Benjamin Bowling

Disproportionate and Discriminatory: Reviewing the Evidence on Police Stop and Search

Eight years after the Lawrence Inquiry, the question of police powers to stop and search people in public places remains at the forefront of debate about police community relations. Police are empowered to stop and search citizens under a wide range of legislative acts and the power is employed daily across Britain. Far from laying the debate to rest, the Lawrence Inquiry prompted new research studies and fresh theories to explain the official statistics. We argue that the statistics show that the use of the powers against black people is disproportionate and that this is an indication of unlawful racial discrimination. If stop and search powers cannot be effectively regulated - and it seems that they cannot - then their continued use is unjustified and should be curtailed.

Policing Migration: A Framework for Investigating the Regulation of Global Mobility

Criminologists are increasingly pointing to new forms of control that are associated with the regulatory‐yet‐punitive states of late modernity. This article starts from the premise that the policing of global population movements is an example of an emerging punitive regulatory system that demands urgent attention by criminologists. It articulates an agenda for the critical examination of “migration policing” in Britain set against the backdrop of the historical inclusion and exclusion of immigrant groups, and proposes a “sites of enforcement” framework that is intended to guide further empirical investigations into the operation of immigration control networks.

Fair and Effective Policing Methods: Towards ‘Good Enough’ Policing

It is unhelpful and unrealistic to demand perfect police; instead we should aim to achieve ‘good enough’ policing, re‐evaluating and questioning the concepts of fairness and effectiveness. To be ‘fair’, should the police treat everyone identically or on the basis of their needs? To be effective, should the police be law‐enforcers or guardians of community safety? How should we balance the tension between fairness and effectiveness? Do measures to increase fairness blunt police effectiveness, or is fairness an essential quality of effective policing? Focusing specifically on the power to stop and search people in public places and on the experiences of communities who complain of being ‘over‐policed and under‐protected’, this lecture ponders how ‘good enough’ policing can be achieved.

Policing and Human Rights

Racial discrimination, xenophobia, intolerance and the abuse power are problems in police forces in many parts of the world.1 In recent years, allegations of racism and racial discrimination have led to public inquiries into many police agencies, including the Metropolitan Police (Bowling, 1999; Macpherson, 1999; Bowling and Phillips, 2002) in London, the New South Wales Police (Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, 1991; Johnston, 1991; Chan, 1997; Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service, 1997) in Australia, the Los Angeles Police Department (Christopher 1991; Human Rights Watch 1998) in the USA, and the South Africa Police Service (Brogden and Shearing, 1993; Cawthra, 1993, 1997; Brewer, 1994; Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 1998; Melville, 1999). In each of these places, evidence has been gathered relating to individual cases and the broader organizational context. Although these are among the best documented examples, the problems of racism, discrimination and the abuse of power have also been identified in many police agencies elsewhere.

Globalization, ethnicity and racism: An introduction

There is a troubling relationship between human difference—visualized through the tropes of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’—and the study of crime and punishment. This relationship is manifest in myriad ways from studies of ‘ethnic differences’ in the demographic characteristics of arrestees and penal populations to persistent allegations that racism is institutionalized in the courts, policing and prisons. It is also evident in public fears about ‘visible’ ethnic minorities and those regarded as non-citizens who are often assumed to be more crime prone than the natives. Most recently, the importance of ‘difference’ has been invoked to explain criminal acts perpetrated against the State as well as in the State’s reaction to these events in the prosecution of a ‘war on terror’ or the pursuit of ‘national security’. Indeed, the ‘globalization of fear’ after 11 September 2001 heightened anxieties about the new ‘globally mobile’ dangerous classes (terrorists, traffickers, immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, ‘illegal aliens’ and so on) and this has been coterminous with increased securitization of societies both within and without the borders of the State. The ‘new’ security agenda—focusing on ethnic conflict, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, drug trafficking and human smuggling—which supplanted Cold War ideology, has become seen as the ‘dark side’ of globalization linking migration to crime, smuggling, terrorism and the policy issues of ‘law and order’ across the globe. Despite the importance of racism and ethnicity in shaping patterns of crime and victimization, in media representations and in criminal justice policy, academic criminology has had little to contribute to our understanding of this complex field. While there have been a few attempts to provide a synthesis of theory and research in this field these are exceptions to a general indifference to the study of difference (Tonry, 1995, 1997; Bowling and Phillips, 2002; Theoretical Criminology

