This week we’re looking at policing in England and Wales. Amid repeated scandals and signs of poor performance, is policing in crisis? If so, what needs to change? And how likely is it that such change will actually happen?
In recent years, policing in England and Wales has appeared to be trapped in a cycle of crisis. From high-profile scandals to criticisms of operational standards, concerns about the police’s role and conduct have intensified. Perhaps most shockingly, a serving police officer was convicted of the murder of Sarah Everard, a tragedy that underscored the urgent need for accountability within the force.
A subsequent review by Baroness Louise Casey highlighted deep-seated issues within the Metropolitan Police Service, pointing to "institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia" within the organization. Meanwhile, there’s a growing perception that the police have deprioritized certain types of crime, like shoplifting. Political figures, too, have weighed in, accusing the police of double standards in their approach to protests and civil unrest.
All of this has contributed to a significant decline in public trust. So, what exactly are the root issues? What realistic solutions could address these complex problems? And how might the current political climate impact the feasibility of any reforms?
To explore these pressing questions, we are joined by three experts in crime and policing:
Together, Ben, Jon, and Emmeline have edited a new special issue of The Political Quarterly titled Policing the Permacrisis, which dives into these challenges and potential solutions. Regular listeners might recall that The Political Quarterly shares our goal of making cutting-edge political and policy research accessible to a broad audience beyond academia. This episode marks the second installment in our occasional series where we discuss insightful work published in the journal.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:00] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics and this week we're looking at policing in England and Wales. Amid repeated scandals and signs of poor performance, is policing in crisis?
If so, what needs to change, and how likely is it that such change will actually happen?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick, and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. Policing in England and Wales has seemed in recent years to be in a perpetual cycle of crisis. There have been multiple scandals, most prominently the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer.
A review by Baroness Louise Casey found that there was institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia in the Metropolitan Police Service here in London. There are perceptions that the police have given up on tackling some forms of crime, such as shoplifting. Some prominent politicians have accused the police of double standards in their handling of protests and riots.
And amidst all of this public trust has fallen. So what exactly are the problems? What might be the solutions? And does the political context make the implementation of such solutions at all likely? To unpack this complex topic, I'm delighted to be joined today by three renowned experts on crime and policing.
Ben Bradford is Professor of Global City Policing in the Department of Security and Crime Science here at UCL. Jonathan Jackson is Professor of Research Methodology in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics. And Emmeline Taylor is Professor of Criminology in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City, University of London.
Ben, Jon and Emmeline are the co editors of a new special issue of the journal, The Political Quarterly, called Policing the Permacrisis. As regular listeners may remember, The Political Quarterly, much like this podcast, seeks to make cutting edge research about politics and policy accessible to a wide audience beyond academia.
And this is the second in an occasional series of episodes in which we'll be drawing on articles published within it. Ben, Emmeline, and Jon, welcome all of you to UCL Uncovering Politics. It's great to see you here today. And let's start with a very broad question. You've put together this special issue of the journal.
What was it that made you want to do this special issue? What's the nature of the problem, the crisis that you're seeking to address? And what did you want to explore in relation to that? Ben, do you want to start us off?
[00:02:49] Ben Bradford: Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I mean, as you say, it certainly seems as if there's a moment of legitimacy crisis in England, policing in England and Wales at the very least. And while in a sense that's always been true, I mean, policing is inherently difficult, it involves making difficult decisions in situations where you haven't got much information, are incredibly consequential involves dealing with people at moments of life changing stress, its politicized.
It faces a complex, never changing set of social situations, harms processes, debates and so on. So policing has always been controversial for these reasons and other, but at the present point in time, there seems to be something particularly going on. Partly for some of the reasons that you alluded to there about the scandals around things that have happened within the force, highlighted most obviously in the Casey report, which came out last year, which I'm sure we'll come back to several times as we go through, through this podcast.
