Maurice Punch

Whistleblowers, the Public Interest, and the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998

Corporate crime and organisational deviance raise complex legal issues. An initial problem lies simply in identifying when such wrongdoing has occurred. Here, whistleblowers can perform a valuable service. However, publicized cases suggest that they often pay dearly for their candour, encountering unfair sanctions at work. In Britain, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 seeks to protect “good-faith” whistleblowers from employer reprisals. In the wake of this legislation, the authors examine whistleblowing from a socio-legal perspective, asking what motivates whistleblowers, how do institutions respond to them, can legislation adequately protect them, and what effects will PIDA have on whistleblowing, employment practices, the culture of the workplace and, ultimately, society.

Policing by Degrees: Police Officers' Experience of University Education

The British Police was established as an artisan organization that would develop its own leaders. This fostered continuous debate on the quality of leadership and proposals for lateral entry, which elicited sustained opposition from the Police Federation and politicians. By the 1960s, intense pressures to change led to an emphasis on recruiting graduates and support for university education. The Essex Police decided to send officers to university full‐time, gave them free choice of subject and did not require them to stay after graduation. This article draws on interviews with officers who attended Essex University full‐time and it analyzes their experiences as students, their return to operational policing and their reflections on the impact of having graduates within the police service. The material raises issues about policing, leadership and education, and illuminates how the police organization has changed to a more sophisticated institution with well‐educated leaders, but without bending to lateral entry.

Strange union: changing patterns of reform, representation, and unionization in policing

Unions and policing are a relatively under‐researched area. But this paper, adopting a comparative approach, argues that police unions have been and still are influential, that they differ across cultures, and are involved in a variety of ways in police reform. They can be supportive of change, hostile to it, or closely involved in the reform process. Some are representative bodies where the police may not unionize while there are increasingly special interest groups based on faith, gender, and ethnicity. This paper focuses on representation and voice for ordinary officers in relation to reform in policing.

Policing and police research in the age of the smart cop

I read the recent paper by Bradley and Nixon (2009) with much interest. And I shall reflect on it in relation to the two societies I know best, the UK and the Netherlands. When I first became interested in policing – through teaching police officers in the early 1970s in the UK – very few cops had a degree while police research in Britain was in its infancy. Everyone looked to the USA and especially to the work of Westley, Skolnick, Bittner, and the President’s Crime Commission (1967); and later to Rubinstein, Manning, Reiss, Van Maanen, Marx, and others as well as the influential Police Foundation in Washington, DC. This varied palette of research styles opened up policing to scrutiny and had a diverse impact on policy. Herman Goldstein’s work on ‘Problem Oriented Policing’ did have a major impact and he gave a methodology to new-style community policing; and he is still active in the ‘POP’ movement. But for police practitioners and academics in Europe the USA was clearly the land of research, publications, and innovation – but also of violence, discrimination, and corruption in policing (e.g., the Knapp Commission of 1972 in New York) – so if you were interested in policing in that period, in its good or bad forms, you turned to America. The adage was ‘Go West young man.’

Paradigm Lost : The Dutch dilemma

Abstract In the 1970s the Dutch police developed a paradigm of policing that married ideas from the United States on community-oriented policing to a strongly social and democratic role for the police in society. From the early 1990s there was a gradual shift to the right in Dutch society that was reflected in concerns about crime and safety. The paradigm came under scrutiny. Then Dutch officers began to visit New York in considerable numbers and returned with ideas on ‘zero tolerance’. This ‘tough’ approach to crime reduction appears to conflict with Dutch ‘tolerance’ in criminal justice. The paper argues that there is reluctance to abandon that original paradigm, ambivalence about the new concepts from abroad but, above all, an inability to develop a new, comprehensive paradigm. This may well be true elsewhere and we assume that modern policing needs to be based on a well-thought paradigm on the police role in society.

Researching law enforcement and public health

ABSTRACT Academic and practitioner attention to law enforcement and public health/LEPH is relatively new. Its seemingly fresh promise can convey a picture of smart, joined-up and reflective inter-agency cooperation to assist the vulnerable and to support victims. But arriving at and establishing cooperation between the two worlds has been a prolonged and even vacillating process, while continuity may now be endangered. This Special Edition interrogates LEPH in detail; how has it developed, what are its current trajectories, and can its promise adapt and even survive in these tough times? The contributors pay special attention to the conceptual and research foundations that must underpin effective and just engagement between LEPH.

Animal Rights, Public Order and Police Accountability: The Brightlingsea Demonstrations

This article examines the policing, and the aftereffects, of concerted public demonstrations against the export of live animals at Brightlingsea (Essex, England) in 1995. It focuses particularly on leadership, command and control and the crucial question of accountability. The article also describes and assesses the impact, personally and in the broader context of policing public disorder, of summary charges brought against the principal author as a consequence of his leadership/management in the events at Brightlingsea.

Policing the Risk Society

field notes. Moreover, the book boasts a level of descriptive detail that is too seldom found in ethnographic texts. In fact, if the book has a notable flaw, it can be found in Fines reluctance to push past the details and raise the broader sociological questions prompted by the study. For example, the cooks Fine studied (and, indeed, cooks in general) hailed from the working class. How, then, do these individuals develop the cultural capital demanded of haut cuisine? Is the occupation stratified along class lines, or does some sort of social acculturation take place? Such questions are not raised, much less answered. In one sense, this show of restraint is laudable. As essentially exploratory research, this studys chief objective is to know better the phenomenon chosen for examination, not to make sweeping generalizations or broad theoretical statements, although it is also likely to leave sociologists with an interest in such questions unsatisfied. But perhaps it is the nature of all good books to leave one with appetite whetted and hungry for more. This is certainly the case with Kitchens.

