THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CRIMINOLOGY SECOND EDITION Biited by MIKE MAGUIRE ROD MORGAN and ROBERT REINER CLARENDON PRESS - OXFORD“osfor Univesity Press, Gre Clarendon Sires, Oxford ox 60" ‘Oxford New Yo Athens Aucklend Baghok Bogota Bombay ‘Burs tives Caleta Cape Town Da es Sloan ‘Doth Horence Hong Kong fanbul Karachi ‘Kuale Lonpar Madras Maid Melbourne “Mercy Cty Nairabi Parks Singapore ‘Tel Tokyo Toronto Warsow ed astociated companies ‘erin Toda Oxfords rade mar of Osford University Pres Pade nthe United States ly Oxford Unio Pres nc, New Yor {© Oxford Univesity Press 1997 re pablo’ 1997 was te en wast arte yr ihe pase creer tele ed wg tore Bagticoag eat i Se Raed en *Prvemt tothe Rights Department, Oxford University Press is bk ld bjt the condo ht salt by wy ot res el ou rte cet 1 tors ro cout yom of ig oe ces pied a te london aan ee bpd on he sen Pa sh Library Cotalegung in Pubcon Data Dats valale Livary of Congres Cataloging in Pubes Data at ovalable ISBN 0-19-826287-3 ISBN 0-19-576485-5 (Pbk) 2 7010864 Printed in Gro Brita by Bids Ld lord a Krys Lar Preface ‘The first edition of The Oxford Handbook of Criminology was prepared in 1992-3 and published in 1994, The background to the enterprise was explained in the Introduction to the first edition and is expanded on in the Introduction ‘which follows. Our editorial rationale has not changed. We wrote in 1994 that we hoped the Handbwok would meet a teaching and research need. The sales of the first edition suggest that our hopes have not been disappointed. Our purpose with the second edition is the same as it was with the first, and is best summarized as follows. First, we asked each of the thirty-one British scholars contributing to this collection of thirty-two original specially commissioned essays to provide a state-of-the-art map of their respective topics, drawing largely on British ilus- trative material. We asked them (o draw on relevant theory and recent research, to point to policy developments and to highlight those aspects of current debate of which students and practitioners should be aware. We also asked them to provide a short guide to further reading and include comprehensive bibliographies so that students can follow up topies in greater detail ‘Secondly, we selected contributors recognized for their research and scholar- ship, ustually, though not always, i the topic aieay alaval which we asked them to write, We have not stipulated the theoretical approach they should adopt, however, and we have approached scholars representing different perspectives. ‘This is, as was the first edition, a collection oPdifferent voices. Our single ideal is that each author should review his or her respective literature, not intone any one vision, Thirdly, we have tried to ensure that all the principal topics ordinarily included in criminology and criminology-related courses are covered. This was also our aim with the frst edition, yet this collection differs from the first. This difference requires explanation. The first edition proved to be a more complex task than we envisaged, In 1992-3 we approached several more potential authors than eventually con= tributed, and in the event not all the topics we wished to cover were covered. ‘Some of the scholars we approached were unable 10 participate because of other commitments and we were not able always to find substitute authors. “Moreover, because we gave our authors a relatively free hand regarding the ‘manner in which they approached their subjects, the balance between chapters ‘was not always as we anticipated. This inevitably led to some theoretical perspectives and substantive topics receiving less attention than they deserved. Coverage was not ideal, and this fact was reflected in the many comments received from colleagues or gleaned by our publishers. The views collected from many of our readers coincided with our own, and this is reflected in the planning for the second edition, planning that has been28 Policing and the Police Robert Reiner INTRODUCTION: CRIMINOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF THE POLICE In popular culture cops and robbers are a conceptual couple, the former perennially chasing the later. In eriminology until relatively recently this was not the case. For most of its history criminology has focused on robbers and assorted miscreants, but the activities of cops and other agents of the criminal Justice process were outside its purview. The legal and criminal justice systems ‘were taken for granted—though they were responsible for making the laws the breaking of which was the theofStical hunting ground of eriminology, and corralled the captive law-breakers who were the raw material for much crim nological research, Prior to the rise of the positivist interpretation of criminology (which coined the name for the new discipline in the late nineteenth century), there had flourished a variety of competing disourses about erime, criminals, and control (Garland, this volume). In these ‘proto-eriminologics’ the criminal justice system was at the centre of analytic and policy concer, The so-called ‘classical school associated pre-eminently with Beccaria (Volt and Berard, 1985: chapter 1; Roshier, 1989; Morrison, 1994) was concerned primarily with constructing a rational and efficent system of criminal law and justice At much the same time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there flourished a vigorous branch of political economy known as the ‘science of police’ (Pasquino, 1980; Reiner, 1988). This saw as its problematic the understanding of crime and disorder and the development of appropriate policies for its prevention and control. Its leading British exponent was Patrick Colquhoun, a Middlesex magistrate and architect of the first professional Police foree in Great Britain (the 1800 Thames River Police). Although Colquhoun is best known today as one of the procursors of Peel's Metropolitan Police, ‘police’ in the modem meaning of people in blue uniforms figured as only a relatively sinall part of his project. ‘The term ‘police’ was used then in a much broader way to connote the whole craft of governing a social order by economic, social, and cultural policy (Rawlings, 1995). The potice in our contemporary sense were seen as merely & ‘small part of the whole business of domestic government and regulation, all ofar 998 Robert Reiner Policing and the Police 999 ‘which was relevant for the understanding and contro! of crime and disorder, This perspective was one widely sharod by the leading political economists of the day, from Adam Smith (Smith, 1763) (0 Bentham. Colquhoun himseit wrote several works on political economy, such as The Treatise on Indigence, in addition to his better remembered and more diecily influential Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (ef. Radzinowicz, 1956). “The positivist ‘science of criminology’ in the late nineteenth century largely clipsed this earlier concern with the functioning of eriminal law and justice. ‘The problematic became the explanation of ‘criminality’. initially seen as a nnon-social defect of specific individuals (Garland, 1985). Even sociological theories of crime did not remove the blinkers which excluded the functioning ‘of policing and the criminal justice process from the intellectual province of criminology. There were, to'be sure, lively debates about how criminology should interpret the concept of crime. Was it satisfactory merely to take over legalistic definitions, or was it necessary to develop more sociologically coherent and theoretially adequate concepts (ef. Netken’s discussion in this ‘Volume of ‘White-collar crime as a contested concept’)? But the functioning of the police and other criminal justice institutions was not part of the research tor theoretical conceras of criminologist.” i ‘During the early 1960s an epistemological break occurred in the crimino~ logical enterprise, under the broad banner of “labelling theory’, which paved the way for new forms af radical and critical criminology (Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973: chapters 5-9; 1975; Downes and Kock, 1¥88: chapters 7, $, 105 Morrison, 1995; Garland, Rock, Sparks, Sumner, and Young, this volume). ‘The essential departure of the new approaches was to make problematic, intel lectually as well as politically, the structure and functioning of criminal justice agencic, rather than the people they labelled as offenders.