The Police and Social Conflict

Nigel Fielding

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781135310608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique du droit

Policing remains one of the most controversial areas of criminal justice. Recent years have seen major changes in every aspect of policing: new constructions of the police mission, new ways of delivering police services and new arrangements for police accountability.

The police have had to respond to international terrorism, international organized crime, the new faces of migration and asylum, globalization and the reconstitution of societies in the post-Communist and Islamic world. This completely revised second edition argues that through these changes enduring and fundamental divisions can be traced.

The book is relevant to those studying criminology, police studies, sociology, social policy and law, wherever their interests touch on the police.

1. Policing and social conflict

The perception that society is ‘in crisis’ often features in both journalistic and social scientific discourse. Perceptions of ‘crisis’ implicitly have at their core some notion of society’s normal state. If existing arrangements differ from the presumed normal state, commentators are apt to see a ‘crisis’. Since normal society involves a balance of interests, society tends always to be in crisis from the perspective of the ideologically-committed. Narrowly conceived critical perspectives tend to elevate collective values, and narrowly conceived neo-conservative perspectives tend to elevate the value of the individual. The notion of ‘crisis’ as an endemic feature of society is harder to sustain when political systems are seen as necessarily seeking some reconciliation of values both of categorical equity and individualised justice. This perspective helps us to recognise as inevitable the tensions that arise in pursuing a temperate treatment for all people, as individuals and as instances of collective social categories. If these tensions are inevitable, so is social conflict. Using the language of degree and increment reserves the language of ‘crisis’ for extreme circumstances – a dictatorial government, a proven conspiracy, a corrupt constabulary.

There are dangers in playing the crisis card for radicals and reformers. To engender public engagement such groups may wish to exaggerate problems. Often the result is more power for the established order, as when the late Lord Scarman’s assessment that the Brixton riots had been of a scale that brought Britain to the brink of total collapse was used to justify equipping police with new armaments. The truer vision is that if one comes down too hard on any socio-economically pressured community it takes little to provoke disorder; but power is better prepared for the apocalypse than are the weak, and is always poised to profit from a crisis that can be depicted as resolvable by more repression.

It is worthwhile reminding ourselves how familiar, and conventional, the language of crisis has become. Rather than being endemic, longstanding conflicts and problems of disorder are represented as an alarming contingency, an incipient cataclysm. These alarmist representations are more apparent at a distance. Thus one 1970s commentator claimed that Britain’s ‘closely woven social fabric’ was ‘now subject to growing stress . . . And the conditions and forces which make for strain, tension and division show every sign of increase throughout the society AQ is this Brown, as below; consider ref for clarity??’. Almost everything was implicated.

Rapid technological change, ceaselessly modifying the shapes both of our economic and social structures, creates inherent instability; whilst in the foreground are the consequences of our immediate problems: anxiety and insecurity bred of economic decline and monetary inflation, together with a declining faith in our political management that also serves to devalue the political system. In this climate of unease and disaffection, extraconstitutional and extra-legal uses of power become more frequent – tactics all the easier to deploy in a society where both individual values and communal systems of self regulation AQ check quote: might be a hyphen ‘self-regulation’??? lose hold. And usage serves to normalise, if not to legitimise disorder. Yet though political and economic issues take the limelight, there may be more deep-seated, long-term causes of insecurity in the social fabric: losses of meaning in family and community life; traditional values, beliefs and sources of authority all giving ground; a culture of commerce gaining sway, enshrining the anarchic values of individual acquisition, individual gratification; and western man divided – crucified, you might say – across his desires to achieve in the world’s terms of success and his growing alienation from them . . . In this climate, common purposes and consensus become more difficult to achieve . . . The multifarious components of society pursue their own paths, often with intransigence. (Brown, 1975: 95)

This cosmic catalogue of travails moves from topics dimly relevant to Brown’s subject (community policing) onward into existential imponderables. It was written in 1975. Can things truly have developed from there without the apocalypse, or is social conflict society’s normal state?

