Policing the Crisis
Like so many movements for equality and social justice, the student protest movement in the UK and the occupy movement in the US have come up against the capitalist state in its most immediate and repressive form: the police. Robert Reiner is professor of criminology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Politics of the Police and Law and Order: An Honest Citizen's Guide to Crime and Control. He discussed with NLP’s Tom Mills the history of the police and its role in policing crime, inequality and political dissent.
What are the origins of the police and how was ‘law and order’ dealt with before the police were established?
Anthropological studies show that specialised legal systems and law enforcement emerge with the development of social complexity, and more particularly private property and inequality (references can be found in my book The Politics of the Police ,Chapter 1).
The police in the contemporary sense originated in early modern Europe as agents of the monarchy. In the UK creating such a body was argued for by a growing body of opinion in the 18th and early 19th century, but resisted by parts of the elite (especially the rural sections) and by the mass of the population (not represented in Parliament of course) successfully until 1829 when the Metropolitan Police were set up by Robert Peel. The shift towards supporting this in Parliament is attributable to a mix of shrewd Parliamentary tactics by Peel, playing down the role of the New Police, defusing fears about threats to liberty. But it is fundamentally due to the changing nature of power (growth of industrial relative to landed ruling class) and associated shifts in conceptions of order and the threat to it. As Alan Silver argues in his seminal 1967 article ‘The Demand for Order in Civil Society’, a more urban and industrial ruling class required more predictable, bureaucratic, legal and apparently universal means of maintaining order. Before that ‘keeping the peace’ was done by a mix of civilian service as watchmen and constables (usually actually performed by paid deputies), private detectives (like the Bow Street Runners), the rural yeomanry, and in the last resort the Army (discredited by ‘Peterloo’).
To what extent do you think common public perceptions of the police are out of step with the reality of how the police in fact operate?
Common perceptions have usually been out of step with policing practice, but in shifting ways. The key fact here is that most people in all classes have little or no contact with the police in any particular period. So conceptions are largely shaped by the media, not direct or even indirect experience.
In the ‘Golden Age’ of consensual policing in the mid-20th century, the Dixon of Dock green era, the poorer sections of the working class were largely ‘police property’ and there was much abuse of suspects. This is clear from police memoirs and oral histories. Since the 1960s the decline of deference, the growing social divisions, and the more intrusive and competitive media (and more recently the proliferation of citizen media devices) have focused more on police wrong-doing, so awareness of corruption and malpractice has become more widespread, possibly at the same time as the extent of malpractice may actually have declined.
But throughout police history a myth of ‘police fetishism’ has prevailed: that the police are the vital and crucial guardians and guarantors of public safety. Popular culture has long been saturated with news and fiction stories in which the Scotland Yard, the Mounties, the FBI etc. always ‘get their man’. Smart and tough police heroes are the bedrock of social safety. In reality most crimes (even in the narrow legal sense, let alone wrongs and harms perpetrated by the powerful that are ambiguous legally) are never recorded let alone detected. On official Home Office figures, only 2% of crimes (in the British Crime Survey, a vast underestimate) result in a conviction. There is huge public over-estimation of the actual and potential success of police in crime control. For a discussion of the evidence, see Chapter 5 of the current (2010) edition of Politics of the Police. My book Law and Order summarises the similar evidence about the (in)effectiveness of criminal justice as a whole.
This is a big question, but what is the relationship between inequality, crime and policing? Is it accurate to see the police as an instrument of repression necessitated by inequalities in wealth and power?
I think inequality is a key driver of crime (as shown in my Law and Order). More precisely, I think it's the sense of injustice, of unjustified inequality. Both property and violent crime are fuelled by what Robert K. Merton called ‘anomie’, unfulfilled expectations that are incapable of achievement by legitimate means. This flourishes throughout neoliberal societies, driving crime and truly ‘anti-social’ behaviour in the streets and the suites.
The complexity of analysing policing, however, derives from its Janus-faced character. In complex societies there is probably a need for policing to provide a universally beneficial ‘general’ order. But in all actually existing complex societies this is inextricably mixed with the maintenance of ‘particular’ order, an unequal structure of power and privilege. So policing is both universally beneficial and repressive. As Otwin Marenin puts it in the article I am drawing on for this point, they supply both ‘parking tickets and class repression’.
And poorer people and people of colour are policed more heavily and given less protection by the police?
A huge weight of empirical evidence demonstrates that police powers (stop and search, arrest, detention, prosecution) are used disproportionately against the poor, black, most other minority ethnic groups, the young, and generally the least powerful and privileged. This has been true throughout police history and in all societies where policing has been studied. There is no question that in practice the police are primarily an instrument for regulating the lower orders, for all the (much publicised) occasional corporate or political elite offenders they may occasionally deal with too. Although various prejudices and stereotypes feed this pattern, it is primarily structural: the result of broader inequalities and disadvantages. It is also the case that the disadvantaged are generally afforded less adequate protection against victimisation (crime surveys show clearly that less powerful and privileged people are disproportionately victims of crime).
The police have responded to the recent waves of political protests with some highly repressive actions and the student movement in particular has been subjected to serious violence and intimidation. Has political dissent always been ‘policed’ and have there been any significant historical trends or developments in this regard?
Dissent has always been policed. Before the modern police, largely by the elite’s retainers and by the military. The Silver article I cited earlier shows the need to legitimate this in an urban and industrial society was a driving motive for creating the police, wrapped in a mantle of legitimate enforcement of everyday criminal law. But as class conflict became institutionalised in the late 19th century, and with the spread of citizenship as T H Marshall analysed it, so the repressive public order role was attenuated. As Roger Geary put it in 1985, policing public disorder changed from a battle to a match. But in the 1970s and 80s, with the resurgence of more militant industrial and political conflict, as neo-liberalism dug in, so police public order tactics became increasingly militaristic and repressive, and this has intensified again with the fall-out from the economic collapse of recent years. This is all well-documented by a large literature, which I have tried to summarise in Chapters 2 and 3 of my Politics of the Police book.
And what about more explicitly political policing? Special Branch has been in the news recently because of its infiltration of environmental groups. What are its origins and significance?
When the modern police were first established in Britain in the early 19th century (against much opposition, especially from the working class), a major tactic in the attempt to legitimate them was to stress their role as routine crime prevention, denying any political policing. In fact some of the earliest scandals in the 1830s (the Popay case, Coldbath Fields) involved the policing of protest and Chartism. Nevertheless it was not until the 1880s that an explicitly political unit was set up, initially justified by Fenian terrorism, which became today's Special Branch. Although there are notable attempts to study its activities by investigative journalists (Tony Bunyan's The Political Police in Britain, Statewatch) there is no systematic empirical (or even historical) research on political policing in 20th/21st century Britain, largely because of the problems of access.
Tom Mills is a freelance investigative researcher based in London, a PhD candidate at the University of Bath and a co-editor of the New Left project.
About this article
Published on 26 January, 2012
By Robert Reiner, Tom Mills