(The ey references fre Becker, 1964; Lemert, 1967.) Deviants were not special cases, objects of the criminological gaze beeause of their peculiar pathologies. They were human actors whose subjectivites were to be appreciated, not just corrected (Matza, 1964, 1969) “The other side of the picture was thatthe behaviour and practices oferiminal justice agents were not to be taken for granted 2s an automatic professional response to pathological deviance. They had to be understood as interacting with deviants in ways that structured the phenomena of apparent criminality, land were themselves analytically and politically problematic (Becker, 1968). ‘This intellectual conjuncture brought the police onto the research agendas of criminologists. Tn this chaper the development and frdings of pice research over the lst thirty years will be reviewed. The next section will explore the origins and growth of research on the police. The third section of the chapter will address * The Nourishing of penology as the empiccal study of mods of punishing andor treating fenders efter sentence not really am exception to ths. Ik tbeappvation ofthe prise of ostivt criminology (Ut erninaly has cmiter which can be understood) 10 the devopment Eramelioratve teenies for curing or removing these causes. the fundamental but frequently overlooked questions: what is policing and ‘who are the police? The fourth section will argue that the central concept underlying police research has been diseretion, the recognition that the police do not automatically translate law into policing practice, Research on police ‘work and organization will be reviewed in terms of three aspects of discretion: (1) what patterns are implicit in its exercise, and what are its social conse ‘quences? (2) how can these patterns be explained? (3) how can the operation Of police discretion be controlled? Finally, in the concluding section of the chapter possible future trends in policing will be considered. THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLICE RESEARCH Police Research in the United States Systematic research on the police developed at roughly the same time, the early 1960s, on both sides of the Atlantic.? In the United States the key motor driving early police research was concern with civil rights, then the dominant domestic political issues. It was recognized that police practice often departed from legal standards, and could result in abuse of rights and discrimination. ‘The response of politicians and the judiciary was to seek to close the gap by more tightly prescribing the requirements of due process of law (notably through the landmark Supreme Court decisions in Miranda, 384 US 436, 865 5. Ct, 1602, 16 L Ed. 2d 694 (1966), and other cases which collectively mounted a “due process revolution’ (Graham, 1970)) ‘The intellectual response by researchers in criminal law and criminology was to analyse the sources of police deviation from the rule of law, offering a more solid basis forthe practical efforts to close the gap (Goldstein, 1960; Goldstein, 1963; La Fave, 1962, 1965; Davis, 1969, 1975; Reiner, 1996a vol. II, Part 1) Sociological research examined how the police role, organization, culture, personality, and socialization structured deviation from due process values (Stinchcombe, 1963; Skolnick, 1966; Bittner, 1967a and 19676; Bordua, 19 Niederhoffer, 1967; Bayley and Mendelsohn, 1968; Wilson, 1968), Within criminology, the 1960s were the heyday of ‘labelling theory’. This generated numerous studies of how the organizational and cultural biases of the police produced or amplified deviance by focusing on targets which reflected police siereotypes (Piliavin and Briar, 1964; Werthman and Piliavin, 1967). The culmination of this early phase of US police research was the large- scale observational study mounted by Reiss and Black for the 1967 Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement, a product of the urban riots (Reiss, 1968, 1971; Black, 1970, 1972; Black and Reiss, 1970), 2 There hi heen one influent sociological sy of te police conducted ear. by Wiliam ‘Westley for hs PhD i de late 1940 This was published as 4 Book only in 1970, although Wo paps published ia the 1950 were an poraatefereoe forthe 1960s researchers in bath Bean fant the USA (Weatky, 1953, 1986, 1970).1000 Robert Reiner ‘The Presidential Commission was the precipitant of a profound alteration in the character and direction of police research in the United States after the late 1960s, reflecting broader politcal shifs. In 1968 ‘law and order’ displaced ‘civil rights’ as the key domestic political issue (Harris, 1970). The debate about policing moved away from concern about police deviation from legality to more technical and managerial questions about police effectiveness in controlling crime and disorder. The Presidential Commission set up the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which poured money into projects aimed at boosting police efficiency, and research evaluating and developing these (Goulden, 1970: Platt and Cooper, 1974). ‘This resulted in a lucrative police research industry, largely outside academia, although increasingly important as a source of financial support for research by academies as well, The theoretical and civil libertarian impulses which had sven birth to police research were largely eclipsed by the huge growth of policy-oriented, managerial work (Rumbaut and Bittner, 1979), However, the earlier traditions of small-scale and detailed observational research survived, 1s did some critical work, and efforts to develop a theoretical understanding of policing. (Bittner, 1970, 1974; Manning, 1970, 1977; Van Maanen, 1973, 1974; Manning and Van Maanen, 1978; Bernstein etal. 1974—a rare example of a Marnist analysis of the American police) In the 1980s the increasing influence of ideas of ‘community policing’ resulted in something of a synthesis of these approaches. Instead of police efficiency and legal and conununity auuunabilily being secu as contradictory concerns, police leaders, policy-makers, and researchers have argued they are inextricably interdependent (Skolnick and Bayley, 1986, 1988; Greene and Mastrofski, 1988; Trojanowiez and Bucqueroux, 1990; Moore, 1992; Skolnic and Fyfe, 1993; Bayley, 1994; Fielding, 1996), Police Research in the United Kingdom The sources of British police research were a combination of changes in the politics of law and order, theoretical developments in criminology and sociol- ‘ogy, and the shifting institutional context of social science research. The {growth of police research in Britain clearly reflects the trends in the politics of law and order which have occurred in the post-war period (Reiner, 1989) ‘The 1950s were the heyday of cross-party consensus on law and order, as on other social issues (Downes and Morgan, this volume). The British police were routinely referred to as role models for the world (Gorer, 1955). The pedestal fon which they stood is illustrated by the popularity of the TV series Dixon of Dock Green, which encapsulated the cosy stereotype of the British bobby (Clarke, 1983; Sparks, 1992: 26-9). The few books written about the police were within the same celebratory mode, In the late 19506 a series of scandals aroused inereasing public concern about the police. By 1959 this had reached a pitch where the Home Secretary was forced to establish a Royal Commission to look at the role, organization, and Policing and the Police 1001 accountability of the police (Critchley, 1978: 270-4; Bottoms and Stevenson, 1990, 1992: 25-7), This was the most sweeping official review of the structure and functioning. of the police since they were initially established in their ‘modern form early in the nineteenth eentury (Royal Commission, 1962). The carliest sociological research on the police in Britain developed in this ‘context. The first empirical study of policing in Britain, Michael Banton's The Policeman in the Community, was published in 1964 (Banton, 1964). Banton Was well aware of the mood of increasing questioning of the police, but he played down such concerns. Unlike much subsequent police research, Banton’s study was inspired by scholarly questions of sociological theory rather than more immediate issues of policy or politics (Holdaway, 1989) Banton’s pathbreaking study was responsible for many ideas and approaches which have been repeatedly returned (0. It initiated what became the central research strategy of most subsequent work, detailed participant observation, Its account of the police role as prhnarily consisting of non-law enforcement “peace-keeping” tasks has been echoed and developed in much subsequent work in Britain and around the world (Cumming er al. 1964: Martin and Wilson, 1969: Punch, 1979; Waddington, 1993; Bayley, 1994; Becker and Stephens, 1994). The peace-keeping role of the police arose as much from the tendency for the police to “under-enforce’ the law by exercising their diseretion not to arrest as from the inherent character of the public's demand for police services, The exereise of discretion was informed primarily by the values embedded in the informal culture of the police themselves. Banton’s analysis of police culture identified characteristics which have been replicated in many subsequent studies, notably police suspiciousness, internal solidarity and social isolation (Skolnick, 1966: chapter 3; Reiner, 1992a: chapter 3; Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993 chapter 5). Banton’s Key analytic theme, the dependence of formal on informal social control, has often been re-emphiasized (Shapland and Vagg, 1988; Morgan and Newburn, 1997), shorn of the encumbrance of functionalist social theory Within which Banton embedded it. Despite eschewing any concerns with scandal or muck-raking, Banton was acutely aware that there were severe threats to the comparatively benign and consensual mode of policing he ‘described. He anticipated that the British police might lose their sacred aura, and had to construct a new basis for legitimation of theit authority:* » tanton’s work infuencd the development of American a wll British tudes ofthe pli. This was party becise, unlike most ater earch, we corsparative in apprush, Banton’ iyece Is apparent on such eassic American potoe sts at Salah, a6: Wikon, Tee Dayley and Menetsotn, 198; Rebs, 1971 ad Manning. 