The Future of Policing

Jennifer M. Brown, Jennifer M. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136758911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

The police service in England and Wales is facing major challenges in its financing, political oversight and reorganisation of its structures. Current economic conditions have created a wholly new environment whereby cost saving is permitting hitherto unthinkable changes in the style and means of delivery of policing services. In the context of these proposed changes Lord Stevens, formerly Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service was asked to chair an Independent Commission looking into the future of policing. The Commission has a wide ranging remit and the papers in this book offer up-to-date analysis of contemporary problems from the novel perspective of developing a reform agenda to assist the Commission.Bringing together contributions from both key academic thinkers and police professionals, this book discusses new policing paradigms, lays out a case for an evidence-based practice approach and draws attention to developing areas such as terrorism, public order and hate crime.

Policing is too important to be left to politicians, as the health of a democracy may be judged by the relationship between the police and the public. The aim of this book is to question and present analyses of problems offer new ideas and propose realistically achievable solutions without being so timid as to preserve the status quo. It will be of interest to both academics and students in the fields of criminology and policing studies, as well as professionals in the policing service, NGOs and local authority organisations.

PART I

Purposes

1

PEEL'S PRINCIPLES, POLICE PRINCIPLES

Clive Emsley

History is a necessity. Individuals, communities, societies could scarcely exist if all knowledge of the past was wiped out. As memory is to the individual, so history is to the community or society…. It is a commonplace that we live in a time of rapid and far-reaching cultural change. If we are to make a rational assessment of the extent and significance of this change we have no other recourse than to look to the past: how does present change compare with previous periods of change? If we wish to discuss contemporary morality, we can only do so effectively by making comparisons with past moralities. The very stuff of so many pub conversations is in fact drawn from the past…. Actually, much of the stuff of pub conversations is likely to be mythical rather than historical.

(Marwick, 2001, pp. 31 and 33)

Introduction

Peel's principles might not be pub chat, or in the context of the police that should perhaps be ‘canteen chat’, but they have developed a mythical quality. They appear on various websites.¹ They have been cited time after time in text books, and initially, it seems, in text books on policing aimed at students in the United States. But for all that they are called Peel's principles and identified as originating with the Metropolitan Police in 1829, there is no evidence to suggest that they were written in 1829, let alone by Peel, or by either of the first two Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police. Rather, they were given their first significant formulation in the work of Charles Reith, writing more than a hundred years after the first Metropolitan Police constables took to the streets of London, and were subsequently taken up and remoulded in twentieth-century policing textbooks. It is also worth noting that in a series of interviews which I have undertaken with former police officers, several of whom had begun their police careers in the late 1920s and 1930s, while the older men could still quote, verbatim, passages from C.C.H. Moriarty's Police Law, and while most of them credited Peel with founding the whole idea of modern police, not one of them made any mention of ‘Peel's principles’.²

Similarly, it has long been noted that many forces in the nineteenth century repeated the well-known statement from the initial instructions to the Metropolitan Police in 1829:

It should be understood at the outset, that the object to be attained is ‘the prevention of crime.’ To this great end every effort of the police is to be directed. The security of person and property, the preservation of the public tranquillity, and all the other objects of the police establishment, will thus be better effected than by the detection and punishment of the offender after he has succeeded in committing the crime.

(Times, 25 September 1829)

But Joanne Klein's current research on Police Instruction Books suggests that while, during the nineteenth century, this formulation was particularly popular in the south of England, forces in the north were more favourable towards the instructions prepared for the Liverpool City Police which listed two ‘primary objectives’, the first being the ‘protection of life and property’ and the second being the ‘prevention of crime’. The Liverpool instructions also stressed that efficiency could be measured by a decrease in crime and by there being no complaints against police. In 1919 the Desborough Committee recommended that the Home Office prepare an instruction book to help establish uniformity among the 200 or so police forces in England and Wales. In the subsequent discussions the Metropolitan Police made it clear that, while it was prepared to participate in discussions, it considered itself significantly different from all other forces having many distinct and separate tasks, and that in consequence no universal set of instructions could apply to it. Other forces also made pleas for their own, special circumstances and while the Scottish police forces were able to agree on such a book, discussions in inter-war England and Wales, and again during the 1950s, all foundered (Klein, 2010a, 2010b). Once again, aside from the constant repetition of the importance of the 1829 dictum of the centrality of the ‘prevention of crime’, there appears to have been no mention of Peel's principles.

Peel's principles

The principles, as formulated by Reith, were linked with his firm belief that English/British policing was different from policing on continental Europe. Reith spent some 20 years at the beginning of the twentieth century as a tea and rubber planter in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and was an officer in the Indian Army during the First World War (Hjellemo, 1977). His beliefs about the contrast between British and continental police institutions were based on a comfortable middle-class Victorian understanding of the world and a general ignorance of the structure of policing in Europe and how it had developed. Furthermore, Reith did little archival research beyond the first 20 years or so of the Metropolitan Police and appears to have assumed a broad consensus in Victorian politics and society. Subsequent Whig historians³ of the police largely adopted Reith's national and historical perspectives with further assumptions about ‘rioters’, ‘criminals’, ‘protestors’ and even critics of the police as the ‘other’, essentially individuals who did not behave or think like the ordinary, law-abiding citizen (Robinson, 1979).