So there's not only scandals of that kind, but they're coming off the back of a long, for example, a long period of austerity that started when the new coalition government came in 2010, police budgets were reduced in ways that just hadn't happened in the past, which had a number of consequences, for example, the withdrawal of policing from many neighbourhood activities, making police less visible, less available to people, closing of police stations, lots of internal reform or change. At least off the back of that. Those are austerity cuts. So it really seems like there's a moment in the last couple of years when all these things have come together. Another example would be the Black Lives Matter protests, particularly 2010 - 2020 rather - which is another, another element to that whole situation. And these things together just have created this moment. We wanted to add to the debate around that while at the same time recognizing a lot of the issues that we talk about in the special edition, we talk about in the study of policing are really long running issues that have been going on for decades in some cases.
[00:04:44] Emmeline Taylor: I'd absolutely agree with that. And you know, some of these are really you know, long established issues and they're recurrent, but the speed with which they appear appears to be quickening up, the police have barely recovered from one crisis before they seem to be lurching into the next one.
I think for me as well, when the invitation first landed to pull together this special issue, it was really about the, some of the audience of Political Quarterly. So we know that it's well read in Westminster. Uh, we know that, you know, it's focused on those sort of policy implications and solutions. So really, in bringing together the various authors, it was, yes, we can all identify the various issues and we're quite well versed in some of these critical stances taken against the police, but what should happen as a result?
And that's really what we focus on. So there's various solutions that are addressed and presented. There's certainly not one view, it's quite holistic. So there's multiple workable ideas. And for me, I think that was what we were aiming for. We were first invited to put together three or four articles that really got to the, you know, the real nub of the issue.
But when we sat down, you know, we quickly identified 14-15 authors and topics that absolutely had to be included. And we were really honored that pretty much everyone agreed when we sent that invitation out.
[00:06:04] Ben Bradford: I think I did a good job.
[00:06:08] Alan Renwick: All was good when you were putting together a special issue as an editor.
And can you tell us a little bit more, and maybe Jon, you can come in on this, on the nature of the roster of authors that you put together. Because it's quite a mix. It's partly academics, it's partly a range of different practitioners. What shaped that?
[00:06:22] Jon Jackson: I mean, I think there's a lot of academics there, but there's some ex police officers, there's people who work in think tanks, people who work for uh, government organizations. So we wanted voices to be, to come from within and between and from outside.
[00:06:35] Alan Renwick: And it felt to me sometimes like there was a bit of a difference in voice between the academics in kind of traditional universities and academics working at the College of Policing with a more kind of practical hands on approach.
Is that fair?
[00:06:48] Emmeline Taylor: Yeah.
[00:06:48] Alan Renwick: And so the title of the special issue refers to the idea of permacrisis. What does that mean? And why was that an appropriate term to use to describe the situation that we see here? Ben?
[00:07:04] Ben Bradford: So permacrisis refers to David Shariat Mandari. He has a definition of permacrisis, which just seems to sum up very closely what's going on in policing his definition of a permacrisis is a dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be found around them.
And that does actually sum up what's going on, has been going on in policing the last few years.
[00:07:31] Alan Renwick: Yeah, that really sums up what Emmeline was just describing there in terms of just seeing they have a never ending series of crises.
[00:07:36] Ben Bradford: Yeah, and everyone, in a sense, everyone in and around policing is certainly waiting to see what
[00:07:43] Jon Jackson: and they're recurring, not new horrors.
[00:07:44] Ben Bradford: Yeah.
[00:07:46] Jon Jackson: They seem to be recurring horrors.
[00:07:48] Emmeline Taylor: So I think it's, you know, we wanted authors to begin to, you know, be able to identify why that is, why don't they get resolved, we all teach policing in various aspects in our academic careers. And it seems that we're, just updating the literature, that the students need to read with the latest inquiry or the latest review of the police that will culminate in various recommendations.
But it's almost as if something is preventing those from being embedded in new policing cultures. And that's where I think these authors really begin to contribute to, how do we redefine policing? What the police are, what they should be, and what our expectations of the police can be.
[00:08:27] Alan Renwick: We'll get into some of those general questions later, but it's maybe useful to go into the specifics of some individual articles before trying to tackle the general.