1977, The liter ako ane othe ew Biss of reeerch o incorporate stady of more than one cout abel reversing Benton's rans Atlantic trajectory in being wn American scholar’ analysis of Drtsh as wells Abeta policing * In the optimistic seentisis mood of the mid-1980s Danton sss mre sexology in police training asa posible tool for this I oly PC Dinon had reud nome Durkin he might never have tue io Dirty Hany!1002 Robert Reiner Policing and the Police 1008 ‘These themes were developed by a number of young British researchers in the early 1970s whose work provided a firm anchorage for analysis of the rules and meanings constituting potce occupational culture * The key theme was the Charting of what industrial sociologists might call the informal organization of police work, echoing the importance in early American research of the discovery of discretion, Observation found that the backstage life ofthe poco apparently the acme of a bureaueratic,rule-bound organization, disciplined to discipline others—was in facta fluid worl, seething with tensions, spontaneity, land deviance. Ingeniously varied interpretations of the "Ways and Means Act” Structured patterns of deviation of the “aw in aetion’ from the ‘law in the books’, Police organization was a ‘mock bureaucracy’ (Gouldner. 1954), the auasi-ilitarstic drill and discipline of te station masking the discretion and deviance of the strets, “This research was inspired by scholarly rather than practical concerns, but its political and policy implications were fairly evident, Holdaway sums it up in his representative collection of essays: "One of the basic themes running through this book i thatthe lower ranks of the police service control their ‘own work situation and such control may well shield highly questionable practices’ (Holdaway, 1979: 12) 'As the 1970s drew to a close the political implications of policing and police research were prominent, reflecting a groving politicization of all aspects of| national life. “Law and order’ became @ central political issue, and an impor= tant ingredient of the Conservative victory in the 1979 General Hlection (see Downes and Morgan this volume). The police themselves were becoming an overt pressure group on the politcal stage (Reine, 19784: 268-9; 1980). “This politicization of policing was reflected in the emergence of tO new strands of researc. Inthe academsc world overtly critical or Marxist work on the police proliferated. One strand was historical analysis of the role of the police in relation to class confit (e.g. Storeh, 1975, 1976; Coben, 1979) ‘Another key theme was the need to enhance police accountability (Brogden, 1977, 1981; Hain, 1979, 1980; Cowell et af, 1982; Jefferson and Grimshaw, 1984), Others offered general accounts of policing as a means of state control (Bunyan, 1976; Hall etal, 1978; Seraton, 1985). Some of the first-generation Sociological researchers. published more critical theoretical and politcal analyses (Cain, 1977, 1979; Reiner, 1978 and 19780). “The other new strand of police esearch in the late 1970s was policy-orientod research commissioned by government bodies or even the police themselves. A ‘atiety of oficial bodies began to stimulate an ever-widening stream of research directed towards answering problems of policing policy (Reiner, 19890, 1992r). 2 The main examples are Cai, 197%: Chaterton. 196,172, 1983; Holdaway 1977, 197% tye, Manning 19, 193s all Ameria soot amas of Anglo Ameria bulking: Rel, 1978 Punch, 197%, 1S observational studies of the Datch pol by & Bit souilonst Te intoenes of Beaton on the development of pie researc has recently been undorined by Chaterton 1995; Holdaway, 109: and Reine, 1998 in colleson to mark a tenement Despite their origins such studies are far from uniformly managerialist in style or conclusions. For example, one of the first pieces of independent research commissioned by a police force was the celebrated study of policing in London conducted for the Metropolitan Police (Met) by the Policy Studies Institute (Smith e¢ al, 1983). This produced a warts-and-all portrait which was significant in building up a head of steam for police reform initiatives. Many studies by the Home Office Research and Planning Unit or the Police Foundation (an independent charity established in 1980 to promote police research) haye questioned central assumptions of*policy and practice. Much research in the early and mid-1980s was sponsored by radical Labour local authorities, notably the Merseyside and Islington Crime Surveys (Kinsey et a, 1986; Jones er a, 1986). Official policy-oriented research is thus not necessarily uncritical or mana gerialist. None the less there was a significant trend during the 1980s for pole ‘oriented research to eclipse thooretical or eritical work. Some theoretically spired work continued, and much policy-oriented work continues to be informed by liberal or even radical values, but the fastest growth areas are in managerialist studies of immediate policy relevance, This is now ofen conducted by the police themselves, or by government agencies with responsi- bilities for policing (Brown, 1996). Before reviewing the findings of police research, the next section will consider the conceptual issues who are the police and what is policing? ‘POLICE’ AND ‘POLICING’ Most research rests on a taken for granted notion of the police (Cain, 1979). TThe police are assumed to be a state agency mainly patrolling public places in blue uniforms, with a broad mandate of crime control, order maintenance, and service functions. They are supplemented by non-uniformed departments ‘concerned primarily with the investigation and processing of criminal offences and sundry administrative tasks Understanding the nature of policing, especially over a broader span of space and time, requires some conceptual deconstruction of this assumed idea of the police. Modern societies are characterized by what can be termed ‘police fetishism’: the ideological assumption that the police are a functional prerequisite of social order, the thin blue line defending against chaos.* In fact Imany societies have existed without a formal police force of any kind, and certainly without the present model. The contribution of the police to the ® An amusing explication of this is Morrison's analysis ofthe picture ofthe poi in child's stones Enid Biton's Mr Plod and Lite Nad, Yor insta, dseribos the sonst ‘ation fe Toytows when BC Pid x put out of action fora wl bya jy. Wh ie pong Drolet us against robbers? wall the anxious inhabitants. It is inconceivable that order can be Droveted (until Noddy aeees to depuize or Mr Plo: ct. Morrison, 1984) Similar eonesplons"7 1004 Robert Reiner control of crime and maintenance of order today is debatable, as studies of police effectiveness imply (Reiner, 19921: 146-56; Bayley, 1994). The prob. Jematie nature of the present notion of the police is increasingly evident, because contemporary societies are characterized by a process of fragmen. tation of the police function (ef. the Conclusion below). It s important to distinguish between the ideas of ‘police’ and ‘poticing’. The ‘police’ are a particular kind of institution, whilst ‘policing’ implies a set of processes with specific socal functions. ‘Police’ are not found in every society, ‘but ‘policing’ is arguably a universal requirement of any social order, which ‘may be carried out by a varity of diferent processes and institutional arrange- ‘ments The idea of policing is an aspect of the more general concept of social control. Social control is itse'@ complex and much debated notion (ef. Hudson this volume; Cohen and Scull, 1983; and Zedner, 1993). In some sociological theories social control is seen broadly as everything that contributes to the reproduction of social order. This makes the concept all-encompassing, including all aspects of the formation of a culture and the socialization of the individuals who are its bearers, An example of this broad usage is Park and Burgess’ classic sociology textbook, which declared that ‘All social problems ‘tur out finally to be problems of social control (Park and Burgess, 1924: 785). ‘Therefore social control should be ‘the central fact and the central problem of sociology’ (ibid: 42), The problem with this bwwad wnept uf sucial an It fails to distinguish the specificity of social control as a sub-category of all social processes. This is that they are essentially negative, intended to prevent of react to threats 10 social order. As Cohen acerbieally expressed it, the broader usage is ‘a Mickey Mouse concept’, and the term should be restricted to refer to “the organised ways in which society responds to behaviour and peo- ple it regards as deviant, problematic, worrying, threatening, troublesome or undesirable" (Cohen, 1985: 1-2), In either its broad or its more specific interpretations the idea of social control may be regarded positively or negatively, according to whether a con- sensus of conflict model of society is espoused. In conservative versions of functionalist sociology (especially during the heyday of Parsonian functional- ism in the 1950s), social control was seen as the necessary bulwark of the consensus underpinning social order. Ensuring adequate control mechanisms against deviance or disintegration was a functional prerequisite of any viable society, although especially problematic in rapidly changing modem societies. Accomplishing adequate social control was seen as ‘the major problem of our time’ (Landis, 1956) ‘The development of labelling theory and subsequent radical criminologios 1 iy its aimorphousness, th necesity ofthe police underpin the wisp fears abot police strikes, which ae seen at inviably-produeing disorder,» perecpon full by home sores about Bosion ia 1918, {Userpoo! in 1919, and Monreal in 190 In fact oumezous police strikes have occured with tie apparent efecto lawaunes (Ayres and