Policing Human Rights

Abstract

Human rights are a common feature of police reform, rhetoric and regulation in many jurisdictions. Yet how human rights law might serve to regulate policing, function as a discourse for describing what police ‘do’ or perform as a critical concept for engaging with what the police role is, or ought to be, has received limited attention. This book is an endeavour to produce one of the first sustained, interdisciplinary accounts of the empirical realities of human rights law in policing. The substantive insights are drawn from unprecedented access to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The book takes the reader on a tour of four sites of policing: the public forums host to ‘official’ police narratives, routine policing, public order policing and police custody. It seeks to better understand how and why police officers performing different aspects of policing, operating in distinct regulatory sites and enacting their own identities and experiences, come to encounter and engage with human rights law in their everyday work. The book aspires to embrace criminology’s interdisciplinary spirit, drawing on concepts from criminology itself, as well as law, anthropology, sociology and organizational studies, to illuminate the empirical realities of human rights law. It offers a series of findings and insights that expose how human rights law functions in modern policing, and the histories, imaginations, visions and values police officers’ express in narratives, sensemaking and practices of routine police work.