'Soft' Policing

The Collaborative Control of Anti-Social Behaviour

D. McCarthy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137299383
• eBook ISBN: 9781137299390
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Examining multi-agency working in response to anti-social behaviour, this book investigates the way in which the police, social work teams and the youth justice service work together on early intervention initiatives to help young people, and explores the complexities and practical struggles of these partnerships.

1

Introduction

Steven, an 11-year-old boy, was referred to the case conference meeting having been seen hanging out on the streets until late at night with a group of older males in their mid to late teens. Kate [police sergeant] began to read from the case referral form in front of her. She read to the rest of the practitioners around the table that Steven had been on the child protection register for several years and had already been referred to the police’s Prevent and Deter scheme which put in a package of support interventions to help steer him away from crime. Steven was receiving a lot of help at school but truanted regularly. He also had a social worker as part of his child protection referral. Kate said that regular domestic violence had been reported in the home, including Steven being alleged to have assaulted his mum and dad on numerous occasions. The referral to the case conference also included Steven’s mum displaying what Kate termed ‘very paranoid behaviour’, where she had been making a significant number of reports to the police about neighbours allegedly harassing her. According to each police investigation, these reports had turned out to be false. The mum’s character continued to be dissected by the group. She was reported to have been suffering from depression for several months, rarely leaving the home and appearing to be confused about basic details when the police came to talk to her. Her husband left her approximately eight months previously, leading to the practitioners around the table questioning whether this may have played a part in the concerns raised about Steven. The diagnosis of the mum’s behaviour continued.

Belinda [Mental Health Worker]: ‘It sounds a lot like schizophrenia to me’ [nods of agreement from practitioners around the table].

Hayley [Youth Offending Team officer]: ‘It is difficult to see whether the behaviours are anti-social, or just mirrored through mental health problems.’

Vicky [Police Sgt]: agreeing with Hayley, recommended that the mum be referred to the Community Mental Health Services for some support. Vicky then asked whether Steven had any leisure or sporting interests. Brian, the neighbourhood warden for the area, said that Steven was a big fan of hip hop music and street dance. Vicky was pleased with this and immediately offered for the police to pay for Steven to attend a programme of classes at the local community centre. She concluded: ‘It is almost as if Steven is a victim in all of this. It would be nice to get him away from mum for a while as it seems his behaviour is heavily influenced by her.’

[Fieldnotes from Case Conference Meeting – Hobarten]

Steven’s case is quite typical of case conference meetings. Rather than looking at immediate steps to punish the wrongdoers for their involvement in anti-social behaviour (ASB), the shared philosophy behind the meetings and subsequent interventions is to diagnose the causes of the behaviour through the joining together of professionals ranging from police officers to social workers to mental health workers, all of whom bring together their own bodies of expertise, knowledge, training and experiences. These multi-agency responses embrace a style of problem-solving which transcends emphasis on viewing issues as purely ‘anti-social’ or ‘criminal’, articulating causes as requiring a joined-up series of supportive interventions, or combining support with some informal or formal sanctions in the event of more serious ASB. The overarching philosophy of the case conferences is that children and young people exhibiting warning signs of criminality, commonly attributed to markers of ASB, should be dealt with at the earliest stage – what is commonly characterised as ‘intervening early’. This follows what Robert Castel (1991: 283) eloquently articulates as the ‘postulation of the hypothesis of a more or less probable relationship between certain present symptoms and a certain act to come’. While critics may argue that the relationship between ‘present symptoms’ and ‘a certain act to come’ may not correspond directly, the focus on intervening early has been claimed to be a progressive alternative to the management of issues of ASB through powers such as Anti-social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs),¹ bringing together a range of community agencies to share information, resources and, in the process, forming varying epistemologies of social control.