Stop and search in global context

Police, Stop! Halte! Igazoltatás! Thamba! Tomare! Pare! Alto! Halt! Arrêtez-vous immédiatement! The command issued verbally or in the form of a road sign, a roadblock, or a flashing light on the top of a police car is universal. Police officers around the world have the power to stop, question and search people, their clothing, bags and vehicles in public places. This ranges from street stops of people suspected of possessing prohibited items; ‘suspect passengers’ passing through ports, airports and railway stations; and proactive stop and search carried out in an attempt to prevent serious crime and terrorism. The power to stop, check, interrogate and search, and the way it is exercised, is a contentious aspect of police community relations and a key issue for criminological and policing scholarship. It offers a fascinating case study in the state use of legal powers. It is a visceral manifestation of coercive and intrusive power and the most publicly visible interaction between state agent and citizen or, increasingly, between state agent and non-citizen. This collection examines the power to stop and search in the context of police studies from various parts of the world. The diversity of geographic examples in this collection of essays is echoed in diverse forms of stop and search and in where, how and why it is used. The similarities and differences in the everyday use of stop and search in different countries enable us to look at some key issues. While the pressure to monitor and control minority populations has always been a feature of police work, new and renewed fears about emerging and existing ‘suspect populations’ often accompanied by new powers and technologies intended to control them have arisen in the face of instability associated with rapid global change. This special issue synthesises and extends knowledge about stop and search practices across a range of social, political and cultural contexts. Starting from specific socially, geographically and historically situated locations, the contributions engage with globally relevant themes such as the resurgence of nationalism in the face of globalising pressures; patterns of ethnic and racial targeting; increasing reliance on surveillance and identification technologies; and the convergence of criminal, migration and security paradigms. It is now evident that things happening in one part of the world are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa (Held and McGrew 2002). The world economy has integrated. Transport and telecommunications networks have thickened and widened. Global flows of all kinds have become more extensive, intensive and faster-flowing. Global interconnectedness has created new possibilities for police and criminal justice cooperation and the sharing of technologies, policies and practice (Bowling 2008, Bowling and Sheptycki 2011). Through sharing of information, nodes and networks of power are emerging that involve a range of different organisations locally, nationally and globally. Policing & Society Vol. 21, No. 4, December 2011, 353 356

Global Policing and Transnational Rule with Law

This paper advances the ‘rule with law’ concept. After a brief overview of the global policing field and its relationship with law, we use socio-legal theories of policing to examine four examples of law in action: (i) the global money system, (ii) transnational mobility, (iii) intellectual property, and (iv) high policing. These examples illustrate how legal instruments become tools in the hands of public and private social actors operating in the transnational sphere. The paper advances three arguments. First, we argue that global policing practices exemplify rule with law not rule of law. Second, we argue that attempts to codify transnational (criminal) law and procedure must recognise the distinction between ‘law in the books’ and the ‘living law’ as revealed in the practice of transnational policing. Third, we argue that the study of transnational policing should not be restricted to the response to transnational organised crime or defined as coterminous with transnational criminal law. Global policing practices deploy many kinds of public and private law as power tools in the governance of the global system.

Towards a transnational and comparative approach

The power to stop people in public places, to question them and to search their person and belongings is common to policing worldwide. Drawing on the small, but growing, academic literature on ‘stop and search’ in a range of different geographical and institutional settings, this chapter examines the use of this power in theory and in practice. It explores the range of purposes for which stop and search is deployed, including the often vaguely defined general goals of security, crime prevention and counter-terrorism. Here it is contended that stop and search is the widest and least circumscribed coercive power of government. Although it is often socially invisible, stop and search is among the first and most frequent contacts between police and public and has far-reaching consequences. The chapter reflects on the problems of ensuring that police power is constrained by mechanisms of transparency, accountability and respect for human rights, and notes that this is particularly important as police power globalises. We argue that the way forward is to develop an agenda for transnational and comparative research to provide the basis for mechanisms to ensure that increasingly globally connected police power can be held to account.

The Rise and Fall of Suspicionless Searches

This paper examines the extraordinary rise and fall of police powers to stop-and-search without suspicion in public places in England and Wales. Suspicionless searches – authorised by s.60 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 and s.44 Terrorism Act 2000 – rose to a peak of 360,000 in 2009 and then declined radically to fewer than 1,000 in 2015. The paper seeks to explain changes in the use of suspicionless search powers drawing on a theory of the relationship between law and policing by examining the police ‘working environment’ comprised of three structures: law, politics and work. The paper concludes with a consideration of attempts to reform stop-and-search powers and the implications for the future of suspicionless searches.

Robert Reiner: a pioneer in policing scholarship

This article charts the career of Robert Reiner, the pioneering British police researcher and prolific writer on mass media, popular culture, political economy, law and order, crime and justice. It surveys his life and work focusing on his contribution to the sociology of policing. The article examines Reiner’s empirical and theoretical studies of policing and the ways in which his work has shaped the discipline. The Politics of the Police, published nearly 30 years ago and now in its fourth edition, is the finest, most authoritative and comprehensive account of British policing in the post-war period and remains the standard work in the field. The article explores the historical, sociological, cultural and social-legal facets of Reiner’s work that have decisively shaped our thinking about policing, how it should be defined, understood and studied. The legacy of Reiner’s work is a tradition of policing scholarship that embraces a fully social and democratic sensibility of what the police are for in order to show how policing can best be performed.