Reith presented ‘nine principles of police’ as a summation of both how the British police evolved and the foundations upon which it is based (Reith, 1943b, pp. 3–4; Reith, 1952, p. 154). But different American textbooks from the 1960s to the 1980s identify nine, ten and twelve principles, often with significant variations; and while some make reference to Reith, others cite Captain W.L. Melville Lee's A History of Police in England first published in 1901 but which has no discussion of Peel's principles (Lentz and Chaires, 2007, pp. 72–3). The fullest statement of nine principles and one which makes reference to both Reith and Melville Lee is that contained in P.D. Mayhall's Police–Community Relations and the Administration of Justice reproduced as Box 1.1.

BOX 1.1 PEEL'S PRINCIPLES (AS LISTED IN MAYHALL, 1985, PP. 425–6)

1 To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

2 To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

3 To recognize always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing cooperation of the public in the task of securing observance of the law.

4 To recognize always that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes, proportionately, the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.

5 To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing; by ready exercise of courtesy and good humour; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.

6 To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public cooperation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or restore order; and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.

7 To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8 To recognize always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the power of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the state, and authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

9 To recognize always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

Generally speaking, and given the emphasis placed on avoiding the use of physical force and maintaining the support of the public, it would be difficult to find a modern, liberal democratic state that did not subscribe to such principles when it came to its policing institutions. Moreover, reading the histories of the policing of such states it becomes clear that significant elements of these principles were present within them from the beginning of modern bureaucratic policing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is also apparent that some of the principles were more noticed in the breach than in the observance. This is perhaps most noticeable in Principle 9. John Wainwright joined the West Yorkshire Police after war service in the RAF and he recalled learning rapidly that

[b]obbying was as near to piece-work as the powers-that-be could make it. ‘Don't tell me you can walk about for eight hours and not see someone doing something you can book 'em for.’ That was the standard remark from on high if you didn't make a weekly court appearance, and it was always made on pay-day…. Court appearances really were the yardsticks used to measure efficiency.

(Wainwright, 1987, p. 19)

Nor is it necessary to be a police institution in a liberal democratic state for at least some of these principles to apply. The Gestapo was a tiny institution linked with the detective police of the Third Reich, the Kriminalpolizei (or Kripo), and the Nazis made tremendous efforts to build on the Weimar Republic's notion of the police officer as a ‘friend and helper’ and to develop close relations with the public. The Polizeitag (or Day of the Police) was held for the first time shortly before Christmas 1934 and annually thereafter. It became so popular that, by 1937, it was no longer a day but a week with parades, bands, charity collections and so forth (Gellately, 2001, pp. 43–5). Karl Daluege, the commander of the beat patrol police of Nazi Germany insisted that his men's authority came from the community (Volksgemeinschaft) and that they were the servants of that community (Blood, 2003, p. 100). This, and the Nazi suggestion that the people should not to worry too much about the police sticking rigorously to the law when it came to dealing with ‘criminals’ and ‘enemies of the state’ or of the Volk, highlights some of the potential problems inherent in the principles; specifically problems that result from ignoring the political and social context of policing, and commentators on that policing.

The nineteenth century: a unique new system?

Modern, bureaucratic police institutions were not exactly new inventions of the early nineteenth century, but they did become more firmly established, better organised and disciplined in that period. It is possible but, in the end, rather pointless to argue about which police force was the ‘first’. Some Scottish police historians have claimed that Glasgow beat London; the sergents de ville of Paris took to the streets in March 1829, six months before the first constables of the Metropolitan Police started their beats in London. But first or not, the Metropolitan Police rapidly acquired an impressive reputation overseas and by the close of the nineteenth century senior police officers, politicians and a variety of other commentators regularly spoke of the English/British police as ‘the best in the world’ and hence, by implication, the model for elsewhere.

For the early, traditional police historians such as Reith, the reasons for this reputation lay in the far-sightedness of Peel and the first two commissioners, the soldier, Lt. Col. Charles Rowan, and the Irish barrister, Richard Mayne. While not specifically spelt out, but certainly implicit in Peel's principles, Reith and others saw the unique nature of the English police as resulting from it being non-military, unarmed and non-political. Reith himself insisted that the English police was ‘a kin police’ which emanated from the people rather than a Gendarmerie imposed on the people from above by the state. Each of these supposed unique qualities can be challenged.

Given the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ‘free-born Englishman's’ hostility to a standing army it was essential that any police established in England did not look military. Their tunics were blue, unlike the scarlet of the infantry, and they wore top hats rather than military shakos; yet by the end of the century the police wore high-collared tunics like the army, and the police helmet – especially those into which a spike might be screwed on top for parades and special occasions – closely resembled the infantry helmet. The divisions of the Metropolitan Police were initially called ‘companies’. The discipline was ferocious and among the earliest sergeants, inspectors and superintendents were men who had served as NCOs in the army, notably at Waterloo. Such former NCOs commanded police units in clashes with political radicals, Chartists and opponents of the New Poor Law. They might not have carried firearms or edged weapons as a rule, but it is at least arguable that such weapons were not much needed at the close of the 1820s. John Beattie has made a convincing case for a shift to less violent offending in early nineteenth-century London, a shift brought abo...