What is especially interesting about these styles of working illustrated by Steven’s example, and displayed in cases throughout this book, is the key role played by the police. It is not altogether surprising that the police frequently steer case conference discussions and dominate meetings, due to the higher numbers of officers attending meetings and the levels of resources that they can deploy. It may well be tempting to attribute this to a hegemonic order of the police, as they stretch the tentacles of a very particular modality of crime control onto fellow community agencies – a dictatorial and hierarchical, rather than genuinely collaborative, relationship. Likewise, the accusation that the police use their role in such proceedings to gain information on suspects through exchanges with other agencies is often levelled. Without denying that instances of these actions take place, one curious theme that this study confronts is that the police, rather than having a closed mindset in relation to social support alternatives for dealing with low-level ASB and related problems, for the most part actively appear to support these types of response.

‘Soft’ policing

Writing in the context of world politics and foreign policy, Joseph Nye (2004) has provided a reasoned account behind why nation-states should adopt ‘soft power’ over ‘hard power’ to confront a range of geo-political matters. In preventing conflicts between nation-states, Nye argues that it is not access to material resources through power over other nations that leads to genuine alliance and cooperation. Rather ‘an attraction to shared values and the justness and duty of contributing to the achievement of these values’ (ibid.: 7) are, according to Nye, the crucial ingredients for cooperation. This cooperative model of soft power is seen by Nye as having a greater capacity to provide more effective relationships at the international level by providing an alternative to command-control, ‘hard-power’ power relations. As Nye recognises, there are restrictions on and difficulties inherent in such ideas being adopted in practice. Nation-states must share some commonalities before committing to a relationship founded on soft power. Such cooperation may be driven, both directly and implicitly, by a fear of reprisals from fellow nations (such as trade restrictions or more aggressive coercive instruments of power). There are also challenges for ‘Big States’ in wielding power if it requires such a degree of compromise that they dilute the essence of the values according to which they operate and organise their territorial controls.

Although Nye’s work concerns foreign policy and negotiation at the international level, it also contains transferable social practices which can be applied to police and policing. Policing is often thought of as something ‘hard’ as the power structures of the police are ostensibly charged with the maintenance of order in society (Bittner, 1974). Yet, while policing can certainly be ‘hard’ and characterised by coercive capacities, classic policing ethnographies such as those by Bittner (1967) and Muir (1977)² also remind us that much policing involves coercion as a secondary lever of enforcing social compliance even in ‘soft’ contexts of ‘social service’ and human engagement. This can present challenges for the police who frequently struggle to define their occupational status in the wake of the sheer diversity of functions which they deliver on an everyday level. The term ‘soft policing’ is also a culturally loaded phrase which has been subject to extensive contempt from within the police (Innes, 2005; Herbert, 2005). The approach has been seen by police officers as a waste of resources, ineffective, not ‘real’ crime-fighting, and often driven by ‘intolerant’ and ‘trivial’ requests from the public. However, as this book will argue in detail, when situated in the context of collaborative partnership between the police and community agencies, and where framed around the formulation of ‘early intervention’ strategies designed to curtail or forestall criminality in children and young people, the attitude of the police in practice to the approach has been positive, although with notable exceptions and variations.

The soft policing practices described during the book can be classified under the broad banner of Neighbourhood Policing (NP), although it is important to analyse the key distinctions between various ‘early intervention’ initiatives. NP has its roots in a more general philosophy of community policing, tied especially to its role of responding to community-level concerns. In the UK, NP has its roots in so-called ‘reassurance policing’ whereby activities carried out by the police aim at reducing fears and anxieties shared by local citizens, and consist of a broad range of roles and activities designed to raise community confidence and improve the quality of contact between the police and citizens (Innes and Fielding, 2002; Innes, 2004; Innes, 2005). NP also has some roots in the model of the Chicago Area Policing Strategy (CAPS), which was designed in the early 1990s to improve relations between the police and public to support cooperative solutions to local problems of crime and disorder (see Skogan and Hartnett, 1997). These policing styles emphasise the role played by the police in attending to low-level ASB, rather than focusing purely on volume crimes such as burglary, vehicle crime and violent crime. The broad philosophy of NP is based mostly on the police building up closer relationships with local citizens, while at the same time engaging more closely in problem-solving tasks with partner agencies. The latter focus is the closest to the approach shown in this book, where the police, alongside other community agencies, monitor specific persons and highlight those deemed to be at an early stage of offending or otherwise exhibiting ‘risks’ that raise their potential for offending in the future. Here the policing role comes close to a quasi-social worker role, where ‘soft’ interventions rather than instant ‘hard-edged’ mechanisms of control are more commonly invoked, at least in the first instance.

