include 17 year‑olds. From now on criminal and care proceedings were radically separated, the renamed youth court having no power to remit cases to the family court. ‘Justice’, rather than welfare, was now pre-eminent in youth court proceedings. The major changes in English youth justice in the 1990s were triggered by several events of which the murder of Jamie Bulger was only one. The crime rate – in the context of a recession which raised unemployment above the three million mark – rose by over 40 per cent in 1989–92. There were well‑publicised urban disturbances in 1991 and a moral panic about so‑called ‘persistent young offenders’. In 1993 the secure training order (STO) was introduced aimed at ‘persistent juvenile offenders whose repeated offending makes them a menace to the community’ (Hansard,



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2 March 1993, col 139). The measure was applied to 12–14 year‑olds convicted of three imprisonable offences who had proved ‘unwilling or unable to comply with the requirements of supervision in the community while on remand or under sentence’. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 doubled the maximum sentence in a young offenders institution (YOI) for 15–17 year‑olds to two years. The predictable consequence was a rise in the use of youth custody. The number of 15 to 17 year‑olds given custodial sentences rose by almost four‑fifths between 1992 and 1998. These punitive measures met with little criticism from the Labour Party which was gearing up to outflank the Conservatives over ‘law and order’ (Downes and Morgan, 2002) and did so in the General Election three years later. Tony Blair describes in his political autobiography how he latched onto the Bulger case in particular and crime in general as a topic which, in his judgement, would, if given a harder policy edge, have traction with the electorate and raise his profile and standing within the Party (Blair 2010, 55–57). His judgement proved wholly correct. The Audit Commission, established in 1982 to promote economy, efficiency and effectiveness in public services, became increasingly influential in criminal justice during the 1990s. The Commission’s report on youth crime and justice, Misspent Youth (Audit Commission, 1996) was hugely influential, and strikingly similar to that in a discussion document simultaneously produced by the Labour Party (1996), still the Opposition but shortly to assume government. The call in both documents was for an emphasis on ‘criminality prevention’. The Audit Commission was highly critical of existing youth justice arrangements, considering them uneconomic, inefficient and ineffective. The Commission was particularly critical of repeat police cautioning, the lack of programmes directed at offending behaviour and what it judged to be the absence of coordinated working. Its most damning indictment was that overall, less is done now than a decade ago to address offending by young people. Fewer young people are now convicted by the courts, even allowing for the fall in the number of people aged 10–17 years, and an increasing proportion of those who are found guilty are discharged (ibid: para 69).

The system, the Commission argued, needed to be streamlined, speeded up and greater attention given to early preventive work focusing on ‘risk factors’ which longitudinal research associated with offending by juveniles. The Audit Commission’s reports on youth justice largely escaped academic or indeed informed criticism in general, but one of the very few critiques to examine its methods and evidence, as well as its implications for the system, concluded that, ‘though highly influential, [they] lack a clear understanding of the youth justice process, confuse individual offenders with individual charges, confuse average and marginal cost, and make judgements that are not adequately based upon the evidence presented’ (Jones, 2001: 378). For example, costs for the system of £1billion are assembled on highly problematic bases. Cases dismissed and discontinued are conflated as ‘nothing happening’ when ‘not guilty’ verdicts quite properly lead to

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that result. All in all, the obeisance to the Audit Commission’s reports on juvenile justice, given their generally punitive implications, eagerly taken up and acted upon by the New Labour government, was a strange case of criminological neglect. After New Labour’s 1997 election victory the Commission’s analysis and proposals were taken up in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. The Act was heavily managerialist in approach, emphasising inter‑agency cooperation, the necessity of an overall strategic plan, the creation of key performance indicators and active monitoring of aggregate information about the system and its functioning. To a youth justice system that had been the site of competing philosophies, approaches and ideologies – notably welfarism, punitive just deserts and systems management – New Labour added actuarial managerialism and its own potent blend of populist communitarianism. Some commentators saw it as the emergence of a ‘new youth justice’ (Goldson, 2000). The framework laid down in 1998 remains largely in place today and it is to that framework to which we turn next. Throughout the country local authority youth offending teams (YOTs) were set up, multi-disciplinary teams the membership of which initially comprised seconded social workers, probation and police officers and limited representation from the health and education services. The concept seemed sound: children who got into trouble would be dealt with holistically, with close liaison between all the child-related services. But the YOTs ossified and their staffs became mostly permanent, dealing less with children and young people per se and more, as their title made clear, with ‘young offenders’. The fact that once their charges had been drawn into the criminal justice channel there was no longer the possibility of their being referred by the youth court across to the family court increased the tendency for hard-pressed social services departments to look to the YOTs to intervene once children reached the age of criminal responsibility. Meanwhile the New Labour Government passed criminal statute after criminal statute, 27 in all (Ministry of Justice, 2010: para 165), creating new offences and providing the police and the courts with a host of additional powers for responding to crime and anti-social behaviour. These provisions were accompanied by managerial initiatives whereby the police were set numerical targets for ‘offences brought to justice’ (OBTJs) in order that the ‘justice gap’ be closed (see Padfield, Morgan and Maguire, 2012): that is criminal justice net-widening was encouraged to reduce offenders’ alleged impunity. The result, unsurprisingly, was that there was a dramatic increase in the number of children and young people criminalised for minor offences (the so-called ‘low-hanging fruit’) and incarcerated, despite the fact that all the evidence was that the incidence of crime, including that for which children and young people were responsible, was falling (for a comprehensive review of these youth justice developments see Morgan and Newburn, 2012). Despite assertions to the contrary (see Home Office 1997, para 2.1.2.2) there are inherent contradictions between what we may term the punishment, or just deserts, and the welfare paradigms of criminal justice systems. In our view, these contradictions have become so severe that they are now unsustainable in relation to the concept of criminal responsibility as traditionally understood.



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V.  Dual Responsibility for Crime? In a review of the evidence on parental responsibility, as part of a wider inquiry into state and family responsibilities for the upbringing of children, a commission set up by the National Family and Parenting Institute, chaired by Sir Michael Rutter, argued that: The government’s supposition underlying its enforcement of parental responsibility is that parents are able to control their children’s behaviour in most circumstances. However, research evidence shows that there are significant limits to the capacity of parents to control their children’s behaviour, particularly as children grow older (NFPI/ NCH, 2005: 29).

Notably: • ‘parents do indeed have effects on their children but so too do children have effects on their parents’ (ibid: 30) • twin studies of genetic influences on children’s misbehaviour, especially in relation to hyperactivity (Rutter, et al 1998; Rutter, 2006) ‘mean that it would be quite wrong to assume that children’s behaviour is necessarily due to failures in parenting’ (ibid). • ‘the relief of poverty has beneficial effects on parenting’, hence the state bears a responsibility to enhance economic support for good parenting. • ‘The research evidence points to the value of supporting parents in respect of their overall relationship with their child and with difficulties in their own situation. It does not suggest that a coercive approach may be the best way forward’. (emphasis added) (ibid: 31) Despite the weight of the evidence against the assumption that parents have a power of ultimate control over their children’s behaviour, even those just under the age of 16, and regardless of genetic influences and peer group influences on children’s behaviour – which some studies have found to be far more potent than parental influence – the New Labour government plunged ahead in two utterly inconsistent directions. First, it brought in Parenting Orders and contracts by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, giving magistrates the power to direct the parent of a young offender or truant to engage in some form of guidance or counselling, including residential courses, for the failure to undergo which she – for it is usually the mother – may face a prison sentence. In the self-same 1998 Act, it also, as stated above, abolished the defence of doli incapax, just when the weight of research into the developmental psychology of children testified to its wisdom: ‘Child development should be a pivotal factor in determining the age of criminal responsibility and the flexibility and assessment required in determining whether a young person is fit to plead’. (ibid: 33) A welter of evidence confirms that the age of 10 is too young. Moreover, it is vital to recognise ‘the fluid nature of child development. There may be delays in one or more of the

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child development areas’, generally agreed to be physical, intellectual, emotional and social. Doli incapax took account of this fluidity, but New Labour had difficulty catching up with this progressive aspect of mediaeval thought. Table 1: Political economy and indicators of penal moderation



Penal pop.¹

Homicide rate ²

MACR³

Neo-liberal USA South Africa New Zealand England and Wales Australia

756 5.56 6–12 335 55.86 7 185 2.5 10 153 1.59 10 129 1.87 10

Conservative corporatist Italy Germany Netherlands France

92 89 100 96

1.5 14 1.15 14 1.51 12 1.73 None

Social democracies Sweden Finland Denmark Norway

74 64 63 69

1.1 15 2.86 15 1.02 15 0.95 15

Oriental corporatist Japan

63

1.05 11

  Prisoners per 100,000 population   Homicides per 100,000 population ³   The MACR ages given are in several instances only rough guides because of doli incapax provisions or offence-specific minima. South Africa, for example, has a doli incapax provision to age 14. The position in the USA, where there is great variation between the states, is particularly complex. In France there is no MACR: it is for the court to establish children’s discernement. 14 years is often cited as the MACR for Japan, though recent amendments to Japanese juvenile law allow the family courts to order severe penalties against children as young as 11. Adapted from Reiner (2007: Table 4.1, p 106) and Cipriani (2009: Annex 2, 187–224). Also Cavadino and Dignan (2006), Barclay and Tavares (2002) and Walmsley (2009). ¹ ²

The somewhat cynically entitled No More Excuses White Paper of 1997, which heralded the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act abolition of doli incapax, ignoring the Law Lords’ then recent pronouncement that no such step should be taken without proper judicial review, justified this step by stating that while ‘parents may not be directly to blame for the crimes of their children . . . [they] have to be responsible for providing their children with proper care and control’. Yet these developments in tandem signify a far-reaching shift in the nature of criminal responsibility: They rest on a justification that amounts, despite the disclaimer in the White Paper, to a presumption of dual responsibility for the offending behaviour of children up to the age



Waiting for Ingleby 257 of 16. This presumption is based on an interpretation of parental duties for the care and control of children that now includes crime prevention (ibid: 32–33)

and despite the same Act’s injunction that children aged as young as 10 are now legally defined as aware of all the implications of their conduct as a mature adult. Without wishing to overwork the links (see Nelken [2011] for some problems of cross-national comparisons) there are strong associations between countries of comparable development and their mode of political economy, homicide rate, MACR and commitment to human rights. All the countries listed in Table 1 have signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child except for the USA, which has signed but not ratified. It does seem reasonable to infer a causal matrix from the broad correspondence between the more social democratic forms of political economy, lower rates of lethal violence, less resort to ‘punitive’ rates of imprisonment and the age at which young people can be criminalised.

