Citizens, Community and Crime Control

K. Bullock

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137269324
• eBook ISBN: 9781137269331
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Analysing the historical circumstances and theoretical sources that have generated ideas about citizen and community participation in crime control, this book examines the various ideals, outcomes and effects that citizen participation has been held to stimulate and how these have been transformed, renegotiated and reinvigorated over time.

1

Introduction

This book is about citizen participation in political institutions, focusing on the police service of England and Wales. The police service may not be ‘popularly’ understood as a political institution. Political institutions are perhaps more normally understood in terms of the structures, organisations and arrangements of central government such as legislative bodies, political parties and electoral systems. However, the protection of liberty, the promotion of social and economic opportunities and the ability of individuals to determine and develop their lives are, as Jones et al. (1994: 1) argued, crucially affected by public services. Indeed, in this late modern era, the ways that public services impinge on the lives of citizens may be more important as the embodiment or negation of the democratic ideal, than parliament or central government (Jones et al., 1994: 1). Contemporary government discourse places great emphasis on citizen participation in political decision making. Whilst participation in political institutions certainly can be viewed narrowly, in terms of voting or standing as a candidate for political office – and indeed ‘lay’ understanding of participation in politics may well be limited to such activities – incorporating activities as diverse as signing petitions, contacting officials (elected or otherwise), organising protests, attending consultation events and discussion forums, responding to questionnaires and volunteering, the notion of participation in democratic structures is today deemed to be much wider than the periodic vote.

Understood in a variety of ways, citizen participation in political processes has been held to be important for millennia. For political thinkers as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, all of whom we will meet again in Chapter 2, citizen participation has been viewed to legitimise decision making, to develop the minds and souls of citizens and to foster a healthy democracy. In contemporary societies, characterised by complexity and diversity, citizen participation in political decision making is sometimes held to offer the prospect of attaining realistic and meaningful ‘solutions’ to social problems, to provide a base for engagement in politics and to facilitate the development of trust, empathy and social capital (Stoker, 2004, 2006). Citizen participation has, as Stoker (2006: 177) notes, been ‘premised on the idea that involving people in the hard, rationing choices of politics in a shared sense of citizenship can deliver a more mature and sustainable democracy’. However, from Plato’s infamous tale of intrigue aboard the ‘Ship of State’, which we will return to in Chapter 2, participation in political decision making has not always been seen as an unalloyed public good. It has been variously contended that the views of citizens – characterised by some as parochial, uninformed and open to manipulation – should not be used as the basis of decision making, that structuring decision making around the will of the majority risks ‘tyranny’ and that there are in any case wide-ranging practical problems involved in canvassing and representing the views of citizens in political decision making.

This preliminary chapter sets the scene for the detailed analysis of the role of the citizen and community in contemporary policing that follows. We first situate the citizen and community within historical patterns of crime control. In so doing, we start to reveal the social and political context that has shaped the configuration of the relationship between the citizen and modes of governance together with how this relationship has changed over time. We second consider the rationale for contemporary appeals to the citizen and community in the enactment of crime control. In so doing, we meet the ideological perspectives which have shaped the field. We third critically examine the central concepts – ‘community’, ‘participation’ and ‘crime control’ – that shape the analysis contained in the monograph. We fourth consider the links between policing, participation and democracy. We will see that citizen participation is but one facet of our understanding of democracy and democratic policing. However, it is one that is important and, as we are starting to see, inherently contested. Lastly, this chapter sets out the arrangements for the analysis explored in the forthcoming chapters.

