Transformations of Policing

Alistair Henry, David J. Smith, David J. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351878050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Police and People in London is still the largest and most detailed study of a police force and its relations with the public that has yet been undertaken in Britain. The twenty-three years since its publication has seen a constantly-accelerating rate of change in the legal framework of policing, in the arrangements for democratic accountability of the police, in the technologies involved in crime and policing, in management structures and methods in the police service, in financial control systems imposed by central government and in methods of assessing police performance. Over the same period, crime control has moved from the bottom to the top of the political agenda, leading to increasing pressure on the police to be seen to be effective. Transformations of Policing returns to the central issues discussed in 1983 and considers whether the main conclusions need to be revised in the light of what has happened since. It also reviews areas of debate and research that have emerged more recently and highlights areas of turbulence that are creating fundamentally different patterns from before and raising genuinely new questions.

Chapter 1
Looking Back on Police and People in London

Alistair Henry¹

In policing and police research, as in all aspects of national life, 1979 and the election of Mrs Thatcher mark a significant break. The advent of the 1980s is more than just a convenient chronological dividing line. The harbingers of growing conflict, which were already apparent by 1979 (and associated with the development of the new interest in police research exhibited by official agencies and radical groups), presaged an extent of controversy and debate about policing that was unprecedented in recent times. In turn, this stimulated a flood of police research that was completely without precedent and is still continuing (Reiner, 1992, 443–4).

In his 1992 overview of British police research for a thematic volume of Crime and Justice on modern policing, Robert Reiner provided a compelling account of the importance of the 1980s to the development and transformation of both policing and police research in the UK. The scale and nature of the quantitative and qualitative transformation of the field throughout this period was illustrated through reference to the research that had preceded it. For Reiner, the 'starting point' of British police research, or its 'clear and distinguished genesis' (1992, 439) was to be found in Michael Banton's The Policeman in the Community (1964). Reiner observed that, up until Banton's pioneering contribution, the literature on the British police had, largely, either been produced by 'enthusiastic amateurs' of various stripes (including journalists and ex-police officers), or had taken the form of government-sponsored surveys designed to inform public inquiries such as the Royal Commission on the Police which reported in 1962. It was Banton according to Reiner, who brought police research into the academy, and it was Banton (through The Policeman in the Community and his series of police research conferences in Bristol in the early 1970s) who would shape the character of much of the academic British police research that would emerge throughout the 1960s and 1970s (based on participant observation, focused on the everyday 'peacekeeping' functions of the police and the informal rules and values that shaped police practice. However, by the end of the 1970s Banton-influenced police research in Britain would still remain a niche area of interest, and the preserve of only a 'cosy club' of academic researchers. This was not to change until the 1980s.

The 'starting point' for the present volume was another influential and important study of the police: the Policy Study Institute's (PSI) Police and People in London, referred to in this volume as PPL (Small, 1983; Smith, 1983a; Smith, 1983b; Smith and Gray, 1983). There are a number of important continuities between PPL and Banton's legacy, yet PPL also exemplifies many of the transformations in policing and police research that Robert Reiner saw as characterizing the 1980s. These linkages can be summarized as follows:

