Criminology for the Police

Craig Paterson, Ed Pollock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367532307
• eBook ISBN: 9781000577488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Criminologie

This book offers an applied approach to criminology suitable for prospective police officers. It covers the fundamentals of criminological knowledge, theory and research, and their relevance to policing. The book is split into two parts, the first introducing the basics of criminology, and the second connecting criminological research to police practice. It focuses on the principles of evidence-based practice and encourages students to think critically about the issues covered. Core content includes the following:

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• A history of policing in England and Wales, through a criminological lens.

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• An overview of the literature on police culture, bias and discretion.

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• A review of the challenges of applying criminological insights to policing, and the impact of the College of Policing code of ethics on police practice.

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• An exploration of the challenges of contemporary policing, including complex crime, transnational investigation, digital and organised crime.

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• A critical overview of evidence, and public sources of evidence.

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• An examination of the contested definitions and perspectives on Evidence-Based Policing.

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• An introduction to criminological research, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods.

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• A review of problem solving in policing, including SARA and Atlas models.

This book is essential reading for all students studying degrees in Professional Policing, as well as students of criminology engaged in criminal justice knowledge and practice.

Chapter 1IntroductionA Criminology for the Police?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003081012-1

Introduction

Welcome to Criminology for the Police!

The main objective of this book is to introduce prospective police officers and students of policing to the two fundamental components of criminological knowledge: theory and research. The book is split into two parts with the first part providing an introduction to the underpinning ideas that have dominated criminology as an academic discipline and the linkages with changing perspectives of police amongst the public and key policing stakeholders as well as police policy and practice itself. The book thus offers an introduction to criminological thought that should have practical use for those interested in police. The book does not offer a comprehensive state of the art picture of criminology across the globe, but it provides introductory nudges to this literature via a curated gallery of academic and policy sources that have been selected specifically for those attempting to understand what police do through a criminological analytical lens.

The second part of the book introduces applied contemporary criminological challenges to connect criminological research and theory to police practice. The book does this by focusing upon principles of evidence-based practice, which are commonplace in many professions but relatively new to the field of police, and encourages students to think critically about the knowledge that they will encounter, access, and use in their future professional domain. The book explores the influence of the ever-changing social world that surrounds the world of professional practice and uses a myriad of case studies and problem-based tasks to get you to think about how academic criminology can help you to address real-world police problems. For those of you who are new to criminology, you will see that we utilise a range of literature from different academic disciplines (sociology, psychology, geography, law, and many others) to try to understand why crime happens and to explore how these insights might influence how you respond to the social problems you see around you. Criminology is a broad discipline, so we will be focusing upon the bits which are most closely aligned to the College of Policing’s Police Education Qualifications Framework (College of Policing, 2020) whilst also providing links to other literature that you may want to investigate in the future.

As the title states, this book is an introduction to Criminology for the Police, so whilst much of the book will address issues related to front-line policing to assist those who are interested in joining the police and those who have recently joined as police officers, the book also covers the contextual issues that might inform the development of policing policies so that it will be useful for police officers, managers, and civilian staff in a wide variety of roles. The book is essentially about problem-solving and how introducing police to a wider variety of analytical tools can help to improve individual and organisational responses to changing landscapes of crime, deviance and disorder as well as public (in)tolerance of different issues.

Most importantly for us as authors, the book draws on our experiences of working with those involved in police training and education. This includes the students we have met over 15 years of working together, new recruits to the police, police staff, trainers, and educators in England and Wales and across the world. The book thus engages directly with the content of the pre-join undergraduate degree (BA Hons in Professional Policing), the police constable degree apprenticeship, and the degree holder entry programme curricula to introduce police-relevant criminological knowledge in alignment with the College of Policing’s Police Education Qualification Framework (College of Policing, 2020). The book has a primary focus upon police work in England and Wales to align with the demands of the College of Policing’s education framework, but it is also contextualised and informed by recognition that the local impact of crime is influenced by national, global, and transnational forces.

The College of Policing curriculum has introduced a new focus upon digital crimes, vulnerability, and social scientific research that can be interrogated using criminological analysis, and we address these issues in the middle and latter parts of the book. Thus, while the book seeks to support those who are encountering criminology through their interest in police, we will extend the scope of our analysis beyond the police curriculum to engage with new and often contentious subject matter and the multiple critiques of police and policing that you will encounter in your personal and professional lives.

This introductory chapter addresses the most obvious yet potentially complex question, “what is the point of criminology for police”? The chapter explores the potential benefits that degree-level study offers to the police officer role using evidence from a range of international jurisdictions and connects this evidence to theoretical critiques of the role and function of the police as an institution. The chapter discusses the benefits and challenges of the new Policing Educational Qualification Framework and points readers in the direction of appropriate further reading to help understand the advantages to police officers of understanding criminology as an applied discipline and the benefits of engaging with criminological literature more generally to support your own future development.

Before we proceed any further, we are required to ask some simple questions with hugely complex answers. First, we need to ask what do the police actually do? This question provides some baseline context for our second question (and the one most commonly raised by public and politicians at times of crises), what should the police be doing? This discussion will take up the next couple of thousand words of this introductory chapter, so if you want to look at specific information, then please just use the contents and index to navigate your way around this book. If you’re happy with the chronological approach, then the next thing we will do is introduce some context surrounding what the police do. In this section, we will introduce you to criminological theory for the first time.

