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Accountability and Governance
There are two distinct forms of accountability within writing on policing and the police. The first is policy accountability ā the degree of influence exercised by external democratic bodies over police organizational policies concerned with overall goals, resource allocation and policing styles. The second is individual accountability ā the extent to which, and the ways in which, individual police officers are held to account for their behaviour as they go about their day-to-day activities (Reiner 1995).
In writing on policy accountability, the term āpolice governanceā has been used to denote the constitutional and institutional infrastructure for framing and directing the policies of the police (Lustgarten 1986). There is now a substantial body of research on the policy accountability of the police in the UK, most of which has focused on England and Wales (though see Walker 2000 for an analysis that also includes the distinct systems in Scotland and Northern Ireland). In England and Wales, the Police Act 1964 divided responsibility for policing policy in the 41 provincial police forces (outside London) between the three parties of the ātripartite structureā: police authorities (including a majority of locally elected councillors), central government (the Home Office) and chief constables. The Metropolitan Police ā Britainās largest and most influential force ā operated with the Home Secretary as its police authority until the Greater London Authority Act 1999, which introduced a statutory police authority for London, including local government representation. Policing policy was thus supposed to be balanced between a combination of local, national and professional interests. The tripartite structure contained a good deal of studied ambiguity about the relative powers of each party and became the subject of heated controversy during the 1970s and 1980s when local Labour authorities challenged the jealously guarded āoperational independenceā of chief constables. These arguments were repeatedly resolved in favour of chief constables, supported by the courts and central government. There was, however, some recognition that local police commanders ā the senior officers in charge of the local geographical units of policing, or ābasic command unitsā (BCUs) ā needed to consult more closely with their communities.
From the late 1980s onwards, the challenge to chief constablesā policy-making autonomy came increasingly from national rather than local government. The key factor underpinning the increasingly terse relationships between chief constables and central government ministers (of both main parties) was successive government attempts to reform the Police Service along the same centrally driven performance model that has been applied to other public services. In effect, this has served to continue a longer-term trend towards growing national control over policing policy. Home Office influence has expanded in a variety of ways in recent decades, through issuing policy circulars in a range of areas, greater control over the training and career paths of senior police officers, the increased proportion of police funding that comes from central government and, from the late 1980s onwards, the development of an increasingly vigorous national performance framework. Increasingly, managerial and contractual forms of police accountability have come to displace political forms (Jones 2003).
A further illustration of growing central control over policing policy is the emergence of national policing organizations, the most recent example being the establishment of the Serious and Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) in 2006. Part of the justification for the establishment of SOCA was that many provincial forces were considered too small to be able to provide these functions effectively. In 2005, it seemed that further radical centralization of control over policing was imminent, when the then Home Secretary stated his strong support for a restructuring of police organization in England and Wales into a much smaller number of large regional forces. This raised grave concerns among some police chiefs and local authorities about the lack of local accountability in the proposed structures, though supporters of the restructuring argued that accountability mechanisms would be most effectively developed at BCU level. However, a combination of local bodiesā lack of statutory powers and the likelihood that local police chiefs would be constrained by regional and national influence cast doubts on how accountable to the local democratic process such large forces would be. In the event, the proposed restructuring became mired in controversy and was postponed indefinitely following a change of Home Secretary in 2006. In a striking reversal of party positions during the 1980s, calls for more direct control of policing by locally elected bodies have most recently come from Conservative sources, who have attacked the Labour government for its centralizing tendencies (Loveday and Reid 2003).
Turning to individual accountability, there is a substantial literature about the mechanisms used to regulate and control the activities of individual police officers and the systems of complaint and redress against them (Goldsmith and Lewis 2000). A formal system for dealing with complaints against the police in England and Wales was introduced by the Police Act 1964, though it lacked any independent element in the investigation and adjudication of complaints. This independent element in the oversight of the complaints process (if not the investigation) was gradually introduced with the establishment, first, of the Police Complaints Board in the 1970s and then the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) in 1984. The PCA supervised the investigation of more serious incidents referred to it by the police. It also provided regular official comment on certain police policies and practices. Research has cast doubt on the effectiveness of this complaints system, from the viewpoint both of police officers and from those who made complaints (Maguire and Corbett 1991). A key source of criticism concerned the fact that those undertaking the investigation were still police officers, albeit from another division or force. The PCA was abolished by the Police Reform Act 2002 and replaced with the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). Unlike its predecessors, the IPCC has its own independent investigators, enabling it to oversee police investigations into serious complaints or, alternatively, to investigate them itself. Although most discussion of individual forms of police accountability focuses on formal complaints systems, Dixon and Smith (1998) demonstrate how the civil law has increasingly been used as a remedy for police misconduct. In particular, civil actions appear to be growing in popularity as an alternative to the police complaints systems as a means of redress for police misconduct in particular instances.