• Participant observation. The method of fieldwork favoured by Banton and the 'cosy club' of early British police researchers would also form a central component of the PPL research (see below). Where Reiner did not argue that participant observation had been the sole research method deployed in pre-1980 research (some studies used 'questionnaires, interviews or analysis of statistics and case files' (1992, 441)), he did indicate that it was important in shaping its focus on the 'backstage life of the police' and the 'various ways of distinguishing the "law in action" from the "law in books'" (1992, 442). In short, the early British police research was largely focused on understanding the mundane, everyday work of the police organization and both the formal rales (for example, the law) and the informal rules (such as those arising through police culture) that shaped and animated it. Participant observation was also a striking element of PPL, although it was explicitly seen as only one of a number of sources of data about the police, the various publics they served, and the interactions between them and the public. Smith wanted to avoid theorizing that went 'well beyond the available facts' (1983a, 18), and sought specifically to identify, as far as possible, the facts about policing London in the early 1980s. To this end, observational findings were routinely tested against those produced by other research methods (large-scale surveys, interviews, documentary analyses, etc.) and vice versa. Participant observation remained an important aspect of PPL,² but only within the context of a study which aimed to produce a much broader understanding of the police and police/community relations against which such observations would be tested and understood.
• The limited role of the police in producing social control. It was observed by a distinguished reviewer at the time that PPL actually made very little explicit reference to any of the pre-existing police research (Bottoms, 1985,179–80), despite sharing some of its methodological orientations. It is worth noting that the lead researcher on the PSI study, David Smith was not one of the 'cosy club' of police researchers, and neither were Jeremy Gray and Stephen Small, the other members of the team. None of them had done work on any aspect of policing, crime or criminal justice before becoming involved in this project. Smith had carried out the second in PEP/PSI's landmark series of studies of racial discrimination and disadvantage in Britain, and it was because of that specialist interest that he was drawn into a study of the police in which race relations issues were thought to be of central importance. It should be noted that Banton, too, was a specialist in race relations research. Also, PPL shared a significant theoretical orientation with Banton. Both PPL and Banton started from the premise that the police are but one means of social control, and that they are by no means the most important or fundamental one in the regulation of daily life (Banton, 1964, 1–11; Smith. 1983a, 10—13; Smith, Chapter 12 in this volume). Although they did not use the language of more contemporary scholars (see chapters by Crawford, Johnston and Shearing in this volume), both PPL and Banton understood that the police did not create social control by themselves, and were but one component of a diverse regulatory framework drawn from a patchwork of informal, formal, state, private and community sources.
• 'Pioneering' and 'seminal' studies. Reiner's descriptions of both Banton's book and PPL are indicative of their importance in their respective contexts, and are worth briefly reviewing (1992, 439 and 453). As noted, Banton's book was, for Reiner, the first major, scholarly, non-sensationalist account of the British police (1992, 439–42). In fact, in some respects it remains an important 'pioneering' study. Firstly, it was a comparative study looking at the police in 'a Scottish city' and in Carolina, Georgia and Felsmore in the US (Banton, 1964). In the intervening decades there has been rather little in the way of Scottish police research (Walker, 2000, Chapter 5), and so Banton's study remains an important example. However, there are signs that the postdevolution Scottish police are under greater political and academic scrutiny than they have been for some years, and it is likely that this field of study may yet flourish in the way that it has in England and Wales (see Donnelly and Scott, 2005). Secondly, the comparative aspect of Banton's research remains original, and there have only been a select few quality comparative studies since (Reiner, 1992, 441; see also Jones and Newburn, 2006). PPL has become seminal, not only because of its 'uncompromisingly critical (albeit constructive)' contribution (Reiner, 1992, 453) to the 'unprecedented' debates around policing of the early 1980s, but also because of the sheer level and scope of the access granted to the working lives of police officers over a period of two years (see below for a fuller description of the study). Not even the Policing for London study, specifically designed as a 'sequel' to PPL in the aftermath of the Macpherson Inquiry, was able to draw upon such a sustained body of fieldwork (FitzGerald et al., 2002, xiii). Current changes in the organization of policing, particularly in the fields of organized crime, transnational crime and terrorism (involving cooperation with security services personnel) suggest that the level of access afforded to PSI is likely to remain unsurpassed (Sheptycki, Chapter 3 in this volume).
• Quantitative and qualitative transformation of police research in the 1980s. In 1979 Simon Holdaway published a collection entitled The British Police, comprising 'ten essays representing almost all of the important research of the time' (Reiner, 1992, 438) (meaning that it included work by most of the members of the 'cosy club' of British police researchers). Reiner (1992) observed that by 1989 the Police Foundation register of police research listed over 184 different projects being carried out throughout the country, a substantial increase in the quantity of British police research. Not all of the new research was being undertaken within the academic world. By the close of the 1980s there was a raft of police research activity in various institutional contexts and funded in various ways, including academic bodies, central and local government, independent research foundations, pressure groups, the media, and private organizations, but perhaps most importantly, within the police organization itself. In short, the 1980s would see 'the state of British police research completely transformed' (Reiner, 1992, 437). Police research was no longer a topic of interest only to a 'cosy club' of academics. PSI was an independent research organization committed to producing policy-relevant, practical research and PPL was its first policing project, although not its last. PPL, therefore, provides an example of the shift away from scientific police research being the sole preserve of academics. Although Reiner is clear about the critical credentials of the PSI study, it should be noted that the widening of the institutional contexts within which police research was being conducted throughout the 1980s not only had a quantitative effect but also a qualitative effect on police research in Britain (1992, 489–90). In particular, a key argument of Reiner's 1992 overview is that much police research was being shaped less by the sociological imaginations of researchers and more by narrow and short-term interests of managers within the police (1992, 489). It is undoubtedly the case that an ongoing and deepening focus on performance management of the police shows Reiner's concerns to be of continuing relevance (see chapters by Neyroud, Hough and Smith in this volume). That said, the relative health of the field, in terms of quantity, quality and sheer diversity of scholarship is well illustrated within the chapters of Tim Newburn's Handbook of Policing collection. Changed days since 1979.
• On the cusp of the transformations of the 1980s. Returning to the passage quoted at the head of this chapter, no other study of the police straddled the period in which the 'harbingers of growing conflict' would be realized, and would generate 'an extent of controversy and debate about policing that was unprecedented in recent times' (Reiner, 1992, 443–4) as neatly as the PSI study. Commissioned by the Metropolitan Police in the wake of high-profile corruption scandals, public order conflicts (most recently, and pertinently, at successive Notting Hill carnivals), Sir Henry Fisher's damning report into the wrongful convictions in the Confait case, the newly established Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, rising concerns about the capacity of the police to reduce crime rates, and unease at the apparent collusion between the police and the newly elected Conservative administration, it was one of the first harbingers of conflict.

