Towards a Political Sociology of the British Police - A Review of 1979 and 1980 (From Maintenance of Order in Society, P 27-55, 1982, Rita Donelan, ed. - See NCJ-88674)

• NCJ Number: 88676
• Author(s): M Cain
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 29 pages
• Sale Source: Canada Ministry of Supply and Services
• Language: English
• Country: Canada

Annotation

Sociological analyses of police-community relations, albeit few in number, could have helped the British police avoid much of the public criticism against them if structures of communication between the police and sociologists had permitted a rethinking of the police task in relation to research findings.

Abstract

There is much dissatisfaction with the British police among the public because of evidence of police brutality against those in custody, the excessive use of force against demonstrators, and a perceived lack of structures for police accountability to the community. Overall, the police are viewed by many as having become repressive, secretive, abusive, and unresponsive to public opinion. The offerings of sociologists in the years 1979 and 1980 have been relatively slight. Two contributions should be mentioned, however. The first study -- Mawby's 'Policing the City' (1979) -- tested a large number of hypotheses about policing derived from labeling approaches to crime. The study indicated that even in those few cases where an offender was identified by purely proactive policing with no help from a victim, they lacked both the knowledge and the resources to label effectively. The second contribution was Holdway's 'The British Police.' In this work, a series of research papers deal with issues of how police officers are controlled, the police and the mass media, police social welfare work, and police unionism. In most cases, these works do not consider policing in relation to Britain's changing political-economic context; they make little contribution to a theory of policing upon which significant reform can be based. To make the needed contributions to the policing task, sociologists should do work that will assist in rethinking the police task, that is explained in terms understandable to the police and the public, and that is given serious consideration by the police through structures of communication and interaction between researchers and the police leadership. The conference discussion of the paper is included, along with 58 references.