Week 7: The police and policing

"We are accountable, I suppose, essentially to ourselves as a responsible body."
- James Anderton, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester (May 1987)

"Accountable: liable to be called to account or to answer for responsibilities and conduct; required or expected to justify one's actions, decisions, etc.; answerable, responsible"
- Oxford English Dictionary

In this week's lecture we looked at the work of the police. What are the police responsible for? How important is crime in defining the police's various responsibilities (crime prevention, crime reduction, crime investigation)? We looked at some figures on how the police actually spend their time, and considered a different way of looking at police work: perhaps (as Egon Bittner argued) the key factor which makes something a job for the police isn't crime, but the use of force. In other words, perhaps the kind of problem which the police deal with is the kind of problem that may need to be solved using force. The reason why the police attend football matches, for instance, isn't that crimes may be committed but that physical force may be needed to calm things down - or, at least, the threat of physical force may be needed to stop things getting too lively.

This definition still leaves a very wide field of activity: the police could spend their time dealing with anything from domestic violence to terrorism, from Saturday night disorder to organised crime, from anti-social behaviour to drug smuggling. If we start asking who decides what they actually do - and who judges how well they do it - we're asking about police accountability.

Borrowing from the dictionary definition above: to say that a person or an institution is accountable is to say that they're required to justify their actions and decisions. These are two very different things. If you're required to justify your decisions, that means that you have to explain what you've chosen to focus on - and the person asking you to explain can tell you that you've focused on the wrong things. (You may have thought that shoplifting and truancy were the two key problems facing your area, but you were wrong.) If you're required to justify your actions, on the other hand, that means that you have to explain what you've done - and at the end of it you can be told that you've done the wrong thing or you haven't done enough. (You may have thought that an extra CCTV camera would turn the shoplifting situation around, but it hasn't.)

(Before reading any further, cast your eye up the page and re-read that quotation from James Anderton. If the police in general took this approach, would they be accountable?)

Accountability can be tough, and imposing accountability on powerful people (like senior police officers) can be a very good way of keeping them on the straight and narrow. But there's a problem: who sets the standards that are used to keep the police accountable? And how do we decide who those people are?

The current answer to these two questions takes the form of Police and Crime Commissioners. Each police force area (outside Greater London) has a Police and Crime Commissioner. The police forces are each accountable to their Police and Crime Commissioner, who can judge whether their decisions are correct and whether their actions are adequate. The Police and Crime Commissioners in turn are accountable to the voters: if we think they're holding the police to account in the wrong way, we can vote them out of office.
 One issue with this kind of two-tier accountability (voters/PCC, PCC/police) is that it's a bit asymmetrical: the PCC has a lot more influence over the police than the voters can possibly have over the PCC. But there's a bigger problem, which is that the ways in which the police need to be held accountable may not be the ways in which the public want them to be held accountable. A particular police force might be doing well at reducing anti-social behaviour but have a massive problem with racism and sexism. In this situation, should the PCC concentrate on holding the police to account on dealing with racism and sexism? What if the public who elected the PCC didn't care about these issues, and wanted the police to concentrate on anti-social behaviour?

Here are some useful links on Police and Crime Commissioners, one year in.

BBC News (2013), "'One in three unaware' of police and crime commissioner", BBC News Web site, 14th November

Jon Collins (2013), "Elected police commissioners still have much to prove", Guardian, 12th November

ITV News (2013), "PCCs do 'three times as much work' as police authority", ITV NewsWeb site, 14th November.

Nick Tarver (2013), "Six fresh policing ideas from past 12 months", BBC News Web site, 14th November

Antony Wells, (2013), "Police and Crime Commissioners a year on", UK Polling Report blog, 14th November

Read (or watch) these Web pages and then think about these questions (you can write down your answers for future reference if you want to).

Who is your Police and Crime Commissioner?

Was your PCC elected as a party candidate or an Independent?

Does your PCC's political affiliation (or lack of one) affect your view of him or her? If so, why?

What do you think a PCC's main priority should be: telling the police what they're doing wrong or telling the police what the public want?

Do you think your PCC is doing a good job?

If you answered the last question No (or Don't Know), what do you think your PCC should do?