Wheslen, 197%, Reine, ITE. $9), Policing and the Police 1005 changed the evaluation of social control institutions. Far from being seen as 2 necessary protection against deviance, social control came to be regarded as producing deviance through the effects of labelling and stigmatization, Social control agents were seen as oppressors to be questioned and opposed (Becker, 1967). More stueturalst or Marxist versions of eriicd criminology saw these simple reversals of moral blame as merely making social control agents ‘all guys’ for the wider structure of power and privilege (Gouldner, 1968 MeBaret, 1979) ‘The concept of policing is closely related to that of social control, and is subject to the same variations in usage and interpretation, Indeed « recent dictionary defnition identifies policing as ‘the function of maintaining social control in society” (Wilson, 1993). However, as with the broad usage of social control, this wide definition of policing cartes the danger of amorphousness 11 misses the specificity ofthe idea of policing as a partieular aspect of social control processes, Thus punishment is clearly an aspeet of social control but is usually regarded as something which should be Kept separate from policing, even though any police intervention may be experienced as punitive by those who aro policed. The police may in fact ofien exercise forms of kerbside punishment—the Rodney King ease in Los Angeles being a notorious recent example-but this i seen as scandalous in terms of a liberal democracy's vale us of legality (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993). Policing is not coterminous with social control but a specific phase or aspoct of it The wanept of policing connotes efforts to provide security through surveillance and the threat of sanctioning (Spitzer, 1987; Shearing, 1992). Policing isthe set of activities directed at preserving the security ofa particular Social order (although the effectiveness of any form of policing is a moot Point) Policing does not encompass all activities intended to produce order. It excludes post hoe punishment, as well as activites intended to create the conditions of social order (or example socialization, measures to secure family stability, encouragement of religion, or other forms of interalized ethical control), ‘The specificity of policing asa sub-set of control processes is the creation of systems of surveillance coupled with the threat of sanctions for discovered deviance (immediately or by initiating penal processes), The most familiar such system is the one denoted by the modern sense of police: regular uniform Patrol of public space coupled with post hoc investigation of reported or Aiscovered crime oF disorder. Policing may be carried out by a diverse array of people and techniques. of ‘hich the modern idea of police is only one (Spitzer and Scull 1940), Policing may be done by professionals employed by the state in an organization with an omnibus polising mandate—the archetypal modern idea of the police or by state agencies with primarily other purposes (like the Atomic Eneray ‘Authority Police, Parks Constabularies, the British Transport Police and other ‘hybrid’ policing bodies ef. Johnston, 1992: chapter 6). Police may be pro- fessionals employed by specialist private policing firms (contract security) or1006 Robert Reiner security personnel hired by an organization whose main business is something tlse (in-house security ef. Shearing and Stenning, 1981; South, 1988). Policing functions may be performed by citizens in a voluntary capacity within state police organizations (like the Special Constabulary: ef. Leon, 1989; Gill and Mawby, 1990), in association with the state police (like Neighbourhood Watch schemes: Bennett, 1990; McConville and Shepherd, 1992), or in completely volunteer bodies (like the Guardian Angels, and the many vigilante bodies which have flourished at many times and places: Johnston, 1996a). Policing functions may be carried out by state bodies with other prime funetions, ike the Army in Northern Ireland, or by employees (state or private) as an adjunct of ‘their main jab (like concierges or shop assistants who also guard against theft). Policing may be carried out by technology, like security cameras or listening devices (although these can of course only be used in association with human ‘operators at some point). These policing strategies are proliferating today (Newburn and Jones, 1997), even though it is only the state agency with the ‘omnibus mandate which is still popularly understood by the label the police Unti! modem times policing funetions were primarily carried out as a bye product of other social relationships and by citizen ‘volunteers’ or private ‘employees. Anthropological studies show that many pre-fiterate societies have existed without any formalized system of social control or policing. A well known study of fifty-one pre-industrial societies founel a relationship between legal evolution and societal complexity (Schwartz and Mille, 1964). Police in the seiise of a “specialieal ariel fone used pastially oF wholly for notm ‘enforcement’, were found in only twenty of the fifty-one societies ibid: 161) Police appear ‘only in association with a substantial degree of division of labour (ibid: 166), and are usually preceded by other elements ofa specialized legal and governmental system like moncy, mediation, and damages. Specialized policing institutions emerge only in relatively complex, societies, ‘They are not, however, a straightforward reflex of a burgeoning division of labour, as the Durkheimian undertones of Schwartz and Miller’s analysis imply, Whilst policing may originate in collective and communal processes of social control, specialized police forces develop hand-in-hand wit the develop- rent of social inequality and hicrarchy. They are means for the emergence and protection of more centralized and dominant state systems (Spitzer, 1975). ‘A valuable recent review of the anthropological litorature concludes that the development of specialized police “is linked to economic specialisation and differential access to resourees that occur in the transition from a kinship- to a class-dominated society’ (Robinson and Scaglion, 1987: 109, 199; Robinson ct al., 1994), During this transition communal policing forms are converted in incremental stages to statelominated ones, which begin to function as agents of class control in addition to more general social control. ‘The complex and contradictory function of contemporary police, as simultaneously embodying the quost for general and stratified order—“parking tickets’ as well as ‘lass repression’ (Marenin, 1983)—is thus inscribed in their birth proces. British police ideology has rested upon the idea of a fundamental distinction | Policing and the Police 1007 between its model of community based policing and an alien, ‘Continental’, state-controlled system (Mawby, 1991, 1992), Conventional histories of the British police attempt to trace a direct lineage between ancient tribal forms of collective self-policing and the contemporary Bobby (Lee, 1901), The consequence of this populist pedigree is supposed to be a uniquely popular polive force (Reith, 1956). Such claims have been characterized aptly as ‘ideology as history’ (Robinson, 1979), I is truc that many European systems of police did develop ‘more overtly as instruments of state control (Chapman, 1970). Revisionist histories, however. have emphasized the relationship between modem police evelopment and the shifting structures of class and state in Britain as well as the United States and otler common law systems (Silver, 1967: Storch, 1975, 1976; Miller, 1977; Brogden, 1982; Emsley, 1983, 1991, this volume; Seraton, 1985; Reiner 1992a: chapters 1 and 2). The supposedly benign ‘British’ model ‘was in any case for home consumption only. A more militaristie and coercive ‘model was from the outset exported to colonial situations (Brogden, 1987; Palmer, 1988; Brogden and Shearing, 1993), Although contemporary patterns of police vary considerably in detail, they have tended to converge increasingly around fundamentally similar organiz- ational and cultural lines. without the qualitative distinctions of the kind implied in traditional British police ideology (Mawby, 1991, 1992; Bayley, 1985; Brodeur. 