In the workshops we run with students and police professionals, we tend to find that the word “theory” is quite off-putting, but it is an essential component of the analytical framework which we will use throughout the rest of the book. Theories are just ways of explaining things. They help us to explore and challenge our underpinning assumptions about the world that surrounds us. An everyday example of a theory could be taken from what we choose to buy to eat and how we interpret which foods are best for us (is it the most tasty, or the most nutritional?). We try to provide logic to our decision-making by providing explanations about why we eat so healthily (or not!). In academic language, this is an explanatory theory. In this book, our questions focus upon what makes the best police and policing, and we use theory to explain the thinking that underpins these different criminological theoretical perspectives. It will come as no surprise to you that there are lots of different theories and perspectives about what makes the best police and what the police should do. We will turn to this issue now.

Reflective Task

What do you think are the main roles and function of the Police Service in England and Wales? The College of Policing’s website (www.college.police.uk/) provides you with an introduction to the many and varied responsibilities of the twenty-first century police.

Now, have a look for your local police force’s website and look for their mission or values statement. To what extent does this correspond with your expectations of the police role?

What Do the Police Do?

The core function of what the police do is often presented to the public as a balance between crime-fighting and order maintenance although the day-to-day functions of police work could be more simply described as peacekeeping. Criminological pioneers from the United Kingdom and United States such as Banton (1964) and Skolnick (1966) have illustrated how the police undertake an essential social role in keeping the peace through the deterrent value of the Police Service’s uniformed presence on the streets and the coercive, and most commonly unused, threat of their legal power to use force (Bittner, 1970). This publicly visible presence is highly valued in England and Wales with approximately 75% of the British public indicating support for the police role and demands for more police officers being a recurrent discourse in political election campaigns (Office of National Statistics, 2021). This debate about what the police should be doing and how many police we need, when placed in a political and economic context, is essentially a discussion about what is the best use of finite government funds and police resources.

The 2011 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary assessment of police demand identified that 61% of the police workforce could be described as working on the front-line in a mixture of visible patrol and specialist roles (this figure increases to 70% in some forces). Yet, studies in the United States and the United Kingdom have consistently shown that less than 25% of calls for service to the police involve crime directly, and this figure has regularly decreased to between 15% and 20% (Bayley, 1994). There are some logical reasons for this. A phone call to report a crime may turn out to be inaccurate, the disturbance or situation may have been resolved prior to police attendance and support may be required from another agency. Thus, contrary to much public belief, crime is a relatively minor part of everyday patrol work (Morris and Heal, 1981). But, and it is a significant but, police visibility is directly linked to levels of public confidence in the police in England and Wales (Bradford et al., 2009; Mesko and Tankebe, 2015), so even without the productivity of resolving crime problems, there is a strong argument to maintain visible police patrols. Everyday policing is thus relatively mundane and, as Banton acknowledged many years ago, often made up of “waiting, boredom and paperwork” (1964: 85).

There is longstanding consistency in this depiction of everyday policing. In a similar 1996 Audit Commission report entitled Streetwise: Effective Foot Patrol, it was identified that 75% of police resources were taken up with front-line roles that included patrolling by foot or car and criminal investigation. This resource-intensive and reactive approach to policing is driven by the public who are the most significant influencers of what the police do. Members of the public make the 999 and 101 calls that determine how police officers are deployed, and in cities across the world, these emergency calls have historically generated around 90% of patrol work (Bayley, 1994). It is this reactive mandate and the position of police as the sole 24/7 emergency responses service that stretches the police role beyond crime and into public nuisance, anti-social behaviour, public health management, and other social issues.

Once the police engage with the public, the police role is most commonly interpreted through their legal authority to use force, to stop and search, and to remove a person’s liberty as well as their role as investigators of crime. This legal authority provides police officers with a formal role as gatekeepers to the criminal justice system and a more blurred social authority to make judgements about individual and/or collective behaviour and to decide where it is appropriate to exercise some form of regulatory control. These regulatory controls serve a range of purposes that incorporate diffuse elements of order maintenance (Marenin, 1982; Wilson and Kelling, 1982), public protection (Bajpai, 2013; Bittner, 1970), and crime prevention (Alderson, 1979; Farrell, 2001). Despite law being the tool that the police use to administer justice, justice itself is mentioned on only rare occasions (Manning, 2010). These different visions of the purpose of policing highlight the complex and contested nature of developing, configuring, and implementing policing strategies but also the partial lens through which the purpose of policing is conceptualised. There is little discussion of the ways in which policing compounds existing inequalities, the blind eye that is turned to crimes of the wealthy, or the impact upon over-policed populations’ conceptions of democracy and social justice (Manning, 2010; Sklansky, 2005; Tyler, 2006).

The police are also often defined in news stories and fictional characterisations by their legal authority to use violence and coercion (Bittner, 1970). This definition tends to shift focus onto formal uniformed police agencies rather than the much broader networks of, often informal or at least non-uniformed, policing that exist within any society. It is thus worthwhile to outline the main functions of the police before we move on any further. The three core functions that are highlighted here are by no mea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Chapter 1 Introduction: A Criminology for the Police?
• Chapter 2 Disciplinary Criminology and the Police
• Chapter 3 Criminology for the Police
• Chapter 4 Policing Strategies
• Chapter 5 From Police Culture to Policing Vulnerability
• Chapter 6 Problem-Solving for Police Officers
• Chapter 7 The Evolution of Evidence-Based Policing
• Chapter 8 Doing Research on Crime and Policing
• Chapter 9 Doing Your Own Research
• Chapter 10 Conclusion
• Index