VI.  MACR as a Red-lined Issue? The extent to which certain criminal justice issues seem impervious to change, or even to reinforcement of the status quo, as is the case with MACR over the past 50 years, raises the question of how far this reflects some more fundamental constraint in the realm of political economy and the politics of law and order. Other such issues would be the right of prisoners to vote, and the criminalisation of deviant drug use. Is there some common feature which accounts for the singling out of certain issues as untouchable, despite the balance of evidence to the contrary in terms of arguments for change, when in the past some apparent candidates for nonchange have indeed been re-defined as in need of long overdue reform? The cases of homosexual and abortion law reform and the abolition of capital punishment spring to mind. In the 1950s, all seemed lost causes yet, within a decade, all had been legalised or scrapped. Indeed, in the case of capital punishment, repeated attempts at its reinstatement, particularly in the context of IRA and UDF terrorism, were defeated by ever-increasing parliamentary majorities. Nor is it simply a case of the rise of neo-liberal political economy as a force for reactionary laws. The Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act were both introduced by New Labour, as was the extension of gay rights to marriage and adoption. However, their reformism did not extend to those designated criminal or anti-social, with which their ‘governing through crime’ credentials had come to be so strongly identified. One element in common with the three examples above is that the case for their reform, which in the case of MACR and the decriminalisation of illicit drugs, were at their height in the 1960s, is the way in which, once the opportunity for reform was lost – for whatever reason – the opposition mobilised against it proved increasingly potent, and the forces allied for it became somewhat dispersed. Thus MACR was

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one element in the sweeping changes proposed for juvenile justice that culminated in the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act. Before it could be implemented, Labour lost the 1970 election, and the incoming Conservative government, explicitly opposed to the loss of the juvenile court system run by magistrates, simply left much of it to wither. Scotland, by clear contrast, had already adopted the report of the Kilbrandon Committee, embracing much the same sort of system proposed for England and Wales It has operated more or less unchanged ever since. (See Bottoms and Dignan, 2004 for the major differences between the systems; and Ravenscroft, 2011 for the history of how and why the two countries diverged so markedly.) Back in power in 1974, Labour were faced with severe economic crises on a scale greater than those of the 1960s, but perhaps more significantly had lost the momentum for welfarist reforms to the penal system in the wake of growing doubts about the treatment model. In the case of decriminalising drugs, the climax of possibilities for reform came in the aftermath of the report by Barbara Wootton on cannabis. Her recommendation for decriminalisation was seen by James Callaghan, the then Home Secretary, as an electoral handicap – an early example of political fears of being seen as ‘soft’ on crime. From that point on, though the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act did enact the separate categorisation of cannabis and heroin, and distinguished other so-called ‘soft’ from ‘hard’ drugs, the whole issue of decriminalisation reached virtual vanishing point. In the mid-1970s, methadone was phased in as the substitute for heroin at designated treatment centres, and the ‘black market’ for illegal heroin entered its major expansion. In a sense, policy reforms resemble abandoned cars in Zimbardo’s (1973) experiment in vandalism. Neglect them for too long, and they get stripped, first of their trim and then of their main parts (Downes, 1995).They are then declared un-roadworthy and scrapped. Such ‘red-lined’ policies may be rescuable, but it usually requires a disproportionately greater effort to restore their credibility. A fourth example is the problem of curbing penal expansion, once the ‘prison works’ mantra has taken hold. ‘Red-lining’ has the great advantage of the bestowal of the ‘master status’ of – in Popper’s sense – being beyond refutation. Thus, ‘prison works’ whatever happens to the crime rate. If it goes up, or stays the same, clearly more prison is needed. If it goes down, then it is working. With drugs, the same logic applies: however huge the costs of prohibition – the creation of narcostates, the corruption of law enforcement agencies, the risks of contaminated supply – they are declared essential to prevent the ‘floodgates’ of addiction opening ever wider. Decriminalisation is vandalised to equate with legalisation. Examples of countries which have shown some success in decriminalising heroin and cannabis without such outcomes are simply ignored. ‘Oh, that’s just a piddling little country’, one vendor of privatised prisons commented to one of us who cited Sweden as a successful low custody state. The experience of such countries is ‘too small to count’. On the other hand, once adopted, ‘red-lined’ policies are – like the banks that generated the financial crises of the past three years – ‘too big to fail’. Another factor uniting such ‘red-lined’ policies is that key constituencies adjust their analyses to take account of them as fixed and unchallengeable. Thus the mem-



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bers of the recent Independent Commission on Youth Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour (2010) apparently took a strategic decision not to recommend that the MACR in England and Wales be raised partly on the grounds that were they to do so their report would immediately be dismissed by the redtop press as another typically liberal, soft-on-crime utterance and thereafter known generally in the media for little else.1 The Commission had other reasons for not making the recommendation, namely, that jurisdictions reliant on criminal as opposed to family court or other tribunal proceedings are as capable of making decisions informed by a welfarist as opposed to a just deserts paradigm and vice versa (see McAra, 2010: 294). New Zealand, for example, has at 10 years the same MACR as England and Wales but has pioneered restorative justice as a way of proceeding with most young offenders. Likewise Scotland has, at eight years, until recently had a lower MACR than England and Wales, but has pursued a more welfare-oriented, diversionary approach. The Inquiry therefore concluded that the ‘much needed reforms to the youth justice system in England and Wales do not depend on raising’ the MACR (Independent Commission, 2010: 14). They also concluded, quite reasonably, that whatever the MACR it would be necessary to ensure that principles needed to be enunciated and arrangements put in place to guarantee that children both above and below the MACR were ensured justice, and it was on these general principles that they concentrated their attention. Nonetheless it seems certain that had the Inquiry sensed that there was even the glimmer of a green or even amber Westminster light showing in the direction of a raised MACR, they would unequivocally have recommended it. Among the recommendations they made, for example, was that children and young people charged with serious offences should no longer be dealt with in the Crown Court, as the Bulger offenders were. All cases should be heard in the youth court, when necessary by judges specially trained, in effect ‘ticketed’, for the purpose (ibid 64–65). This proposal is instructive. It recapitulates Lord Justice Auld’s recommendation in his review of the criminal courts ten years earlier, a recommendation which the Labour government ignored. The MACR fell outside Lord Justice Auld’s terms of reference but, he was clear about the relationship between the MACR and the nature of criminal justice tribunals: There are strong arguments that, even for grave crimes, a different form of tribunal should be provided. The younger the young defendant, the stronger the case for it, and the more it overlaps with arguments for raising the criminal age of liability in England and Wales above the age of 10. (Auld, 2001: para 207).

Auld went on to cite the European Court of Human Rights judgment in in T and V v UK,2 which was highly critical of the manner in which Thompson and Venables were dealt with.   Personal communications.   [1999] ECHR 171.

1 2

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It seems reasonable to conclude that though the Labour government took up practically all of Lord Justice Auld’s recommendations for reforming the organisation of the criminal courts, it spurned this particular recommendation because it ran counter to the general tenor of its youth justice policies of increasing both the actuality and appearance of the criminal responsibility of children and young people. The Independent Commission may be correct in its assertion that the reforms it seeks do not depend on raising the MACR, but it is surely incorrect in its implicit judgment that they not more likely. It would have been more courageous, and in the long run more persuasive, to argue that the positioning of the MACR, the character of criminal tribunals and the adequate provision of alternative interventions for children who engage in harmful behaviour below the MACR, are logically related. The Independent Commission has not been alone in deferring to the prevailing, known, red-line politics of youth justice policy in Whitehall and Westminster. Sections of the children’s lobby have done likewise. The children’s charity, Barnardo’s, which has done so much to criticise the rise in recent years in the number of young children prosecuted and incarcerated has nonetheless argued that the age of criminal responsibility should be raised from 10 to 12 for ‘all offences other than murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, rape and aggravated sexual assault’ (Barnardo’s, 2010). They offer convincing reasons as to why the MACR should generally be raised – because children who offend aged 10 and 11 generally have limited understanding and are typically multiply disadvantaged, because punitive measures for children of this age are demonstrably ineffective, because there are interventions of a non-criminal character that would work better, and so on – but provide no rationale for retaining the power to prosecute for grave offences. Why then retain that power? The answer it appears is because ministers have privately let it be known that they will entertain no proposals which would mean that were a Bulger case to reoccur – their red line – that children as young as Thompson and Venables could not be prosecuted.3 Further evidence for this interpretation came in January 2012. The Centre for Social Justice, a think-tank established by Iain Duncan Smith and thus well connected with the Conservative Party, published a substantial review report on youth justice policy in England and Wales (Centre for Social Justice, 2012). Raising the age of criminal responsibility to at least 12 years was a key recommendation, breaching what the CSJ described in its press release as a policy ‘taboo’. Recent neurological research, the CSJ argued, provided a compelling case for making the change: although young children could distinguish right from wrong they are compulsive and generally have a limited capacity to gauge the consequences of their actions, particularly if brought up in dysfunctional environments, which with serious young offenders is so often the case. Support for this argument came almost simultaneously from the Royal Society (2011) as part of a general report on the implications of contemporary neuroscience for social policy. The Justice Minister attending the launch of the CSJ report, commenting favourably on most of its findings and rec  Personal communication.

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ommendations, nonetheless singled out just one recommendation for immediate rejection: that relating to the age of criminal responsibility. This taboo was not to be breached: it was not, he inexplicably argued, in the interests of justice and in any case few children under the age of 12 were affected by the current arrangements. The red line was thickened, the taboo would not be breached.

VII. Conclusion Robert Reiner’s work has long been seen as inspiring as well as analytical. In his ‘lament’ for the displacement of ‘social democratic criminology’ (Reiner, 2006) by a risk-based and largely amoral ‘contrology’, he argued passionately for the revival of earlier concerns to search for the causes of crime in more than an actuarial sense. We have sought to show how his approach has relevance to such issues as the minimum age of criminal responsibility, which have been abandoned rather than neglected as outside the scope of political feasibility. Challenging such ‘red-lining’ of entire swathes of criminal justice policy is part of the process of re-creating the momentum for a criminology that goes ‘beyond risk’. As Reiner put it, ‘paraphrasing Rosa Luxemburg, on present trends the choice is social democracy or barbarism’ (ibid: 39). All too ominously, however, over the past five years, largely due to what has come to be known as feral banking, the prospects for social democracy have diminished and those of ‘barbarism’ have sharpened. It is all too likely that the consequences will be translated remorselessly into criminal justice terms.

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Walmsley, R (2009) World Prison Population List 8th edn (London, International Centre for Prison Studies). Wootton, B (1978) Crime and Penal Policy (London, Allen and Unwin). Young, A (1996) Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal conversations (London, Sage). Zimbardo, PG (1973) ‘A field experiment in auto shaping’ in Colin Ward (ed), Vandalism (London, Architectural Press).

13 The Shifting Boundaries of Policing: Globalisation and its Possibilities PHILIP C STENNING and CLIFFORD D SHEARING

I. Introduction During the 40 years or so that we, as well as Robert Reiner, have been developing ourselves as would-be ‘policing scholars’, policing has been anything but static. Indeed, as Bayley and Shearing (1996) observed, these years have seen something of a ‘watershed’ in policing that is comparable to the moment in the early nineteenth century that saw the birth of the ‘new police’ in England. We have had many memorable discussions with Robert about these developments over the years, and while we have not always been in complete agreement on these matters, Robert has always been successful in forcing us to ‘consider our position’. And for that, as well as for his unfailing friendship throughout these years, we have been especially grateful. The starting point for all of these discussions has always been the same seemingly simple question: What is policing? Together with its corollary: What is not policing? Both questions inescapably leading on to a further question: What is the difference, and where is the boundary, between ‘policing’ and ‘social control’? It was our early research on private security, and our insistence that what private security organisations provide is a form of ‘private policing’, that usually provoked these discussions, Robert, at least initially, rejecting the tag ‘private policing’ as an oxymoron. Cleaving to a Weberian tradition (Weber, 1921), and in keeping with a long history of ‘policing’ scholarship (which we regarded as more properly described as ‘police’ scholarship), Robert used to insist, in our conversations, that ‘policing’ is a function inextricably linked to the state, and that trying to apply the term to the activities of private security organisations (or any other non-state provider of such services for that matter) simply, and unhelpfully, muddied the conceptual waters. Of course, the conversation has moved on considerably from those earlier discussions as, in the 1990s, the terms ‘plural policing’ and ‘nodal governance’ emerged in the policing literature. This new lexicon of ‘policing’ inevitably challenged Robert’s earlier argument, and much to his credit he has re-considered his position. His reconsideration is summarised in the most recent (fourth) edition of his classic book, The Politics of the Police (2010), in which he writes:

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Modern societies are characterized by what can be termed ‘police fetishism’, the ideological assumption that the police are a functional prerequisite of social order so that without a police force chaos would ensue. In fact, many societies have existed without a formal police force of any kind, and certainly without the present model . . .. It is important to distinguish between the ideas of ‘police’ and ‘policing’. ‘Police’ refers to a particular kind of social institution, while policing implies a set of processes with specific social functions. ‘Police’ are not found in every society, and police organizations and personnel can have a variety of shifting forms. ‘Policing’, however, is arguably a necessity in any social order, which may be carried out by a number of different processes and institutional arrangements. A state-organized specialist ‘police’ organization of the modern kind is only one example of policing. (2010: 3–4)

Of ‘policing’, Robert continues: Policing cannot usefully be analysed as coterminous with social control but must be seen as a specific aspect of it. Policing implies the set of activities aimed at preserving the security of a particular social order, or social order in general. . . Policing does not encompass all activities directed at achieving social order. What is specific to policing is the creation of systems of surveillance coupled with the threat of sanctions for discovered deviance – either immediately or by initiating penal processes. (ibid: 5)

He adds: Policing thus defined may be carried out by a diverse array of people and techniques, of which the modern idea of police is only one . . . Policing may be done by a variety of agents: professionals employed by the state in an organization with an omnibus policing mandate. . .or by state agencies with primarily other purposes . . .. Police may be professionals employed by specialist private policing firms – contract security – or security employees of an organisation whose main business is something else – in-house security. . .Policing functions may be performed by citizens in a voluntary capacity within state police organizations. . .or in completely independent bodies (such as the Guardian Angels and the many vigilante bodies which have flourished at many times and places . . .). Policing may be carried out by state bodies with other prime functions, such as the Army, or by employees (state or private) as an adjunct of their main job (such as concierges or bus conductors). Policing may be carried out by technology, such as CCTV cameras . . . [or] may be designed into the architecture and furniture of streets and buildings . . . as epitomised by Mike Davis’s celebrated example of the bum-proof bench (Davis 1990). All these policing strategies are proliferating today, even though it is only the state agency with the omnibus mandate of order maintenance that is popularly understood by the label ‘the police’. (ibid: 5–6)

In this chapter, we review these recent developments and their implications for our current understandings of ‘policing’ – developments that have made very clear that indeed policing has been, and is still being, fundamentally transformed in a wide variety of ways. When we first started to speak of these developments we spoke of a ‘quiet revolution’ (Stenning and Shearing, 1980). Today this revolution is most certainly no longer as quiet as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Private security is now a very visible and central part of global security. Indeed, in recognition of this, and in recognition of the need to dissociate the function and activities of



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policing from state police, one of us, with Les Johnston, has proposed the use of the term ‘governance of security’ (Johnston and Shearing, 2003) – a term whose value Robert (2010: 15) has, in our ongoing dialogue, questioned, in his characteristically respectful, supportive but rigorous manner (see also Zedner, 2009). As Robert makes clear in the passages cited above, if policing ever was monopolised by states and their agents this is most certainly no longer the case. It is now widely accepted that policing is an inclusive domain involving many agents, and many sets of resources, that include, but are not limited to, the use of force that has been so closely associated with the work of state police (Bittner, 1970). In reviewing these developments we consider to what extent recent research on policing has been adequate to support new understandings of policing that we think are needed in the twenty-first century. We start with that simple question – what is policing? – which has challenged our thinking for so long.

II.  What is ‘Policing’? We are very sympathetic to Robert’s most recent definition. Depending on what the term ‘sanctions’ is intended to convey, however, we might question whether policing necessarily involves either ‘the threat of sanctions’ (‘consequences’ might be a more appropriate term) or of ‘penal processes’ (Johnston and Shearing, 2003). In a paper on the future of policing that we prepared with some colleagues at the University of Toronto for the Law Commission of Canada that was published in 2005, we proposed the following as our own broader definition of ‘policing’: any activity that is expressly designed and intended to establish and maintain (or enforce) a defined order within a community (Hermer et al, 2005: 23).

Despite its interesting title (The Policing Web), and despite its author’s stated aim to develop a new, integrated ‘theory of policing’, the late Jean-Paul Brodeur’s last book (Brodeur, 2010), which will undoubtedly become a classic in the literature on policing,1 surprisingly does not include a definition of ‘policing’. Rather, adopting a seeming ‘grounded theory’ approach,2 Brodeur builds his proposal for a new theory of policing on his own new definition of ‘policing agents’: Policing agents are part of several connected organizations authorized to use in more or less controlled ways diverse means, generally prohibited by statute or regulation to 1   Robert has described the book, on the back of its dust jacket, as ‘erudite, provocative, insightful and stimulating, it offers a magisterial overview of the field’. 2   Characteristically reflecting his training as a philosopher, he wrote: ‘In drawing a tentative map of policing, we have to break out of a definitional circle. On the one hand, it would seem that we need to know what policing is before mapping out which agencies are involved in policing. On the other hand, it is difficult to frame a definition of policing out of context and without examining empirically what police organisations really do. This theoretical circularity can be avoided in actual research practice. We can build on a common preconception of the business of policing: providing a general sense of order and offering protection against personal aggression’ (2010: 21–22).

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the rest of the population, in order to enforce various types of rules and customs that promote a defined order in society, considered in its whole or in some of its parts. (2010: 130)

We question Brodeur’s claim, however, that this definition is equally applicable to public and private ‘policing agents’ (ibid: 297), since our own research on private police has revealed that one of their distinguishing features is that they typically undertake policing without recourse to means that are ‘generally prohibited by statute or regulation to the rest of the population’ and that many, if not most, of them are not authorised to use such means (Stenning, 2000). It is a definition by Adam Crawford and his colleagues, however, which appeared in a book they published in 2005, which we have found especially helpful in answer to this question in the current era. Crawford et al (2005: 4) wrote: For our purposes ‘policing’ is defined as intentional action involving the conscious exercise of power or authority (by an individual or organisation) that is directed towards rule enforcement, the promotion of order or assurances of safety.

There are seven features of this deceptively succinct definition that we find particularly noteworthy: 1. Neither the state nor the public police are specifically mentioned in it. 2. None of the words ‘crime’, ‘law’ or ‘criminal justice’ appear in it. 3. The definition does not suggest that policing is necessarily something that is only undertaken within a specified geographical territory. 4. It refers to ‘power’ as well as ‘authority’ as a basis for policing. 5. It notes that policing does not necessarily have to be done by an ‘individual’. 6. It defines policing as involving an intentional and conscious exercise of power or authority specifically directed to the achievement of particular ends. 7. Despite these previous six features, the definition easily covers what the public police do. Together, these seven features of Crawford et al’s definition nicely capture what we perceive to be the modern realities of policing – pluralised provision, not monopolised by nation states, serving a broad range of ends reflecting a broad range of public and private (state and non-state) interests, occurring in cyberspace as well as terrestrially, performed through technology as well as through human agency, and occurring transnationally as well as ‘domestically’ – while still (through its insistence on intentionality directed towards particular ends) distinguishing reasonably between policing and social control more generally. We consider next the extent to which our understanding of each of the six features of modern policing that we have just identified has been supported by research in recent years.



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A.  Plural Provision The idea that policing provision is not (and perhaps never has been) the monopoly of ‘public (state-sponsored) police’ has, despite early resistance from some police scholars, become the accepted orthodoxy in the twenty-first century. Our own early research on private security in Canada in the 1970s led us by the end of the 1990s to conclude that ‘it is now almost impossible to identify any function or responsibility of the public police which is not, somewhere and under some circumstances, assumed and performed by private police in democratic societies’ (Stenning, 2000: 328). By now, the myth of state monopoly over policing provision has been debunked for good, and the conceptual boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ policing provision have become increasingly blurred (Dorn and Levi, 2009). Johnston (1992 and 2000) and Jones and Newburn (1998 and 2006) have particularly contributed research in the UK supporting this new appreciation of the plurality of policing provision, but so have many others.

B.  Defining and Maintaining Order Our early research on private security began with a wrong assumption – that private security were simply privately (non-state) sponsored organisations performing the same functions – mainly crime prevention and law enforcement – in the same way that the public police perform. It did not take us long, however, to realise how badly wrong we were. In the first place, many of the private security personnel whom we interviewed seemed much more interested in talking about ‘loss prevention’ than about ‘crime prevention’ – and indeed provided us with business cards on which they were identified as ‘Loss Prevention Officers’ – and did not seem to regard the law or the criminal justice system as especially relevant or useful to them in doing their work. After a while we came to recognise that the private security organisations were typically policing different ‘orders’ (defined primarily by their clients or employers) by different means. While responding to problems as crimes, and enforcing laws, were certainly not irrelevant to their work, neither were they the essence of it. A turning point in our thinking about this occurred with our analysis of Disney World where policing proved to be an activity that was typically embedded in other functions and roles (Shearing and Stenning, 1985). In developing these insights, the influential article by Stewart Macaulay (1986) on private government was particularly helpful to us in re-theorising the role of private security in light of these findings. It led us, both alone and with David Bayley (Bayley and Shearing 2001), to think of policing graphically in terms of the following simple matrix:

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Auspices (who determines the order?) Non-state State* Non-state 1 2 Providers (who maintains/enforces the order?) State* 3 4 [* By ‘state’ here, we refer to the nation state and any sub-unit of it.]

While conventional police scholarship saw policing as essentially (or at least predominantly) in quadrant 4 on this matrix (state-sponsored public police policing state-defined law and order), we came to understand what was happening in the last decades of the twentieth century as a not so gradual diffusion of policing provision throughout all four quadrants in the matrix.

C.  Policing Goes Hi-tech and Virtual Technology has, of course, transformed the nature and ‘field of operations’ of much policing in the last two decades (Chan 2003a; 2003b). Both the order problems that policing addresses and the means by which policing is accomplished have come to be virtually and technologically based, rather than just terrestrially bounded. Much of the hardware traditionally associated with the task of policing (cars, guns, batons, water cannon, etc) is of no use in this new policing environment. As JeanPaul Brodeur emphasised in his last book, however, the original foundational strategy of the ‘new police’ – surveillance – has assumed radically new manifestations and an increasingly crucial role in effective policing (Brodeur, 2010: ch 7). Policing has become increasingly technology-intensive rather than labour-intensive, and in this respect, as we suggested many years ago, private security have always enjoyed an enormous advantage over public police in doing it (Shearing and Stenning, 1983). The traditional call for ‘more police on the streets to fight crime’ has become increasingly anachronistic, since the streets, even if they ever were, are not now the places where most crimes, including the most serious crimes, occur (let alone other forms of disorder that occupy the attentions of public and private police). Nor is the use of force, or the threat of it, now as critical to policing as Egon Bittner (1970) suggested 40 years ago. Other coercive mechanisms, again pioneered by private rather than public police, have proven much more effective in persuading people to comply with many modern prescriptions for order; for a credit card company, for instance, the threat of withdrawal of access to credit serves the purpose very well in most cases.



