Mike Stephens

Care and control: The future of British policing

The paper focuses on the interplay of care and control functions within the British police. There are several areas of police activity, such as child sexual abuse investigations, sexual assault, and the handling of the mentally ill, where there is already an operational mixture of care and control functions. Recently, the police have emphasised the service and care nature of their work. Indeed, there are good operational and ethical reasons to do so. However, the governments priority, expressed through such documents as the White Paper on police reform, the report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, and the Sheehy Report, appears to be one of enhancing the polices control functions. An emphasis on a combination of care and control would, however, result in greater benefits than a focus predominantly on control alone. The paper highlights the obstacles that the police service must overcome to realise that combination.

The Matrix of Care and Control

It is not that individuals fail to appreciate and perceive subtleties, nor to recognise interconnections; it is that in some areas of life we frequently prefer strong and clear messages. We form partial images of many types of activity, which seem to operate at times as a kind of social shorthand. These allow us to distil quickly what we perceive to be the essence of those activities. As far as the police are concerned, and with the image of the Dixon of Dock Green kind of bobby now fast receding from the public’s direct experience and consciousness, there is perhaps an understandable tendency to view the activities of the police as primarily a controlling set of functions.

Policing and accountability: the working of police authorities

In recent times policing has attracted a good deal of controversy, such as the paramilitary tactics employed at demonstrations, the use of stop and search powers under the Terrorism Act 2000, and the manner in which police officers are deployed on day-to-day duties. This paper outlines the role and potential of police authorities to influence police policy and operations and also highlights the need to seek greater citizen participation in holding the police to account. The major part of the paper draws on ground-breaking research on police authorities using questionnaire and in-depth interview data to outline just how it is that police authority members approach their duties.

Police Encounters with the Mentally Ill: The Role of the Crisis Intervention Service

With the advent of new drug regimes in the 1950s more and more mentally ill patients found themselves being discharged from long-term incarceration in hospital. In 1961 this policy of deinstitutionalisation became official when Enoch Powell, the then Minister of Health, suggested that the majority of longstay mental hospitals should be closed. As a result, the number of patients housed in long-stay hospitals in England and Wales fell from about 150,000 in the mid-1950s to 60,000 by the beginning of 1992. In March 1992, it was reported that 60 of the remaining 90 psychiatric hospitals were planned for closure over the next five years. The policy of deinstitutionalisation clearly has further mileage. Indeed, the ‘twinning’ of deinstitutionalisation with the development of community care initiatives has, in large part, served to justify the closure of psychiatric hospitals and the discharge of their patients.

Introduction: Force is Part of the Service

This book takes us to the centre of the debate about care and control in the police service. The police face new and renewed challenges to their traditional modes of operation, posed amongst other things by a heightened public and media concern with lawlessness and wrongdoing, by the escalation in reported crime, and by an uncharacteristic assault on the police body politic from a government concerned to improve performance, quality and value for money in all publicly funded utilities (see, for example, Sinclair and Miller, 1984; Audit Commission, 1990; Home Office, 1993; Sheehy, 1993). A rehabilitation of the care/control debate is urgent-it is at the heart of the matter about the future direction of British policing. The ways in which policy makers, chief constables and rank and file officers address the critical balance between care and control, and engage with the policy and procedural issues, will have major implications for the shape, goals and legitimacy of the police service up to, and beyond, the millennium.

Safer Guildford: A case study of a public sector partnership between a borough council and the police in the UK

There has been an increasing trend in recent years for public agencies to work in partnership with each other and with commercial organizations, which has presented special managerial issues and problems. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 gave the police and local authorities a statutory duty to work in partnership in order to promote and improve community safety. One such partnership is Safer Guildford, which was formed before the legislation came into force and which consequently already had a range of community safety initiatives in place. However, the partnership still had to comply with the new legislation and had to conduct an audit of crime and disorder in its area and publish a strategy for dealing with it. By examining the progress of Safer Guildford using a management perspective, a number of lessons can be drawn that will inform the future management of community safety partnerships.

The Madison model of community care for the mentally ill: Some lessons for Britain

Abstract In the light of the governments plan to overhaul the system of community care for the mentally ill and to introduce a new policy committed to protecting the public as well as to supporting the mentally ill, now is an appropriate time to throw light on some of the governments individual proposals. At the heart of the new policy will be a focus on secure accommodation, 24-hour nursing care, outreach teams, crisis intervention capabilities and more acute mental health beds. In addition, greater work opportunities for the mentally ill are to be explored and there is to be a thorough reexamination of the Mental Health Act. However, there are also elements of compulsion at the heart of the governments strategy, as community care orders and provisions for compulsory restrictions on those with severe personality disorders testify. Compulsory community treatment runs the great risk that it will prove to be counterproductive and turn people away from seeking help. In Madison, Wisconsin, there has operat...

Policing and Internal Security

All societies require mechanisms for preserving social order and control. Among the most prominent of these are the police and the security or intelligence services. This chapter concentrates on the work of the police, as it is the police that have the higher public profile and the greater impact in the majority of instances relating to the normal social activities of a country. Furthermore, given that within Britain there are distinct police organizational structures in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England and Wales, this chapter will focus on the largest police body in England and Wales.

Community safety and the mentally ill: How to improve community care

Government plans for the mentally ill include elements of compulsion such as indefinite detention for those with severe personality disorders. In contrast, in Madison, Wisconsin, USA community safety is assured through an integrated network of services dedicated to supporting the mentally ill in the community.

Book Reviews : Liberty and Order: public order policing in a capital city P.A.J. Waddington UCL Press Ltd, London, 1994, £12.95 pbk

Waddington was allowed almost three years of unprecedented access to the Metropolitan Police to observe their handling of recent public order events, such as demonstrations, protest marches, ceremonial events and carnivals, in London. He was witness not only to extensive briefings and planning meetings, which preceded such events, but also to on-the-ground observations of the actual course of public order situations. The author argues that we should not only take protest seriously as part of our democratic tradition, but equally we should take careful note of the policing of protest and how this might contribute to or detract from that tradition. During the 1980s there was a considerable increase in police powers, especially with the passage in 1986 of the Public Order Act, which caused some commentators to talk of the development of a growing paramilitarism in the police. Waddington, however, argues that this Act did not significantly expand the powers of the police, whose common law authority to interfere with civil liberties remains great, so much as codify existing powers. Indeed, Waddington maintains that during the period of his research major protest regarding contentious issues passed off in London without the police extensively using the powers granted to them under the Public Order Act. Why then, he asks, do the police not use their legal powers and their paramilitary capabilities more frequently? The argument that we are drifting into a state of police paramilitarism ignores, according to Waddington, the context and reality of everyday policing in which under-enforcement of the law is commonplace. In terms of public order events, the police wish to minimise trouble and disorder and to maintain control. Far from wishing to provoke confrontation with demonstrators, the police seek to avoid trouble whenever possible. Confrontation may cause two kinds of ‘grief’ for the police; on-the-job trouble in terms of having to deploy the panoply of paramilitary activities, and inthe-job trouble both in terms of the severe criticism that may subsequently flow from politicians and public and in terms of possible censure from the