The SAGE Dictionary of Policing

Alison Wakefield, Jenny Fleming, Alison Wakefield, Jenny Fleming

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412930994, 9781412930987
• eBook ISBN: 9781446245811
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The SAGE Dictionary of Policing is the definitive reference tool for students, academics and practitioners in police studies.

The Dictionary delivers a complete guide to policing in a comprehensive, easy-to-use format. Contributions by 110 of the world?s leading academics and practitioners based in 14 countries map out all the key concepts and topics in the field.

Each entry includes:

" a concise definition

" distinctive features of the concept

" a critical evaluation

" associated concepts, directing readers to linked entries

" key readings, enabling readers to take their knowledge further.

In addition, The SAGE Dictionary of Policing offers online resources, including free access to key articles and links to useful websites.

This is a must-have for students, lecturers, researchers and professionals in police studies, criminology and criminal justice. It is the ideal companion to the SAGE Dictionary of Criminology: together the two books provide the most authoritative and comprehensive guide available.

Alison Wakefield is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of New South Wales. She was previously based at City University, London.

Jenny Fleming is Professor at the Tasmanian Institute of Law Enforcement Studies, University of Tasmania.

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ACCOUNTABILITY

Definition

Police accountability requires police officers and the institutions to which they belong to explain, justify and answer for their conduct. Individual police officers are obliged to account internally to their superiors and to an internal investigation unit and, in established and emerging democracies, to external, independent accountability institutions. At the political level, police organizations commonly answer to a senior member of government (such as a police minister, attorney-general or general directorate of public security).

Distinctive Features

Police accountability structures and processes are determined by the nature of a sovereign state and its particular political system. For example, in totalitarian regimes the police are the tool of government and are used by those in power to exercise authoritarian control over citizens in general and to suppress any opposition to the ruling elite in particular. There is no sense of ‘policing by consent’ and hence no requirement that police organizations or individual officers account to the people for the way in which they exercise their coercive powers, or of police using them according to the rule of law, a doctrine which holds that all citizens are equal before the law and will be treated equally by it. In totalitarian regimes the relationship between the police and government is so intertwined that they are often referred to as ‘police states’.

In contrast, in democratic societies, police are required to adhere to the rule of law, abide by due process when enforcing the law and protect citizens’ human, civil and political rights. This protection encompasses any illegal action by the state and extends to all members of legislatures regardless of the position they hold. The parameters of police power and the way in which police are held to account for the exercise of those powers is laid down in legislation enacted by freely elected and representative legislatures. Regardless of how circuitous the route, ultimate accountability is to the people through their elected representatives.

External, independent civilian oversight bodies are slowly becoming an accepted feature of police accountability in established and emerging democracies. These bodies are independent of the police organizations they oversee and in some, but not all cases, are independent of government in that they report to the legislature or a committee of the legislature rather than directly to a government minister. The former reporting structure helps to depoliticize the police accountability process.

The role of civilian oversight bodies is to monitor, review and/or investigate alleged corruption and misconduct. The more advanced civilian oversight bodies have ‘own motion powers’ which allow them to adopt a proactive approach to police accountability. It means that they do not have to first receive a formal complaint from a member of the community or another police officer before they can act, but rather can initiate their own investigations into suspected misconduct and corruption.

The level of government that has jurisdiction over general duties police determines to whom the police are accountable in a political sense. In some countries, including the US and the UK, policing is largely a matter for local government. In other countries it is the responsibility of state/provincial/regional governments (for example Canada and Australia). Under this arrangement accountability is to a designated minister of the state, province or region. Various countries organize their police on a national level (such as New Zealand) and where this occurs, accountability is through a minister of the national government. But distinctions are not clear cut. In many countries policing takes place at each level (local, state and national) with each jurisdiction having its own distinct accountability structure.

Community consultative committees are used in many countries to enhance police accountability and to involve non-police in the accountability process. They are used widely in the UK.

To be effective, the ‘policing by consent’ model requires the community to trust its police and that trust is contingent on police behaving according to constitutional and legal processes established by the people through a freely elected, representative parliament. Police are expected and required to act in a responsible and ethical manner and, most importantly, to be held accountable for their behaviour if they do not.

Over the past 50 years there has been a marked increase in the level of police accountability in democratic societies. The adoption of ‘new public sector management’ principles in the 1980s has resulted in improved accountability in relation to budgetary, financial and administrative matters.