Situating citizens within historical patterns of crime control

Historical patterns of crime control

For much of our history crime control was situated in the realm of the communal and in the mutual obligations that bonded citizens, communities and the state. Prior to the establishment of a professional police service in 1829 crime control was the outcome of the social structures and social relations embedded in communities, characterised by ‘volunteer’ citizen patrols and private policing (Reiner, 2000). Early medieval systems of crime control placed mutual obligations on communities to protect themselves and each other (see Critchley, 1978; Rawlings, 2002, 2008). Based on the so-called ‘tithing’ system (where families were clustered into groups which formed administrative units) mechanisms for enacting crime control were situated in the wider social structures of community governance. Such aspects of communal responsibility for crime control started to become institutionalised in the late medieval period. Critchley (1978: 7) describes how the Statute of Winchester (1285) recognised the responsibility of all citizens to maintain the King’s Peace and in so doing reaffirmed the principle of communal responsibility for crime control and personal service to the community. In meeting these obligations, citizens were required to keep arms to follow the hue and cry (a call for help in the aftermath of a crime), victims of robbery could claim recompense from a tithing that failed to bring the delinquent to justice and the Statute required that two ‘constables’ ‘in every hundred and franchise’ were chosen to see that its provisions were enacted. The constable, an office that clearly survives to this day, was for much of its history in fact an unpaid or poorly paid volunteer. He was the primary official responsible for crime control in most communities in the medieval and early modern period and was responsible for wide-ranging administrative matters (Rawlings, 2008). The Statute of Winchester also required that towns established a Watch which was to be mobilised to guard the entrance to towns and to conduct patrols during the summer months. Again, members of the Watch were volunteers derived from the citizenry. The unpaid constable and Watch endured despite criticism (and some reform) throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries (see Critchley, 1978; Rawlings, 2008). We can reveal then that mutual obligation and the voluntary actions of citizens embedded in wider social structures and relationships characterised early forms of crime control. Despite the intrinsically convivial undertone to terms such as ‘community’, ‘communal’ and ‘obligation’ it would, as Crawford (1999: 18) states, be wrong to understand these obligations for crime control as consensual, conciliatory or egalitarian. Rather, they were discriminatory, brutal and reinforced hierarchy. However, the point is that the charge for early forms of crime control was embedded in informal, community and often face-to-face relations (Crawford, 1999: 18).

The ‘New Police’

Sir Robert Peel’s 1829 Metropolitan Police Act saw the birth of a professional, paid police service and the start of the process of the development of the police service that we would recognise today. The establishment of the ‘New Police’ was to fundamentally transform the relationship between citizens and crime control. However, it was not the case that the ‘new’ police simply expurgated the ‘old’ (Emsley, 2011). The link between the citizen, community and crime control endured within the new arrangements, on the face of it at least. First, conventional histories of the development of the New Police place the citizen centre stage in the model devised by Peel. The oft-quoted ‘Peelian’ – and we use the term advisably as they were unlikely to have been articulated by either Peel or his early Commissioners (see for example Emsley, 2013) – principles of policing sought to sustain the aforesaid historic tradition of collective responsibility for crime control. Police officers, ‘Peels’ principles affirm, were merely uniformed citizens paid to perform duties that could have been accomplished by any citizen, should they have been minded to do so. Second, a link between the local and the organisation of policing lingered within the new arrangements, at least nominally. Jefferson and Grimshaw (1984: 36) describe how, through the retention of oversight by democratically elected local representatives and the consequent development of bureaucratic and/or democratic forms of direct supervision, the notion of local and communal responsibility for crime control endured (albeit attenuated) in the system that evolved following the establishment of the New Police. The weakening of the role of local and communal structures of policing governance, to which the statement from Jefferson and Grimshaw (1984) alludes, is something repeatedly returned to throughout this monograph. As we will come to see, whilst the aforementioned ‘Peelian’ principles are much invoked in contemporary discussions of policing, the centrality of a relationship between the citizenry and the police was not to last.

Professionalism, community and control

Social and political pressures combined with the processes of professionalisation and specialisation, structural constraints and the development of new technologies served to transform police work, its organisation and systems of oversight following the establishment of the New Police. As policing transformed, barriers between the police service and citizens started to be constructed (Crawford, 1999; Emsley, 2011). The construction of these barriers gathered pace in the period following the Second World War underpinned by the development of claims to professional expertise, the dominance of a so-called Professional Model of policing and the notion that the police service should be ‘operationally independent’ in its decision making, themes we will briefly unpack and return to throughout this monograph.

First, claims to professional expertise formed the foundations of the barrier between citizens and the police service. Professional expertise – be it in policing or public policy more generally – was a bedrock of the welfare state which developed in post-Second World War Britain. Informed by a social democratic perspective the British state sought to provide a (minimum) level of social security for all citizens (Crosland, 1956; Marshall, 1963; Titmuss, 1968). Through providing uniform, state-led and professionally administered responses to social problems the state could, it was asserted, protect citizen rights, ensure adequate provision and promote social justice. In the post-Second World War atmosphere there was great optimism about the capacity of the state to achieve these ends. As Garland (1996: 447) put it in respect to crime control:

There was no doubt about the state’s capacity to deal with the problem. On the contrary, the implied promise of the statement was that the state would win the war against crime, just as the warfare state had vanquished its foreign enemies and the welfare state was now attacking the social problems of peacetime.

By virtue of their professional knowledge and experience, the judgement of the police officer was heralded as the most appropriate for influencing the nature of police policy and practice.

Second, the barrier was grounded in the so-called Professional Model of policing. We will look at other features of the Professional Model in the forthcoming chapters. For the time being it will suffice to say this model rejected political or citizen participation in police decision making. Instead, it demanded an impartial, neutral and distant relationship between the police and citizens (Kelling and Moore, 1988; Crawford, 1999). Enforcement of the criminal law and professionalism, as Kelling and Moore (1988: 5) noted, were established as the principal bases of police legitimacy. Within this model the primary function of the police service was viewed to be the enforcement of the criminal law with, as Goldstein (1963: 144) put it, ‘total objectivity – of impartiality – and of enforcement without fear nor favor’.