Developments since the Labour government came into power in the UK in 1997 have seen the formalised re-alignment of police activities towards not only forming collaborations with other agencies, but also towards taking a greater role in the identification of children and young people at risk of criminality (ACPO, 2008; Home Office, 2010). Although not exclusively, the spirit of NP has informed many of these changes, which in turn have influenced the practices documented in this study. In particular, the shift towards a preventive paradigm of joined-up methods of supporting clients³ with complex social and psychological issues through multi-agency working, despite tensions and contradictions regarding their actual adoption by police officers, challenges many of the traditional accounts of the police as action-orientated, masculine crime-fighters.

Further changes have included the role of the police in pre-court interventions under the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), which has led to systems being established to identify individuals coming to police attention, with these details passed on to Youth Offending Teams (Souhami, 2007). Specific to the state’s package of responses to ASB, the Respect Agenda (Respect Task Force, 2006) directed closer attention towards early intervention and supportive interventions for ‘at risk’ young people, vulnerable persons and families (Youth Taskforce Action Plan, 2008). The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has also pointed to the benefits of making preventive youth work and early intervention strategies an integral part of police work (ACPO, 2008), most notably under the broad framework of Neighbourhood Policing. In the field settings of this study, police departments would offer financial assistance to families and young people for formal activities such as outreach projects, trips to bowling or ice-skating for families, transportation costs, even paying for school uniforms for some children. These types of social support have been well documented historically in relation to social work agencies, but much less so with the police (with exceptions; see Jackson, 2005 for examples).

The police officers involved in what is termed soft policing were typically neighbourhood officers whose roles were defined exclusively in terms of community policing activities, with multi-agency working being a key part of this. These were officers who for the most part had selected this as a career pathway within the police, and who had actively sought roles which concentrated on local problem-solving, rather than on rapid-response or more specialised enforcement tasks. At the same time, however, despite the orientation towards more general community policing activities, previous studies have also pointed out that officers can formulate values about policing which are far from ‘soft’ and they can often show cynical and resistant attitudes towards the adoption of soft policing styles (for example, see Gordon, 1984; Lyons, 2002; Herbert, 2005). Because the broad underlying definitions of what constitutes community policing vary considerably, at a national political level, police force level, and indeed officer level (see Fielding, 1995), practices on the ground can vary widely. In light of this, one should express caution in conflating community policing with soft policing. While the latter operates under the broad banner of community policing and is certainly facilitated by this general reform movement, there are specific differences in the values and beliefs regarding the interventions used. Firstly, unlike more general community policing, the range of practices defined as soft policing are focused purely on the offenders and those deemed to be ‘at risk’ of offending. As such there is no appeal to forming closer links between citizens and the police. Secondly, much community policing has a strong orientation towards neighbourhood reassurance and building up trust within communities between police and citizens. Again, soft policing is not focused on these activities and is more about the provision of services and support for those ‘at risk’ or engaged in crime and ASB, although these actions may also ultimately have a general community benefit. Thirdly, where community policing and soft policing tend to overlap is in what is termed mixed economy policing (Crawford et al, 2005), where the police engage in problem-solving activities in direct collaboration with other community service providers such as housing landlords, youth services and neighbourhood wardens. Within such activities, there is a range of options available for such practitioners to establish particular schemes and focused interventions, both of support-orientated and more enforcement-based styles. These practitioners may also play a key role in making the initial identifications of ‘problem’ persons in particular locales, including referring some of these individuals to the case conferences. Throughout this book we find that the police officers attending case conference meetings and taking part in the intervention work beyond these meetings were all Neighbourhood Police officers engaged in multi-agency work as a key aspect of their duties.

