Book Reviews
| Author | Rose Parkes |
| Pages | 85-94 |
BOOK REVIEWS
Edited by Rose Parkes, Senior Lecturer in Community and Crimina l Justice,
De Montfort University
EQUALITY AND DIVERSITY IN POLICING
Stout, B. (2010). ‘Policing Matters’ Series, Waddington, PAJ & Wright, M. (Eds.)
Exeter: Learning Matters. V + 153pp. pbk. £16 ISBN 978-1-84445-353-5
This text book has been written specifically for students undertaking degrees in policing and
related subjects. It is part of a series on ‘Policing Matters’, in which all books provide key
information and learning activities related to core modules, and follow a common format of
chapter objectives, case studies, practical and reflective tasks, with links to relevant National
Occupational Standards and current legislation. This particular volume benefits from an
author with criminal justice experience in both South Africa and Northern Ireland, the
latter being of particular relevance in discussing the policing of sectarianism, associated hate
crime and restorative justice issues. It provides a context for the difficult history of the
police in relation to equality and diversity, lucidly sets out legislative and policy frameworks,
and examines diversity issues both between police and community and within policing
organisations and cultures. Its main concern is to encourage existing and potential police
professionals to be reflective about the diversity dilemmas they may face, and to come to
understand the importance of promoting fairness and equality in the policing arena. The
book rightly emphasises that this is a process which amounts to much more than the
‘common sense’ rationale with which it is sometimes dismissed.
Six of the book's eight chapters are built around what are described as ‘the six strands of
diversity’, these being categorised as age, disability, gender, race, religion and sexual
orientation. Although a function of the book’s deliberate structure, the reader might have
benefited from hearing before, rather than after these categories were introduced, that
diversity is a nuanced term which embraces any state of potential oppression, such as
poverty, unemployment, homelessness and so on. Similarly, an earlier explanation of social
construction (or labelling) theory would have provided a comprehensive underpinning of the
entire subject matter, rather than appearing first in Chapter 3 on disability. The other
difficulty, which pervades most contemporary writing on criminal justice is that, having
exhorted its readers to refer to, for example, the disabled, as ‘disabled people’, the book goes
on to use the label ‘offender’ rather than ‘a person who offends’. Just as in practising
diversity, in writing about it there are no easy answers!
Book Reviews
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