Third, the barrier was fortified by the notion of operational independence. Described by Loveday and Reid (2003: 17) as an ‘ancient and somewhat mysterious convention’, a prevailing view within British policing has been that Chief Constables should have independence over operational decision making to mitigate the risks posed by political interference in policing. Despite its importance within the discourse and imagery of the British police service, operational independence has never been formally defined and has attained something of a mythical status. Reiner (2000) describes how the principle has evolved over time from legislation, Royal Commissions on the police and from legal judgements. In respect to the former the Police Acts of 1964 and 1996 accorded Chief Constables the statutory duty to maintain the direction and control of their police service but did not make specific reference to operational independence. The 1962 Royal Commission on the Police stated that officers should be free to determine when to enforce the criminal law and should be free to make wider policy decisions about, for example, which crime problems should be prioritised by officers and how and where resources should be deployed. The view that the police service should be autonomous in both of these ways was reinforced by the widely cited legal judgement of Lord Denning in the case of Blackburn in 1968 which affirmed that:

No Minister of the Crown can tell him that he must, or must not, keep observation on this place or that; or that he must, or must not, prosecute this man or that one. Nor can any police authority tell him so. The responsibility for law enforcement lies on him. He is answerable to the law and to the law alone.

The Denning judgement strengthened the view – dominant in the Professional Model – that the officer should be held accountable to the law rather than citizens, political representatives or any other kind of external body (Jones et al., 1994). Laws, which have to be interpreted and applied by actors in the criminal justice system, are at best guidelines and cannot influence or regulate the pattern of policing (Jones et al., 1994). The impact of Denning’s judgement, note Jones et al. (1994), was accordingly to distance the police from any oversight at all. The principle of operational independence has been much invoked – by police officers, politicians and other commentators – as a safeguard against excessive political interference in decisions about law enforcement. However, it has been seen by some as a useful linguistic device through which the police have sought to resist control and oversight by democratic structures.

To summarise the above points, in post-Second World War Britain the emphasis of public policy was on service provided by professionals underpinned by their attendant organisational and administrative coherence and claims to expertise, with a range of implications for the relationship between the police service and the citizen. On the one hand, the state came to displace other forms of provision, be it that informal assistance provided by family, neighbours and friends; the more formal assistance of cooperatives, trade unions or charities; or, that purchased from the private sector. On the other hand, the application of universal rules by impersonal professionals ‘became the totems of modern criminal justice’ (Crawford, 1999: 2). In this context, ‘the managers of the “new police” sought to establish forms of physical, social, psychological and symbolic distance between the police and the community they policed’ (Crawford, 1999: 2). In the context of professionalisation, the Professional Model and overriding concerns with operational independence the citizen was marginalised in the process of crime control. Citizens became defined as recipients of a ‘service’ funded by the state and administered by professional agents. Officers had the monopoly on ‘expertise’ regarding how to dispense crime control. The citizen was relegated to (at best) providing the information – reporting crimes, giving statements and providing evidence in court – that the police needed to draw on to facilitate the enforcement of the law (Kelling and Moore, 1988; Wasserman and Moore, 1988).

The rediscovery of the citizen

We seem to have come full circle. In the context of the high crime rates that characterise most modern Western democracies and acknowledged limits to the agencies of the criminal justice system, more on which in the forthcoming chapters, the state has become less confident in its ability to control crime. Above all, notes Garland (1996: 447), ‘there is an explicit acknowledgement of the need to rethink the problem of crime and the strategies for managing it’. The sources of this ‘re-think’ are varied. They flow from concerns that the police had lost touch with the needs of citizens and communities, crises of consent and legitimacy and associated calls for greater democratic accountability and oversight. They flow from powerful critiques of the welfare state and the relationship between citizens and professions within them. They flow from the (re)emergence of certain strains of political thought which have sought to mobilise citizens, render public services more responsive to citizen need and reinvigorate democratic structures. At the heart of attempts to recalibrate the processes through which crime control is conducted is a challenge to the view that that crime control should be a state monopoly driven by expert fiat. Where the state had once, as Crawford (1999: 25) put it, been expected to provide an authoritative solution to social ills, the expectation is now that citizens and communities will play a role in resolving them. Let us consider the drivers of this shift in emphasis.

