Book review: Layla Skinns, Police Powers and Citizens’ Rights: Discretionary Decision-Making in Police Detention
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620954565 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Author | Megan O’Neill |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
350 Theoretical Criminology 25(2)
Rather than discounting the importance of race, the contemporary treatment of groups
like the Roma people in Norway—officially deemed “white” but othered all the same—
would seem to present an opportunity for further investigation into the complex ways
that race, culture, and borders interact.
Despite this, The Crimmigrant Other is a timely and insightful contribution to the
field. Franko draws on rich empirical findings to demonstrate the rationalization of puni-
tive border control within existing humanitarian frameworks. Findings support her main
theoretical argument, that the image of immigrant as criminal moves migration from a
question of inequality to a question of morality—a switch that justifies retributive strate-
gies of migration management and reinforces the belonginess of citizens. In this way,
through the inferred immorality of the migrant, the problematic nature of citizenship in a
deeply stratified world is obscured.
Layla Skinns, Police Powers and Citizens’ Rights: Discretionary Decision-Making in Police Detention,
Routledge: London, 2019; 248 pp.: 9780203080979, £120 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Megan O’Neill, University of Dundee, UK
Ethnographies of policing have, over many decades and in several countries, explored
the occupation in intricate detail. Skinns is unique in this broad field in her attention
towards police detention. Police officers, while subject to internal policies and statu-
tory procedures, do still have a significant degree of discretion in this setting. That this
aspect of the policing craft has been skimmed over by policing scholars for so long is
rather surprising.
Skinns presents in Police Powers and Citizens’ Rights a much needed international
comparative work on police detention, drawn from 480 hours of observation and 71
interviews from four countries: the United States, England, Australia and Ireland. Her
aim is to examine how elements of the law, police discretion and internal procedural
rules influence police practice in detention sites, using these sites as a lens through which
to view the broader relationship between the state and its citizens.
Chapter 1 sets out the purpose of the text and main concepts to be explored. Chapter 2
begins to outline the primary theoretical tools which Skinns will employ in her analysis.
Unlike most policing scholars, Skinns examines this field from both socio-legal (whether
the police abide by legal rules) and socio/criminological (how they abide by the legal rules)
perspectives. From Packer (1968) she develops the concept of ‘compliance’: the intersec-
tion of police legal authority and citizen behaviour. Compliance includes coercive, norma-
tive, cultural/symbolic and manipulative compliance. Discretion is a second core concept
in Skinns’ analysis and she utilizes Ericson’s (2007) five-point typology: following the
rules, using the rules, beyond the rules, within the rules, without the rules.
Chapters 3 and 4 provide, in very impressive detail, the broader structural contexts for
police powers and use of discretion in each of the four countries. Chapter 3 examines the
social, political and economic conditions of each, and in particular, the role (or lack
thereof) of neoliberalism in its systems and processes. Chapter 4 considers the policing
system and its history in each country, and how they have influenced each other in their
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