Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter examines four recent changes that are currently being reflected in the criminal laws, in their administration and in their interpretation. These are shifts in the role and status of the State (governance); an altered perception of the significance of risk; a retreat from open justice dispensed in court; and a move towards local empowerment and responsibility for social problems and the broader ‘Big Society’. Each of these is placed within the prevailing context of neo-liberalism in economic and social affairs and the associated trend towards the so-called globalisation of both much economic activity and modern society.
Chapter
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki
The concluding chapter pulls together the implications of the earlier chapters of this book for an assessment of where policing is heading, and what is to be done to achieve greater effectiveness, fairness, and justice. It seeks to answer eight specific questions: What is policing? Who does it? What do police do? What are police powers? What social functions do they achieve? How does policing impact on different groups? By whom are the police themselves policed? How can policing practices be understood? It considers technological, cultural, social, political, economic changes and their implications for crime, order, and policing. It also examines the multifaceted reorientation of police thinking, especially shifts in the theory and practice of policing in the 1990s that included the rhetoric of consumerism. The chapter considers the limits of police reform and the implications of neo-liberalism for the police before concluding with a call for policing based on the principles of social democracy.
Chapter
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki
This chapter first looks at the history of British professional policing between 1829 and 1856, when the police idea was highly controversial. It compares the new police with the old forms, the motives for police reform, and the social impact of the new police. It also considers the basis of opposition to the police, and describes how the role of policing in social order became recognized. There follows an analysis of the legitimation of the modern British police in the face of widespread opposition. This partly relates to such operational strategies as bureaucratic discipline, subjection to the rule of law, non-partisanship, accountability, a service role, and preventive policing. These were facilitated by cultural changes, notably the incorporation of the working class, into the fabric of civil, political, and socio-economic citizenship. After the 1970s, with the emergence of neo-liberalism, these processes reversed and the police became increasingly controversial and politicized.
Chapter
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki
The chapter surveys theories concerning the hybrid nature of the plural policing web. It evaluates the claim that a fundamental shift in policing occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Holding police métier as a definitional constant, the chapter examines how policing is enacted from different institutional positions in plural policing. It outlines the history of claims about the rise of plural policing before discussing its relation to law, the military, technology, territory, locality, the rising importance of private ‘high policing’, and the centrality of surveillance. The chapter demonstrates the complex opportunity structure of the plural policing web, the variety of legal and technological tools involved in its operations, and suggests that it poses fundamental problems for the democratic governance of police that have not been resolved. It concludes that there is both continuity and change in the politics of the police and that claims of a fundamental break have been overstated.
Chapter
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki
This chapter critically examines the concept of cop culture, that is, the world view and perspectives of police officers. It considers the core characteristics of police culture portrayed in empirical studies at many different places and times, relating them to the danger and authority associated with the police role. It then discusses the themes of mission, hedonistic love of action, and pessimistic cynicism that characterize policework and how they relate to other facets of cop culture such as suspicion, isolation/solidarity, and conservatism. Finally, it analyses variations in cop culture and in organizational culture. The fundamental argument is that the structural features of the police role in liberal democratic societies generate tensions and the cultural perspectives that enable police to cope with them, although these have negative features reflecting the fundamental patterns of social injustice and inequality.
Book
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James W E Sheptycki
In its fifth edition, The Politics of the Police has been revised, updated, and extended to take account of recent changes in the law, policy, organization, and social contexts of policing. It builds upon the previous editions’ political economy of policing to encompass a wide global and transnational scope, and to reflect the growing diversity of policing forms. This volume explores the highly charged debates that surround policing, including the various controversies that have led to a change in the public’s opinion of the police in recent years, as well as developments in law, accountability, and governance. The volume sets out to analyse what the police do, how they do it and with what effects, how the mass media shape public perceptions of the police, and how globalization, privatization, militarization, and securitization are impacting on contemporary police work. It concludes with an assessment of what we can expect for the future of policing.
Chapter
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki
This chapter synthesizes a theoretical view of police and media which considers not only media content, but also how different kinds of media technologies function as tools in the hands of different kinds of institutional actors. It also considers police-media relations in the light of neo-liberal market conditions. Relations between police and media have traditionally been conceptualized between two poles of argument, on the one side the orthodox/hegemonic and on the other the revisionist/subversive. However, the social fragmentation of ‘postmodern conditions’ at the cusp of the millennium troubled this binary. A common question in thinking about the police and media concerned the manufacture of consent and the creation of socially integrative conditions for policing by consent of the governed. This chapter argues that social conflict and dissensus are functional symptoms of neo-liberal social order in which security has become a commodity. The social disintegration accompanying an over-mediatized society does not inhibit market relations, but it does make policing more difficult.