The media, through its reporting of police related scandals over many years, has played a key role in keeping police accountable for their actions and for placing police accountability on the political agenda. Mediaexposed scandals have often resulted in the establishment of commissions of inquiry. The subsequent reports from these powerful, ad hoc forms of accountability have overwhelmingly criticized internal, police controlled accountability processes and recommended the establishment of independent, external civilian oversight bodies.

Police accountability in democratic societies is complicated by the doctrine of constabulary independence. In liberal democracies such as Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand, which adopt the Anglo-Saxon ‘kin’ style of policing, it is the independent discretion that attaches to the office of constable that draws a distinction between a government’s democratic right to formulate policing policy and the widely held convention that the state is not to interfere in operational policing decisions, including the decision to detain, arrest and charge a person with a criminal offence. Such decisions are said to rest solely with the police and they are held accountable for the exercise of their powers and conduct more generally.

In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon model, many European and South American countries have what is referred to as a ‘gendarmerie’ form of policing in which military police have responsibility for policing the civilian population. Accountability is often to the ministry of defence.

Some accountability reforms introduced to improve the degree to which police in democratic societies are held accountable include better resourced and more effective police internal investigation units, also known as ethical or professional standards departments. They are staffed by police officers whose role is to investigate misconduct allegations against other police within their own organization.

Criticism that internal and external complaints processes concentrate almost exclusively on the investigative process to resolve complaints led to the introduction of informal resolution processes. This form of accountability involves the complainant and the police officer who is the subject of the complaint meeting to resolve the issue. It is increasingly used (with the consent of the complainant and police officer) to address less serious complaints. It has the advantage of being a less punitive and resource intensive form of accountability than the full-blown investigative process.

Complaints profiling is a more recent accountability management tool used by police internal investigation units and external oversight bodies to determine if a police officer who is the subject of a complaint has a history of inappropriate behaviour. Complaints profiling can act as an early warning system and as such incorporates a preventive element to the police accountability process.

Integrity testing, which can be targeted to specific officers or applied randomly across a police organization, is another more recent form of police accountability. It is designed to covertly test an officer’s capacity to resist the temptation to engage in misconduct. Officers who are the subject of the test are sometimes identified and targeted through complaints profiling. Random testing has a preventive element in that police officers are never sure if the temptation they are being subjected to is the result of random integrity testing or not.

Miscarriages of justice cases and findings from commissions of inquiry into police conduct in a number of jurisdictions revealed incompetent and corrupt police interview practices, including forced confessions. The audio and visual recordings of police interviews has become a commonly used accountability tool designed to reduce misconduct and improve accountability at the crucially important interview stage of the investigative process.

Evaluation

The stressful and often confrontational nature of ‘general’, ‘everyday’ police work coupled with the many temptations and opportunities it provides for misconduct makes effective accountability an essential part of police legitimacy. Despite the many layers of accountability that police are subjected to, police corruption and abuse of police powers still occurs in police services around the world. However the chance of having that type of conduct exposed has increased dramatically through improved internal and external accountability processes.

But not all police work involves what is termed ‘general’, ‘everyday’ policing duties. Brodeur has drawn a distinction between what he defines as ‘low’ and ‘high’ policing. The accountability structures and processes outlined above relate to ‘low’ policing, the ‘everyday’ policing function performed by public police officers who, with the exception of members of criminal investigation units (detectives), normally wear identifying uniforms. ‘High’ policing primarily involves the gathering of intelligence by state intelligence agencies such as Britain’s Security Service (‘MI5’) and Secret Intelligence Service (‘MI6’), America’s Criminal Intelligence Agency (CIA), the French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS). These organizations are not subject to open, transparent accountability processes; indeed, in many instances ‘high’ policing personnel are protected by legislation from having to account to the people for their actions.

The introduction of a raft of counter- terrorism legislation post 11 September 2001 has significantly strengthened the powers and resources of those involved in ‘high’ policing. It has also resulted in the introduction of increased covert powers for police undertaking ‘low’ policing functions. The enacting of legislation that grants secret powers to police undertaking ‘low’ policing has been accompanied by diminished forms of accountability. This trend has the potential to undermine the foundations of democratic policing, which over the past 40 to 50 years have been strengthened by improved accountability, in particular by enhanced forms of external, independent oversight.