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D.  Policing Goes Global Perhaps no other development has preoccupied scholars more in the last 20 years or so than the phenomenon that has come to be known as globalisation, and policing scholars have been no exception in this regard. Although police began cooperating and collaborating across national boundaries a long time ago, concerns over sovereignty inhibited such initiatives as far as public police were concerned right from the start. Interpol, founded in the 1920s, was a voluntary association of police officers from different countries with no formal international status, and no executive police authority. Its role was to facilitate cross-border policing rather than to actually do it. The ideas of Max Weber (1921), who identified claims to a monopoly over the legitimate use of force as a key characteristic of state sovereignty, can be regarded as a source of such concerns; the domestic public police, after all, were the embodiment of such claims. As with so many other aspects of policing innovation, it was private security organisations, working for transnational corporations such as shipping companies, airlines, banks, credit card companies, resource extraction companies, hotel chains, etc, that pioneered modern transnational policing. And today it is private security organisations that are the pre-eminent global policing agencies. Consider for instance Abrahamsen and Williams’ (2009: 2) observation that Group 4 Securicor employs some 530,000 people across the globe and, in Africa alone, is represented in 29 countries (2011: 22).3 Despite this, for the longest time, and to a great extent still, policing scholars who have undertaken research on transnational policing have, for the most part, focused their attentions on arrangements and institutions designed to facilitate transnational cooperation and collaboration between domestic public (state) police organisations (eg Sheptycki, 2000; Lemieux, 2010; Bowling, 2010; Bowling and Sheptycki, 2012) and state- and international organisation-sponsored police ‘assistance’ to post-conflict and ‘transitional’ states (eg Bayley, 2006; Hills, 2009; Bayley and Perito, 2010). This, we argue, merely reflects the transposition of often unwitting biases of conventional police scholarship (that ‘policing’ is all about what the public police do) to the international field of research. It thus represents the one area of policing scholarship that has been, and remains, most blind to the modern realities of policing. So it is this ‘blind spot’ to which we turn our attention in the rest of this chapter.

3   As we write this, G4S’s plans to buy up its Danish rival ISS, after which it will have 1.2 million employees in more than 130 countries, and will be ‘the world’s second-largest private-sector employer after American retailer Walmart’, were being announced (Kollewe, 2011).

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III.  The Realities of Modern, International and Transnational Policing Provision – What Do we Know? Compared with research on domestic policing, which really took off in the 1960s (at least in the United States and the United Kingdom), with the pioneering research of scholars such as Westley, Skolnick, Bittner, Wilson, Reiss and Banton, research on transnational policing is still in its infancy. One of the reasons for this, of course, is that transnational policing itself is a relatively recent phenomenon; another is that undertaking research on it is difficult and often expensive.

A.  ‘International’ and ‘Transnational’ Policing These two terms are often used interchangeably to refer to policing activities which transcend/cross national boundaries. The term ‘international policing’, however, derives from the prevailing view, that we have identified, that policing is an exclusively state-sponsored activity. Hence, ‘international policing’ came to be used to refer to policing which was state-sponsored (or sponsored by international organisations – such as the United Nations – which were themselves state-sponsored), or was carried out through cooperation between state-sponsored policing organisations (eg through Interpol, discussed further below), but which took place either within multiple state boundaries, or in areas of the world (such as the high seas or international air space) which are not subject to individual state jurisdiction. That is, it referred specifically to ‘inter-national’ policing – policing undertaken between or among states or state-sponsored policing institutions. The term ‘transnational policing’ has more recently been preferred (see eg Sheptycki 2000), however, as better reflecting the ‘plural’ characteristics of modern (or as some would have it, ‘post-modern’) policing referred to above. That is, it recognises that policing which transcends national borders does not only (or perhaps even primarily) reflect the security concerns of nation states, and is undertaken by a wide range of non-state, privately sponsored organisations, as well as by state- or internationallysponsored policing organisations (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011). At the heart of the evolution of international and transnational policing has been the development (especially during the latter half of the twentieth century) of economic and political transnationalisation (or, as it is more commonly referred to, ‘globalisation’) facilitated by enhanced transport and communication technology. While much of this economic and political transnationalisation has been ‘terrestrial’, the development of the Internet during the last 20 years or so has opened up a whole new spectrum of ‘virtual’ transnationalisation. And with economic and political transnationalisation, a whole gamut of transnational crimes and disorders has emerged, the policing of which requires transnational policing organisations, since they are not confined within the boundaries of any single nation state.



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It is important to remember that international and transnational crime and disorder are not new – piracy on the high seas, for instance, has been around for as long as ships have (Konstam, 1999).4 What is new, however, is the more organised and effective policing of it in recent decades as a result of international and privatesector cooperation and investment (Martin, 2010; Mathieson, nd; Spearin, 2010). As Johnston and Stenning (2010: 285–86) summarised current taxonomies of transnational policing: Several authors have tried to capture the complexity of these developments in typological form. Benyon et. al. (1993: 11–13) differentiate between ‘micro’, ‘meso’ and ‘macro’ levels of cooperation: the ‘macro’ level involves ‘constitutional and international legal agreements, and harmonisation of national laws and regulations’; the ‘meso’ level involves ‘police (and other law enforcement) operational structures, practices, procedures and technology’; and the ‘micro’ level involves ‘the prevention and detection of particular offences and crime problems’. Loader & Walker (2007) distinguish between security practices operating ‘below’, ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ the state, while Bowling & Foster’s (2002) typology draws a four-fold distinction in which national policing agencies (such as MI5, MI6, Special Branch, the CIA, the DEA or the FBI), are operated ‘by government’; transnational and cross-border police arrangements, such as Schengen, TREVI and Europol, operate ‘between governments’; international policing agencies, such as the UN Security Police, the UN’s Civil Police Units and Interpol, operate ‘above government’; and private transnational policing bodies such as Securitas and MPRI, operate ‘beyond government’.5

B.  International Policing Organisations Interpol (the International Criminal Police Organisation), with its headquarters in Lyon, France, was the first international police organisation, established in 1923. It currently has 188 member countries,6 and it ‘facilitates cross-border police cooperation, and supports and assists all organizations, authorities and services whose mission is to prevent or combat international crime’. It is not directly involved in operational policing as such, and its constitution prohibits ‘any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character’.7 It is governed by a General Assembly consisting of appointed delegates from each member country, and has a 13-member Executive Committee, supported by a General Secretariat, with responsibility to implement its policies and programmes (see Sheptycki, 2004.) Europol (the European Police Office) is in many ways very similar to Interpol. It was established pursuant to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty (the Treaty on European Union). It started out life as the Europol Drugs Unit (EDU) in 1994, and its formal constitution, the Europol Convention, was ratified by all of the European Union 4   But of course ‘piracy’ nowadays also refers to theft of intellectual property – a whole new policing challenge (Curtis, 2002). 5   Or, in Abrahamsen and Williams’ (2009 and 2011) words, ‘beyond the state’. 6   Note that there are currently 197 separate countries in the world. 7   See its website at www.interpol.int/public/icpo/default.asp.

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Member States8 in 1998. It is essentially a criminal intelligence organisation, and its mission is ‘to assist the law enforcement authorities of Member States [of the EU] in their fight against serious forms of organised crime’, particularly organised crime and terrorism, ‘with an emphasis on targeting criminal organisations’.9 Like Interpol, it is not directly involved in operational policing. Its offices are in The Hague, in The Netherlands. Policing is only one aspect of the work of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which adopts a very broad concept of security. The OSCE, which is an intergovernmental organisation with 56 Member States and 11 ‘Partners for Co-operation’,10 began life in the early 1970s as the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), a forum for intergovernmental, East-West dialogue to promote peace and security in Europe. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the effective end of the ‘Cold War’, the CSCE acquired some permanent institutions,11 and in 1994 its name was changed to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE is an ad hoc organisation under Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter, and its principal focus is on ‘early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation’. It is principally a ‘talk shop’,12 but also mounts and helps to organise specific operations in response to particular crises.13 The organisation’s Strategic Police Matters Unit (SPMU), based in its Secretariat in Vienna, ‘supports policing in all OSCE participating States as part of the rule of law and fundamental democratic principles and, through assessment, expert advice and assistance, develops accountable policing services that protect and aid their citizens’,14 and maintains a Policing OnLine Information System (POLIS) – essentially a digital database on policing-related information and best practice. Much international policing assistance, however, is delivered through bilateral arrangements in which one country sends some of its police officers to assist in policing, police training and providing advice on policing to another (for instance Australian police assistance to some Pacific Island countries, such as the Solomon Islands – see eg McLeod and Dinnen, 2007). Some, however, is provided through the United Nations’ civilian police programme (UNCIVPOL – the so-called ‘Blue Helmets’)15 – almost always as part of a broader peacekeeping mission. Typically   There are currently 27 Member States of the EU.   See its website at www.europol.europa.eu/.   The Member States include countries in North America, Europe and Asia. The 11 ‘Partners for Cooperation’ are other countries in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. For a full list, see the OSCE’s ‘What is the OSCE?’ at www.osce.org/secretariat/35775. 11   A Ministerial Council, a Permanent Council, a Parliamentary Assembly, a Forum for Security Cooperation, a Chairman-in-Office and a Secretariat headed by a Secretary General. It also now has an Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, a Representative of Freedom of the Media and a High Commissioner on National Minorities (see ‘What is the OSCE?’). 12   ‘Dialogue is in the OSCE’s genetic code’ (‘What is the OSCE?’). 13   eg, the OSCE intervened in the dispute between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008. 14   See www.osce.org/spmu/. 15   See www.un.org/Depts/dpko/police/index.shtml, and Bayley 2006: 7–8. 8 9

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such assistance is provided to countries in post-conflict situations, and may last for months or years. Bayley (2006) has raised the important question of whether such foreign policing assistance really serves the interests of the ‘donor’ or recipient countries, and how it can be ensured that they serve the latter rather than the former. Of course, not all international policing is always as consensual or benign (or is perceived as such) as this. The policing of post-invasion Iraq, for instance, was essentially imposed by the invading countries (led by the United States) through an agreement between them and a Provisional Administration which they had imposed on the country. The transition to a new ‘domestic’ policing organisation which is acceptable to the people of Iraq has proved to be an ongoing (and as yet still unmet) challenge. And often, in post-conflict situations, there is no viable government with which to negotiate policing assistance, so it is provided under some kind of international agreement (see eg Hills, 2009). Within the last 10 years or so the G8 (and even more recently, the G20) countries, as well as the OECD, have taken initiatives to coordinate the international policing of financial markets and institutions, in order to combat such problems as organised crime, money laundering, corruption, etc. The scope of these activities and the scope of what is required to respond to them is nicely illustrated by Nordstrom in her book Global outlaws: crime, money and power in the contemporary world (2007), in which she traces, in the rich and nuanced analyses of an anthropologist, the extra-legal features of our global economy. International policing, therefore, takes two broad forms: international cooperation in the policing of an ever-growing list of transnational crimes such as terrorism, trafficking in drugs, weapons, women and children, etc, fraud, art and antiquities theft and forgery, organised crime, money laundering, corruption, piracy, hijacking etc (to name just a few);16 and international policing assistance and peacekeeping, whereby one or more countries provide policing services, either through bilateral or multilateral agreements, or through the sponsorship of an international organisation such as the United Nations or the European Union, to states which, for one reason or another, are unable to provide adequate domestic policing themselves.

C.  Non-State-Sponsored ‘Private’ Transnational Policing In addition to these various international policing organisations and activities, however, is a burgeoning range of private transnational policing. Most large multinational corporations (such as oil companies, mining companies, banks, shipping and airline companies, hotel chains, resort operators, etc), for instance, have their own in-house security organisations, including investigative departments as well as guard forces, which are deployed to protect their assets and personnel in overseas 16   Policing with reference to international crimes (such as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998) can also be considered as included within this category.