1995). This is facilitated by the emergence of a new inter- datiunal of tecuicratic police experts who are fesponsible for the diffusion of fashions in police thinking around the globe. It is problematic to define contemporary police mainly in terms of their supposed function (Klockars, 1985). As Bittner has emphasized, the police are called upon routinely to perform a bewildering miscellany of tasks, from traffie control to terrorism (Bittner, 1970, 1974). The uniting feature of police work is not a particular social function, whether it be crime control, social service, order maintenance or political repression. Rather itis that all demands on the police involve ‘something that ought not to be happening and about Which someone had better do something non!" (Bittner, 1974: 30), In other words, policing tasks arise in emergency situations, usually with an element of social conflict. The police may invoke their legal powers to handle the situation, but more ‘commonly they resort to a variety of ways and means to keep the peace with- out initiating legal proceedings” (Bitiner, 1967; Kemp, Norris, and Fielding, 2 Te police are also not usually regarded as responsible for al elements of Keeping the peace. ‘Thc tak ie the emergency response to reals of Unorder, not the eration of is res ons (although thi has been implied in some very brond conceptions of community poling ch Algerie, 1979. Waddinglon express tho point welk “The police are the sacl cyuvaent of "he AA OF RAC patrolmen, who intervene when thiage go anpredcably wrong sad socue a Drovisonal solution” (Waddinglon 1943" 38) "Ih terme ofthis analogy, thy are neither service Staton mechanics nor car makers nor rad bulges. However, ike the AA they may lgtinately ‘vie on pos for which thir work experience may e felevat 8 well co-operating With ‘other agcacis to prevent future problems,1008 Robert Reiner 1992), None the less, underlying all their tactics for peace-keeping is their bottom-line power 10 wield legal sanctions, ultimately the use of legitimate force. ‘A benign bobby ... sil brings to the situation a uniform, a truncheon, and a battery of resource charges . .. which can be employed when appease ment fails and fists start flying? (Punch, 19792: 116). The distinctiveness of the police lies not in their performance of a specific social function but in being the specialist repositories for the state's monopoliz- ation of legitimate force (Bittner, 1974: 35), This should not be construed to imply that all policing is about the use of force. On the contrary, ‘good! policing has often been seen as the craft of handling trouble without resort to coercion, usually by skilful verbal tactics (Muir, 1977; Chatterton, 1983; Bayley and Bittner, 1984; Kemp, Norris and Fielding, 1992), To sum up, ‘policing’ is an aspect of social control processes involving surveillance and sanctions intended (o ensure the security of the social order. ‘The order in question may be based on consensus, of conflict and oppression, of an ambiguous amalgam of the two, which is usually the ease in modern societies, Whilst policing may be universal, the ‘police’ as a specialized body of peo- ple given the primary responsibility for legitimate force to safeguard security 4 feature only of relatively complex societies. The police have developed as “domestic missionaries’ in the endeavours of modern, centralized states to propagate and protect a dominant conception of peace and propriety (Storch, 1976), This is not to say, however, that they have been mere tools ofthe state faith- fully carrying out tasks determined from above. A considerable extent of police diseretion is inevitable, above all because of the nature of police work as dispersed surveillance. The next wo sections will analyse the concept of discretion and its functioning, which has been a key intellectual underpinning of police research. POLICE DISCRETION: ITS NATURE, OPERATION, AND CONTROL. Many jurisdictions have denied the legitimacy of police discretion. Some continue to do so, especially outside the common law tradition. In the United States many states have had full enforcement statutes, requiring the police 10 initiate criminal proceedings whenever there was evidence of an offence (Allen, 1984; Williams, 1984). ‘The starting point for empirical research on the police in the United States im the early 1960s was the recognition that the police did not and could not enforce the law fully. Discretion was inevitable because the volume of incidents that could be regarded as breaches of the law would always outstrip police Policing and the Police 1009 ‘capacity to process them. Choices about priorities were inescapable, Discretion was also inevitable as a matter of logic: translating general rules of law into enforcement decisions in particular fact situations could not be mechanistic and automatic, It required interpretation of the meaning of the rules, with an inherently subjective element. Discretion could also-be desirable, It avoided the oppressiveness of invoking the full panoply of eriminal law to deal with incidents not commonly regarded as warranting this, The difficulty was that discretion opened the way for disparity and discrim- ination in legal decision-making. If police organizations did not operate mechanistically, automatically enforcing the rules laid down by legislatures and courts—if the ‘law in action’ deviated from the ‘law in the books’ (in the terminology of American legal realism)—it became important to understand the operation of the law in practice, This could be done only by empirical research on the reality of police work, to understand its dynamies, and be able to regulate undesirable practices. In Britain the reality and desirability of police diseretion had never been denied completely (Reiner and Leigh, 1992). None the less there was an air of scandalous revelation when the early British sociological studies of the police ‘emphasized its extent, The theme of these studies is encapsulated in the title of| ‘an article summing up the early British and American work, “The Police Can Choose’ (Lambert, 1969), The recognition that the police did not adhere mechanistically to the rule of law raised the prospect of diccrimination and other malpractices. The aiiswei to this, however, could not be the traditional response ta revelations of police \wrongdoing: slap on new rules, or enforce existing ones more rigorously. The research showed that police discretion was exceptionally hard to control. ‘The dispersed character of routine uniformed or plain-clothes police work gave it low visibility’ from the point of view of police management or any outside regulatory bodies (Goldstein, 1960). This was particularly true of decisions not to invoke the law, which might never be reviewed by anyone at all apart from the operational police officer, who was in effect a ‘streeteorner politician’ (Muir, 1977). The street cops determined the policies in practice of the whole organization. Because of the low visibility of everyday police work, ‘the police department hhas the special property . . that within it diseretion inereases as one moves down the hierarchy’ (Wilson, 1968: 7). For many years research concentrated ‘on the dynamics of rank-and-file policing. Supervisory and senior management levels were almost completely neglected. The gap between ‘street’ and “manage- ‘ment’ cops was emphasized (Ianni and Lani, 1983), and the real getion was supposed to emanate from the cultural imperatives of the former. In the late 1970s a structuralist critique of this position developed, inspired mainly by the work of Doreen MeBarnet (McBarnet, 1978, 1979, 1981: Ericson, 1981, 1982; Shearing, 19814, 19814; Brogden, 1982, 1983; Grimshaw and Jefferson, 1987). This argued that the almost complete rule scepticism of the early sociology of the police, implying the virtual irrelevance of formal law1010 Robert Reiner and policy, made the street cops ‘the “fall-guys” of the legal system taking the blame for any injustices’ (McBarnet, 1981: 156). Although some degree of discretion was inevitable, the British law took an unnecessarily permissive stance to police powers, which could be regulated more tightly, The principles, of the rule of law should be embodied in a set of specific legal rules specifying the legitimate limits of police practice in a clear, unambiguous, and strcily ‘enforced way. By framing the powers of the police in elastic and vague rules the judicial and political elites’ effectively condoned police deviation. ‘MeBarnet’s argument paved the way for more detailed studies of the inter- action between legal rules and police practice (‘bluc-letter law’: ef. Reiner and Leigh, 1992), as well as studies of the supervisory and management ranks of the police (Currie, 1986; Chatterton, 1987; Grimshaw and Jefferson, 1987: Part IV; Reiner, 1991). In the ensuing sections we will review the results of research ‘on the pattern of exercise of police discretion, its consequences, causation, and control The Operation of Police Diseretion Police discretion has often been lauded as not only inevitable but wise and desirable, The central premise of the policing philosophy advocated by Lord Searman in his Report on the 1981 Brixton disorders (Searman, 1981)—which has become the conventional wisdom of the police elite (Reiner, 1991: chapter 6}—was that public canguillity should have a gieater privsity than law enforcement if the two conflicted, Discretion, ‘the art of suiting action to particular circumstances’, was the better part of police valour. The problem is that research on police practice has shown that police diseretion is not an equal opportunity phenomenon. Some groups are much ‘more likely than others to be at the receiving end of the exercise of police pow- ers. A general pattern of benign under-enforcement of the law disguises the often oppressive use of police powers against unpopular, uninfluential, and hence powerless, minorities. Such groups have been described graphically as ‘police property” (Cray, 1972; Lee, 1981; 53-8), The social powerlessness which makes them prey to police harassment also allows the police to neglect their Vietimization by crime, They tend to be over-policed and under-protected, The main grist to the mill of routine policing is the social residuum at the base of the social hierarchy (Brogden, Jefferson, and Walklate, 1988: chapter 6). Those who are stopped and searched or questioned in the street, arrested, detained in the police station, charged, and prosecuted are disproportionately young men whe are unemployed or casually employed, and from diseriminated- against ethnic minorities. The police themselves recognize that their main business involves such groups, and their mental social maps delineate them by a variety of derogatory epithets: ‘assholes’ (Van