The Future of Policing (original) (raw)
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Chapter 1: Introduction to Policing in an Age of Reform
This first chapter provides an introduction to this book Policing in an Age of Reform: An Agenda for Research and Practice. The book itself draws on both scholarly research and practical experiences as all chapters are authored or coauthored by policing scholars who have had careers in policing either in Europe, Australia, or North America. We begin this chapter with a brief description of the calls for police reform in the United Kingdom, United States, and France. The views of the editors and chapter authors coalesce and diverge in important ways, which are briefly described. They affect the way we think about police reform in a changing world, and so we introduce two primary focuses of reform, i.e., police methods and police mandate. Depending on which one of these two types of reform is the primary aim of the reformer, four perspectives emerge:1) maintaining, 2) retrofitting, 3) coopting, and 4) transforming. These are explained as the chapter evolves.
International Journal of Law and Public Administration
Policing develops in different ways at different times and to differing demands in states around the world. Thus, policing and security models are established and evolve in the context of the host society. In England and Wales, modern bureaucratic policing emerged from a locally focused and administered system. Following on from this, contemporary Anglo-American policing aligns, to varying degrees, with the political, socio-cultural, legal and ideological aspects of contemporary liberal democratic society with its emphasis on democratic localism and decentralised accountability. Policing is also a field where Anglo-American and other western states provide support to transitional states with often different developmental paths. The transitional states seek, or have imposed on them (depending upon your perspective), western democratic models of policing and the policies, programmes, institutions and tactics associated with these models. This paper reviews the conceptual and theoretic...
From the Guest Editors: Re‐shaping Policing: Ideas in Action
Police Practice and Research, 2007
This Special Issue addresses an issue that continues to be at the heart of policing studies, namely, the manner in which policing is being reshaped. In exploring this question the contributors herein seek to explore the factors that have been driving transformations in policing in time-and space-specific contexts as well as globally. They also examine the ideas shaping the change-making efforts of particular institutions and groupings in their attempts to respond to such drivers. In essence, their concern is with ideas in action. In keeping with the now rather conventional view that policing is authorized and provided by a multiplicity of formal and informal organizations (Bayley & Shearing, 2001), the question of who exactly participates in transforming its field is perhaps now, more than ever, a complex one. We know that representatives of public institutions, such as police leaders, unionists, politicians, policy-makers, and public administrators continue to play key roles in shaping the ways in which policing is provided as well as regulated. What the following articles further reveal is the importance of non-state actors-including CEOs of private corporations, special interest groupings, and everyday citizens and consumers-in constituting new 'nodal' (Shearing, 2001) and 'networked' arrangements (Fleming & Wood, 2006). Security 'goods,' be they 'private,'
Reforming Police: Opportunities, Drivers and Challenges
A few years ago, David Bayley and Clifford Shearing (1996) argued that at the end of the 20th century we were witnessing a ‘watershed’ in policing, when transformations were occurring in the practices and sponsorship of policing on a scale unprecedented since the developments that heralded the creation of the ‘New Police’ in the 19th century. In this special issue of the journal, we and our fellow contributors turn our attention to a somewhat neglected aspect of this ‘quiet revolution’ in policing (Stenning & Shearing, 1980), namely the nature of the opportunities for, and challenges posed by, the reform of policing in different parts of the world at the beginning of the 21st century. Our attention in this issue is particularly focused on the opportunities, drivers and challenges in reforming public (state-sponsored) police institutions.
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What is to Be Done About Crime and Punishment? Towards a 'Public Criminology', 2016
What is to be done about the police? This deceptively succinct question begs a series of theoretical and normative questions concerned with what policing is, who should do it, how it should be done, how its fairness and effectiveness should be evaluated and how it should be made accountable.
The Role, and Functions of Police in A Modern Democratic Dispensation
IJIRT, 2022
This article considers some varieties and supports for a democratic police and briefly contrasts policing. Democratic policing should be viewed as a process and not an outcome. Societies experience a continual tension between the desire for order and liberty. There is a paradox in the fact that a democratic society needs protection both by police and from police. Given the power of new surveillance technologies, democratic societies must continually ask "how efficient do we want police to be and under what conditions is the use of these technologies appropriate. Policeman's function is in activities unrelated to crime control or law enforcement. Cumming, el al. (1965) reported that half of the calls for assistance to an urban police department may involve family crisis or other complaints of a personal or inter-personal nature. The policeman's role, unlike many other occupational roles, is ambiguous. The policeman is a friend and a protector. He assures safety on the streets and keeps the peace. You call him when you are in trouble, when your neighbors are making too much noise, or when your cat is caught in a tree. At the same time, the policeman is foe and repressor. He inhibits your freedom, tickets you when you are speeding or illegally parked, comes to your house to quiet you down when your neighbours complain about noise, investigates, and interrogates you when you are suspected of or involved in some illegal activity. There is no accepted systematic theoretical paradigm within which policing is viewed. The role and function of the police in a democratic and modern dispensation are typically assumed, and a measurable facet such as crime control is defined as the scholarly interest. Those viewed as essential policing functions and how they should be performed are products of the theoretical context within which the police are viewed, their perceived political role, and the posited character of the police organization. As a result, there are alternative versions of policing and what it is good for.
The irreplaceable role of the state in policing
The question that this dissertation attempts to answer can be formulated as follows: Is there any irreplaceable role of the state in the deployment of policing? If the answer to that question is affirmative, how can this role best be characterised? The route to answering this, however, is not straightforward. Before analysing what the role of the state in policing should be, it is necessary to shed light on why this question is pertinent. In other words, before inquiry about the role of the state (if any), the current scenario of policing should be described. In order to produce a description, I have chosen the case of England and Wales, for reasons that I explain below. Two caveats, nonetheless, must be made here. First, this is not an empirical work. It is, essentially, a normative work, that is, one whose main concern is how things ought to be, not how they are. In this sense, the arguments sustained in this work are based on a normative position about the role of the state. Second, this normative approach does not mean that empirical data is dismissed. I follow the warning done by sociologist Otwin Marenin, who has advertised that within 'the theoretical structure of critical thought', the actions should be concretely specified (Marenin, 1982, p. 242). The rigorous use of England and Wales case pretends to function as pertinent evidence for the normative statements made in this work. This dissertation is divided into two large sections. The first has a predominantly empirical character. The second is essentially normative. The first section is, in turn, divided in three subsections. The first is dedicated to examine how the establishment of professional police in 1829 in England is best understood if the trajectory of the concept of police power itself is looked at. In the case of the police as institution, it represents a narrowing in the meaning of the broader concept of police power, marking a path from a science concerned with prosperity and happiness to the establishment of a 'technique of security' (Neocleous, 1998). The adoption of this historical approach is convenient, among other reasons, because the 'institutional concept' of police as 'uniformed police' is a remnant of 'the broad 'practical concept of Polizei' (Kenymeyer, 1980, p. 173), or, more briefly, because 'police officers are the police power incarnate' (Sklansky, 2006, p. 110). The second subsection analyses the historical path from 'police' to 'policing', which has been described as a reflection of the historical path from modernity to post modernity (Reiner, 1992, quoted by Newburn, 2001, p. 835).