Seven: Partnerships or plural policing?
Pluralised policing is, of course, a phrase that encourages the partnership approach to providing services to the public. Neighbourhood policing teams are, in a sense, an historical example of the partnership approach in terms of the delivery of policing at the local level. The partnership approach, therefore, is an important facet of the idea of pluralised policing and worthy of examination. In recent years, the notion of community safety partnerships – which focus primarily on crime prevention – and the idea of public–private partnerships (PPPs) with private security companies such as G4S have both come to the fore. This chapter focuses on these two major ideas, which illustrate that agencies other than the police organisation have been involved in policing for some time.
Since the introduction of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the police organisation has been legally obliged to engage in partnership work with many other agencies involved in crime prevention activities. These agencies began to ‘police’ their geographic areas alongside the public police and are, in effect, engaged in plural-style policing.
It is difficult to identify precisely when the concept of partnerships first entered the debate on policing and crime prevention. ‘Partnership’ in this sense refers to a purposeful relationship between the police and the public, or between the police and other agencies in this field. The debate on policing does not appear to have mentioned the concept until the rise of community policing in the early 1980s; since then, the idea that the police could no longer tackle crime alone has developed into something more than a slogan.
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