Policing Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: The View from South Wales

By Martin Innes

Through the lens of South Wales Police, this volume reflects upon the changing role of the police in society. Conceptually, by connecting the pasts, presents and futures of policing, each chapter individually and collectively demonstrates how some of today’s challenges and controversies about policing in the UK are deep-seated. Uniquely co-authored by a blend of police practitioners and expert academics, Policing Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow explores how a range of social, political and economic influences impact upon the contemporary organisation and conduct of police work. Key topics covered across the chapters, include community and neighbourhood policing; major crime investigation; police finances; violence prevention; gender and policing; police technologies; and leadership. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781837720866

Book preview

1

REFORM, REINVENTION AND RECURRENCE IN POLICING

Martin Innes and Jeremy Vaughan

Historically, the ‘invention’ of the police as a social institution was intimately connected to how modernising societies sought to navigate and negotiate the social forces and tensions unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, and its accompanying processes of urbanisation. Although the innovations in thinking and practise that occurred in the early nineteenth century and coagulated into the bureaucratic organisational form of ‘the police’ were to prove especially influential and long-lasting, they did not occur in isolation. For the establishment of the police institution was just one of a number of significant governmental interventions that transformed the systems and processes of regulation and governance, in terms of how the state sought to maintain order and prevent and protect its citizens from an array of harms. The state progressively assuming responsibility for policing was part and parcel of a wider shift in reconstructing the role and purpose of government institutions, across the domains of public health, safety at work, the built environment, as well as security in public spaces.

Whilst it has become commonplace in academic commentaries to assert ‘policing’ stretches ‘before’ and ‘beyond’ the police as a formal institution, because they are one component (albeit an especially significant one) in the state’s regulatory apparatus designed for the delivery of social control and order maintenance, such considerations have become especially apposite in the contemporary moment. For as multiple commentators on the trajectories and dynamics of the information age have asserted, many of our key interactional and institutional formations are being profoundly disrupted and changed by an array of digital information communication technologies (Marx 2016; Zuboff 2018). Indeed, some commentators are starting to ask whether, if the information revolution is going to be as deep and profound as the industrial and urban revolutions were in terms of social, economic and political consequences, then might we need similarly dramatic revisions to the ecosystem of social control. This might involve considering whether the police, with its structural roots in the 19th century, can ever really encompass and accommodate the dynamics and mechanics of digital harms.

If this were not complex and challenging enough, and layered on top of the above considerations, we are writing at a moment where the Covid-19 global health pandemic has disrupted and displaced rhythms, rituals and routines of social life in ways that would hitherto have been almost unimaginable and inconceivable. Almost overnight, officers from South Wales Police and their colleagues across the UK, as in many other countries, found themselves deployed as part of a new public health surveillance network. This involved trying to secure behavioural compliance with citizens as social and economic life was rapidly ‘locked down’ as part of desperate efforts to interrupt the viral transmission pathways and reduce Coronavirus’ reproduction rate. Furthermore, it also saw the Welsh forces, for a period, being asked to police the border between England and Wales on behalf of the public, to restrict all but essential travel between the two nations.

The pandemic has been a rapidly evolving situation that has necessitated a degree of improvisation and innovation, as new policies and procedures have had to be rapidly designed and delivered to respond to the unfolding emergency. At the time of writing, there had been at least 29 different iterations of official coronavirus guidance and regulations issued by the Welsh and English governments, not all of which were consistent or coherent with one another. As such, negotiating the pandemic has also opened a window into how the police view their own mission. For example, from some quarters, there were calls for police to become centrally involved in enforcing new regulations associated with the initial ‘lockdown’, assertively ensuring the maintenance of ‘social distancing’. But many senior officers publicly demurred from such suggestions on the grounds that they were neither feasible, nor desirable, and certainly incompatible with the idea that the British policing model proceeds, for the most part, on the basis of ‘policing by consent’. Instead, the UK police’s involvement with policing the pandemic alighted on a four stage model of: ‘engage; explain; encourage; enforce’. As the periods of lockdown stretched on and infection rates rose, there was some re-balancing towards increasing the use of enforcement actions against egregious instances of breaching lockdown guidelines. More generally, the urgent need to try and regulate public health behaviours brought many members of the middle classes into contact with police, which were far less likely to happen pre-pandemic. These points notwithstanding, what is intriguing about this basic escalatory dynamic is that it represents a highly condensed analogy of the broader policing system. The majority of police work is predicated upon negotiating order and compliance, rather than resorting to legally endowed enforcements.