Maanen, 1978), ‘pukes’ (Bricson, 1982), ‘scum’, ‘slag’ (Smith et af, 1983; vol, IV, 164-5), ‘prigs’ (Young, 1991). In turn public attitude surveys show that such groups have the ‘most negative views of the police (Smith e” al, 1983: vol. l, 314-15, vol. IV, Policing and the Police oul 162-8; Jones and Levi, 1983; Hough and Mayhew, 1983, 1985; Kinsey, 1984; Jones er a, 1986; Crawford et al, 1990; Skogan, 1990, 1996) “The basic organization and mandate of the police in an industrial society tend to generate this practical concentration on policing what has currently come to be known as the underclass (Dahrendorf, 1985: 98107), Most police resources are devoted to uniformed patrol of public space (over 65 per cent according to Tarling, 1988: 5). It has long been recognized that the institution of privacy has a class dimension (Stinchcombe, 1963). The lower the social class of people, the more their social lives take place in public space, and the more likely they are to come to the attention of the police for infractions. People are not usually arrested for being drunk and disorderty in their living rooms, but they may be if their living room is the street. Detective work—the next most important concentration of police resources (about 15 per cent according to Tarling, 1988)—largely involves processing those handed over by uniform patrol. Even when it does not, detectives’ clientele is stil largely the same police property group of ‘rubbish’ or ‘toe-rags’ (Maguire and Norris 1992: 9-11) whose comparative lack of the rights conferred by the institutions of privacy exposes them more easily to detection. The end result is that most of those handled by the police are from the ‘police property” groups. The overwhelming majority of people arrested and detained at police stations are economically and socially marginal. One study of prisoners in custody found that over half (5S per cent) were unemployed, Most of the rest (@ thint overall) wei in manual working-class jobs, pre= dominantly unskilled ones. Only 6 per cent of the sample had non-manual occupations, and of these only one-third (ic. 2 per cent overall) were in professional or managerial occupations. Most detainees were young (59 per ‘cent under 25), 87 per cent were men, and 12 per cent were black (Morgan, Reiner, and McKenzie, 1990). The weight of adversarial policing falls dispro- portionately on young men in the lowest socio-economic groups. Racial Discrimination Numerous studies have shown that the police disproportionately exerise their powers against black people (Jeiferson, 1988; Reiner, 1989, 1993: Smith, this ‘olume). This has been well documented with respect to stop and search inthe street (Wills, 1983, Smith era, 1983; Jones er af, 1986; Crawford er al, 1990; Skogan 1990); arrest (Stevens and Willis, 1989; Smith et al, 1983; Jeerson ‘and Walker, 1992), and the decision to prosecute (Landau, 1981; Cain and Sadigh, 1982; Landau and Nathan, 1983). The evidence that black people are disproportionately at the receiving end of police powers is overwhelming. What remains contested isthe extent to which this is due to more black offend. ing or to discrimination by the police because of individual or institutionalized racism, The politically charged nature of this debate has often been rellected in the adoption of polarized either/or postions. However, the evidence suggests ‘that a complex interaction between police diserimination and social pressures1012 Robert Reiner Policing and the Police 1013 generating disproportionate offending by young black people is the most plau- sible interpretation of the current pattern (Reiner, 1989, 1993; Smith, this yok. um), It is also widely documented that ethnic minorities are disproportionately victimized by crime of all kinds, often due to racist motives, and that they peroeive the police response as frequently inadequately sympathetic or effective, These problems are related to the issue of racial discrimination within the police force in the treatment of ethnic minority officers (Holdaway, 1991, 1996), The evidence on race and policing will not be reviewed here in further etail, as itis discussed thoroughly in Smith’s chapter in this volume. Gender and Policing ‘The issue of sex discrimination in policing has also been a vexed one in recent years, A fundamental difference between the debates about race and sex ‘discrimination in policing is that, whereas black people are disproportionately at the receiving end of police powers. the opposite is true of women. The very small proportion of female suspects or offenders at every stage of the process is probably the most consistent pattern in criminal justice. Feminist crimi- nologists have rightly underlined the maleness of the overwhelming majority ‘of processed offenders as perhaps the most important though usually over- looked feature of crime (see Heidensohn’s discussion, this volume). It dose not fellow, however, that the police do not dea! with women euspects ‘or potential suspects in discriminatory ways. It has plausibly been suggested that police officers tend to regard women with a conventional imagery bifur- cating them into either ‘whores’ or ‘wives’ (Heidensohn, 1985: 58; Brogden, Jefferson, and Walklate, 1988: 119-20). A consequence could be that the low rate of formal processing of women as suspects masks a complex web of dise crimination, Some women may eseape suspicion because of ‘chivalry’ placing them outside the frame of likely offenders in the stereotypes of investigating officers (Visher, 1983; Morris, 1987: 80-1). Yet others, such as teenage girls behaving in sexually precocious or deviant ways, or prostitutes, may be dealt with by the police at a lower threshold of entry into the system because they violate the officers’ codes of acceptable behaviour, or may be seen paternal- istically as in need of ‘protection’ from themselves (Brogden, Jefferson, and Walklate, 1988; Dunhill, 1989). As Heidensohn concludes in her chapter in this volume, “evidence on this topic is patchy, and conclusions necessarily tentative’ ‘There is much clearer evidence of discrimination at the expense of women in their treatment by the potice as victims (Walklate, 1996). Calls to domestic disturbances have always been a significant part of the police workload, but notoriously have tended to be treated by officers without recourse to eriminal proceedings even where evidence of assault is present (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Stanko, 1984). ‘Domestics’ are seen as messy, unproductive, and not ‘real’ police work in traditional cop culture (Reiner, 1978: 177, 214-15, 244-5; ‘Young, 1991: 315-16). This issue has become highly charged in the last two decades, and around the world police forces have attempted to improve their response to domestic assaults, with debatable results (Edwards, 1989; Hanmer, Radford, and Stanko, 1989; Sheptycki, 1991, 1993; Dobash and Dobash, 1992; Sherman, 1992). There has also been much concern about Tasensitive or even hostile treatment of rape victims, an issue dramatically highlighted a decade ago by a celebrated episode of Roger Graet's TV documentary on the Thames Valley Police which filmed a very disturbing interrogation of a rape victim (BBC 1, 18 January 1982), Despite considerable improvements since then (Blair, 1985; Temkin, 1987; 158 62), the treatment of rape victims by police remains problematic (Hanmer, Radford, and Stanko, 1989). It is also clear from a growing volume of evidence that women are dis criminated against as police officers, in terms of career prospects as well as harassment in the job. Until less than twenty years ago discrimination within police forces was open and institutionalized in the existence of separate depart- ‘ments carrying out radically different functions. This itsolf followed from widespread resistance within (and outside) the force to the initial recruitment of policewomen in the early decades of this century (Carrier, 1988). Since the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 women have been formally integrated into the same units as male officers. Nonetheless the continuation of discrimination has been documented by numerous studies (Bryant et wl. 1985; Jones, 1986, 1987. Graef, 1989: chapter 6; Young, 1991: chapter 4; Heidensohn, 1992; Walklate, 1992, 1996; Brown ct al, 1993), ‘The issue of harassment and discrimination against women in the force was vividly highlighted by the much publicized action brought by the former Assistant Chie Constable of Merseyside, Alison Halford, alleging discrimi- nation against her in her attempts to be promoted (Halford, 1993), Since then ‘one woman chief constable has been appointed (Pauline Clare in Lancashire), and several others have achieved assistant chief constable rank. Many commentators have argued that the unequal employment and pro- ‘motion of policewomen is not only important as an issue of justice, but 10 dilute the machismo element in police culture which has been seen as an impor= tant source of abuse. As Heidensohn’s chapter in this volume makes clear, however, this argument is not firmly founded on research evidence that women officers police differently from their male colleagues, though it remains plausi- ble (see also Heidensolin, 1992), Police Discretion and the Rule of Law ‘The evidence of discrimination itself shows that policing practice routinely departs from the principles of the rule of law. This is supported more generally by research evidence about the extent to which the police exceed their legal powers. In a liberal democracy the police are