Modern Policing and Reform Collection
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 11 items
This chapter considers how the calls to ‘defund the police’ might impact on police mental health work. Reformist positions have been argued for a shift in funding from policing towards an investment in welfare and community services. In calling for this policy shift, campaigners have highlighted the need for significant investment in mental health services.
The Black Lives Matter movement galvanised protest movements against police and state violence around the globe. A common theme in many protests was the demand to ‘Defund the Police’. Increasing attention to the idea of defunding or divesting from police forces is gaining in mainstream politics and media. We need to seriously consider what is required to fundamentally change the way policing operates. The option of divestment opens up this discussion. Defund the Police is not another book about police reform. It is an engagement in the contemporary debate on the politics and possibilities of police abolition. To date, the majority of popular and academic literature in policing studies, law reform, and criminology has been preoccupied with conventional ideas related to top-down police reform. These reforms include efforts, for example, to recruit diverse and inclusive police officers, to implement cultural-awareness training, to introduce technical solutions like the use of body cameras, to place limitations on the use of force, and to introduce police-led programs aimed at cultivating localised or community policing. We have had decades of these types of reforms, and part of the explosion of protest internationally is driven by the profound sense of frustration at the inability of police to reform themselves. This chaper outlines the nature of the international protests and argues that, although local conditions generated what became an international movement for change, there were common themes among the protesters across different countries. The chapter outlines in brief the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement and how in the US there were various responses from local, city, and state governments. The link between Defunding the Police and the broader challenges to mass incarceration and the carceral state is also discussed.
The introduction first describes the policy context in which discussions of policing take place, and the tendency for politicians and the media to see crime problems – and solutions – within a simplistic deterrence framework which rappeals to provides some context for a discussion of good policing. It then summarises the book’s arguments in brief. It moves on to characterise procedural justice theory as offering both a descriptive account of how legitimacy is built (or lost) and a normative theory about what good policing looks like. It traces similarities between procedural justice theory and other approaches such as ‘responsive regulation’. It describes how procedural justice theory relates to other theories of policing. The chapter ends by describing the content of the remaining chapters.
Chapter 3 examines the concept of police legitimacy, and considers the ways it can be produced and maintained in policed communities. The chapter explores the lengthy histories of poor police legitimacy in UK and US communities, and the ways police misconduct negatively impacts police legitimacy. The chapter further offers an important contribution to understandings of police legitimacy by tying it to the theory of representative bureaucracy. It asserts that passive bureaucratic representation alone can improve public perceptions of legitimacy, particularly in traditionally marginalized communities. It further argues that active bureaucratic representation can change outcomes for historically oppressed groups. It further examines the degree of minority group representativeness required to improve legitimacy, and ultimately change organizational culture, considering whether a ‘critical mass’ of diversity is required to shift police organizational culture. The chapter concludes by arguing that the only way to rapidly achieve sufficient degrees of representativeness to improve legitimacy in some key minority communities is through positive discrimination/affirmative action.
This exploration into the policing brain begins with taking stock of the world in which we find ourselves in the 2020s. As there are calls on everyone’s resilience, so are there calls on the resilience of emergency responders, police officers, police staff and those who share their lives with them. Some challenges we all share, and some are unique to our own jobs and the ways we have adapted to them. The opening chapter looks at the obvious environmental influences on contemporary policing from the wider social and political sphere of criminality and social care. Crucial findings from socio-psychological research show how we interpret these wider influences and how they translate into our perceptions of everyday policing – and how the emerging discipline of ‘police wellbeing’ addresses them. Finally, we introduce some initial glimpses of what makes a ‘policing mind’, supported by the latest developments in neuroscience. In doing so we open to a new way of perceiving police resilience – from the inside, out.
This chapter introduces the book and situates it in its broader international context. It discusses the definitional difficulties associated with community policing and communities in general. It notes the historical development of the approach in the US and the UK, and some of the barriers to its implementation, but also the variable success of the strategy in the Global South in comparison to the Global North. Finally, it sets out the book’s approach and its exploration of effective practice.
The introduction outlines the aim of the book, the case study and theoretical approaches it draws on, and the overall book structure.
The 21st century poses distinct new twists for the very long-standing challenge of holding police to account and providing democratic governance of a range of law enforcement and regulatory agencies with considerable power over citizens. Web-based technology and artificial intelligence (AI) seem poised to transform policing and social regulation in fundamental ways just as swathes of other industries and services have experienced. Often characterised as ‘predictive policing’, the possibility that law enforcement and partner agencies might mine vast reserves of intelligence and data in order to forecast – with spectacular accuracy – the perpetrator, venue and timing of offences yet to happen offers a policing future by turns terrifying and exhilarating in criminological terms. Potentially, the reach of such technologies expands the scope and power of policing such that long-established moral, ethical and political concerns about democratic accountability are considerably more pressing. By 2020 the Chinese government plans to have fully deployed a social credit system that uses big data and principles of commercial credit scoring to assess the ‘trustworthiness’ and social standing of all citizens, using vast and complex systems of surveillance technology (Liang et al 2018). Not only does this new combination of policing, surveillance and regulation offer the possibility of identifying any individual anywhere in China within a matter of moments, it provides the basis for high-level social sorting such that freedom of movement, access to services, and political and social participation can be permitted or denied via technological assemblages. It is argued at many points in the book that the rush to technological determinism needs to be resisted in the face of such predictions: that such developments might be technically possible does not mean that they will be enacted.
This chapter serves as an introduction to the spycops scandal, starting with the exposure of Mark Kennedy, who had infiltrated environmental activists. It details findings from several reviews into the practices of undercover policing, and the information provided by a whistleblower, which convinced the Home Secretary at the time to establish a statutory inquiry. The political undercover units targeted left-wing and anti-racist activism and used sexual relationships to build trust and cover identities. The chapter thus analyses these units in relation to the allegations of institutional racism and institutionalised sexism.
The chapter introduces the volume, sketches the broad outlines of the 16 substantive chapters which follow and sets out the issues and concerns which underpin the approach taken by the collection. The discussion engages, albeit briefly, with the work of a range of Southern and postcolonial commentators who have drawn attention to Southern differences and the postcolonial intersectionalities of race, gender and class. The chapter also introduces the notion of ‘boomerang’ (or ‘blowback’) effects as violence and forms of criminalization and securitization, which were first deployed by imperial nations across their empires, find their way back home and into in the modern governance systems of Northern neoliberal societies. At the same time, processes of transnational governance, even disarmament, peace and human rights initiatives, replicate the many of imperial relations they were meant to ameliorate or replace.
