Abstract
AbstractHuman rights have become a dominant paradigm in police reform projects worldwide, championed by policymakers, legislators and campaigners alike. Such projects are often premised on, and evaluated according to, a conception of human rights as an autonomous, coherent and legitimate body of norms. It is a paradigm made real through formal training, procedures and oversight. This paper invites a different reading of human rights. Drawing on extensive interviews with junior officers, it reveals how human rights come to be emergent from, and embedded within, the minutia of their working lives. The presence and meaning of human rights are sustained through a series of ‘sensemaking’ narratives arising from the rich intermingling of legal and organizational representations of rights and officers’ own experiences. Subtle variations, inconsistencies and contradictions in officers’ sensemaking are revealed across a four-fold typology which disrupts the stability and coherency of the human rights paradigm, but also generalizations made about police culture.
Highlights
The last half-century has witnessed the ‘apparently ceaseless and expanding process of international human rights standard-setting’ (Grear 2012: 19)
Inconsistencies and contradictions in officers’ sensemaking are revealed across a four-fold typology which disrupts the stability and coherency of the human rights paradigm, and generalizations made about police culture
A raft of international human rights treaties, standards and codes of conduct introduced by the United Nations, Council of Europe and European Union are directed at law enforcement agencies and disseminated through a panoply of police training courses, conferences and inspections (Hornberger 2010; Kilpatrick 2018)
Summary
Human rights have become a dominant paradigm in police reform projects worldwide, championed by policymakers, legislators and campaigners alike. Such projects are often premised on, and evaluated according to, a conception of human rights as an autonomous, coherent and legitimate body of norms. It is a paradigm made real through formal training, procedures and oversight. Inconsistencies and contradictions in officers’ sensemaking are revealed across a four-fold typology which disrupts the stability and coherency of the human rights paradigm, and generalizations made about police culture
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