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locations. In addition, there is a growing array of transnational commercial security (TCS) companies which provide a wide range of policing and security services to clients around the world. Johnston and Stenning (2010: 286) have identified six varieties of TCS: 1.  In-house security departments within transnational corporations. Many, if not most, global companies maintain in-house security departments though neoliberalism has coincided with security functions being increasingly outsourced to contract companies (see 2-6 below). 2. TCS companies offering specialist services (e.g. SECOM in respect of the provision of electronic surveillance). 3. Transnational service companies which, despite having little or no prior history in the security field, have now entered it due to the opportunities offered by outsourcing of public services (e.g. Sodexho and Serco in the domain of private corrections). 4. Companies, such as Blackwater17 and MPRI which are involved in the provision of armed defensive security services (sometimes called ‘private military companies’, though preferring to regard themselves as members of the ‘peace and stability operations industry’). 5 Multi-service security companies such as G4S and Securitas, the largest players in the security market. 6. Security consultancies, such as Kroll and Control Risks, primarily concerned with the minimisation of client risk. Arguably included among these are multi-national forensic accounting firms (such as KPMG) which offer their services to investigate corporate fraud and other forms of financial and white-collar crime. Many of the so-called ‘private military contractors’ (PMCs) provide domestic policing and security services under contract in addition to their military involvements. Research on these private transnational policing organisations and activities is in its infancy (see eg Johnston, 2000), and it is difficult to get even an approximately accurate estimate of their size, numbers and turnover, since for obvious commercial reasons, such data are typically not publicly accessible. There is every reason to believe, however, that, as is the case domestically, they employ far more people than their international policing counterparts (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011).

D.  Transnational Policing ‘Assemblages’ These international and transnational policing organisations are frequently targeting the same problems (eg piracy, human trafficking, illegal drug trafficking, etc) and so commonly cooperate with each other, as well as with local domestic policing agencies, in policing and security provision (Spearin, 2005; Gichanga, 2010; O’Reilly, 2010; Schack, 2011; The Economist, 2011). Abrahamsen and Williams   Renamed Xe Services LLC in 2009.

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(2011) have recently analysed some of these ‘global security assemblages’ operating in connection with resource extraction by multi-national corporations in West Africa. Their analysis highlights the delicate and difficult balance which has to be struck between promoting the corporate interests of employers and clients, on the one hand, and respecting the national interests of the countries in which they are operating, on the other.18

E.  The Challenges of Governance The plural and transnational character of this kind of policing and security provision generates substantial challenges for effective governance and accountability, especially when undertaken in conflict or post-conflict situations and in what have come to be termed ‘weak or failed states’ which do not have effective domestic governments. It is often unclear as to which laws apply to their operations, and which institutions have jurisdiction to entertain complaints and resolve disputes about them.19 The legal status and accountability of security personnel in such situations may be affected simultaneously by international law, the domestic laws of the countries in which they are operating, the domestic laws of the countries of the firms for which they work, the contractual terms under which their services are provided, and bilateral or multilateral agreements between states that provide and states that receive such policing and security services. TCS provides good examples of the challenges of effective governance of, and accountability for, transnational policing. In order to understand these, it is necessary to have information about: who companies are working for; what relationships pertain between those they are working for, those they employ, and those whom they are policing; where they are working; and what they are doing. Johnston and Stenning (2010) have explored these issues in some detail.

IV.  The Realities of Transnational Private Policing Provision – What We Don’t Know, and Why During the last 40 years, private policing has emerged as an increasingly significant item on academic and policy agendas. Almost all of the research on this topic (including our own up to this point), however, has focused on domestic private policing provision (eg Johnston, 1992; Rigakos, 2002; Wakefield, 2003; White,   See also their project website at http://users.aber.ac.uk/rbh/privatesecurity/.   Consider, eg, the uncertainties that have recently arisen over the legal and political accountability of the employees of Blackwater (recently renamed Xe) for their policing and security activities under contract in Iraq (see Bjork and Jones, 2005; Chulov and Tran, 2009; Goldenberg, 2008), and over the activities of the security firm CACI International at the infamous Abu Ghraib detention centre there (see Merle and McCarthy, 2004; White, 2007; London, 2008). 18 19

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2010), and it is only in the last decade (actually since the terrorist attack on the United States in 2001, and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq) that much serious attention has been paid to the transnational provision of private policing. The fact that it was these three events that principally sparked this interest has had a significant distorting impact on this research. In the first place it has meant that much of the attention paid to transnational private policing has focused on its role in combating terrorism and in war zones. Secondly, it has meant that much of this attention has been focused on the transnational role of contract private security companies in supporting military forces, and in contributing to peacekeeping, security, nation (re)building in post-conflict, failed and ‘transitional’ states,20 and security sector reform (SSR). And in this respect, the distinctions between mercenaries, ‘private military contractors’ (PMCs) and ‘private security contractors’ (PSCs), and between ‘public’ and ‘private’ force, have become increasingly blurred (see, eg Percy, 2007; Alexandra et al, 2008; Owens, 2008). Thirdly, it has meant that almost all of the research on transnational private policing has focused on the activities of contract security companies, and very little on the activities of in-house security organisations. The combination of these three distorting features has also affected the quality of the little research that has been done on the transnational role of private security. Because the focus of this research has been mainly on the role of private security in extremely dangerous and volatile environments, most of those who have undertaken such research have confined their data collection to secondary sources of data (including media accounts and accounts in official reports) and/or interviews with private security executives, often in their home countries, far away from their companies’ actual fields of operation (eg Hills, 2009; Sotlar, 2009). Yet we know from a long history of research on public police organisations, that research that is limited to such sources inevitably generates biased, unsystematic and incomplete accounts of the realities of policing ‘on the ground’. Most research accounts of the transnational role of private security organisations, therefore, manifest these weaknesses and tend to be highly anecdotal and emphasise the problems associated with transnational private security, without much (or any) attention to the benefits that may be associated with it (for exceptions, see eg Spearin, 2001; Vaux et al, n.d.).21 A review of the extant literature on this topic, therefore, reveals that to date we actually know very little about it. The picture of transnational private security that emerges from this literature is a very partial, anecdotal one, largely unsupported by the kind of systematic empirical research that scholars have traditionally demanded 20   Companies that provide such policing services have come to be described as part of the ‘peace and stability operations industry’ (Johnston and Stenning, 2010: 286). 21   It was revealing, we thought, that when the Afghan President announced in 2010 his government’s intention to ban private security organisations from operating in the country, a number of countries indicated that they would probably have to close their embassies in Afghanistan, and some humanitarian NGOs suggested that they would have to withdraw from the country, if this decision were implemented (Boone 2010a; 2010b).



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as a basis for treating claims as reflecting facts.22 This situation lends credibility to Brodeur’s (2010: 263) general observation that, to date, the voluminous published empirical and observational research on the public police has not been matched by research of comparable quality and depth on private security. The most important research deficit on this topic, in our view, therefore, is the absence of any systematic ethnographic research on the activities of transnational private security personnel ‘on the ground’, or on how they manage their relationships with local authorities and communities in the countries in which they operate. While there may be good explanations for this deficit – difficulties in obtaining research access, political obstacles, possible risks in doing such fieldwork, and the likely high cost of it, etc – it represents a huge gap in our knowledge about policing in the early twenty-first century, which urgently needs to be filled. Associated with this is the fact that because so much of the research on the international use of private security has been viewed from the point of view of state auspices, particularly, in the case of private military companies, the conceptual bias that has been brought to this research has been that researchers looked for coordinated patterns of policing, often with state auspices at the centre of this stage. Thus, the field of global policing has tended to be viewed as one of coordinated networks. This underlying assumption of global policing as coordinated by powerful auspices ‘as if they comprised relatively coherent organizational forms’ (Shearing and Johnston, 2010: 499), however, is problematic. The problem here is not unlike the problem that led to the public police being placed at the centre of the analytic stage of policing scholars. It comes about because all too often in policing research implicit assumptions about the nature of the world of policing are not subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny. The error we are drawing attention to here is the inclination of scholars to look for, and to find, only coordinated networks. Shearing and Johnston (2010) term this ‘the fallacy of nodal-network equivalence’ in which nodes of policing are assumed to be coordinated. We argue that what is required as we seek to understand the contours of global policing, is a focus on a mapping of nodes where no node is assumed a priori to have a privileged place, and it is not simply assumed that the various nodal assemblages that make up global policing are necessarily operating in a coordinated fashion. Such an approach would recognise that policing is essentially a highly contested terrain, and would focus on revealing the roles of different players in, and the dynamics of, this contestation.

V. Conclusion An implicit feature of our discussion so far has been that one of the factors that accounts for the development of the diversity of forms of policing that constitute 22   We are reminded of the Canadian author, Michael Ondaatje’s comment that ‘in Sri Lanka a welltold lie is worth a thousand facts’ (Ondaatje, 1982: 206)

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today’s policing terrain has been the shifts that have taken place in the nature of the risks and insecurities that humans face. While we have not sought to develop this line of argument in this chapter, it is clearly one that deserves attention. The ‘evolution of policing’, to use Robert’s term, cannot be understood simply by looking closely at what has been happening to policing, and police, absent from the context for this evolution. Policing, as the classic historians of policing understood, has always evolved in response to shifts in the nature of the insecurities and risks that powerful elites in societies have perceived (Reiner, 2010: part II; Robinson and Scaglion, 1987). At the time of the development of state police institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across Europe a crucial motivation for the profound changes in policing that the emergence of these institutions brought about was undoubtedly a concern, particularly on the part of elites, to find ways of addressing civil unrest (Palmer, 1988). This continues to be a motivation for development in policing as we enter the twenty-first century, along with the now oft-cited concern with terrorism (Zedner, 2009). But this is by no means all that is brewing in the wings of the policing stage. We suspect that another ‘quiet revolution’ in policing is evolving, away from the lenses of contemporary policing scholarship, which may soon lead us to a new watershed. This is the revolution engendered by the expected massive effects of global environmental change that are, to use an appropriate global warming metaphor, gradually gathering steam. These changes, that are already appearing as dark clouds on our political, social and economic horizons, will bring with them new insecurities that today we only barely glimpse.23 They may include the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria, the consequences of the increased frequency of natural disasters and the imposition of increasingly stringent regulations intended to reshape the way in which humans engage with ecological and other earth systems, and so on. We expect that some of our readers might now be raising eyebrows and wondering about these suggestions. The evidence for these developments, however, is similar to the evidence for the ‘quiet revolution’ of the pluralisation and globalisation of policing; it is right under our noses but not yet fully in our scholarly sights. As these developments begin to force themselves upon us, we look forward to participating in new debates of precisely the sort that we remember engaging in with Robert in the 1980s. This will be both a challenging and an exciting time to be a policing scholar, just as it has been for us, and for Robert, since we met some three decades ago. As this debate unfolds it will constitute a fine tribute to the vibrant arena of policing scholarship to which Robert’s own exemplary scholarship has contributed so much.

23  Interestingly, in his Inaugural Ray Whitrod Oration in 2007, the then Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Mr Mick Keetly, identified climate change as one of the key challenges facing the police in the twenty-first century. ‘Climate change’, he said, ‘is going to be the security issue of the 21st century’, which has ‘the potential to wreak havoc, cause more deaths and pose national security issues like we’ve never seen before’ (Keelty, 2007).



