7 - Consent: Class Relations in Police History

Abstract

This chapter presents alternative perspectives on the question of consent that are contrasted through the medium of accounts of the history of police-class relations. In the first half of the chapter, the professional ideology is documented. Certain core assumptions preface that orthodox history. Inter-related premises on the legal and political relation of the police institution, on the philosophic contribution of the English Utilitarians, and on the features of early police organizations are central to that account of the development of consent. Consent, as a major prop of the ideological relation of the police institution, must be subject to a more adequate historical appraisal. A number of more radical historians have begun to document fragments of an alternative history. The chapter analyzes and outlines the present-day evidence about consent to policing and the various devices by which consent is reconstructed. As with the historical accounts, the contemporary accounts suffer similarly from distortion.