5 - The Legal Relation

Abstract

This chapter discusses the substance of the legal relation of the police in England and Wales and exposes the essential ideological function of that relation. This legal relation has three particular implications for the police institution in Britain. It provides for a unique dimension of authority. It allows the police institution to refute conventional requirements of political accountability to reference to legal controls. Moreover, it allows a particular ideological relation to be postulated between the police institution and civil society. The one major feature that distinguishes chief police officers from other managers within the local state relates to the form of control. Housing managers, education officers, planning officers, and their equivalents all owe their position and their exercise of authority to political appointment. They are answerable personally for their actions to the representatives of the politically dominant class. The proposition that the police officer has original powers has a special value for the function and authority of the chief officer. The notion of the legal relation is then extended to encompass the practice of legal and judicial control over the police institution and the prosecution process.