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INDEX abortion, 188, 257 Abrahamsen, R, 271, 277–8 ACPO, 144, 145, 148, 149, 196, 212, 221, 230, 235 Adam Smith Institute, 220 Afghanistan, 50, 208, 278 age of criminal responsibility:   argument, 249–51    Bulger case, 246–7    Ingleby Report, 245–6, 249    international positions, 249–50, 256, 257    law and order discourse, 246–9    neo-liberal youth justice, 251–4    red-lined issue, 257–61 Alcock, B, 119–20, 131 Alderson, John, 7 Alison, Wendy, 124 armed officers, 103–4 Arrow Cross Party, 4 art theft, 211 Audit Commission, 197, 226, 235, 253–4 Auld Report (2001), 259–60 Australia:    immigration control, 50, 52    intelligence-led policing, 200, 201    penal attitudes, 256    police assistance to Pacific islands, 274    police corruption, 159    police culture, 92–3, 104, 105    White Australia policy, 62 authoritarian state, rise, 16, 20 The Avengers, 118 Bangladesh, 50 Banton, Michael, 1, 2, 69, 83, 272 Barnardo’s, 260 Barry, Brian, 23 Batson, David, 99 Bayley, David, 70, 81, 82, 83, 265, 269–70, 275 BBC, 90, 95, 114 Beck, Ulrich, 14 Becker, H, 135–6 Beckett, Katherine, 57 Beijing Rules, 250 Belgium, 60, 75, 199, 200 Bellfield, Levi, 142 Belur, Jyoti, 84, 94 Benyon, J, 273 Berry, Jan, 229 Between the Lines, 112, 125, 130, 131

Big Society, 162, 220, 248–9 The Bill, 112, 121–2, 129 Bittner, Egon, 70, 95, 174, 181, 270, 272 Black, DJ, 70 Blackberry Messenger, 166 Blackwater, 276 Blair, Ian, 138, 139–40, 141, 160 Blair, Tony, 94, 169, 246–7, 253 Blue Murder, 120, 128 Bosworth, M, 59, 60 Bottoms, AE, 252 Bovenkerk, F, 84 Bowling, Ben, 47, 83, 84, 98, 273 Boyte, H, 33 Bratton, William, 136, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150 Brazil, 56, 104 Brewer, John, 97 bribery, 142, 159, 204 British Horseracing Authority, 205 British Phonographic Industry, 205 Broadwater Farm, 164 Brodeur, Jean-Paul, 81, 267–8, 270, 279 Broer, Wim, 70–3 Brown, Gordon, 169 Brown, Jennifer, 115, 118, 121, 122, 123, 125, 128, 130, 131, 132 Brunsdon, C, 113, 126 Buber, Martin, 3 Buikhuisen, Wouter, 73 Bulgaria, 200 Bulger, Jamie, 246–7, 253, 260 Burke, Marc, 124 Burma, 50 Burrows, Colin Stanley, 101 Bush, George W, 44, 208 Cagney and Lacey, 111–15, 119–20, 124, 126–32 Cain, Maureen, 2, 69, 82, 245 Callaghan, James, 2, 258 Cambridge Institute of Criminology, 3 Cameron, David, 143–4, 145, 146–7, 148, 164 Canada, 51, 81–2, 184, 197, 200, 269 cannabis, 258 capital punishment, 19, 257 card fraud, 209, 234 Cartaret, Anna, 121, 124–5 cartoons, 132 centralisation, 85, 222–3, 236, 240–1 Centre for Social Justice, 260–1

286

Index

Ceuta, 50 Chambliss, WJ, 70 Chamy Media, 143 Chan, Janet, 82, 91, 92–3, 105, 106 Chandler, Raymond, 12 Charlie’s Angels, 119 Chatterton, Mike, 2, 102 Chechnya, 50 Chicago School, 245 chief constables:   appointment, 227   London see Scotland Yard    media and, 135–51     2011 riots, 144–9     Hugh Orde, 144–9, 151     institutionalised corruption, 141–4     phone hacking, 139–44     retheorising relationship, 137–8     Scotland Yard Commissioners, 139–51     trial by media, 138–9    Reiner on, 7, 135, 137, 151    retirement, 225, 227    typology, 135, 151 children:   offenders see young offenders   responsibility see age of criminal responsibility    rights, 250, 251, 259 China, 50 Cipriani, D, 249, 250, 251 cities, police and race, 53–7 Clarke, Kenneth, 247, 248 Clarke, Peter, 143, 146 Cohen, Stan, 81 Colbran, Marianne, 122, 129, 132 Collins, Randall, 164 Collins, Steve, 102 The Commander, 127, 128, 129, 130 community policing, 55, 75, 81, 89, 92–3, 106, 111, 112, 127, 161, 183 Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs), 198, 212, 233 Control Risks, 276 copyright violations, 205 Corcoran, P, 231 corruption:    noble cause corruption, 101–2, 159–60    phone hacking and, 141–4    police history, 159    rotten apple excuse, 160    Scotland Yard, 141–4, 160–2    undue influence, 160 cosmopolitanism, 45, 46, 54, 60, 62, 64 Council of Europe, 206 counterfeiting, 205, 211 Cox, Carol, 95 Crawford, Adam, 268 Creeber, G, 123, 126

Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, 162, 198 crime control:   1970s, 195   evolution, 195–214    financial crime, 197, 201, 203–11   intelligence-led policing     financial crime, 204–8     organised crime, 199–201     overview, 196–201     surveillance, 202    IOM, 202–3, 212, 213    MAPPA, 202–3, 213    new policing in action, 201–11    targets, 198, 223, 227 criminal responsibility:   age see age of criminal responsibility    individual v social, 246    trials of police officers, 190 culture see police culture Currie, Elliott, 7–8, 23, 27 cyber-security, 78, 181, 205, 212–13 D’Acci, J, 119, 120, 131 Daly, Mark, 90 Daly, Tyne, 113, 118, 119, 127 dangerous classes, 43, 47–8, 57, 98–9 Darley, John, 99 databases, 49–50, 60, 159, 204, 274 Davis, Angela, 58 Davis, Mike, 54–5, 266 De Giorgi, A, 59 death penalty, 19, 257 Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit, 209 democracy:    deliberative democracy, 33    democratic egalitarianism, institutions, 22–34    democratic professionalism, 34    direct democracy, 34    everyday democracy, 34    information and, 241    institutions, 22–34, 219   majoritarianism, 238    narrow issues and, 243    new mantra, 231    ocular democracy, 31    police function in, 221–2    police governance and, 222–4, 231–2     participation, 235–7    Reiner on democracy and policing, 219–24    social democracy see social democracy    tragic necessity of public policing, 220–1 Dempsey and Makepeace, 128 Denmark, 200, 256 Dhani, A, 115–16 Dick, Cressida, 144 Dickenson, Angie, 119 Dijk, Jan van, 73



Index 287

Disneyland, 56, 269 Dixon, Bill, 99 Dixon, David, 101 Dixon of Dock Green, 111, 114, 120–1 DNA, 60 domestic violence, 20, 97, 183, 235, 237, 240 Dowler, Millie, 142 Downes, David, 81 Dragnet, 117–18 drama:    analytical perspective, 176–9    ceremonial occasions, 183–4, 185    core dramas, 186   definition, 176    functions of Anglo-American police, 179–89    petite police functions, 180–3    police self-representation, 173–91    representation of state authority, 183–9   television, 111–32    theorising policing, 190 drug offences:   children, 250    control, 198, 201, 202, 207, 209, 234    corruption and, 160    criminalisation of drug use, 257–8    global markets, 36    immigrants, 52, 59    international control, 200, 275, 276   legislation, 258   Netherlands, 71    smuggling, 234, 250    social threat, 213   treatment, 212 Du Bois, WEB, 46, 58, 61 Dublin system, 50 Duggan, Mark, 156 Duncan, HD, 180 Durkheim, Emile, 179, 190 Dzur, Albert, 34 Earle, R, 60, 61 Eastwood, Clint, 118, 160 economic crime see financial crime Egmont Group, 206 endism, 17 The Enforcer, 118 epistocracy, 32 Ericson, Richard, 82, 139, 197 Estlund, David, 32 ethnicity see race ethnonationalism, 46 European Court of Human Rights, 259 European Criminal Intelligence Model (ECIM), 199, 211 European Union:    Belgian presidency (2010), 199    financial crime control, 205, 206    immigration control, 50

   UK presidency (2005), 199 Europol, 199, 273, 273–4 Europol Organised Crime Threat Assessments (OCTA), 199–200 Fabians, 5 Facebook, 166, 179 Fahy, Peter, 147 failed states, 277 Fanon, Franz, 46 Federation Against Copyright Theft, 205 Fedorcio, Dick, 143 FIFA, 205 FIFA World Cup (2010), 56 Fijnaut, Cyrille, 74–5, 76, 77, 80 Filkin, Elizabeth, 143 financial crash (2008), 15 financial crime:    crime control, 201, 203–11    formal investigation phase, 208–9   impunity, 204    intelligence phase, 204–8    media and, 197    other organised crime and, 210–11   perceptions, 204    public-private policing interface, 205, 209–10    white-collar crime, 201, 204, 210, 211, 213 Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs), 206, 209 Financial Reporting Orders, 198 Finch, Emily, 94 Finland, penal attitudes, 256 Fleming, Jenny, 82 Fortuyn, Pim, 79 Foster, Janet, 273 Foster, Meg, 119, 131 France, 56, 60, 161, 249–50, 256 Franklin, Benjamin, 44 Fraser, N, 32 Friedan, Betty, 118 Fuzz, 118, 119 G8/20, 275 G20 protests, 141, 158, 165 Gadd, David, 99 Galleon Group, 210 Gamble, Andrew, 17 Gambling Commission, 205 gambling crimes, 205 Garland, David, 17, 18, 36, 59, 81, 82, 196 GCHQ, 205, 213 gender see women genocides, 20 The Gentle Touch, 111, 112, 120–1, 126, 127, 128, 129 Germany, 13, 62, 104, 256 Gilroy, Paul, 46, 61, 64 Gless, Sharon, 113, 119, 127, 131 global south, 43, 45

288 globalisation:    dark side, 57    global apartheid, 43, 62, 63–4   impact, 21–2    policing, 271, 272–3    policing assemblages, 277–8    policing governance, 277    policing organisations, 273–5    private policing, 275–6     hidden realities, 277–9    transnational capitalism, 43 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 43–4 Godwin, Tim, 144, 146, 149 Goffman, Erving, 79, 80, 175, 176, 177–8, 180, 187, 190 Gogh, Theo van, 79 Gold, M, 206 Goldberg, DT, 59 Goldsmith, Andrew, 6 Goldstein, H, 70 Goldthorpe, John, 1, 2 Good Samaritan, 99 Goodman, Clive, 141–2 Gordon, Diana, 55 Gould, Stephen Jay, 43 governance see police governance Gray, J, 239 Greece, 50, 60 Green, Damian, 140–1 Green, JE, 31–2 Greer, Bonnie, 32 Grimshaw, Roger, 231 Groce, Cherry, 164 Group4Securicor (G4S), 271, 276 Guatemala, 50 Guil, M, 59 Guinea-Bissau, 250 Gypsies, 50 Habermas, Jürgen, 33 Haggerty, Kevin, 82, 197 Hahn, Frank, 1 Hailwood, Andy, 102 Hale, D, 118, 121 Halford, Alison, 124 Hall, Stuart, 16, 17, 64, 136 Hallinan, Colin, 123–4 Harcourt, B, 13 Harleston, D, 131 Harris, J, 43 Harvey, D, 22–3 Hayman, Andy, 143, 146 Hegel, Georg, 44 Heidensohn, Frances, 4, 82, 112, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129, 130, 132 Helu, Carlos Slim, 44 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), 139, 143, 201, 212, 229, 235

Index Herbert, Nick, 230 Herrnstein, RJ, Bell Curve, 45, 57 high-tech policing, 270 Hillyard, Patrick, 6 Hinton, Mercedes, 82 Hobsbawm, Eric, 13 Hogan-Howe, Bernard, 144, 146, 149–51 Holdaway, Simon, 2 Holocaust, 4, 220 Home Office, leaks, 140–1 homophobia, 18, 98, 113, 119, 124–5 homosexual law reform, 257 Hornberger, Julia, 82 Horthy, Admiral, 4 Hough, M, 239 House, Steve, 146, 149 Howard, Michael, 247 Hoyle, Carolyn, 97 Hu Jintao, 44 human rights:    children’s rights, 250, 251, 259    dangerous classes, 48   India, 94–5    international attitudes, 257    just ordering and, 29, 34    social democracy and, 19–20 Hungarian Working People’s Party, 4 Hungary, 4 Hurd, G, 114 Hutton, Will, 15 immigrants:    criminal justice and, 43   crimmigration, 50    forced migrants, 20    global vagabonds, 47, 49    imprisonment, 59–60, 63    policing borders, 48–53     foreign appearance, 63    UK practices, 51, 52 Independent Commission on Youth and AntiSocial Behaviour, 259, 260 Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), 139, 143, 146, 163 India, 50, 84, 94–5 indigneous people, 20 individualism, 12, 222, 248 infectious diseases, 280 informants, 159 information age, 157 Ingleby Report (1961), 245–6, 249 insider dealing, 203, 208, 210, 211 Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB), 210 intelligence gathering, 165–7 intelligence-led policing:    financial crime, 204–8    organised crime, 199–201   overview, 196–201