The majority of existing literature on accountability concerns the public police. This appears increasingly anomalous in the light of the pluralization of policing that has occurred over recent decades. Policing is now both authorized and delivered by diverse networks of commercial bodies, voluntary and community groups, individual citizens, and national and local governmental regulatory agencies, as well as the public police (Bayley and Shearing 2001). These developments echo an influential body of thinking in political science concerning the changing ways in which societies are governed. In particular, the term governance has been used ā in a different way from the use of the term āpolice governanceā as outlined above ā to capture the ways in which the governing process has become more complex and fragmented and cannot be regarded as the preserve of state institutions. Rather, it is increasingly characterized by āinter-organizational networksā, including commercial, community and voluntary bodies as well as state institutions (Rhodes 1997). These changes have been linked to a range of developments associated with neoliberal reform programmes, such as privatization, contracting out and the creation of semi-autonomous service delivery agencies. Such developments have, it is argued, led to a fragmentation of the state, reducing central stateās control over the implementation of policy and further encouraging the development of inter-organizational networks.
Recent work has applied this broader notion of governance to the context of policing (Johnston 2000). Some authors have argued that the fragmented nature of contemporary policing requires new ways of thinking about what policing is and what it is for. It has been suggested that āsecurity governanceā provides a more appropriate term for thinking about these issues than does the term āpolicingā, which remains strongly associated with the institutions of the state (Johnston and Shearing 2003). In particular, it is argued that we need to develop ways of bringing these increasingly influential āsecurity networksā under the direction and control of democratic governance. Loader (2000) has proposed the establishment of local, regional and national āpolicing commissionsā with a statutory responsibility to monitor and direct policing policy as exercised by a wide range of āpolicingā agencies and institutions. This kind of thinking was influential in shaping the recommendation of the Patten Commission on policing reform in Northern Ireland for the establishment of ādistrict policing partnership boardsā. These would be a committee of the local authority with the power to ābuy inā extra local policing resources from providers other than the public police. It also recommended that, at force level, a āpolicing boardā (not a āpolice boardā) should be established that would have substantially more powers than the existing police authority (Shearing 2000). It was suggested that this body might be given responsibility for regulating all policing providers, including commercial firms, and for co-ordinating provision across policing networks. The governmentās legislative response to the Patten Commission ultimately held back on some of these elements. However, although perhaps its time had not yet come, the model laid down by Patten provided an interesting way of approaching the problem of governing local security networks. This requires the effective management of the diversity of policing provision and the maintenance of standards of accountability and equity (Johnston 2000).
Related entries
Bichard Inquiry; Constabulary independence; Corruption (police); Deaths in police custody (DPCs); Ethics in policing; Independent advisory groups; Legitimacy; National security; New public management (NPM); Patten Report; Plural policing; Police Act 1964; Police and Magistratesā Courts Act 1994; Police authorities; Police powers; Police Reform Act 2002; Royal Commission on the Police (1962).
Key texts and sources
Goldsmith, A. and Lewis, C. (eds) (2000) Civilian Oversight of Policing: Governance, Democracy and Human Rights. Portland, OR: Hart Publishing.
Jones, T. (2003) āThe governance and accountability of policingā, in T. Newburn (ed.) Handbook of Policing. Cullompton: Willan Publishing.
Walker, N. (2000) Policing in a Changing Constitutional Order. London: Sweet & Maxwell.
See also http://www.crimereduction.gov.uk/activecommunities/activecommunities49.htm for a Home Office report into public perceptions of police accountability. The Police Federationās website also contains a page on accountability (http://www.polfed.org/we_stand_accountability.asp). The Independent Police Complaints Commissionās website is at http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/.
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Bail
Bail is the releasing of a person suspected or charged with an offence while awaiting the outcome of an investigation or trial. If suspects or defendants are refused bail, they are either detained in police custody or remanded in custody by courts, depending on the stage their case has reached.
Decisions about whether to bail suspects/defendants are taken at different stages of the criminal justice process ā namely, pre-charge and post-charge by the police and courts when defendants are awaiting trial or sentence, or when offenders appeal against their convictions or sentence. Most bail decisions are taken when suspects/defendants are legally innocent. It is for this reason that bail decisions are of paramount importance to perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy of the criminal justice process and are a significant indicator of civil liberties. Bail decisions are important for other reasons ā for example, their impact on the prison remand population, which has been rising steadily in recent years, and their impact on subsequent decisions, including pleas and sentencing (Hucklesby 2002). The margin for error in bail decisions is high because they require an assessment of likely future behaviour, and a small minority of decisions are proved wrong with the benefit of hindsight as they result in serious offences being committed.
The law governing bail is contained in the Bail Act 1976. The Bail Act has been amended considerably since its enactment, mainly to make the granting of bail more difficult for certain groups of offenders (i.e. serious offenders and offenders who have allegedly committed offences on bail) (Hucklesby 2002). Consequently, the right to bail has been significantly eroded. Nevertheless, in most cases, there is a p...
