Week 9

This week we left the realms of theory and started looking at the actual criminal justice system (CJS for short), beginning with the police.

A point I've stressed on this unit is that the CJS isn't a perfect, coherent, logically designed system: it consists of a lot of separate agencies, each of which has grown and changed over time. This week's seminar exercise focuses on the broad range of goals the police are charged with achieving and the very different approaches they need to adopt in order to do so. The focus in the lecture was on how the police - and the police's relationship with government and society - has changed over time.

The key issues in the history of the police are power and accountability. Police forces, and chief constables in particular, have always wanted the power to do the job as they see fit, without being made accountable either to local authorities or to central government. Neither local authorities nor the Home Office have ever been keen on this idea; as a result, between the 1960s and the 1990s a three-way power struggle developed over who should be in charge of the police. The tug-of-war was resolved in 1994: it was established that chief constables would have free rein over operational matters, and that local authorities would not have any effective oversight; the police were to be governed through targets, guidelines and contracts, defined by the Home Office and implemented locally. This basic structure remained unchanged under both John Major and New Labour. Local democratic control was more or less non-existent; the police were pressured to do something about low-level disorder and anti-social behaviour, on the grounds that this was what "the people" wanted, but the pressure came from above, not from below.

The Coalition aims to change all of this: out goes the bureaucratic apparatus through which all those contracts and targets have been administered; out goes constabulary independence in favour of Home Office oversight over chief constables: and in come locally-elected Police and Crime Commissioners, with democratically-validated authority over the local chief constable. How this will work out we can't yet say, although it seems highly likely that penal populism will figure heavily in the platforms of the first wave of Police and Crime Commissioners, and that chief constables will push back against anyone trying to tell them what to do.