Index 289

  surveillance, 202 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 250 International Cricket Council, 205 International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), 200 international policing organisations, 273–5 Internet, 158, 179, 272 Interpol, 49, 274 IOM (Integrated Offender Management), 202–3, 212, 213 IRA, 257 Iraq, 208, 275, 278 Italy, 50, 256 Japan, 52, 256 Jefferson, Thomas, 44 Jefferson, Tony, 231 Jermyn, D, 114, 115 Jews, 50 John, T, 196 Johnson, Boris, 148, 149, 150, 228, 248 Johnston, Les, 82, 267, 273, 279 Jones, D, 253 Jones, Trevor, 231, 235, 239 Judt, Tony, 12, 13 Juliet Bravo, 111, 112, 114, 120, 121, 123, 124–5, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130 Junger-Tas, Josine, 73 juries, mock juries, 94 just ordering:    contemporary penal politics and, 34–6    human rights, 29, 34    social democracy and, 15–22    social justice and solidarity, 29–31, 36    towards institutions of, 22–34    why ordering, 27–9 Kant, Immanuel, 44 Karstedt, Susanne, 83, 84 Kelly, Liz, 126 Kennison, Peter, 102 kettling, 165 Kilbrandon Report, 258 The Killing, 112, 113, 130, 131–2 King, Rodney, 190, 191 Klinger, David, 101 Knapp Report, 159 KPMG, 276 Kroll, 276 La Plante, Lynda, 127 Lang, G and K, 135 law and order discourse, 20, 47, 81, 94, 117, 140, 243, 246–9, 253 Lee, Maggy, 83 Left Realists, 27

legitimacy, 6, 12, 19, 31–2, 35, 47–9, 59, 72–3, 151, 160–1, 235–6, 238, 241 Lemert, EM, 182 Leng, Roger, 98 lesbianism, 119, 123, 124–5, 131 Levi, Michael, 206, 207, 209 liberalism, social democracy and, 12 Linnaeus, Carolus, 44 Loader, Ian, 14, 17, 18, 82, 91, 99–100, 136, 273 local government, decline, 236 Lockwood, David, 1, 2 Loftus, Bethan, 93, 98 Lombroso, Cesare, 44 London Bombings (2005), 142 London School of Economics (LSE), 1, 2, 5, 85, 245 Lonsway, K, 116 Lustgarten, Edgar, 3 Luxembourg, 60 Luxemburg, Rosa, 11, 261 McConville, Michael, 98 MacCormick, Neil, 28 machismo, 76, 97, 122, 124, 125 McLaughlin, E, 111 Macpherson Report (1999), 90, 92 Maguire, Mike, 196 Maisie Raine, 128 Malaysia, 249–50 Malthouse, Kit, 228 Malton, Jackie, 112, 123, 127 Manning, PK, 70, 81, 93, 102, 136, 167 MAPPA (Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements), 202–3, 213 marginal groups, 33, 47, 58–9, 99, 187 Mark, Robert, 155, 159 market abuse, 203, 205, 210 Marks, Monique, 55, 82 Marquand, David, 19 Martin, J, 82 Martin, Susan, 120 Martin, Troy Kennedy, 114 Marx, GT, 70 Marxism, 4 May, Theresa, 143, 145–7, 148, 149, 150, 164, 227, 229 May Day riots (2005), 165 Mayerle, J, 119 Mead, Margaret, 92 media:    chief constables and, 135–51     2011 riots, 144–9     Hugh Orde, 144–9, 151     phone hacking, 139–44     retheorising relationship, 137–8     Scotland Yard Commissioners, 139–51     trial by media, 138–9    female police in TV cop shows, 111–32

290

Index

media (cont.):    fictional representation of police, 6, 111–32    financial crime and, 197    information environment, 156–8, 163    mass images, 187    new politics of policing and, 167–9    PCCs and, 219    phone hacking, 139–44, 155, 158–63, 167, 190, 248    police relations, 155, 160–1    public opinion and, 138–9   punitivism, 94–5    Reiner on, 6, 111–12, 114, 117    representation of crime, 158    right-wing shift on policing, 85    social media, 158, 163, 166–7   unreality, 186 Melilla, 50 Menezes, Jean Charles de, 101, 190 mercenaries, 278 Merkel, Angela, 63 Merton, Robert, 13, 23 Messner, S, 23 Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), 139, 143, 144, 148, 149, 228 Metropolitan Police Service see Scotland Yard Mexico, 50 Midsomer Murders, 112 Miller, WR, 70 Milliband, David, 15 Milliband, Ralph, 1 miners’ strike (1984–85), 6, 231, 234, 238 Mirren, Helen, 112, 127 MIT, 128 Mitchell, Katharyne, 57 Mittal, Lakshmi, 44 money laundering, 200, 201, 203, 204–5, 206–7, 208–9, 211, 234 Morris, Terence, 1, 81, 245 Morse, 112 MPRI, 273, 276 Muir, WK, 70 Mulcahy, Aogàn, 99–100, 136 Mulcaire, Glenn, 141–2 Munro, Vanessa, 94 Murder in Suburbia, 128 Murray, C, Bell Curve, 45, 75 Muslims, 60, 72, 79 Naeyé, Jan, 75, 76–7 The Naked City, 117–18 National Audit Office, 235 National Community Tensions Team, 166 National Crime Agency, 200, 212, 213 National Family and Parenting Institute, 255 National Fraud Authority, 209, 213 National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, 209, 213

National Intelligence Model (NIM), 196, 198–9, 201, 211, 212 National Policing Improvement Agency, 230 natural disasters, 280 neighbourhood policing, 162, 196, 198 neo-liberalism:    academic literature, 15    coercion and, 49, 64    competitive egoism, 13    democratic egalitarian alternatives, 22–34    end of social democracy, 11–14    individual v social responsibility for crime, 246    inequalities, 23, 47–8, 54    law and order, 246    New Labour and, 247, 248   pathologies, 27    privatisation of policing, 220    rearguard action against, 22–3    Reiner and, 4, 7, 11    rise, 15, 16–17    standard readings, 20    Thatcher years, 248    youth justice and, 251–4, 256 Netherlands:   academics, 83    consultancy firms, 79    control of organised crime, 200    Muslims, 72, 79   Occupation, 71    penal attitudes, 256    police culture, 104    Police Foundation, 71, 73, 75    police politics, 85    police research, 70–81, 84     action driven, 78–9     ad hoc, 78–9     changing police, 72–4     civilians, 77–8     ‘crossovers,’ 74–7     fragmentation, 80     non-intervention principle, 79–80     traditional scope, 80–1    professional police magazines, 80    race and language, 63   terrorism, 79   xenophobia, 72 New Labour:    criminal courts, 260    criminal legislation, 254, 255–6    Ian Blair and, 140, 141, 160    law and order discourse, 20, 27, 94, 247–8, 253    law reforms, 257    police governance, 223    populist communitarianism, 254 New Left, 105 New Tricks, 127, 128, 130, 131 New Zealand, 256, 259



Index 291

Newburn, Tim, 95 News International, 142–3, 151, 155, 158, 160–1 News of the World, phone hacking, 141–2, 155, 248 Neyroud, Peter, 230 Nordholt, Eric, 72 Nordstrom, C, 275 Norris, Clive, 102 North Korea, 50 Northern Ireland, 97, 148–9, 257 Norway, 211, 256 Obama, Barack, 44, 52–3 OECD, 275 O’Malley, Pat, 17, 18 Orde, Hugh, 139, 140, 144, 145–9, 151 organised crime, 196, 197, 199–201, 210–13, 234, 240 OSCE, 274 Osman, Hussein, 101 O’Sullivan, S, 113, 114 outrage, politics of outrage, 138, 139, 140 Packer, H, 250 Paddick, Brian, 148 Pakistan, 50 Paoline, EA, 97 parental responsibility, 255–7 Parenting Orders, 255 participation, police reform proposals and, 235–7 participative policing, 162, 168 Pearson, G, 50 Peel, Robert, 161, 181 penal welfarism, 26–7 people smuggling, 234 performance indicators, 162, 199, 223, 238, 239, 254 Pettit, Phillip, 34–5 Phillips, Coretta, 60, 61 Phillips, David, 197 phone hacking, 141–4, 155, 158–63, 167, 190, 248 Pickles, Carolyn, 122 pickpocketing, 100–1 pigmentocracy, 44 piracy, 273 plural policing, 265–6, 269, 280 Police and Crime Commissioners:    accountability and, 162–3, 168   assessment, 230–41    complicated structures, 234–5, 242   democracy, 231–3   equity, 238    functions, 226–7, 233    information function, 241    introduction, 169, 219, 226, 248    localism and, 211   majoritarianism, 238    narrow focus, 233–4

  participation, 235–7    Police and Crime Plans, 227, 228    power distribution, 240–1   powers, 234–5    redress mechanisms, 241    service delivery, 239    strategy and, 212 Police and Crime Plans, 227, 228 police authorities, 147, 168, 219, 223, 225–7, 229, 231, 233–6, 240   see also Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) Police Community Consultative Groups, 235, 243 police culture:    authorised version, 90   complexities, 89–106    determinant influences, 96–102   distinctiveness, 94–6    homophobia, 98, 125    isolation, 76, 95    legtitimating myths, 100    machismo, 76, 97, 122, 124, 125    negative values, 91   racism, 91–3    reform target, 90–4    Reiner, 76, 80, 90, 96, 203    suspicion and cynicism, 95–6    talk and behaviour, 102–5 Police Federation, Reiner’s study of, 1–2, 89 police fetishism, 266 police governance:    1964 Police Act, 224–5    1994 changes, 225–6    centralisation, 222–3, 236, 240–1    complicated structures, 234–5, 242    democratic accountability, 222–4    existing system, 224–6    local electoral involvement, 222–3   London, 241    nodal governance, 265    Police Reforms and Social Responsibility Act, 226–9   reform proposals     aims and objectives, 229–30     assessment, 230–241     democracy, 231–2     equity, 237–8     information function, 241     London, 228–9     majoritarianism, 238     outline, 224–9     participation, 235–7     power distribution, 240–1     redress mechanisms, 241     responsiveness, 239–40     service delivery, 239     vulnerable people, 237–8    transnational policing, 277

