The idea of the police must be distinguished from the broader concept of policing, although in contemporary societies the two are commonly assimilated. Police refers to a specific kind of social institution, while policing implies a process with particular social functions. Police are not found in every society, and police organizations and personnel can take a variety of forms. It is arguable, however, that policing of some kind is a universal requirement of any social order, and may be carried out by a number of different institutional arrangements and social processes.
Policing connotes a set of activities directed at preserving the security of a particular social order. That order may variously be seen as resting upon a basic consensus of interests, or a manifest (and/or latent) conflict of interests between groups differentially placed in a hierarchy of flower and privilege, or perhaps a complex intertwining of the two. As one analyst has put it, the police function may involve parking tickets and class repression (Marenin 1983). Whether particular policing activities actually succeed in securing social order is a moot point, as is the relationship between policing and other elements of social control.
Policing is a specific subset of social control processes. It must be distinguished from the broader elements of the creation of social order (for example, socialization and the creation and reproduction of cultural and ethical standards), as well as from institutions for adjudication and punishment of deviance. Policing may be defined as surveillance coupled with the threat of the initiation of sanctions for any deviance that may be discovered thereby. The most familiar system of this kind is the one implied by the modern sense of police: this connotes a formal organization concerned primarily with regular uniform patrol of public space together with post-hoc investigation of reported or discovered crime or disorder. However, policing can be accomplished by a diverse array of people and techniques, of which the modern idea of policing is only one. Policing may be carried out by professional state employees with an omnibus policing mandate—the archetypal modern concept of the police (which itself can take a variety of forms) or by state agencies with other primary purposes, such as the Atomic Energy Authority, Customs and Excise, parks and transport constabularies, and other ‘hybrid’ bodies (Johnston 1992: ch. 6). Policing may also be done by professional employees of specialist private police agencies or by in-house security personnel hired by an organization whose main business is not policing (Shearing 1992; Shearing and Stenning 1987; South 1988).
Policing functions may also be performed by citizens in a voluntary capacity within state organizations, like the British Special Constabulary; in association with the state police, like Neighbourhood Watch schemes; or in volunteer bodies which are not under any state auspices. Sometimes such volunteer policing may be in tension with the state, like the Guardian Angels, and the various forms of vigilantism which have flourished in many times and places.
Policing may be carried out by state bodies with other primary functions (like the British army in Northern Ireland), or by employees (state or private) with other primary roles (like caretakers, shop assistants or porters). Policing may also be done by non-human processes: surveillance technology, architecture, or the security aspects of particular natural or built environments. All these strategies of policing are prevalent now as in the past, although it is only the state agency with the specific mandate of policing which is popularly understood by the label police.
Until modern times policing functions were carried out primarily as a by-product of other social relationships and by citizen volunteers or private employees. Anthropological studies have shown how many preliterate societies have existed without any formalized system of policing. Specialized policing institutions emerge only in relatively complex societies (Schwartz and Miller 1964). This is not merely a reflex of a burgeoning division of labour. Policing may originate in collective and communal processes of social control, but specialized police forces develop together with social inequality and hierarchy. They are means for the emergence and protection of more centralized state systems. The development of specialized police ‘is linked to economic specialisation and differential access to resources that occur in the transition from a kinship- to a class-dominated society’ (Robinson and Scaglion 1987:109; Robinson et al. 1994). In contemporary societies the police become the agency specialized in the handling of the state’s distinctive capacity: the monopoly of legitimate force (Bittner 1974).
There are varying explanations for the creation of specialized police agencies in modern societies. Different countries have experienced divergent historical routes, and interpretations of the rise of the police will vary between different theoretical and political positions (Brogden et al. 1988: chs 4–5; Reiner 1992: chs 12). Anglo-American police ideology postulates a fundamental distinction between continental European police systems, which originate overtly as instruments of state control, and the British system, which is represented as a necessary adjustment of ancient forms of communal self-policing in the face of the exigencies of industrialization. More recent historical and comparative research has exposed the oversimplification of this orthodox perspective (Mawby 1990). The British, US and other common law systems of police may not have originated as direct and explicit tools of the state, but their emergence and development is closely related to shifting structures of state control and class conflict (Emsley 1991; Miller 1977). The supposedly community-based British model was in any case for home consumption only. A more militaristic and coercive state-controlled system of policing was always exported to colonial situations (Brogden 1987).
Since the mid-1960s a substantial body of research on police organization and practice has developed, primarily in Britain and North America, but increasingly elsewhere as well; this is now a major branch of criminology (Reiner 1994). The main source of police research was the growing awareness that the popular conception of the police as simply a law-enforcement agency was misleading in two ways. From the outset police research showed that the police performed a variety of order-maintenance and social service functions apart from dealing with crime and criminals (Banton 1964; Punch 1979; Waddington 1993). Moreover, in performing their various tasks the police exercised considerable discretion and regularly deviated from the rule of law (Holdaway 1983; Manning 1977; Skolnick 1966). The recognition of police discretion raised the questions—for research, policy and politics—of how it was exercised in practice, its relationship to legal and social justice, and how it could be made accountable (McConville et al. 1991; Reiner and Spencer 1993).
The development of police research has coincided with a period in which growing concern about rising crime and about police malpractice has kept law and order at the centre of political controversy. Police forces have grown in powers and resources as a consequence. However, the apparent failure of crime rates to respond to increased police capacity has called into question the actual and potential effectiveness of the police as a crime control mechanism. Researchers have shown that there is little scope for reducing crime by increasing police deployment (Clarke and Hough 1984), although innovative tactics may have a modest impact (Sherman 1992). Despite this evidence, in the early 1990s the British government launched a sweeping and highly controversial package of reforms on the premise that managerial reorganization on private sector businesslike lines can inject a higher level of efficiency which can make the police effective in dealing with crime (Reiner and Spencer 1993).
It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that the police by themselves can play only a limited role in managing the problems of crime. Crime control involves a more complex mix of policing strategies involving the police in partnership with citizens, private security, and technological and environmental crime prevention methods. Above all, it requires social and economic policies which can tackle the roots of crime and reinvigorate informal social control processes. The police are becoming once more a part of a more complex web of policing processes.
R.Reiner
London School of Economics and Political Science
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