Andrew Wooff

Preliminary findings on police custody delivery in the twenty-first century: Is it ‘good’ enough?

ABSTRACT Since the 1980s, police custody in England and Wales has seen the civilianisation and privatisation of key roles formerly performed by police officers and changes to how police custody suites are managed and owned. These changes have been encapsulated in a five-pronged typology of custody suites identified by Skinns et al. Drawing on theories about ‘good’ policing as well as quantitative and qualitative data collected as part of an ongoing study of ‘good’ police custody, this paper provides some preliminary answers to two key questions: Can police custody ever be ‘good’ for suspects and, relatedly, are some types of custody suites likely to be better than others, in this regard? What are the implications for ‘good’ policing? We show that of the five types of custody suites identified in Skinns et al., the ‘unhurried hybrid’ may be particularly beneficial to ‘good’ experiences of police custody; for example, the conditions of custody are better and may facilitate a more trusting relationship between suspects and the police. The data also show that theories about ‘good’ policing are relevant and useful for conceptualising ‘good’ police custody; though of the five dimensions of ‘good’ policing some (e.g. policing as just) are more relevant than others (e.g. policing as crime reduction).

The role of emotion, space and place in police custody in England: Towards a geography of police custody

Police custody is a complex environment, where police officers, detainees and other staff interact in a number of different emotional, spatial and transformative ways. Utilising ethnographic and interview data collected as part of a five-year study which aims to rigorously examine ‘good’ police custody, this paper analyses the ways that liminality and temporality impact on emotion in police custody. Architecture has previously been noted as an important consideration in relation to social control, with literature linking the built environment with people’s emotional ‘readings’ of space. No work, however, has examined the links between temporality, liminality and emotional performativity in a police custody context. In this environment, power dynamics are linked to past experiences of the police, with emotions being intrinsically embodied, relational, liminal and temporal. Emotion management is therefore an important way of conceptualising the dynamic relationships in custody. The paper concludes by arguing that emotional aftershocks symbolise the liminal experience of detainees’ understanding of the police custody process once released, noting that it is important to understand the microscale, lived experience of police custody in order to develop broader understanding of broader social and policing policy in a police custody context.

Police legitimacy in context: an exploration of “soft” power in police custody in England

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how police authority – in its “soft” form – is used and understood by staff and detainees in police custody in England, examining how these meanings are shaped by this unique police setting. It is argued that the nature of this setting, as fraught and uncertain, along with the large volume of citizens who come into contact with the police therein, makes police custody the ultimate “teachable moment”. Design/methodology/approach The present paper is based on in-depth qualitative data collected between March 2014 and May 2015 in four custody suites (in four forces). In each site, the researchers spent three to four weeks observing and then interviewed 10-15 staff (largely police officers, detention officers but also a few other criminal justice practitioners) and 10-15 detainees. In total, the paper is based on 532 hours of observing and 97 interviews (47 with staff and 50 with detainees). Findings One way that the staff used their authority in the custody suites in the research was softly and innocuously; this entailed for example staff communicating in a respectful manner with detainees, such as by being deliberately polite. The authors conclude that this “soft” power was a dynamic, processual matter, shaped in particular by the physical conditions of the suite, the uncertain and insecure nature of detainees’ circumstances, as well as by the sense of disempowerment they felt as a result of being deprived of their liberty and autonomy, all of which contributed to police custody being the ultimate “teachable moment”. Originality/value The paper draws on a range of qualitative data collected from both staff and detainees in four types of police custody suites as part the “good” police custody study. It therefore makes an original contribution to the field which has tended to rely on cross-sectional surveys of citizens not policed populations (Harkin, 2015; Worden and Mclean, 2017).