Social conflict has held a central place in social theory since its earliest days. Even in theory preoccupied with social integration, conflict motivates the problematic. For example, Parsons (1952) dealt with what is needed to procure ‘shared value orientations’ and the ‘fulfillment of role expectations’. His work can be regarded as a sustained attempt to determine means by which tendencies to conflict are resolved, obliging him to consider situations where ‘value-patterns’ are not shared and expectations are unfulfilled. As Rex (1981: 2) noted, because Parsons’s theory was based upon the concept of ‘action’, his methodological individualist position must negotiate what happens when differently motivated actors pursue competing goals, creating conflict. For Weber, too, the term ‘conflict’ refers to action ‘oriented intentionally to carrying out the actor’s will against the resistance of the other party or parties’ (1968, vol I: 38). Moral or legalistic argument represents conflict’s first stage. If ends truly conflict, its purpose will

not be simply to arrive at the AQ is emphasis added: if not, OK as is; if so, pls say so – in the ref??? moral truth but rather at that interpretation of the relevant morality which allows for the attainment of each party’s goals. It will consist in special pleading and rationalisation by each party on his own behalf coupled with an attempt to expose the dishonest or ideological nature of the other’s position. (Rex, 1981: 12)

The first stages of conflict are, then, verbal and ideological. Conflict may be resolved when one party’s moral or cognitive definitions of the situation prevail or where the parties agree they have made mistakes; but, if this does not end the conflict, sanctions will escalate, taking passive or active form. Resolution may occur when the cost of engaging in the struggle becomes greater than any foreseeable gain. Relationships between the parties will have changed and power centres relocated. This can be seen in the jockeying for position between police and magistracy, and police and police authorities, which began in the 19th century. An even more risky possibility is where the party that gained what it sought, senses the prospect of further gains and demands wholly new terms. At an individual level this could apply to cases successfully showing police practice to have been unlawful where the complainant goes on to seek damages or compensation, but such an end to conflict is rare in conflicts of collectivities in the law enforcement arena. The acquiescence accompanying conflicts so conclusively resolved that one side has ‘won’, does not last. A more normatively structured situation comes to pass, in the process Parsons called the ‘twofold binding-in of the social relation’ AQ ref???. The process can be seen as recurrent. Viewed as a social relation, social conflict is indeed enduring.

This is not to suggest that dominant and subordinate groups will always maintain their relative position. Those most alarmed by a theory that implies the persistence of conflict, may well be those who stand to lose the most if one of its outcomes, social change, is brought about. Those who profit from the status quo may feel that all they want is a quiet life, but, however passive, they are parties to social conflict too. There is a difference between conflict and random disorder. Conflict is seldom ‘mindless’.

The history of policing offers many instances of the enduring character of social conflict. Manwaring-White maintains that it is ‘a history which all along the line has been modified by parliamentary and police reaction to violent disturbances – just as it is today’ (1983:3). She notes such events as the riots of starving field-hands in 1830 that resulted in three hangings and 400 deportations, the great electoral reform riots of 1831, the 1839 Birmingham riots when the police and army charged the crowd with drawn cutlasses, the baton and mounted cavalry charges against Fabians at Trafalgar Square in 1884, the riots and looting during the 1919 police strike in Liverpool when three warships were diverted to the city, and the confrontations of the Depression years, including the hundred-plus baton charges against demonstrators between August 1931 and December 1932. From that perspective conflict is enduring, and the embrace by police of CS gas, Taser guns and electronic surveillance is consistent with what has gone before.

It has to be emphasised that, if we are to see such historically dramatic events as ‘crises’, that terminology has to be reserved for them, rather than applied to an endemic condition of society. The divisions or cleavages suggested by dramatic social conflict are mediated by integrating factors that hold at bay the kind of rupture implied by the dictionary sense of ‘crisis’. Manwaring-White reminds us that the period leading up to the First World War was known as ‘the great Unrest’, with over a thousand strikes in 1913 and the formation in Ireland of citizens’ militias by Nationalists and Loyalists; but the war changed this. Social conflict is not inexorable, nor does it develop in linear fashion. The relations between its causes are variegated and interactive. During the war, Home Rule for Ireland was shelved. All attention was focused on the external threat. The Home Secretary was able to extend his control over the police and the police also increased their power. The conditions under which the prewar forms of conflict had proceeded were altered. The Home Secretary became closely involved in policy direction, co-ordinating operations and fixing the distribution of police. Centralisation increased, capacities for managing conflict were extended; but conflict endured. Change was patchy, there was backsliding, resistance, indecision.