And so Emmeline, let's stick with you. One of the articles that you're an author on focuses on shoplifting and the problems around policing shoplifting. Do you want to tell us about that article, but what's the issue and what are the the points that you're trying to make in that article.
[00:08:52] Emmeline Taylor: Yeah, absolutely.
So there's several papers that address particular crime types within the special issue, and I've authored one which is around what I describe as a shoplifting epidemic in the UK. And the reason that I focus on shop theft is because I believe it's quite a good barometer for assessing the health of a nation, when we have elevated levels of acquisitive crime, when seemingly, you know, everyday people are very willing to sort of break their sort of social contracts, in terms of not stealing or being honest in stores. I feel that's a really important area to begin to look at. But it also presents major issues for policing. Policing high volume crime has always been challenging or has its own set of challenges to other criminal types. And so I was interested in shop theft because the root causes are typically social.
So it could be drug addiction, homelessness, poverty all of which we know were exacerbated through austerity. Alongside those austerity measures where we saw the disinvestment in various services, we, of course, saw the disinvestment in the police as well, and that brought forth changes in their operational strategies, as well as removing the number of officers on the beat, which was obviously very well publicized at the time.
The article outlines a chronic underreporting of shop theft, and I think that's important because it begins to convey a lack of confidence in the police, a lack of trust in the police, which I know Ben and Jon will talk about very competently later. But just to illustrate that, so in the 12 months up until March this year, there were 440,000 incidents of shop theft reported to the police.
The British Retail Consortium suggests that figure is actually around 17 million incidents of theft that occurred over a similar time frame. So we've got less than 3 percent of incidents of shop theft being reported. That in itself poses a problem, and we're seeing organized criminal gangs now targeting the retail sector as a result because they see that it's high reward, it's low risk.
And so that's just one of the problems. But when you then look at those less than 3 percent that are reported, over half are closed with no suspects identified. So again, we've got this issue with how confident can people be if the police are not able to respond to and then solve what seems to be a relatively simple crime such as shop theft.
[00:11:22] Alan Renwick: And you also in the article explore what can be done about this and what action can be taken in order to deal with it, at least start to turn that around.
[00:11:31] Emmeline Taylor: Absolutely. So I think we need more visibility. I don't necessarily believe the answer is that every crime is reported and that would quadruple police recorded crime overnight.
And, you know, politically, I don't think that's a particularly tempting proposition. So what I suggest could be established as a national retail crime intelligence bureau, which would mirror what happened with fraud when fraud cases began to go through the roof around 15 years ago, and that could be co funded by uh, by the private sector.
Potentially, we've seen some brilliant examples of retail sector funding, for example, a unit, a strand of the, uh, serious organized acquisitive crime unit, known as OPL, because they recognize that the police have finite resources. I think that poses some really interesting questions around the future of policing. Partnership for me is one of those potential solutions where you can redefine the parameters of what the police can and should do, but you have to be able to bring in other partners to fill the void.
[00:12:36] Alan Renwick: And how far do you think that would get us? I mean, are you suggesting that would kind of, uh, resolve the problems around shoplifting or are these kind of small measures that would start to move us in the right direction?
Do they need to be part of a wider whole? And where are you thinking we get to through the sorts of measures that you're talking about?
[00:12:57] Emmeline Taylor: Yeah, I mean, one of the key aspects of this, we know that, you know, criminals, typically, will do that you know, that assessment of risk and reward. Currently, it's very low risk to commit shop theft in this country.
And we don't have adequate visibility on who the offenders are. So whether they're opportunistic whether they're organized criminal gangs, as we've been seeing in the press this week, we're hearing about the Champagne gang who've been targeting retail across the UK and, you know, sitting tens of thousands of pounds of champagne and with seeming impunity.
And then we also don't know how many of those offenders are a result of social factors. So homelessness, drug addiction, for example, as I've already mentioned. So we don't have a very sophisticated way of dealing with those individuals. And it's only through that enhanced data that we can begin to know what the correct or appropriate sanctions or solutions, whether it's rehabilitation versus punishment, we don't quite know what that should be.