The rising challenges to police legitimacy that characterized the 1980s were the backdrop to the PPL fieldwork and to its subsequent publication and reception. This chapter will look back upon the history of PPL, from the initial letter sent by the Commissioner to PSI through the proposal and fieldwork to publication and reception, all at a time of rapid change in policing and police research. This provides the starting point for considering the transformations in policing discussed in the succeeding chapters of this volume, that have occurred since PPL was first published in 1983.

Commissioning Police and People in London

By 1979 the series of factors that would transform policing, police research and public faith in the police in the 1980s were already well in evidence (Reiner, 2000; Loader and Mulcahy, 2003; Smith, Chapter 12 in this volume). The relationship between the Metropolitan Police and some sections of ethnic minority communities (young African-Caribbean males in particular) were seen to be becoming hostile by the mid1970s (Hall et al., 1978; Smith, 1991; see also Henry, Chapter 4 in this volume). Although high levels of victimization of ethnic groups in Britain in all probability persisted long before this, it was a rising perception that African-Caribbean people were heavily involved in the commission of crime that brought the race issue to the fore in public debate. In a remarkable turnaround, police submissions to the Home Affairs Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration in 1976 indicated that they considered the crime rate amongst the African-Caribbean population to be a specific problem, whereas only four years previously, despite expressing some concerns about the quality of the relationship between the police and the African-Caribbean community, the relatively low involvement in crime of this community had been noted (Smith, 1997, 710).

It was in the context of such concerns that, in the autumn of 1979, the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir David McNee, approached the PSI with a view to commissioning a large-scale study into 'the relations between the Metropolitan Police and the community it serves' (Smith, 1983a, 1). It was made clear to the PSI that the relationship between the police and ethnic minorities was of particular concern, and it was in that light that the Director of PSI, John Pinder, invited David Smith to draft the research proposal. Smith records that the Commissioner gave his 'personal authority' for the study and that this, in all likelihood, helped the subsequent fieldwork go ahead with 'little, if any, manifest opposition' from other senior officers (1983a, 7–8), although he more recently reflected that McNee may well have felt under internal pressure from more progressive elements amongst the senior ranks of the Met.

The proposal was duly drafted and presented to the Metropolitan Police in December 1979. The first point that PSI wished to stress was that the research was indeed to be 'particularly concerned with relations between the police and members of ethnic minority groups', but that 'this should be seen in the context of relations with the public at large'. In order to study the relations between the Met and the publics it served the researchers decided that they would have to design the research in a way that would give detailed information about different groups' views of, and interactions with, the police, incorporating 'different and sometimes conflicting perspectives' (1983a, 5). They also started from the assumption that police officers' actions are largely shaped by organizational structures, imperatives and functions and are not merely the product of personal biases and individual attitudes (Smith, 1983a, 19). There was therefore a need to obtain substantial amounts of information from the public, and also to ensure that the voices of different communities were captured, as well as those of the police (inclu...