292

Index

police property, 46–7, 48, 51, 195n1 police research:   Belgium, 75   Canada, 81–2    female researchers, 82–3   India, 84    international picture, 81–4    international private security, 278–9    liberal elite, 85    mobility of researchers, 82–3    Netherlands, 70–81, 84    organised crime, 210    United Kingdom, 69, 81    United States, 70, 272 Police Woman, 119 policing:    by consent, 73    defining and maintaining order, 269–70   globalisation, 271–9   meaning, 267–72    plural provision, 265–6, 269, 280    private policing see private security    state monopoly, 219, 267, 269, 271 Policing and Crime Panels (PCPs), 228, 232, 233, 234–5, 236, 240 POLIS, 274 politics:    contemporary penal politics and just ordering, 34–6    government interference in policing, 85    high and low police politics, 185–6    law and order discourse, 20, 27, 47, 81, 94, 117, 140, 243, 246–9, 253    new politics of policing, 167–9    policing reform, 161–3, 167–9    politics of outrage, 138, 139, 140   Reiner’s Politics of the Police, 6, 7, 89, 91, 96, 156–7, 169–70, 173–4, 223–4, 265–63    social democracy see social democracy poverty, 45, 51, 54, 255 Powell, Colin, 44 Prenzler, T, 115 Prime Suspect, 111, 112, 114–15, 123–4, 125–7, 128, 130–1 prisons:    cosmopolitan prisons, 60, 62   disturbances, 247    immigrants, 59–60, 63    New Labour and, 248    ‘prison works,’ 247    race and, 57–61    young offenders, 253 private security:    global firms, 57   growth, 266–7    international security, 271, 275–6     hidden realities, 277–9   objectives, 269

  profits, 58    Reiner on, 265    state police and, 270 Problem Oriented Policing (POP), 198 public opinion:    media and, 138–9    punitivism, 32, 59, 94    rising crime, 232    sources of information on police, 117 punitivism, 32, 59, 94–5, 247 quality of life issues, 162 Quentin, Caroline, 120 Quick, Bob, 141, 142 Quinney, R, 70 Rabe-Hemp, C, 126 race:    crime and race theory, 44   essentialism, 44    ethnicity and, 46    global apartheid, 43, 62, 63–4    global shift, 44–5    hate crime, 97, 99    historical theories, 43–4    immigration control and, 48–53    imperial race, 50    institutional racism, 62, 90   miscegenation, 44    modern assumptions, 45   myths, 46   pigmentocracy, 44    police property, 46–7, 48, 51    police racism, 91–2    policing cities, 53–7    prison population, 57–61    theoretical considerations, 45–8    usual suspects, 43 Rákosi, Mátvás, 4 rating agencies, 57 Rawlinson, Paddy, 82–3 Rawls, John, 28 Reagan, Ronald, 18–19 Reenen, Piet van, 76, 77 refugees, 20 Regional Asset Recovery Teams, 212 Reiner, Robert:   Blue-Coated Worker, 1–2, 11, 89   career, 2    on centralisation, 240   Chief Constables, 7, 135, 137, 151    on civil libertarianism, 92    crime control practice, 195    ‘criminology as a Vocation,’ 6    democracy and policing, 219–24, 242   education, 1    evolution of policing, 280    factual policing, 81

   on fire brigade policing, 213    influence, 74, 81, 85    Jewish background, 1, 3, 4, 8, 220    key themes, 156   Law and Order, 7–8, 245, 246–9    LSE and, 5    media and, 117, 129, 131      female cops in TV, 111–12, 114, 127      representation of crime, 156, 157–8    moral drive of police, 74–5    neo-liberalism and, 4, 64    on neophilia, 78   Netherlands, 73    pessimism, 5, 22    police culture, 80, 90, 91, 94, 95, 125, 203    on Police Federation, 1–2, 89    on police fetishism, 266    on police governance, 226, 242    police profiles, 76    police property, 46–7, 51, 195n1    political economy, 7   politics, 4–5    politics of policing, 46   Politics of the Police, 3, 6, 7, 89, 91, 96, 156–7, 169–70, 173–4, 223–4, 265–63    on private policing, 265    on purpose of the police, 233, 242    race and prison population, 58    recent years, 23–4    social democracy, 11–15, 231, 242, 261    social enquiry, 155    on state monopoly of force, 219, 267 Reiss, Albert, 70, 97, 272 research see police research restorative justice, 259 Reynolds, Burt, 118, 119 Rice, Condoleezza, 44 Richmond, Anthony, 62 riots:    2011, 144–9, 155–6, 163–7    asymmetric rioting, 165    Brixton, 89, 117, 225, 238, 243    Broadwater Farm (1986), 164    intelligence gathering, 165–7    media and, 144–9, 155–6    new politics of policing, 167    public resentment of police, 190   South Africa, 56 Robinson, WI, 43 Robson, J, 119–20, 131 Rock, Paul, 81 Rosenfeld, R, 23 Rosenthal, Uri, 77 Rosenzweig, Barney, 126–7 Royal Prerogative, 7 Rubinstein, J, 70 Runciman Commission, 98 Russia, 50

Index 293 Rutter, Michael, 255 Ryle, Gilbert, 99 Sanders, Andrew, 98 SARA cycle, 196 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 160 Saud, Abdullah bib Abdul Aziz al, 44 Scarman Report (1981), 89, 225, 243 Schengen Agreement, 273 Scotland, age of criminal responsibility, 251 Scotland Yard   see also Metropolitan Police Authority    2011 riots and, 165    art theft and, 211   chief constables     corruption and, 160–1     mayoral pressures, 248     origins, 161, 233    chief constables and media     2011 riots, 144–9     Commissioners, 139–51     Hugh Orde, 144–9, 151     phone hacking, 139–44    consultation mechanisms, 225–6    corruption, 141–4, 159, 160    intelligence gathering, 165–7    mayoral control, 162    origins, 161, 233    phone hacking and, 139–44, 163    police governance reform, 228–9 Scott and Bailey, 112, 128 SECOM, 276 Secret Policeman, 92, 161 secure training orders (STOs), 252–3 Securitas, 273, 276 ‘see through services,’ 162, 168 ‘seeing like a citizen,’ 162, 168 Seidman, RB, 70 seigneural states, 49 Serious Crime Prevention Orders, 198 Serious Fraud Office, 208, 209, 234 Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), 200–1, 213, 234 Shalev, Sharon, 83 Shearing, Clifford, 4, 77, 82, 265, 266, 267, 269–70, 279 Sheptycki, James, 83 Sherman, L, 70, 73, 81 signal crimes, 158–9 Sigurdson, J, 115–16 Silvestri, Marisa, 120, 126 Simmel, Georg, 3 Simon, Jonathon, 59 Skolnick, JH, 70, 102, 272 Slovenia, 200 Smith, Anthony, 46 Smith, DJ, 239 Smith, Susan, 62

294 social democracy:    academic literature, 15    criminology and, 21, 26    defects, 17–18, 19    democratic credentials, 21   description, 34–5    end of, 11–14    human rights and, 19–20    just ordering and, 15–22     creating institutions, 22–34    liberalism and, 12    penal attitudes, 26–7, 256    police governance and, 231–2    principles, 12, 24   prospects, 15–22    Reiner on, 11–15, 231, 242, 261   reinvention, 34–6 social media, 158, 163, 166–7 socialism, 19, 231 solidarity project, 29–31, 36 Solomon Islands, 274 South Africa, 51, 55–6, 62, 256 sovereign debt crisis (2011), 15 Spain, 50 Sparks, Richard, 14, 17, 18, 91 Spencer, Sarah, 222–3 Squires, Peter, 102 Stalinism, 220 Stanko, Betsy, 83 Stears, Marc, 34 Steenhuis, Dato, 73 Stenning, Philip, 4, 77, 82, 266, 269–70, 273 Stephenson, Paul, 140, 141, 143, 146, 149, 160, 163, 248 Stevenson, S, 252 stop and search, 58, 63, 100–1, 230, 237 Straver, Ries, 72, 85 Straw, Jack, 223, 247, 248 student protests, 141, 165 Sweden, 113, 200, 256 Swit, Loretta, 119 Switzerland, 60, 206–7 Sydney-Smith, S, 118, 124–5, 126 Takats, E, 207 Talmud, 1, 4, 8 Taylor, Ian, 81 Taylor, Laurie, 81 telecommunication networks, 49 television, 111–32 Terre Blanche, Eugene, 56 Terrill, W, 96, 97 terrorism:    counter-terrorism mistakes, 101    financing, 204, 205    international terrorism, 234, 275, 278   Netherlands, 79    Northern Ireland, 257

Index    priority, 85, 280    UK counter-terrorism, 234    UN counter-terrorism, 205, 206    United States, 186–7, 278 Thames Television, 122 Thatcherism:   alternative, 22–3    criminologists and, 91    law and order, 2   neo-liberalism, 248    rise, 15, 16    social policy, 18–19, 20    youth justice, 252 Thompson, Robert, 246–7, 259 Thornton, Sara, 144 Tobacco Manufacturers Association, 205 Tomlinson, Ian, 158 totalitarianism, 4–5, 220 A Touch of Frost, 124 TREVI, 273 Turkey, 50, 84 Twitter, 166 Tyler, TR, 100 UDF, 257 UEFA, 205 under-enforcement of law, 97–8 underclass, 17 undue influence, 155, 159, 160, 161 United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA), 52 United Nations:    age of criminal responsibility, 250    counter-terrorism, 205, 206    Organised Crime Threat Assessment, 200    police units, 273   UNCIVPOL, 274–5 United States:    age of criminal responsibility, 251    Bill Bratton, 144    ceremonial occasions, 183–4   cities, 54–5    Civil Rights Movement, 118    criminal trials of policemen, 190   culture, 180    financial crime control, 206, 208, 209    gender equality legislation, 118    immigration control, 50, 51, 52–3    insider dealing, 210, 211    intelligence-led policing, 201    International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 200    media and police chiefs, 136   neo-liberalism, 13    penal attitudes, 256    police corruption, 159    police governance model, 237    police gunfights, 101    police research, 70, 81–2, 245, 272

   policing cities, 56    policing in Iraq, 275    race and prison population, 57, 58–9, 60    racial segregation, 61–2    racial theories, 44    terrorism, 186–7, 278    women police officers, 126, 129–30    Women’s Rights Movement, 118 UNODC, 200 usual suspects, 43, 47, 50, 195n1, 213 utopianism, 220 vagrancy laws, 50 van Duyne, P, 207 van Ewijk, A, 115 Van Maanen, J, 70 vandalism, 162, 236, 258 Venables, Jon, 246–7, 259 Venezuela, 104 Vera, 128 victim support, 19–20 Vijver, Kees van der, 71, 72–3, 75 virtual policing, 270 Volume Crime Management Model, 199 Wacquant, Loïc, 13, 23, 58, 59, 60 Waddington, PAJ, 95, 98, 100, 103–4 Waldron, J, 28 Wales, Police and Crime Panels (PCPs), 228 Walker, Neil, 26, 82, 273 Wallis, Neil, 143 Wambaugh, J, 5 Washington consensus, 13 Weatheritt, M, 102 Weber, Leanne, 47, 49 Weber, Max, 3, 173, 180, 265, 271 Welch, Raquel, 118 welfare state, underclass and, 17

Index 295 Westley, William, 70, 272 white-collar crime, 201, 204, 210, 211, 213 Wiarda, Jian, 72 Williams, Eryl Hall, 245 Williams, Kate, 95 Williams, M, 271, 277–8 Williams, Raymond, 18 Wilson, JQ, 70, 92, 272 women:    police culture, 97    police ratios, 115, 116    police researchers, 82–3    Sex Discrimination Act (1975), 118    TV cop shows, 111–32 Wood, Jennifer, 82 Woodfield, K, 51 Wootton, Barbara, 249, 250, 258 Wootton, J, 131 World Prison Population Briefing, 58 Wright, Martin, 95 xenophobia, 18, 56, 72 Yates, John, 142, 143, 146, 163 Young, A, 246 Young, J, 27, 81 Young, Malcolm, 121 young offenders:    dual responsibility for crime, 255–7    neo-liberalism and, 251–4    restorative justice, 259    youth offending teams, 254 Younge, Gary, 51 Z Cars, 111–12, 114 zero tolerance, 57, 144, 149, 189, 247 Zimbardo, PG, 258