[00:13:58] Alan Renwick: So the situation we're in now is that, we, it's not just that we're not implementing a solution, but actually we don't know yet clearly what the solution is and we need to take steps in order to get there.
[00:14:08] Emmeline Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's really key to say, you know, this isn't for the police to solve the maybe add social issues that are, very present across England and Wales, but we just need to know that they can be relied on. When somebody does call them for less than 3 percent of reports, they're the more serious and high value crimes that do need to be addressed.
[00:14:31] Alan Renwick: Fascinating. Let's go to a very different article then. Ben and Jon, your article in the special issue is about trust in the police and changing levels of trust in different communities in the police.
Do you want to tell us about that? Maybe Jon, you should start.
[00:14:44] Jon Jackson: Sure, happy to. So, uh, we start the paper just with a simple observation that trust in the police relative to other institutions remains high. You know, even though the trust in the NHS is going down trust in the police is still high compared to most other public institutions.
So for instance, in 22-23, 68 percent of people reported overall confidence in the police compared to 79 percent eight years ago. In London the belief that police are doing a good job has gone down from 70 percent in 2017 to 50 percent in 2023. That's true for females as well as males. So there's a problem.
[00:15:18] Alan Renwick: And those are really quite dramatic shifts in trust. I mean, as someone who looks at data on trust on lots of things over the years, you don't often see shifts of that scale.
[00:15:27] Jon Jackson: No.
[00:15:28] Alan Renwick: Which I guess suggests that there are kind of particular things and we've been talking about some of the specific events but people are very much seeing those events and responding to them.
[00:15:36] Jon Jackson: That's right, I mean, I think yeah trust in the police is probably quite sticky just like trust in the NHS it's probably quite sticky because of the cultural kind of significance of it. So yeah, we should take seriously decreases. So we talk about some different types of causes, high profile incidents like the murder of Sarah Everard, police mishandling of sexual violence cases, combined with cultural failures. So the failure to address deep seated issues of misogyny, racism and sexism. We talk about disproportionate policing having damaged police legitimacy.
So ethnic and racial disproportionality, like stop and search, use of force, has exacerbated distrust amongst minoritized communities. And we also talk about a lack of visibility, engagement, and responsiveness. Contributed to a sense of abandonment, this links to retail crime, but also just the lack of visible policing and the lack of the sense that if you ring them, they'll do something.
[00:16:30] Alan Renwick: And I found it quite striking when I was looking at the data that you present in the article that although there are different levels of trust in different parts of society, all parts of society are seeing declining trust. So you kind of see lots of parallel lines in some of the charts.
What's going on there? Ben, do you want to come in?
[00:16:50] Ben Bradford: I think, yeah, there's often less socio demographic variation than you might expect in levels of trust in the police. It's often quite flatter across different groups than people might suppose. And I think the general decline maps both onto the kind of the fact that this is to do with high profile cases, Sarah Everard, the Casey Review, these scandals at the centre of policing.
But it's also to do with the kind of the decline in policing services in people's neighborhoods, which has been again, equally spread across different communities and different types of neighborhoods. Many different types of people feel that the police never sense that have, in a sense, abandoned them.
So the court, the kind of causes are fairly constant across groups. And then, of course, you add on top of that long running issues are kind of Jon was just describing between the police and specific communities, for example, many black communities in London. So there is some variation. But that's longstanding.
The decline is due to factors that are quite consistent across different groups.
[00:17:44] Alan Renwick: I was also interested that you argue in the article that although trust in the police is high relative to many other institutions, trust is in a sense particularly important when we're looking at the police. Our whole model of policing kind of relies on trust in order to function effectively.
[00:18:02] Jon Jackson: I mean, I think in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, people trusted the police too much to some degree.
[00:18:08] Alan Renwick: We know during that period there was rampant, is that fair, misogyny, homophobia, racism, corruption,
[00:18:14] Jon Jackson: And intensely high levels of trust.