Colleen Lewis

Associated Concepts: civilian oversight, consent, discretion, independence of the constable, misconduct

Key Readings

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Brodeur, J.P. (2007) ‘High and low policing in post-9/11 times’, Policing, 1 (1): 25–37.

Chan, J. (1999) ‘Governing police practice: limits of the new accountability’, British Journal of Sociology, 50 (2): 251–70.

Hocking, J. and Lewis, C. (eds) (2007) Counter-Terrorism and the Post-Democratic State. UK: Edward Elgar.

Lewis, C. (2005) ‘Police, civilians and democratic accountability’, Democratic Audit Discussion Paper Series, Australian National University: Canberra, http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au.

Mawby, R.I. (ed.) (1999) Policing Across the World: Issues for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge.

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ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR

Definition

‘Anti-social behaviour’ has become a major political concern and policy preoccupation in recent years, most notably in the UK. In the politics of behaviour, diverse activities and risks have been conflated in the amorphous concept of the ‘anti-social’. With its genesis in the management of public housing, a range of policies and interventions formulated under the rubric of ‘tackling anti-social behaviour’ now inform diverse aspects of social life from schooling through to urban planning. Primarily, these strategies have been focused on the question of governing youth. Anti-social behaviour (ASB) has come to categorize and demarcate a distinct policy field that blurs and transcends traditional distinctions between crime and disorder, as well as the appropriate use of civil/criminal and formal/informal regulatory responses. It constitutes a policy domain in which diverse organizational interests, working assumptions, priorities and multi-disciplinary approaches coalesce, often in awkward combinations. At the same time, it introduces the now important dimension of ‘public perceptions’ into issues of local safety, as a result of which fear of crime, public anxieties and community well-being have become prominent concerns in their own right.

Distinctive Features

To some degree, ASB is a misnomer, as all behaviour is ‘social’. The allied concept of ‘acceptable behaviour’ is perhaps more accurate, as it prompts the question: ‘acceptable to whom?’ Nevertheless, the term ASB is now widely used to cover a range of activities, misdemeanours and crimes (sometimes quite serious). It is recognized that people’s understanding of what constitutes ASB is ‘determined by a series of factors including context, location, community tolerance and quality of life expectations … what may be considered anti-social behaviour to one person can be seen as acceptable behaviour to another’ (Home Office, 2004: 3). For this reason, the policy definition of ASB has been left deliberately opaque. In British legislation, ASB is defined as behaviour that ‘causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress’ to others. This capacious definition is both subjective and context specific as it rests on the perceptions of others. This generates difficulties of measurement and meaning, notably between agencies and across localities. ASB, by its nature, does not lie within the remit of any single agency and cuts across traditional legal, organizational and social categories.

Nevertheless, forms of nuisance behaviour do have a considerable impact on the lives of many people, with adverse implications for community life and the degradation of public spaces and where serious and persistent ASB can foster a sense of despair and mistrust which fractures informal relations, encourages those who are able to leave certain areas to move out and erodes the willingness of residents to intervene in support of communal values. Significantly, ASB, like crime, affects the poorest communities most severely. Hence, it has a compounding effect upon other forms of disadvantage.

As a policy domain in the UK, ASB arose out of the work of the inter-departmental Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) which had been set up to ‘narrow the gap’ between the country’s worst estates and the rest of society. One report, published in 2000, focused specifically on ASB. Subsequently, in 2002, the Government launched its ASB Strategy and enacted the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, introducing a swathe of new powers. In 2006, the Government outlined its intention to ‘go broader, deeper and further’ than before with the establishment of the Respect programme and Taskforce. The Government’s aim now is to ‘ensure that the culture of respect extends to everyone – young and old alike’. Some of the novel measures include: fixed penalty notices for disorder (PNDs), acceptable behaviour contracts (ABCs), parenting contracts and parenting orders, anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) and injunctions (ASBIs), tenancy demotion orders, child curfews, dispersal orders, as well as preventive programmes, such as youth inclusion projects and a focus on family intervention. Paradoxically, at the moment in history when the ‘myth’ of the monopolistic sovereign state had bec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Entries
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Editors’ Introduction
• The Sage Dictionary of Policing
• Name Index
• Subject Index