Policing Diversity: Themes and Concerns from the Recent British Experience (original) (raw)

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the recent development of the notion of "policing diversity" in England and Wales. In addition to outlining why policing diversity has become a preeminent theme in current debates about policing, the article explores central conceptual issues and argues that it does represent a fundamental break with long-standing notions such as "policing by consent." However, it argues that, taken to its logical conclusions, the concept might raise serious problems for the police service. Although concern about police relations with sections of the community in the United Kingdom has been particularly salient since the urban unrest of the 1980s and, arguably, has become the single most important issue of debate in the aftermath of the public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, it is worth noting that police-community relations have been fraught with difficulty since the foundation of modern police forces in the mid-19th century. Similar concerns have applied in many other societies and have been a major issue in the United States for many decades (Barlow & Barlow, 2001). Historians have demonstrated that various sections of the public in Britain have been understood as problematic for the police during particular periods (Emsley, 1996; Reiner, 2000). In the early decades of the modern policing era, the "dangerous classes" located in urban slums were widely regarded as a threat to the police and to "respectable society" more generally (Morris, 1994). In the century or so between the foundation of the modern police and the beginning of large-scale migration to Britain from the Commonwealth, Irish people, Jews from Eastern Europe, and Arab and African seaman, among others, were in various ways understood as difficult

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