But having said that we know from lots of evidence, lots of studies that trust and legitimacy are important because without them, we have hard power traps, where if policing by consent is withdrawn, then the police need to be more aggressive to get the compliance and cooperation of the public because people don't want to comply with them and cooperate voluntarily and that can lead to more confrontational and less effective policing, which reduces trust and legitimacy and we talk also about low cooperation traps.
And we use the example of sexual violence and rape victim survivors. And so, if you're a a victim of such harm and you don't trust the police to to investigate the crime and support you then then this damages the functionality of the legal system. They can't show that they do this job properly if nobody comes forward in the first place.
[00:19:05] Alan Renwick: What then can be done about low trust?
[00:19:09] Ben Bradford: We identified four or so things in the paper, none of which I don't think are particularly revelatory. Again, people have been talking about this stuff for a long period of time. So we talk about procedural justice, which is all about improving the quality of the interactions between police officers and members of the public, particularly in those kind of mundane, everyday encounters, which are the bulk of police interactions with people out there, in the real world.
And that's all to do with improving. communication, those encounters improving the sense to which people feel they're respected by the police, making those mutual exchanges of information, and so on. But we're also very careful to say that procedural justice does change in the way that individual officers act.
It's not a silver bullet, it's not going to solve all the problems that currently face policing. So we, again, we also talk about re engaging communities. Getting people to feel that the police are present and back in their community, which many people currently feel they're really not. A strong sense of kind of abandonment in public discourse around policing talk to people about these things. The police aren't here anymore, I never see them, they don't care about us, they're not here. doing work for us. We talk about reforming internal culture, so addressing some of those issues of misogyny and racism and so forth, what we talked about at the top of the show.
And those are very long, very longstanding themes and kind of academic and policy discourse in this area. The other thing we identify, which again is not particularly new, but does frame things in a slightly different way, perhaps, it's talking about policing doing less. So often, the police response to a problem is to do more policing better.
And obviously that's going to be important in some places in some ways. But it may be the case that just there are some elements of policing, stop and search is a really good example, which just damage the relationship between the police and community. And the way to stop that, relationship damage further is just to stop doing so much stuff, stop and search, and there may be other examples in policing as well, particularly around new surveillance powers where the police just didn't go there or pulled back from some of the things that they're doing, which do damage trust or at least inhibit growth of trust and confidence over time, that might also be an important part of the mix, and that possibly taps into an idea that again we might come back to later is, we need to think quite carefully about what the police are for, and particularly what the public think the police are for, and trying to align those things more closely.
[00:21:25] Alan Renwick: Before we get to that, let's bring Emmeline in again on this issue of trust, because you've got two articles in the special issue, and the other one is, I guess, focused on one aspect of trust, or one form of low trust in the police, and one potential solution to that. Do you want to tell us about that?
[00:21:43] Emmeline Taylor: Yeah.
Yeah, so the other paper that I've co authored with Arabella Kipriyanidis begins to look at some of those more historical incidents, high profile incidents of harmed communities and begin to look at perhaps how they can be remedied. We began to see that there's almost a trend in the way that these incidents is almost like a tinderbox.
And so something will happen and it triggers these deep seated harms or these historical memories that have harmed communities. I mean, some of the examples might be around, you know, the failure of the police to investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence adequately, or the Hillsborough disaster, or more recently the policing of the Black Lives Matter protests.
And you can argue that, these incidents have all had impacts on communities well beyond those that are immediately involved within them. And you can see then generationally that some of the harms can be passed on through communities and families. So we wanted to see are there examples from other areas around reconciliation which potentially, we could then lend to the police as a framework to begin to try and resolve some of these more deep seated issues.
And so we looked at what some of the hallmarks of successful sort of interventions have been across a range of areas, including housing, for example. And we began to explore what some of the reconciliatory actions could look like. And some of this seems quite obvious. It's about sincerity. It's about listening to the community and actually addressing and acknowledging where harms have taken place.
