Elizabeth R. Turner

Learning and practicing police craft

Purpose The authors consider current policy debates in the UK about the professionalisation of the police to respond to changing patterns of crime and, specifically, the suggestion that officers be educated to degree level. Drawing on the ethnographic evidence, the purpose of this paper is to focus attention on how officers learn, and continue to develop the applied, that is the craft aspects of the work of uniformed constables. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on a long-term ethnographic project observing officers during the course of their duties. The focus is on the use of discretion and of particular powers. But in the course of the research, the authors also observe the way officers behave and the way they talk about their job. Findings The authors suggest that, while there may be a role for degree qualifications, attention needs to be paid to the practices the authors observe, practices that have long been the core craft skills of uniformed officers. Originality/value The authors suggest that, despite the emergence of cybercrime and other new forms of crime/threat, the evidence suggests that much has not. Not least, crime is not the only focus of police work.

Archaeology: Surfaces of Emergence for the Public Confidence Agenda

Turner shows that the shape taken by the public confidence agenda has ‘conditions of existence’, including the following: (1) increasing separation between the public and the criminal justice system makes it necessary for the public to have confidence in justice, rather than witnessing this first-hand; (2) an understanding of the criminal justice system as legitimately oriented towards the production of effects, which grants ‘experts’ priority in knowing about and accurately and objectively representing the reality of crime and justice; and (3) a political system which incentivises aspiring political leaders to treat public perceptions of policy and practice as centrally important and encourages them to see such perceptions as able to be accurately captured by aggregating opinion surveys. These conditions of existence have emerged through historical changes, including the following: (1) professionalisation of criminal justice limiting opportunities for public participation; (2) a shift towards an instrumental orientation of transforming individuals; and (3) the change to universal adult suffrage creating new expectations for accountability, and, increasingly, managerialist regimes using quantitative performance indicators.

Public Confidence in Criminal Justice: What’s the Problem?

Turner sets the idea of public confidence in criminal justice in the context of concerns about ‘penal populism’. She notes that criminologists have proposed a number of responses to populism, including protecting criminal justice from political influence, better educating the public to produce more informed opinion, and shifting towards a ‘better politics’ through dialogue and deliberation. Turner suggests that deliberative methods show the most promise when it comes to making sustainable improvements in the politics of criminal justice policy. However, she argues, the dominance of quantitative, survey-based approaches to understanding ‘public opinion’, including ‘public confidence’, poses a substantial barrier to adopting a more deliberative approach. In light of this, she proposes, it is necessary to examine how the survey-based approach became dominant in order to challenge it more effectively.

Constructing Public Confidence: A Chronology of the Research Agenda

Turner describes the emergence and development of the public confidence research agenda. During the 1970s and 1980s, researchers criticised general measures of public opinion, and proposed the use of specific scenario-based questions in order to gauge opinions about appropriate sentencing practice. However, some researchers suggested that specific measures were artificial, and only general measures could capture ‘real life’. During the early 2000s, a dominant understanding of public confidence emerged, which saw it as a real and measurable phenomenon, pre-existing research, and with identifiable causes. Survey-based approaches were promoted as the only way to measure true confidence. These approaches are aggregative and general, premised on an atomised, passive conception of the citizen (or AGAP). Recalling the doubts about the AGAP approach expressed in the 1970s and 1980s, Turner challenges this dominant view. She argues that proponents of AGAP approaches misrepresent a value-based decision about how to know about confidence.

Genealogy: How the Public Confidence Agenda Got Its ‘Hooks’ into Criminal Justice

Turner argues that the social and political context from the late 1970s onwards allowed ‘public confidence’ to ‘hook’ into criminal justice discourse. The events and issues described are: (1) revelations about police misconduct and tense police-community relationships; (2) political debates about how to alleviate overcrowding in prisons taking place against the backdrop of Thatcherite authoritarian populism; (3) miscarriages of justice exposed during the late 1980s; (4) intense political contest between the ailing Conservative government and a resurgent Labour opposition during the 1990s; and (5) the debate about sentencing and minimum tariffs for murderers. The idea of public confidence was frequently invoked by groups competing for power and influence within the criminal justice arena, and the researchers themselves, responding to the increased opportunity to disseminate knowledge in this area, were not disinterested participants in the struggle for power and influence.

Deconstructing Public Confidence: The Public Confidence Agenda as a Governmental Project

In order to produce knowledge about confidence, researchers use ‘procedures of intervention’ that come between the things to be known and representations of those things: this constitutes a ‘violation’. All knowledge, whether derived from a survey or a deliberative process, involves researchers choosing procedures that violate what they study. The decisions they make, then, are about how to violate reality in order to arrive at knowledge. The dominant approach to public confidence research constructs a hierarchy of objects: reality, representations, perceptions, feelings. The solution to the confidence problem is understood as that of correcting perceptions through better representations of reality. This dominant conceptualisation of public confidence privileges expert ways of knowing. Deliberative approaches, promoting dialogue, are unfairly dismissed as unable to access the ‘reality’ of public opinion. But this view fails to acknowledge that all ways of knowing about public opinion must produce the phenomenon they go on to represent.

Conclusion: Researchers and the Making of Political Worlds

Bringing together the observations from the analysis provided in the previous four chapters, Turner argues that public confidence in criminal justice never was a pre-existing, independently ‘real’ phenomenon: it had to be constructed and was carved out of the raw materials of historical circumstance and political opportunity. This agenda has ‘costs to existence’: influenced by and contributing to a wider political culture that de-emphasises engagement and dialogue between the public and policymakers and casts the public as passive ill-informed individual consumers reliant upon experts to inform them about ‘reality’ and to communicate their opinions to their elected representatives. In assembling a public, researchers create a picture of society which may be reflected back into that society. They are involved in the making of political worlds. As such, they should not hide behind an objectivist epistemology in order to avoid acknowledging the responsibilities they have as inevitably political actors.

Democracy (re)imagined: Some Proposals for Democratic Policing

This book approaches penal reform from an international perspective and offers a fresh and diverse approach within an established field.