Despite the involvement of a range of community agencies in multi-agency working, the police have tended to dominate the operation of responses to ASB (Crawford, 1997; Foster, 2002). There are two main reasons for this; on the one hand, structurally the police have the availability of operational staff, including administrative staff, as well as greater material resources for managing problems associated with ASB. This may also lead to fellow agencies expecting the police to pump in more resources, thereby leading to them limiting the level of resources that they contribute. On the other hand, the police also have arguably more to gain from multi-agency working than other agencies: the ability to boost their legitimacy as a more open, inclusive agency, through recognition of their limits to deal with the causes of behaviour affecting many of the persons they identify, as well allowing the passing off of many cases to other agencies through referrals to housing services, mental health teams and so on (perhaps saving police resources, and/or perhaps with the wider goal of helping the client). Indeed because the police are best known publicly for their capacity to use force (Bittner, 1970) – a feature maintained, in the words of Manning (1977), as a continued ‘mythology of policing’ – making the identity challenge that soft policing creates a rather curious and ambivalent one.

There is a wide understanding that police officers tend to view ‘soft’ modes of police work as inferior to more ‘hard-edged’ styles (Herbert, 2005; Innes, 2005). From outside, they are frequently seen in terms of their role as masculine actors (Fielding, 1994), as action-orientated crime-fighters (Holdaway, 1983), as morally conservative in their value systems (Reiner, 1978), as self-isolated from the public and with high levels of officer solidarity (Waddington, 1999), and as having a largely cynical and pessimistic attitude towards radical ideas or reforms within the police organisation (Chan, 1997). Policing in the context of this study is an activity which has undergone a considerable challenge to the orthodoxy of its traditional functions. The police’s capacities to use force, whilst obviously ongoing, have been recharacterised according to an alternative logic which rests on helping young people and families involved in ASB and crime, and by seeking to divert and prevent rather than criminalise. Unsurprisingly, these principles have not been implemented in unquestioned and clear-cut ways, and have raised many tensions for the police as they grapple with locating their own roles within this changing ideological terrain.

These tensions, challenges and altogether messy features of implementing the values and working practices of soft policing will be documented throughout this study, as will the re-formulation of aspects of orthodox police occupational cultures as police go through the process of understanding new practices. This reveals several key aspects; firstly, amongst police officers and other community professionals there is a high level of support for soft policing measures, including particular support for intervening early to prevent problems of ASB from getting worse. This compares to a general resistance found by other studies of community policing (for example, Herbert, 2005), and indeed by studies that have found a dominant enforcement-centred rationale for managing problems of ASB in communities (Squires and Stephen, 2005; Karn, 2007; Beckett and Herbert, 2009). Secondly, for police officers especially, the involvement in such initiatives prompted little organisational resistance and few calls to re-establish more traditional aspects of police culture (for example, Loftus, 2009). Officers upheld aspects of traditional police culture, namely those related to morality, mission, authority and pragmatism (see Reiner, 2000) to justify these initiatives and did not rely on these values to resort to resistant attitudes and the adoption of policing forms which correspond to more conservative visions of policing (see Chan, 1997). In the case of gendered activities of professionals, most notably in the police where there existed a higher number of female officers engaged in such soft policing roles, the struggles and strategies of these officers did not always result in further marginalisation of their gender and identities. Thirdly, while benevolence or altruism motivated the interventions and activities of soft policing to a certain ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Institutional Governance of Anti-Social Behaviour
• 3 The Organisation of Decision-Making
• 4 Becoming Anti-Social: the Nexus of Welfare/Juridical Control
• 5 Dealing With the ‘Irredeemable’: Negotiating the Failings of Reform
• 6 Policing in a Benevolent Cloak
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix: Details of Interviewees
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index