In Bittner’s (1980) analysis the capacity legitimately to use force is the core of the police role. His argument is not founded in the struggle over equitable distribution of material resources, but in the struggle to achieve a pacific civil society. Arguing that the search for peace by peaceful means is a culture trait of modern civilisation, he contrasts this with the Pax Romana that sought to ‘subdue the haughty by force’. The modern commitment to abolish ‘the traffic of violence’ has ultimately been checked by the need to deploy responsive (reactive) force against provocation and illegitimate attacks. Responsive force is thus legitimate, but constrained (Bittner, 1980: 36). Force is authorised in self-defence, provided all else has been tried, including retreat. Coercive power is, in its second form, acceptable when exercised by specifically deputised persons against named others, for example, in respect of prison officers and mental hospital staff. The power is legitimated by court orders and is acceptable only in the degree required to implement the judicial order. The third legitimate use of responsive force is through the police. In contrast to the first two it is essentially unrestricted. Bittner invites us to cease looking at police work as mainly to do with law enforcement and crime control. He argues that ‘it makes much more sense to say that the police are nothing else than a mechanism for the distribution of situationally justified force in society’ (Bittner, 1980: 39). This mechanism enables the police to play a key role in maintaining the status quo.

In practice, police efforts are unlikely to be equal, either between bodies of law, social groups or jurisdictions. The exercise of discretion is inevitable in a society where resources are limited. Even with a police force equal in size to the population policed it would be impossible to prosecute every law. The police have to decide priorities, and that is, of course, a question of politics. Setting action in relation to particular conditions is an exercise of discretion familiar to every officer. Speaking after the Brixton riots, former chief constable John Alderson said ‘in order to enforce your law you end up with . . . 4 million worth of property burnt to the ground. You may think you’re being efficient in enforcing your laws . . . but look at it, the place is burning around you . . . I mean, do you enforce the Litter Act in the Mile End Road the same way as you would do in Belgravia?’ (quoted in Kinsey and Young, 1982: 121). Such judgments are inherently political: ‘AQ ‘. . . to’/’[t]o’??? to argue against the prosecution of ganja smoking in Brixton does not mean that demands for racial discrimination in working men’s clubs in Leeds are to be met’ (Kinsey and Young 1982: 122). Similar police dilemmas were expressed prior to introduction of the ban on hunting with hounds in 2005, with police doubtful they had the resources to control extensive civil disobedience by those determined to continue fox hunting.

A copy of any newspaper will reveal conflicts whose basis lies AQ probably shd be ‘whose bases lie’, unless you mean that all the conflicts have the same basis ie every element of following list??? in class, ethnicity, gender and sexual politics, region, nation, employment status, age and ideology. Conflict is endemic. Technological innovation, environmental pollution, economic uncertainty, fear of international terrorism, and the break-up of customary community norms may all engender conflict. The major problems of any age inevitably direct attention to their most dramatic form of expression.