So one of the more promising aspects of this was around using well established things such as restorative justice to actually begin to acknowledge and then repair the harms that have occurred. And with Arabella, you know, we feel very strongly that without that process in place, without that genuine commitment to repair harms, we will just see the same issues spark up time and time again, sometimes decades after the original incident that caused those harms.
[00:23:47] Alan Renwick: And just thinking practically about what that reconciliation process actually looks like, what it involves what are the kind of concrete steps that the police would need to take there?
[00:23:56] Emmeline Taylor: I think the really key thing for us is around this being community led and really involving the individuals and local voices to shape processes, I think are really, you know, the key ingredient for any sort of success. So it's around. having that understanding of community needs, reflecting back to what some of the past harms were collaboration.
So building trust through partnerships and through community groups, but it really speaks to what Ben mentioned before as well around those sort of operational strategies around the police being embedded within communities. And I think that's one of the things that we lost through austerity measures was that emphasis around sort of neighborhood policing, that link to communities, really understanding on the ground what's happening and the social and cultural sensitivities around policing.
And so I think, you know, stop and search, is a really good example where that can potentially trigger past harms, whereas current police officers might not necessarily have that social and historical awareness of things that have occurred through previous policing practices.
[00:25:04] Alan Renwick: Great. Thank you.
That's really clear. And I find it very striking just thinking about those three articles that we've talked about, and there's a ton more articles in this special issue. I think there are 16 in total, aren't there? There's just such a diversity of issues addressed by these articles, both in terms of the nature of the problems and also the nature of the solutions to say, you know, we're talking about shoplifting at one end of the scale, if you like, and just a kind of failure to do basic crime fighting there, if you like, and solutions there are thinking very much in terms of kind of the basics of the policing process that will allow that to be resolved.
But then we're also talking about these big kind of macro social difficulties and structural problems in how the police relate to parts of society and really big potential solutions to these as well. Are these just kind of lots of disparate bits and pieces that are all coming together at the same time in a really difficult period for the police?
Or can we say that actually there are some unifying factors, there are some kind of deeper underlying causes that, that underpin everything that's taking place here? Ben, do you want to come in?
[00:26:17] Ben Bradford: Yeah, can I identify two to start us off? The first is, that we've, I think, collectively have somewhat lost sight of the facts, and Emmeline already alluded to it really, that the police aren't really the solution to many of the problems we ask them to confront.
There isn't really a policing solution, a solution to shoplifting. That solution lies in the people who do the shoplifting, so in the public and in the shops and the businesses that run them. They're the ones together who could solve that problem, the police are those who come in when, if you like, those other systems have failed.
And this is replicated across lots of different areas. So policing is about kind of failure demand at the kind of societal level. Yeah we currently ask and often ask the police to provide those solutions. Police need to do something about shoplifting. The police need to do something about sexual violence.
Well, that's true. They need to do something about the cases of shoplifting and the cases of sexual violence that are identified to them, but the solutions for those things lay elsewhere. And there's a real sense in which the absolute core function of policing, which is, in a sense, to turn up when something has gone wrong and provide a proximate solution, possibly by the application of force, is absolutely central to the function of police.
That's what the public think the police are. There's a famous sociologist, a sociologist of policing called Egon Bittner and his definition of the police. The police of the organization who you call when something ought not to be happening is happening and about which someone had better do something now.
And that's quite ingrained in the way that people think about policing. So when people call the police, and they might not turn up to their bike theft or even look like they particularly care about that. People really take that on board. So there's something about realigning those things that have got lost in the current debate.
[00:27:55] Alan Renwick: Emily?
[00:27:55] Emmeline Taylor: I think when we sent the invitations out to the people that we really knew had something to say on this topic, we gave them, pretty much free reign on what they wanted to write about and the solutions that they would propose. So as editors, as those articles came in, we suddenly then had that job of, you know, what are the core thematics here?
Are there similarities? Or as you say, you know, is this just a very disparate collection of, you know, some range of ideas. But we could then begin to impose that there are really key themes, completely different topics, from the culture of policing, different crime types, recruitment, retention, misogyny, but we begin to see that there's parallel thinking throughout.