Zero tolerance of zero tolerance

Zero tolerance’ seems irreplaceable in the political vocabulary, exuding tough approaches to problems regarding crime and policing. It is associated with New York where it allegedly brought down crime substantially. For me the term is meaningless, dangerous, its success a myth and it should be banned from policy discourse. Mayors of London should seek an alternative concept. But my main objection is that it comes from America! This is not provincial assertiveness, saying that the next time a boat arrives from the New World with an innovation we should dump it overboard. Rather, I contend that to assess zero tolerance we need to understand the nature of criminal justice in the United States; and should also be sceptical about transferring an ostensibly successful policy innovation from American society to another society (see Newburn and Jones, 2004). For in America there is no ‘system’ of criminal justice and of policing. There are hundreds of largely uncoordinated agencies in a highly decentralised structure. The powerful role of the central state in steering reform and change, as in the UK and some other European countries, is unknown. This means that much innovation is local. And in general the mayor is the key player; the police chief serves at the behest of the mayor, with an average tenure of two years. Furthermore, American society has traditionally been characterised by cycles of scandal and reform, by media-driven moral panics and by high profi le policy entrepreneurs. This is related to the dynamics of entire administrations changing following ’ elections and to the fact that many public offi cials stand for offi ce. One sees then a staccato, if not vacillating, element to policy and innovation related to changes in administration, the personalities of the leading players and shifting local circumstances. There is often poor policy transfer within America and even within states. Crucially, at the societal level in recent decades there has been a swing to the right on criminal justice and this has been fuelled by punitiveness. The process began with the election of President Reagan and was later adopted by President Clinton. The US has become the society of the ‘prison-industrial’ complex with some two million people locked up; a society of executions, of torture and of abuse of human rights. It is debateable then as to whether or not a criminal justice policy can be taken from that context, which is scarcely a beacon of enlightenment, and transferred to a different context. Transfer is not some mechanical exercise like putting a new saddle on a bike. ‘Zero tolerance’ was a sound bite that fi tted the shift to tough measures (see Punch, 2007). And in its New York form – attracting global attention and bringing droves of foreign pilgrims to witness the ‘miracle’ – it illustrated the role of personalities and of the local context in policy innovation in America. The background was remorselessly rising crime in American cities. In New York moreover there was a profound sense in the early 1990s that crime was damaging the city’s reputation and impacting on its economy. The morale of the police force, the NYPD (New York City Police Department), was poor as it was undergoing one of its periodic corruption scandals. Then two powerful personalities arrived in 1994. Rudolph Giuliani had risen from being District Attorney to Mayor (and later developed presidential ambitions). His mayoral campaign focused on law and order but particularly on tackling ‘nuisance’ offences in public places that disturbed citizens. William Bratton had earlier reduced crime on the New York subway and was recruited from Boston, where he had become police chief. Between them they championed what became known as ‘zero tolerance’ policing (or ‘ZTP’; both later disowned the term). They helped revitalise the NYPD, reclaimed public spaces, drove down ‘nuisance’ offences by ‘street people’ and elicited wide approval from the public; above all ZTP had apparently made crime fall signifi cantly. But was that really the case? But fi rst, what was the New York variant of ZTP? It rested on three pillars. Firstly, it put more cops on the streets with assertive patrolling and the relentless pursuit of ‘nuisance’ offences (such as begging). Secondly, it made commanders accountable for reducing crime in their precinct. It introduced the swift analysis of crime data and in ‘Compstat’, a command and control centre at headquarters, it brought pressure on commanders to perform in response to the data. The commanders were called at random and grilled by a senior offi cer in the presence of numerous offi cials and cops from abroad in a public gallery. There was an element of ‘kick ass’ in this management style, like the archetypical American football coach, while a Dutch police offi cer called it ‘management by fear’ (Punch, 2007). And thirdly, with help from private funding, there was a multi-agency approach to reclaiming public spaces – in parks, railway stations, subways and around public buildings – by investing in facilities and coordinating private security with public policing. This became known as the ‘Broken Windows’ approach; this implied that a broken window was a symbol of dilapidation that invited more broken windows; the message, then, was –

Book review: Simon Bronitt, Miriam Gani and Saskia Hufnagel (eds), Shooting to Kill: Socio-Legal Perspectives on the Use of Lethal Force

contexts when unpacking the complexities of why and how correctional colonial reproductions of culture, race, subjectivity and ‘offending’ may be either perpetuated or rewritten. Spivakovsky’s goal is an important one: to encourage criminological scholars to take up the project of examining the processes and practices by which racialization and criminal justice are mutually constructed. In her introduction, she explains that ‘as a person from Eastern European and Australian decent ... (p. 14) I have been raised to view the world through Western “norms”’. As such, she made the decision to cast her gaze upon western discourses and practices and upon those who participate in institutional manifestations through these lenses, rather than risk imposing western biases upon Aboriginal perspectives and experiences. While she draws on mostly western scholars working from a critical perspective, the book has little engagement with racialized and/or indigenous scholars from various nation states whose perspective may have contributed to her analysis. She asserts that this book ‘does not evaluate the program and practices it represents’ (p. 14) but rather illustrates ‘inscriptions of power and resistance on institutional and offender’s bodies’. Yet these inscriptions are racialized and colonial (and gendered, which she fails to note in much detail) and an engagement with post-colonial scholars may have deepened her analysis. Still, her genealogical approach to discourse and power within criminal justice policy and programming reveals the complex racialized dynamics of institutional grappling with over-representation of Aboriginal peoples. It also depicts the ways that state responsibility is elided through a slippery discourse of cultural difference. As such, this book will be of tremendous use to those interested in correctional practice, theory and policy and in unravelling the complexities of attempting anti-racist institutional change within criminal justice realms.