subject to a tension between the values of crime control and due process (in terms of the distinction introduced in Packer, 1968; see also Sanders, this volume). When subject to pressure to1014 Robert Reiner Policing and the Police 1015 produce results in terms of effective law enforcement the police wil frequently feut corners in the procedures demanded by the principles of legality (kolnick, 1966). The space for this deviation between police practice and the rule of law is created by the low visibility of routine police work, behind the “blue curtain’ of seerecy in cap culture (Stoddard, 1968). This allows police officers consider- able scope for the construction of post Hoc accounts of their actions which are glossed in legally acceptable terms even though these bear seant relationship to the real grounds for their decisions (Manning, 1977, 1979; Chatterton, 1979, 1983; Fricson, 1981, 1982; Holdaway, 1983). Observational studies have documented time and again that the decision-making process of police officers om the streets is not governed by the terms of legal discourse, even though these appear as a presentational justification in subsequent reports and paper-work The celebrated Policy Studies Instinute research on policing London expressed the issue well in terms of a distinction between three sets of rules: ‘workin "and ‘presentational (Smith et af, 1983: vol. 1V, 169-72). ‘Working’ rules are those which underpin police practice. These derive from the informal culture ofthe police and bear a problematic relation- ship to official police policy and legal rules. inhibitory’ rules are formal ones Which ate effectively sanctioned and therefore influence practice even if they are not accepted a legitimate by the rank-and-file. ‘Presentational’ rules are those rules which have no bearing on police practice, but which nonetheless provide the terms in which after-the-event aecounts must be ofiially couched. Since the 1980s there has been a thoroughgoing attempt to revamp police powers and legal procedures in Britain, Partly this has purported to construct 4 rogime of safeguards to inhibit more effectively any deviation from the rule of law. The main landmark has been the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, and the on-going process of continuous assessment it gencrated (Zander, 1991; Reiner, 1992: chapter 6; Sanders, this volume). In addition, senior police officers and the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary have in’ recent years attempted to respond to a perceived dectine in public confidence due to serious miscarriage of justice scandals by attempting to implement a cultural change in police forces, making them accept an ethical commitment to professional procedures (Williamson, 1996). The extent to which these strategies have succeeded will be reviewed in the section on control of diseretion below. The reform attempts themselves testify to the widespread deviation from the rule of law which has characterized policing, under the euphemism of ‘noble cause corruption’ (in the words of Sir Paul Condon). Policing has reflcted social power and reproduced social divisions rather than impartial justice. In the following seetion we will look at explanations of this pattemn of operation of police discretion, Thi is the precipitating factor lang to most miscarriages of justice, such ae the Gund Four, the Blzmingham Six, and the ‘Tottenham Three at other ces (Wotfinden, 199%, Rozenberg, 1992). ‘The Explanation of Police Discretion ‘Three broad approaches to explaining why police discretion operates as it does can be Uistinguished. These are budividualisic; cull, and. structral accounts Indivldualstic Explanations Many concerns about police work, such as impatience with legal restraints, race, and sex discrimination, have been attributed to the idea that a peculiar {kind of person, with an authoritarian personality, is drawn 10 police work. As the distinguished radical barrister (and now judge) Stephen Sedley put it “the uniformed mind... . tends frequently to be a mind for whicl authority has its special attraction, to which the helmet and the truncheon have a particular appeal’ (Sedley. 1985: 9) A formidable body of research has been conducted to ascertain whether police work does attract people with distinctive personalities, in particular authoritarianism. It is clear from many studies, conducted in different parts of the world, that police officers tend to have a particular constellation of attitudes which has been described as a ‘police personality’ (Balch, 1972). The charac- teristics of this are in many respects similar to the psychological model of authoritarianism, What is debatable is whether this ‘personality’ results from pre-existing individual peculiarities of police officers, or whether it is the product of collective adjustment to the shared predicament of doing police work, a ‘working personality’ (Skolnick, 1966: chapter 6) This issue can only be resolved by comparing the characteristics of police recruits with socially similar control groups. Much research attempting this has bbeen conducted in the United States and Britain. One highly influential British study did conclude that police recruits were more authoritarian than civilian contfol groups (Colman and Gorman, 1982). The findings of this research had been sent to Lord Scarman during his enquiry into the 1981 Brixton disorders and informed his analysis, which attributed such problems as racial discrimi- nation to the failings of particular police officers rather than the institution However, Colman and Gorman’s study has been subject to extensive criticism ‘on methodological grounds, especially because of the unrepresentative control groups used (Waddington, 1982). Some other studies have also found dispro- Portionate authoritarianism amongst police recruits (Brogden ef al, 1988: 14-15, cites examples), Most research, however, does not support the view that police recruits are more authoritarian than ‘comparable civilian samples (McNamara, 1967: 163.252; Niederhoffer, 1967: 103-52; Bayley and Mendelsohn, 1968; 14-30; Skolnick, 1969: 252; Cochrane and Butler, 1980; Brown and Will, 1985). Studies of the socialization of police recruits suggest the typical pattern is that after a temporary liberalizing effect of initial training (Brown and Wills, 1985; Fielding, 1988), exposure to practical policing develops in officers a distinctive1016 Robert Reiner Policing and the Police 1017 constellation of values and perspectives, akin to authoritarianism, This ig better understood as a cultural adaptation to the exigencies of police work than as the unfolding of a set of basic personality traits (Brogden ef al, 1988; chapter 2; Reiner, 1992: chapter 3), a Cultural Explanavions ‘The impact of the informal culture of the rank-and-file is the most common explanation of police working practices found in the research literature. The first systematic formulation of this perspective was in Jerome Skolnick's seminal study of the work of detectives in California (Skolnick, 1966: chapter 3). Synthesizing the findings of his own research and those of earlier studies, Skolnick argued that certain common tensions and problems were inherently associated with the police task in liberal democracies. These generated a shared. sub-culture amongst the police rank-and-file which facilitated the resolution of these difficulties. The police in a liberal democracy are faced with a basic dilemma: they are under pressure to achieve results in the form of law enforce- ‘ment, but the rule of law restricts the methods they can use. They are also visible embodiments of social authority, which exposes to them to perennial danger from those recalcitrant to authority, and creates tensions in all their social relationships. These inescapable elements of the police lot—authority, danger, pressure to achieve results without violating due process of law—give Fise to a common cultural reaction: a set of informal rules, rites, and recipes for coping, Skolnick identified three main aspects of cop culture, and subsequent studies have amplified these and suggested other features (Reiner, 1992: chapter 3), ‘The core characteristics of the police culture which Skolnick emphasized wore suspiciousness, internal solidarity coupled with social isolation, and conservatism, ‘Suspiciousness is a common police attitude because it arises from the pressure to achieve results in the form of detection of offenders, It also results from the poli . concer with danger; people and places are constantly scrutinized to ascertain whether they present risks to the officer. Suspiciousness may also be deliberately cultivated as an aspect of police training, but fundamentally itis ‘4 way of coping with the pressures of the job, Although it is an inevitable aspect of policing, suspiciousness raises many problems. The tendency rapidly to assess whether people encountered may be offenders or dangerous makes the police prone to operate with prejudiced stereotypes of potential ‘villains’ and "eoublemakers This san important souree ofthe discrsminatory exerise of discretion. Internal solidarity and social wolatton are mutually reinforeing. Solidarity is Knitted from the intense experience of confronting shared dangers and pressures, the need to be able (0 rely on colleagues in a tight spot, and the bonding from having done so, Isolation is the product of organizational aspects of the work such as the shift system, the need to maintain social distance in order not to compromise authority, and the wariness with which