So, whilst at first glance aspects of the current situation feel unique and unprecedented, they may actually fit within a broader and deeper pattern. Notably, Egon Bittner (1974), the American sociologist of the police, once famously opined that the defining quality of the police is that they are called upon to act in circumstances where ‘somebody is doing something that somebody needs to do something about right now!’ Thus although ‘law enforcement’ is often centred in political and public discussions of the police function in society, this is only part of what police do. As Keith Hawkins (1992) perceptively concluded, law is frequently an instrument of ‘last resort’ where most problems get resolved through negotiating order. But what the police do uniquely provide is a rapid response, generalised capacity and capability to secure and enforce social order. This has proven important as states across the world have scrambled to innovate responses to coronavirus, with police getting involved in various public health measures

In this chapter, what we want to do is show how, by adopting a ‘wide and long’ analytic lens to examine policy and practice development in policing, it is possible to distil and discern some recurring patterns. In essence, this involves continual and ongoing efforts to improve the services provided to the public, either in terms of their quality or efficiency. At the same time, these reform efforts repeatedly gravitate around a recurring set of challenges and problems. What we intend to do, coherent with the focus of this book as a whole, is explore these through a particular focus upon South Wales.

STRATEGIC REFORMS AND ‘STRUCTURES OF FEELING’ IN POLICING

One of the recurring motifs of academic studies of the police has been to show how particular issues and episodes in police work can be located within broader and deeper patterns of behaviour and organisation (Reiner 2010). For example, across a number of empirical studies, Peter Manning (2010) has repeatedly sought to excavate how, despite revisions to the ‘surfaces’ of how policing is represented to the public, there are some more ineluctable pressures that fundamentally determine core elements of the police function in democratic societies (see also Sparrow 2016). Likewise, Loader and Mulcahy (2003) attended to the police role in symbolically performing otherwise invisible facets of how liberal democratic states orient to the citizenry. And Robert Reiner (1978) has shown how key facets of police occupational culture and the working personalities of police officers as they interpret and make sense of the world that they are moving through, in terms of their decisions about how, why, when and against whom to leverage their legal authority and powers, typically transcends individual organisations and specific roles.

This longer-term perspective is in tension with the fact that we are writing this book against a more immediate backdrop of what feels like repeating disruptions to the organisation of contemporary social life, that are ‘laminating’ one on top of another. The aforementioned Covid-19 pandemic has brought forward new challenges for policing, co-occurring with a revived interest in police-community relations triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement and associated specific calls to ‘defund’ some police departments in North America. More parochially, such challenges are imbricated with the potential consequences of Brexit, which will undoubtedly have constitutional impacts upon the relations between British police forces and their European counterparts, but might also induce increased risks of community tensions. Laminated across these and becoming an increasingly influential social and political movement are the groups protesting for climate justice, amongst the most visible and radical of which is Extinction Rebellion. Framing all of which are the changes to the media ecosystem and information environment, wherein a range of increasingly sophisticated information communication technologies are altering how and what we know. In the process, inducing significant changes to the institutional and interactional ordering of society. This includes the array of demands for service from the public, as new forms of behaviour come to be defined as criminal harms, and also how police engage with the public and their partner agencies.

Mapping these longer-term trajectories of development as policing adapts to deeper shifts in social ordering is more typically the kind of work undertaken by academic outsiders to the ‘social world of policing’, whereas the interests of police ‘insiders’ focus more upon how the organisational rhythms and routines are driven by a ‘conveyor-belt’ of new incidents, cases, emergencies and calls for service, which have to be ‘triaged’ and in some instances responded to. Over the years, there have been repeated attempts to break the organisational focus of incident driven demand, through strategic reforms. For example, Community Policing has argued for a more situated conception of the police role, where officers are embedded within particular community contexts, using the deeper situational awareness this affords them to shape local interventions (Alderson 1979; Fielding 1995). Problem-Oriented Policing urges police organisations to focus upon ‘problems’ as opposed to incidents, where the former are defined as series and clusters of events with shared underlying causes (Goldstein 1990). By implementing diagnostic processes such as the ‘SARA’ model of problem-solving (scan, analyse, respond, assess) it has been asserted that police can influence the causes of crimes and disorders, and thus aggregate patterns of prevalence and distribution. Although adopting a slightly different language and logic, the doctrine of intelligence-led policing has advocated broadly similar reforms, but steered more towards criminogenic people than places (Sparrow 2016).

Across its fifty years, at different points in time, and in different operational units, all of these concepts have been tried and tested within South Wales Police, with varying levels of impact. Experiments with community policing, large-scale training programmes trying to instil problem-solving methodologies across the organisation, and using the disciplined approach to collecting and processing information associated with the National Intelligence Model, have provided the basis for the stories that South Wales Police has told itself about itself, and about the imperatives for reform. And yet, the fact that such attempts have had to be repeated and layered upon one another, tells us something about the limits of the traction achieved in terms of influencing organisational routines and officer behaviour.

That this is so is an indicator of how the emergency-response function of policing exerts a profound and deep influence upon the ‘structures of feeling’ that are seemingly integral to the working personalities of police officers. The concept of ‘structures of feeling’ was first introduced by the historian Raymond Williams (1961) to capture how different ways of thinking emerge at different points in history. He preferred the notion of ‘feeling’ to denote that such matters may not be fully worked out or articulated, but nevertheless shape and guide how and why things get done in particular ways. This seems a useful idea to import into discussions of policing and police occupational culture.

