Policing after Casey: Between abolishing and reforming the police

In the wake of Black Lives Matter and their call to defund the police, the Casey Report on the serial failings of the Metropolitan Police, Liberty’s collaborative report, Holding Our Own, and the Police Race Action Plan produced by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, nobody can be in any doubt that transforming the police is now a mainstream concern that can no longer be ignored.

Reading these critiques can be a somewhat repetitive exercise, such is the level of agreement about the nature of the problem, aptly summed up by Casey’s succinct phrase that the Met is ‘institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic’.

But, if the description of the problem is similar, the choice of what is to be done differs, broadly along the lines of reformation – reforming the current institution – versus abolition – defunding the police and using the money to variously fund non-policing solutions to the problems currently dealt with by police.

Our task in what follows is to briefly analyse the nature of the problem, a task which, as we hope to show, offers a route towards a constructive dialogue between the reformers and the abolitionists.

To understand how the police routinely operate, we need to understand the structures within which policework is embedded and which enable or sometimes constrain their activities.

The legal structure

First and foremost is the law, their mandate to uphold the criminal law according to their lawful powers. But, since there are more laws being broken than the police can deal with, choices need to be made. Which crimes should be prioritised?

Through governance mechanisms like the Strategic Policing Requirement, substantially revised this year, and the forces’ Police and Crime Plans, it is possible to discern official public priorities.

However, accountability for performance remains obscure and hard to measure.

At the operational level, the Chief Constable must decide, in accordance with their Police and Crime Commissioner’s Plan, how much attention can be devoted to drugs, to domestic violence, to child sexual abuse, to rape, to cybercrime, etc. with their finite resources; at the level of the individual ‘copper’, the job may entail a clear field of action, such as traffic control, but much of it consists of reacting to public requests or looking out for incidents of disorder, in ways that present no clear legal agenda, especially in situations of dispute, or where there are multiple legal implications that could be pursued.

Should they be spending time stopping and searching for knives or drugs, or keeping an eye out for those using phones while driving, or talking to members of the community for useful ‘information’ that may at some point come in handy, and so on? The law provides no guidance here.

Similarly, individual laws are often unclear. Take public order law, with its notoriously vague wording about what constitutes an offence. It effectively gives the police, in law, a huge amount of discretion to decide whether a law has been broken, and what are the appropriate powers to apply.

In other words, the legal structure confers power but neither constrains the institutions effectively nor, often, the individual’s decision-making. Hence there is room for discrimination to spread and become embedded. What some see as police rule-breaking is often enabled by a weak legal structure.

Given this weak legal structure of accountability, what other structures operate to constrain and shape police behaviour?

The work structure

One is the organisation, or work environment, which consists of managerial policy with its rewards and punishments, and the cultural norms of the working group. Often seen as at odds – management rules and regulations being undermined by so-called ‘cop culture’ – in reality these form a single work structure which often fills the gap vacated by a permissive legal structure, which despite being more codified, fails to constrain police action in crucial ways or even expands their powers like the Section 60 search powers.

It is not surprising that officers are able to find ways to get round apparent obstacles, making work easier and safer for them. For example, the controversial practices of undercover officers have evolved in a vacuum of accountability.

However, it should not be overlooked that when the law is clear, the legal structure can be a strong determinant on behaviour, like, for example, a legally complicated case where failure to follow the legal rules will lead to an embarrassing failure in court, which neither management nor the lowly detective constable wants.

The democratic structure

The final structure is that of the community, those being policed. We call this the democratic structure. In terms of accountability, this is usually weak in comparison to the other two, not least because being beholden to law precludes partisanship, which is how the democratic structure can be seen by the police themselves: as special pleading.

The significance of elected representatives in determining policing policy tends to be diluted by the influences of legal and work structures, though public funding is central to the scale of policing – and rightly questioned by proponents of ‘defunding’.

This weakness is certainly true of the majority of those policed, since these tend to be the powerless and, sometimes in police eyes, unworthy of consideration, for example, vulnerable women, or those variously perceived as ‘outsiders’. Although the rich and powerful might appear to have a greater potential to influence policing, it appears that their interests are defended more indirectly, by the ways in which the police intervene to control the movements of suspect populations.

Between abolition and reform

This structural reality of policework is what both the reformers and the abolitionists will have to deal with.

In the case of reformers, reforming the work structure, which is where the bulk of attention is put, without attending to the legal structure, will not, ultimately, change much.

In the case of abolitionists, seeking non-policing solutions, which effectively bypass the legal structure, will require the construction of a new mandate to inform the (non)-policing behaviour, as well as attention to the nature of the community input, what the democratic structure should look like. Should it be self- selecting or elected? And, what criteria should determine their actions in the absence of a legal mandate? In pursuit of ‘defunding’, how can the resources currently invested in the police and other agencies be put under communities’ effective control and management?

In other words, both the reformist and the abolitionist route require a comprehensive overhaul of the structuring context of policework, if we are serious about transforming the future of a state institution which, legally, can use violence, including lethal violence, against us, the citizenry.

Roger Grimshaw is research director at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. Tony Jefferson is Emeritus Professor in Criminology at Keele University