members of the public interact with authority figures. Police solidarity and isolation are problematic even if inevitable. Solidarity ean become a device for shielding ‘wrong-doing. Social isolation can exacerbate the unrealistic or prejudiced stereotypes underiying discrimination Conservatism io @ moral and social rather than politcal sense is inherently related to the core police function of symbolizing and safeguarding authority. Charged with upholding the law and preserving public peace the police are likely to have an elective affinity for conservatism, Embracing change and ‘mpathizing with deviance are wont to generate a degree of cognitive dissonance in police officers. This is not to say that police officers can never be liberal in their sympathies and perspective, but it is unlikely to be the norm. Political conservatism is less universal a feature of police culture, although it is certainly much more common than radicalism. Police officers have gener- ally inclined to the Right in their politics (Reiner, 1992: 191-4). This is subject {0 a countervailing tendency which has been apparent in some circumstances. ‘The police are generally recruited from working-class origins, and often have backgrounds in the labour movement (Reiner, 19780: 140, 149-50; Reiner, 1991: chapter 4, 183-3) It has indeed been cogently argued that the formation cof modem police organizations involved a complex process of de-radicalzation in which police officers were culturally tor away from their labour roots and sympathies (Robinson, 1978). ‘Their own position as employees has generated conflicts and pressures which have resulted in most countries in the formation of police unions or similar representative associations (Reiner, 1978). These have often been distant from, even hostile to, the general trade union and labour movements. At certain conjunctures their interests have coalesced, however, for example in the period immediately following the First World War in both Britain and the United States. The Police Federation in England and Wales during the 1970s and 1980s became increasingly identified with the Conservative Party, playing @ significant pact in the Tories’ successful capture of the law-and-order mantle in the 1979 General Election. However, in recent years a variety of tensions have developed between the Conservative government and the police, primarily due to the increasing rigour with which policies to restrict public expenditure have begun to bite on the police (Rawlings, 1989), The result has been an ever more evident rapprochement between the Police Federation and the Labour Party and concurrent alionation between the Tories and the police. Despite the contradictory character of police politics, their culture undoubtedly remains ‘predominantly conservative in a broad sense, and this is under-pinned by the nature of the police role ‘Skolnick’s sketch of police culture has been developed in several ways by subsequent analysts. Numerous studies have enaphasized the important traits ‘of racism and machiomo as frequently encountered aspects of the police out- Took, already adverted to by Skolnick in his account of police conservatism (Holdaway, 1983; Smith et af, 1983; Graef, 1989; Young, 1991).lois Robert Reiner Others have emphasized the degree to which police officers have a strong sense of commitment to the values of what they see as “real” policing fighting crime and catching criminals. Thus the pressure to produce results does nee arise only from outside moral panies about law and order. Police officers often seem to have a sense of mission concerning their work, regarding it almost ab a sacred duty, although this may be hidden behind a surface veneer of cynicism and resentment at obstacles inhibiting ‘real’ police work (Manning, 19 Reiner, 1992: 111-14). They are eager for action to achieve the ends of crime. fighting (Holdaway, 1977, 1983). This connects back to the machistno clement in police culture and is an important ingredient in discrimination against women within the force and the lack of seriousness with which crimes against women in the domestic context have often been regarded (Young, 1991; Heidensohn, 1992, and in this volume), Researchers since Skolnick have not only amplified his account of the cen- tral characteristics of the core police culture. There fas also been significant ‘analysis of the structured variations in culture both within and between police forces, Cultural Variations Within Forces ‘The rank structure and division of labour give rise to structured permutations of police culture within police organizations, There are also variations due fo age, gender, ethnic group, educational and social hackgrnnnd, as well as individual personality. Potice culture is certainly not monolithie, and officers exhibit its characteristics to varying degrees ‘The most obvious cultural gulf is between the stret level and the manage- ‘ment ranks. The latter have supervisory and disciplinary powers over the former. As the arbiters of the career prospects of the rank-and-file the manage. ‘ment strata clearly have potentially conflicting interests and perspectives on a ‘number of issues. This is accentuated when (as was the case in British county forces until the Second World War) there is lateral entry of senior ranks and they come from more privileged social and educational backgrounds (Reiner, 1991: chapter 2), The divergent interests of different ranks are reflected in their organization into different representative associations (in Britain the Police Federation for ranks up to chief inspector, with more senior officers belonging to the Superintendents’ Association or the Association of Chief Polive Officers). ‘Senior ranks are mainly concerned with administration, and with presenting & Public face of acceptable standards of conduct to external audiences, rather than the direct delivery of a service. Senior officers will often be in an adversarial role visl-vir the rank-and-file, especially if scandals break out and complaints need investigation. The rank-and-file ofien hold derogatory images of the managerial levels as parasitic pen-pushers rather than ‘real’ police. Many studies here and abroad have emphasized this gulf between the cultures of ‘street cops’ and 'manage- Policing and the Police 1019 ‘ment cops’ (Ianni and lanni, 1983; Punch, 1983). It clearly introduces an important qualification into the picture of a solidary police culture ‘Nonetheless itis important not to lose sight of the common interests which unite all ranks in the police foree. They share a stake in the status, reputation, and resources of the organization, When these are under threat there is a coalescence of interest and action. Thus since 1989 there has been a series of ‘unprecedented common initiatives between the British police staff associations, concerned to counter a perceived decline in the public standing of the police and hostile government proposals for reorganization on a more “businesslike” basis. Even the normal cultural gulf between street and management cops may be analysed as something of a eynical, Faustian bargain. It allows management cops to do their business of presenting acceptable glosses of police practice to influential public audiences whilst being shielded from the more sordid aspects Of strect policing. Only when the ‘wheel comes off in a scandal does a token show of conflict between ranks occur. In addition to the structured source of culture conflict based on the hierarchy of rank, the organizational division of lnbour produces systematic differences in the subculture associated with specialisms. The most hallowed is the perennial rivalry between uniform and detective branches, Each has a charac teristic ideology which emphasizes the greater importance of its own role and. tn associated negative image of the other. Thus uniform branches will often atreso the bedrock nature of their role in the vryauiation, sal doat contrary 'o public impressions they actually apprehend the majority of offenders (Maguire and Norris, 1993). The CID will be resented for taking over cases for court processing after the hard work of capture has already been accomplished, grabbing the glamour and the glory. For their part detectives pride themselves on being at the heart of ‘real’ policing, dealing with erime and criminals, in particular the more serious cases (Hobbs, 1988: chapters 4, 8) ‘They will look down on the more humdrum peace-keeping service and low- level erime work of the patrol branches, and castigate those stuck there as plodding and dull ‘woodentops’. In turn, both operational patrol and CID officers will have negative images of administrative personnel or specialists in branches like training or community relations who are perceived as removed altogether trom ‘real’ police work. There are also differences in outlook and style amongst groups of patrol officers at constable level, who constitute the majority of police officers. Several studies in different paris of the world and at different times have documented these. What is striking is the similarity of the types of subculture which have been depicted, even though these are referred to by different names in different studies (Reiner, 1992a: 129-33). Four types of variation of the basic police culture have been pinpointed: a peace-keeper, @ law-enforcer, an alienated cynie, and a managerial inclined professional, Essentially these correspond to different career aspirations and trajectories, based on variations in educational and social background as well as individual personality,