And I think for me, some of this, you know, we mentioned having to do more with less. I think a key thing is around technology as well. How can we better use the information and data that is available? We often talk about data lakes and the police have a huge amount of information being fed into them.
Because I always think of the police as sort of data islands, there's 43 different police forces and they don't seem very good at communicating with one another. They're not very good at seeing all the time sort of a national trend or the national picture. And that makes it really challenging.
For each and every one of those individual forces because it's almost as if they're having to invent everything from scratch every time. There's a really interesting report that's been published by the Police Foundation this week and their director Rick Miur has authored a piece within our special issue and they outline that 90 percent of the money invested in police technology is spent maintaining existing systems.
Yet we talk about living in this digital revolution. But I think this is where the police need to improve. It's around using new technologies, using artificial intelligence. Having more data analysts, I think, would really begin to improve the productivity of the police and hopefully begin to address some of those issues of confidence.
[00:29:59] Alan Renwick: Jon?
[00:30:00] Jon Jackson: Well, I think overall, we argue for cultural reform, resource reallocation, a fundamental rethinking of the police's role in modern society. Doing smarter policing means rethinking the role of the police, possibly fundamentally. It means using data and evidence in ways that are better used it in the past and currently and, it means taking seriously contributions of other actors and agencies in interlinked processes of care and social control.
[00:30:30] Alan Renwick: And do you think there's political appetite for those changes? I mean, when you talk about rethinking the role of policing. That sounds like quite a frightening thing for a relatively new Home Secretary to propose. Do you think there is will to do that?
[00:30:45] Jon Jackson: We argue for a Royal Commission, which might help.
[00:30:49] Emmeline Taylor: I think you know, Einstein is always misquoted on this or misattributed, I'm not entirely sure if it is his quote that the definition of madness is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome. So something like a Royal Commission, I think, is absolutely needed. We do need it need to rethink the police.
There isn't going to be more and more resources. We've got an increasingly complex set of criminal issues. We've got more social problems that now present themselves to the police as well. So I think really having that view of how can we change things for the better? I think there is political appetite for that.
[00:31:27] Alan Renwick: It seems to me that this is an issue that politicians often feel they're led by tabloid headlines to some extent. You know, they're terrified of, uh, some scandal on the front of the Daily Mail that suggests that they haven't been doing their jobs properly.
And, finding some way of enabling politicians to kind of step back from that and impose a more kind of thoughtful process of policy making. Uh, in, I mean, in many areas seems desirable, but I guess that seems to be particularly important in this area. And I guess the hope would be that a Royal Commission would create the space for something like that.
[00:32:03] Ben Bradford: Yeah, absolutely. We need to stop thinking about policing as if it's a quick fix. So, you know, the problem of crime, what we're going to do, we're going to get the police to do with it. If we could get out of that kind of mindset and reposition the police within the whole set of institutions that are dealing with problems of crime and order that might be a way to proceed that kind of swerves around that problem.
Because you're absolutely right. The Home Office, police and crime commissioners, senior police officers have traditionally been paralysed by what the Daily Mail headline is going to be tomorrow and remain like that really at the present point in time. And that is a question of political will. It's also a question, I think, of taking a clear eyed view, a look at policing and wondering if we can carry on the way we are at the moment.
I mean, exactly, we've been carrying on in that way for 40 years and it hasn't worked yet. So time for something new, perhaps.
[00:32:50] Alan Renwick: Well, fantastic. Thank you all very much. This has been a canter through a hugely complex area and we've really only scratched the surface. But. It's been really interesting to listen to all of you. I've learned a great deal through this discussion.
We have been discussing the new special issue of Political Quarterly called “Policing the Permacrisis”, edited by Ben Bradford, Jonathan Jackson, and Emmeline Taylor. It contains, as I said, 16 articles in total on different challenges facing policing in England and Wales today, and we will, as ever, put the details in the show notes for this episode.
Our next episode here on UCL Uncovering Politics will be looking at the results of the US presidential election and their consequences both for the United States itself. Remember to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics. All you need to do is subscribe.
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