Yet the danger is that while our attention is naturally drawn to spectacular public order disturbances, intrusive governance, and policing that seems more biased than discretionary, we neglect the more insidious forms of low-level conflict whose effect is more pervasive. In particular we neglect institutionalised forms of conflict. The term ‘institutionalised’ refers to subtle processes that have been distorted in popular usage, to the point where, in its most familiar application, to ethnic and racial relations, the term adds nothing at all to the word ‘racism’ in the phrase ‘institutional racism’. In policing, institutional racism can include the structured inattention the police apply to the demands of blacks in poor inner-city neighbourhoods for more effective crime control. It can speak of the different police deployment figures between adjacent areas with different standards of living. It can refer to the tendency to regard groups of blacks on the street as the problem rather than as the community; but too often it simply means that individual officers are colour-prejudiced. While this is undoubtedly an obnoxious and real problem it is trivial compared to the fact that the police continue to allocate officers to given geographical areas on formulae set at a point in the past when it was accepted that middle-class communities had a greater right to expect that their interests be protected than did poorer communities. One hears little about such institutional discrimination, even following the Met Commissioner’s AQ shd this be ‘Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s’ or will the audience be OK with ‘Met’; but consider full name as 1^st ref in chapt??? acceptance in 1999 that his force was indeed ‘institutionally racist’.

Similarly, institutionalised discrimination can be seen in the balance in law between offences against property and against the person. English law has been keen to protect rights to property, and relatively casual in protecting the safety of the person. These points coalesce in the continuing complaints of ethnic minorities that attacks on them are treated less seriously by the police. Police deployment figures are relevant, as are the legal powers under which the police operate, and their assumptions about the warrant AQ consider ‘justification’ or ‘authority’; ‘warrant’ could confuse the reader in the context??? for and character of harassment. The law’s perspective, or the intentions of its legislators and judicial interpreters, can frame another element in institutional discrimination. Whether an offence can be prosecuted by police or requires a complainant, and which offences attract a right to jury trial as opposed to summary judgments, have effects that shape the official response to a particular social problem, such as spouse-abuse or being a person ‘reasonably suspected’ of being about to commit an offence. While some behaviours are regulated, not all are regulated equally.

Institutionalised discrimination, by definition, implicates the system-wide, macro-level of selection and discretion as essentially political choices affecting large social groups. Critics of police institutionalised racism generally do not go far enough. Often such criticism fixes at the level of occupational culture (‘canteen culture’); but it is doubtful that the key players can be identified in a personified form. Institutionalised discrimination is a product of decisions taken in several settings, in Parliament, in the courts, in the administrative settings of the state, whose consequences may be unforeseen and unintended. Those decisions are informed by a sense of history, of predilections determined by the inspiration of common law and re-interpreted and re-applied at particular, often non-comparable, historical junctures. Another tack in blaming occupational culture is the idea that the racism that affects the perspective of police officers is part of wider working-class culture. ‘The police are not an island of prejudice in a sea of working class tolerance’ (Kinsey and Young, 1982: 125). Notwithstanding the complexity of institutional discrimination, the police do have some power relative to it. The police are not demure in commenting on given laws or policies affecting their interests. If it AQ rephrase to avoid unclear ‘it’??? had been a priority they could have lobbied for law to ameliorate institutional discrimination instead of waiting to be dragged to the issue by the Macpherson Inquiry, during which the Commissioner insisted his force was not ‘institutionally racist’, accepting the judgment only when it appeared in the Inquiry report, and then only on the definition given in the report. While it would be wrong to imagine that social conflict could be softened by change only at the legal level, it is worthwhile considering how many outbreaks of disorder begin as a result of police action.

It may be that amelioration in the forms of institutional discrimination could prevent riots and disturbances. In any case, contemporary protest has largely taken less dramatic forms in respect of racial tensions and problems of discrimination. The greater willingness of police to acknowledge the problem has had some impact. The extension of civilianisation and the Community Support Officer schemes introduced in 2003 have been marked by substantial increases in the proportion of police employees drawn from ethnic minorities. While figures remain modest relative to other occupations, the trend is the first positive development in a long history of the police missing ethnic minority recruitment targets.

There is longstanding evidence of racial stereotypes in targeting black populations. During the l970s, reports from the Community Relations Commission, Institute for Race Relations, Runnymede Trust, National Council for Civil Liberties, and West Indian Standing Conference all documented the effects of racism on housing, employment, policing and welfare. Ethnic minorities are in a situation of multiple disadvantage. They are at the bottom of the class structure and are disproportionately affected by unemployment, bad housing and inferior facilities. For many years they suffered the application of the ‘sus’ (suspected person) procedure contained in the ...