Policing a Postmodern Society
| Published date | 01 November 1992 |
| Date | 01 November 1992 |
| Author | Robert Reiner |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1992.tb00940.x |
THE
MODERN
LAW
REVIEW
Volume
55
November
1992
No.
6
Policing
a
Postmodern Society
Robert Reiner”
Introduction: Paradise Lost?
Four decades after his first appearance,
PC
George Dixon, eponymous hero of the
long-running TV series
Dixon
of
Dock
Green,
remains for many the embodiment
of the ideal British bobby. Dixon, more than any other symbol, conjures up a cosier
era when thanks to the wonders of glorious nostalgiavision, life
-
like TV
-
was
better in black and white.
The Dixon character was unique as a cultural phenomenon, historically and
comparatively.’ In no other country, at no other time, has the ordinary beat-
pounding patrol officer been seen as a national hero. If the police were represented
as heroic figures at all, it was the glamorous crime-busting detective.2 The
enormous influence and popularity of the Dixon character speaks volumes about
the peculiarity of the English veneration of their police
in
what is often described
as the ‘Golden Age’ of policing.
Public attitudes towards the police in Britain have changed dramatically since
the Dixon era. The erosion of the Dixon image is a long process, with roots going
back to the late
1950s,
the last years of the ‘Golden Age’ itself, but
it
has become
increasingly precipitous in the last decade of the century. This article will describe
and attempt to explain this process of demystification. It will be suggested that
underlying the immediate symptoms and causes is a more fundamental transformation
of social structure and culture, the advent of what is often described as a ‘post-
modem’ society. The conclusion will assess the ways
in
which the police have tried
to tackle this problem and their chances of success.
The question of why the image and substance of policing in Britain has changed
is of fundamental importance to understanding current social change
in
general.
The function of policing is essentially to regulate and protect the social order, using
legitimate force if neces~ary.~ The dominant theoretical analyses of the state,
deriving from Weber, see the hallmark of the modem state as the monopolisation
*Professor of Criminology, London School of Economics and Political Science.
This is a revised version
of
an inaugural lecture given at the School on
7
May 1992.
1
For fuller discussions
see
Clarke, ‘Holding the Blue Lamp: Television and the Police in Britain’ (1983)
19
Crime and Social Jusrice
44,
and Sparks,
Television and the Drama of Crime
(Milton Keynes:
Open University Press, 1992) pp
25-30.
2 Reiner,
The
Politics of the Police
(Hemel Hempstead: Wheatsheaf, 2nd
ed,
1992) Ch
5.
3
Bittner, ‘Florence Nightingale in Pursuit of Willie Sutton:
A
Theory of the Police’ in Jacob
(ed),
The
Potential for Reform of Criminal Justice
(Beverly Hills: Sage, 1974).
The
Modern Law Review
55:6 November 1992 0026-7961
76
1
7he Modern Law Review
[Vol.
55
of legitimate force
in
its territory. The police are the domestic specialists
in
the
exercise of legitimate force. Thus policing is at the heart of the functioning of the
state, and central to an understanding of legal and political organisation. The character
and style of policing, in particular the extent to which resort has to be made to
legitimate force,
will
be affected by most changes in the social order. The police
are like social litmus-paper, reflecting sensitively the unfolding exigencies of a society.
Thus understanding policing requires a consideration of the broadest features of
social structure and change. Although the almost complest neglect of the police by
social science twenty years ago has now been remedied by an explosion of research
and comment, almost all of this is narrowly policy-oriented, governed by the
immediate practical concerns of the police and police authorities4 This is valuable
and welcome, but there is also a need for more fundamental social analysis of the
determinants, nature and consequences of policing, apart from anything else to make
sense of the disparate body of research studies.
This requires a return to the eighteenth-century notion of ‘police science,’ when
it
was regarded by Adam Smith, Bentham, Colquhoun, and other major social and
political thinkers, as a fundamental aspect of political economy. Indeed, Adam Smith
referred to it as ‘the second general division of jurisprudence
. . .
which properly
signified the policy of civil g~vernment.’~ The term ‘police’ then had a much
broader connotation than its contemporary one
of
large people
in
blue uniforms,
but the eighteenth-century conception of police science as the art of ‘government-
ality’6 sensitises us to the mutual interdependence of policing and political economy
as a whole. This is obscured by the narrow focus on specific technical aspects of
policing which all too often pervades current research and policy. An analysis of
the troubled state of policing today, and the sources of the malaise, will have to
range much further than the police themselves.
I
Singing the Blues: The Police in a Millennia1 Malaise
The modern British‘police were established in the 19th century
in
the face of
protracted and widespread ~pposition.~ But as new police forces spread out from
the Metropolitan heartland established by Sir Robert Peel in
1829
to encompass
the whole of England and Wales by the mid-nineteenth century, gradually and
unevenly they began to cultivate increasing public consent and support. Painstakingly
the police leadership, beginning with Rowan and Mayne, the first
two
Commissioners
of the Metropolitan Police, strove to develop an image of the British bobby as the
impartial embodiment of the rule of law and the ethic of public service. This rapidly
became the prevailing conception of the police amongst the middle and upper classes,
who had little direct personal experience of their stalwart servants in blue. The
working class, who were far more likely to encounter what contemporaries dubbed
‘the plague of the blue locusts,’8 held more negative attitudes towards the new
regulators of their social and political activities.
4
Reiner, ‘Police Research in the United Kingdom:
A
Critical Review’ in
Moms
and
Tonry
(eds),
Modern
5
Smith,
Lecrures
on
Jurisprudence
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Originally published 1763).
6
In Foucault’s terminology: cf
M.
Foucault, ‘On Governmentality’ (1979)
6
Ideology and
7
For syntheses of recent research on the origins and development of the British police
see
Emsley,
8
Storch, ‘The Plague of Blue Locusts: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England,
Policing
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).
Consciousness
5.
The
English Police
(Hemel Hempstead: Wheatsheaf, 1991) and Reiner,
op cir
n
2,
Chs
1
and
2.
1840-57’
(1975)
20
International Review
of
Social History
61.
762
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