Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

THE ROLE OF POLICE
Emergency services
and policing
Proactive policing has been the norm, but
that practice is now collapsing. The reactive
fire brigade system is emerging as the
model for police practice. By Mike Brogden
Mike Brogden is co-author
(with Graham Ellison) of
Policing in an Age of Austerity.
Routledge, 2013
on crime, tough
on the causes of crime.”
“Tough
The Labour Party slogan
made good politics in outflanking the
then Conservative Party claim of “tough
on crime”. But it was dysfunctional for
effective criminal justice. It bolstered the
developing police intervention in local
communities in the search for the mare’s
nest, the ‘source’ of most petty crime.
Critically, in that community intrusion,
together with media contributions such
as Cracker, it dramatically increased public
expectations of both what the police
could ‘do’ as well as a greater propensity
to report minor problems such as
incivilities to the policing agency.
Such interventions are common to all
three major emergency services – fire,
health and police. Conventionally, we
divide their practices into proactive and
reactive. The former involves dealing with
a problem – crime, fire, accidents, injury
– before it starts. The fire service conducts
mainly reactive work while increasingly
over recent years both the police and health
service attempt to operate preventatively.
In police circles, such intervention
contains both an historical legitimation
as well as innovations. The latter involve
mutations of American imports – for
example, hot spot policing (learning
where to concentrate police resources
prior to potential law-breaking) problemsolving
(using specialists to forestall social
disorder by finding the underlying causes)
and more recently, targeting potential
offenders before a particular event and
impeding their projects.
Most such innovations have little
substantive value. Hot spot policing
demonstrates little that experienced
detectives could not predict themselves.
Problem-solving is stuck between the
infinite search for causes and simply
displacing the deviance somewhere
else. Targeted policing often borders on
the fringes of illegality, as in the recent
malpractices by undercover police
officers operating against environmental
protesters.
But crucially, proactive policing relies on
two different but related measures – the
traditional beat patrol and the current
popularity of neighbourhood policing.
The beat supposedly had several functions
– to apprehend villains in the act, and
to reassure the ‘respectables’. It was also
tended to cow the ‘roughs’ from breaking
out of their deprived areas (the ‘policing
St Giles to guard St ames’ syndrome).
The beat has been mythologised since
the days of Robert Peel, an emblematic
history that rests on dubious foundations.
(Peel’s first London police officers were
strangers policing strangers as they
patrolled the boundaries of the Victorian
rookeries.) A most tedious occupation for
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