A Crisis of Policing

Abstract

In recent times, hardly a week or even a day has passed without a story in the media exploring controversy, criticism or concern in relation to the police. This has ranged from phone-hacking and police corruption to racism in the police; from misuse of police powers and officers operating outside the law to overly favourable pay and conditions; or from incompetence in the policing of public order or in the investigation of high-profile crimes to the contracting-out to the private sector of key police functions. Even in the brief period taken to write the present chapter, the police have been the focus of much public ire. For instance, the ethicality of the infiltration of protest groups by undercover police officers — who formed intimate relationships with some of the protestors, even having children with them, as well as acting as ‘agent provocateurs’ — is a news story about the police which has raised its head time and again. In its latest incarnation, in June 2013, the media reported that an undercover officer allegedly co-wrote the leaflet criticising the McDonalds food chain, which later became the focus of the three-year ‘McLibel’ case, which cost taxpayers and McDonalds millions of pounds (Lewis and Evans 2013a). In the same month, a former Metropolitan police officer has come forward to say that he worked undercover in the aftermath of Stephen Lawrence’s death to collect hearsay information on the Lawrence family and others campaigning for a fuller investigation into his racially aggravated murder, with the aim being for the police to use this information to impugn campaigners’ reputations.1