Relatedly, and as intimated in the preceding passage, academic studies of the police have identified how the kinds of values and worldviews constitutive of ‘cop culture’ that were originally surfaced in the pioneering ethnographies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, continue to shape and influence the practicalities of how police work gets done. For example, Bethan Loftus’s (2009) observations of police talk and action in English police forces in the years following the millennium, resonate strongly with the themes highlighted by scholars such as Bittner (1974), Skolnick (1966) and Reiner (1978; 2010). For what they all point to, and it is a theme replicated across many similar studies, is how police decision-making about how, when and why to intervene, is a highly discretionary act that depends significantly upon the situated interpretations of the officer ‘on the ground’. Indeed, the presence of discretion in terms of how the ‘law in books’ gets translated to ‘law in action’ seems to be an irreducible and defining feature of the Office of Constable.

A necessary and important counterpoint to accenting the importance of discretion in shaping police actions is that, in certain situations and when responding to certain types of problems, there are modes of policing defined by the exercise of command and control. Most obviously this applies to public order situations, where the efficacy of police authority and power depends upon acting collectively, rather than as individuated officers. But it also appears in more ‘team’ based endeavours such as major crime investigations, where the basic operational unit is a group blending a number of specialist functions, rather than single detectives. The defining characteristic of this mode of policing is officers responding to the direction and control of senior decision-makers. The reason for stressing this is that many of the seminal and most influential depictions of police work have centred the activities of street policing, and then used this focus to generalise a set of ideas about what policing is and how it is conducted. However, if we think about the many varied types of task that a police organisation performs on a daily basis, distributed across its many departments and units, we begin to gain a sense of the complexity that attends to contemporary policing when viewed in a holistic manner. Every day, whilst some officers in South Wales are operationalising their discretionary powers, their colleagues are simultaneously acting in accordance with tightly defined orders issued by their senior commanders. How these different operational modes of policing articulate with one another, and the frictions induced, is an under-explored dimension of contemporary police work and probably warrants further attention.

How then should we think about and conceptualise such issues? For there does seem to be a tension between highlighting a series of strategic reform programmes intended to reconfigure elements of the design and delivery of policing, and a recurring set of ‘deeper’ structuring influences. One way to reconcile this is to understand the process of police reform as a continuous dialectic of permanence and change. Framing the issues in these terms helps to articulate the ways policing, as the principal state institution for managing social order, frequently finds itself at the forefront of navigating and negotiating how society responds to social, political, technological and economic transformations. In this sense, the concept of dialectic is supremely useful because of how it accents the ‘hybridised’ ways in which policing responds to societal changes, and in the process, is partly changed itself.

It is precisely because of these conditions that research and evidence has become so important to processes of police improvement. Indeed, over the past decade or so, the discourse and logic of evidence-based policing has become one of the principal motors for reform. It is fair to say that South Wales Police have been at the forefront of this agenda. In 2007, they invested funding into setting up the Universities’ Police Science Institute (UPSI) in partnership with Cardiff and Glamorgan universities, the same year that the Scottish Institute for Policing Research was established. But what was unique about the UPSI concept was the direct relationship between a police force and their local Higher Education Institutions, collaboratively engaging in basic and applied research, accompanied by multiple channels for knowledge exchange. So where other evidence-based policing initiatives were highlighting the importance of quite complex randomised control trial research designs, in South Wales a series of projects were relatively quietly implemented to deliver operationally useful insights and evidence.

Over time this approach has inevitably matured and altered, but it has proven sustainable. Every year for the last fourteen years (at the time of writing), and spanning the agendas of four separate Chief Constables, some form of funded collaborative research has been undertaken involving South Wales Police and its university partners. The importance of this approach is how, over time, the evidence deriving from individual projects starts to mosaic together. It builds understanding, that aggregates into more than can be gleaned from a single research study, no matter how well designed. The arrangement of having direct local relationships between Higher Education Institutions and police forces has become far more commonplace over the past couple of years, but it was not always so.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been a long-standing interest in research as an aid for police improvement. Contemporary students attending to some recent discussions of the evidence-based policing movement could be forgiven for thinking this was a wholly new agenda. It is not. Indeed, one of the most interesting and insightful discussions of how and why research is critical to the business of police reform and improvement is to be found in a series of lectures by Sir Robert Mark, one of the most celebrated Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, published in 1977 as a book entitled ‘Policing a Perplexed Society’. What is striking to the contemporary eye is just how familiar a number of the themes he addressed are. Notably, given the focus of the current discussion, Mark stresses at length just how important good research is, as officers and the organisations to which they belong wrangle with increasingly complex and fluid societies.

PLACE, POLITICS AND THE PAST SHAPE POLICING

The issue of recurrence highlighted in this chapter is important. The contemporary moment is one where, induced initially by the Global economic downturn of 2008, but now being amplified and reinforced by the pandemic, we are seeing socio-economic inequality and disadvantage reappearing in ways not experienced for a generation. But again, this is not entirely new. There may be different immediate causes, but fundamentally similar challenges to be managed and negotiated. For instance, the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 are the most recent iteration of how police-community race relations are a long-standing issue, as attested to by the race riots that took place in Cardiff in 1919. Similarly, the miners’ strikes of the 1980s and the police role therein, continue to exert a profound influence upon the collective memories of some communities in South