A basis of this about turn is the development of certain strands of ‘neo-liberal’ forms of political thought, which started to dominate political decision making during the latter part of the 20th century. The basis of neo-liberalism is difficult to pin down and much contested (see Gray, 1986; Harvey, 2005). For our purposes it will suffice to note that we are referring to an assembly of ideas that came to characterise the policies of governments of Thatcher (in the UK) and Reagan (in the US) during the 1980s. These ideas find their academic heritage most clearly in the work of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick and coalesce around the development of free trade, the reduction in state control of the economy and the privatisation of state owned industries. There is hostility to an active, interventionist welfare state of the sort advocated by social democrats in the post-Second World War period. The critique of the welfare state runs as follows: state organised and delivered welfare is wasteful and inefficient because as monopolies there is no incentive for actors in the system to operate them efficiently; state provision effectively crowds out other forms of intervention; and, in doing so, it inhibits citizen initiative and risks dependency. In contrast, under this model the role of the state should be a limited one focused on protecting and enhancing the free market and providing a basic level of social security for citizens focused on the relief of poverty. Welfare, where given at all, should be provided in a way that maximises competition amongst providers and choice amongst ‘consumers’.

The principles of neo-liberalism have had – and continue to have – a marked impact on public policy in the UK, as elsewhere. They have led to the promotion of the market as provider of goods and services, the promulgation of ‘consumer’ choice and competition between providers and an emphasis on targeted (rather than universal) provision together with means testing (Hills, 1990; Clarke and Newman, 1997; Plant et al., 2009). This position stands in contrast to the principles of social democracy, which traditionally advocated state intervention, a strong system of welfare and uniform provision to redistribute wealth in the name of providing social security and social justice for all citizens. Under neo-liberal posturing, the state cannot deliver social justice in the way that the social democratic position advocates. The concept of social justice, so the argument goes, is vague and contested and, in any case, trying to realise it through state intervention risks undermining individual freedom. From this position, the state is disabling rather than enabling: it disables self-help, it disables mutual responsibility and it disables the market. The mechanisms for inoculation again these risks are the development of strong moral and social orders underpinned by ‘traditional’ family structures, initiative, self-reliance and self-interest. This language resonates with ‘moral’ Conservatism which invokes ‘traditional’ structures and values such as family, kin and informal networks of support (Kirk, 1953; Nisbet, 1953).

To be sure, neo-liberals and Conservatives are not the only ones with a claim on the communal and the principles of forms of self-help and mutual aid. As we will consider in more detail in Chapter 3, appeals to community as a means of organising forms of provision, including aspects of crime control, cross the political spectrum. Indeed, the machinery of the welfare state has been criticised by many for being elitist, geared towards meeting the needs of the professionals it employed – rather than the needs of those it purported to serve – and unable to articulate well the interests and needs of citizens and communities (see Glennerster, 1993; Lowe, 1993; Timmins, 1995). It has been argued that advocates of the welfare state who, as we have seen, placed great faith in experts and welfare professionals failed to see that it could be experienced by some of those who used it as bureaucratic, authoritarian, sexist and racist (Williams, 1989). In turn, calls were made for more cooperative, user-led and community based delivery of public services (Williams, 1989, 1999). Blends of neo-liberalism and neo-communitarianism have also taken root in contemporary political discourse and forms of practice. Seemingly shaped by influential ideas about the relationship between rights and responsibilities in contemporary societies (Etzioni, 1995; Giddens, 1998), a role for the structures of civil society has been found within this new order. Doing so, it has been contended, will promote individual opportunity, responsibility and social cohesion and provide a structure around which public policies can be organised and delivered, themes which we return to in Chapter 3 and again and again in the forthcoming analysis.

Scepticism of state institutions and the role that they can (in light of acknowledged failures to control crime) and should (in light of powerful ideological critiques) play in the organisation and delivery of crime control has touched policing policy and practice in no small way. Through ‘strategies of responsibilization’ governments have sought to recalibrate the relationship between the state and non-state organisations and citizens (Garland, 1996: 452). The suggestion is not that the state withdraws from the organisation and delivery of crime control but that professionals are repositioned as negotiators who mobilise and coordinate community resources rather than (necessarily) directly provide them. The role of professionals is to persuade citizens to ‘act appropriately’ in the name of crime control (Garland, 1996: 452). This might involve mobilising citizens and communities to unite to form Neighbourhood Watch or citizen patrols, encouraging citizens to volunteer – for example as Special Constables or Police Support Volunteers – within the police service o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Citizen Participation and Democracy
• 3. Positioning the Citizen Within Contemporary Policing
• 4. Consultation
• 5. Community Policing
• 6. Neighbourhood Watch
• 7. Citizen Patrols
• 8. Volunteering in the Police Service
• 9. Indirect Democracy
• 10. Conclusion
• References
• Index