A question of scandal? The police and the phone-hacking business
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895816677315 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Author | Rob C Mawby |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2016
Article
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2017, Vol. 17(4) 485 –502
A question of scandal?
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895816677315
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phone-hacking business
Rob C Mawby
University of Leicester, UK
Abstract
Scandals have featured consistently in the development and operation of public policing in England
and Wales. However, criminologists have rarely explored scandal as a concept or its attempted
management by criminal justice organizations. This article contributes to the filling of this gap
with the intention of initiating debate on the utility of scandal as a conceptual tool for the analysis
of policing and criminal justice. It identifies the core components of a scandal using an analytical
framework informed by scandal research undertaken across disciplinary areas. Taking a case
study approach, this framework is applied to the Leveson Inquiry which explored a combination
of potentially scandalous episodes within the overarching scandal of phone-hacking. The article
concludes that phone-hacking was a scandal at macro and micro levels under this framework yet
damage to the reputation of the police was mitigated through active impression management and
enduring characteristics of the police image.
Keywords
Leveson Inquiry, organizational reputation, police–media relations, policing scandals, reputation
management, scandal
The police in England and Wales face difficult times. Government ministers no longer
feel it necessary to court police approval and academics refer to the state of permanent
crisis, even pondering the abolition of the police service (Hope, 2014; Loader, 2014;
May, 2014). How did it come to this? It is not so long ago that the police in England and
Wales were routinely referred to as the ‘Best Police in the World’ and held up as a model
Corresponding author:
Rob C Mawby, Department of Criminology, University of Leicester, The Friars, 154 Upper New Walk,
Leicester, LE1 7QA, UK.
Email: rim6@le.ac.uk
486
Criminology & Criminal Justice 17(4)
state institution (Reiner, 2010). However, in this second decade of the 21st century the
police have reeled from one failure to another that have questioned, variously, their dis-
cipline, effectiveness, leadership and honesty. The terms ‘policing’ and ‘scandal’ are cou-
pled with increasing frequency yet with a few notable exceptions (Greer and McLaughlin,
2013; Sherman, 1978) scholars have not defined and conceptualized scandal when writ-
ing about policing and wider criminal justice events and behaviours labelled as scandal-
ous (see, for example, Evans (2014) on Australian police corruption, Punch (2003) on
police corruption in three European states and Silverman (2012: 79–81) on the UK ‘for-
eign prisoners scandal’). Rather, scandal has been used loosely as a term of convenience
for controversial events, practices and behaviours that reflect adversely on police offic-
ers, forces and the police service nationally. It has been used indiscriminately, inter-
changeable with words such as controversy, crisis, problem, failure, issue and fiasco.
Applied in this way, scandal is in danger of losing its explanatory power as a concept that
addresses questions of power, reputation and trust in public life (Thompson, 2000).
This article encourages the reclamation of scandal from this imprecision by proposing
a model of scandal as a form of individual or organizational failure possessing the attrib-
utes of: (1) transgression; (2) publicization; (3) response; and (4) judgement. The model
is tested using the case of the Leveson Inquiry. In 2012, part of this judge-led public
inquiry into the ‘culture, practice and ethics of the press’ examined a flawed investiga-
tion into phone-hacking and allegations of improper relations between the police and the
press (Leveson, 2012a, 2012b). Within the overall phone-hacking scandal, the Inquiry
considered evidence of several potential sub-scandals that threatened the reputations of
individuals, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS hereafter) and the police service as a
national institution. The proposed scandal model is applied, concluding that the scandal
criteria are met at the macro level, but that the police successfully negotiated a number
of sub-scandals. This was due to a combination of active impression management, resid-
ual good character – the halo effect – and the ‘scattered’ nature of the police image.
These collectively limited the damage to the reputation of the police. While the article
contributes to the study of scandal and the limited criminological literature on the man-
agement of organizational reputation, it acknowledges the need for further work to
develop the concept of scandal in a criminological context.
From Sacred to Profane to Scandalized
Although the introduction of the Metropolitan Police in London in 1829 was not univer-
sally welcomed, by the middle decades of the 20th century the ‘British bobby’ had gained
a symbolic significance (Loader, 1997; McLaughlin, 2005). The reputation and accept-
ance of the police reached its zenith in the 1950s (Reiner, 2010: 67), a period during
which the police organization was particularly well suited to the needs of the time
(Weinberger, 1995) and police officers were respected as ‘holders of a socially authorita-
tive office’ (Loader and Mulcahy, 2003: 13). Thereafter the desacralization of the police
followed due to changing socio-political and technological conditions and organizational
failings (Loader and Mulcahy, 2003; Reiner, 2010: 78). A number of events from the late
1960s onwards highlighted the failings, including revelations by the Sunday Times of
serious organized corruption within the Metropolitan Police (Cox et al., 1977). Brought
Mawby
487
to light by a less compliant media, at the time these failings caused concern but appeared
to be of an episodic nature and the police maintained their status as a prestigious state
institution. Despite an accumulation of evidence that ‘Golden Age’ policing was more
complex and brutal than benign exemplars such as the televised Dixon of Dock Green
publicly portrayed (Hellawell, 2002; Mark, 1978), the previous good reputation of the
police created a halo effect (Sohn and Lariscy, 2014), which buffered the damage inflicted
by intermittent, seemingly aberrant, misdemeanours.
However, further episodes emerged in the following decades concerning shocking
miscarriages of justice, botched murder investigations, brutal public order tactics and the
problematic policing of minority groups. As policing became more politicized from the
1970s, highlighted during the Miners’ Strike of 1983–1984, the halo began to slip
(Newburn, 2008; Reiner, 2010: 78–96). In subsequent decades policing has never been
far from controversy. Particularly, in this second decade of the 21st century, problematic
events and behaviours have increasingly become part of the policing landscape. For
example, the Independent Commission into the Future of Policing noting contemporary
challenges for policing, cited ‘a litany of police organisational failures, malpractice and
scandal’, listing 10 examples (Stevens, 2013: 27). Nine of these, plus others, were also
cited several months later, in May 2014, during the then Home Secretary Theresa May’s
highly publicized address to the Police Federation Conference. In a speech which also
referenced her high regard for ‘the best police officers in the world’, she referred to trou-
bling ‘recent events and revelations’:
In the last few years, we have seen the Leveson Inquiry. The appalling conclusions of the
Hillsborough independent panel. The death of Ian Tomlinson and the sacking of PC Harwood.
The ongoing inquiry by an independent panel into the murder of Daniel Morgan. The first
sacking of a chief constable for gross misconduct in modern times. The investigation of more
than ten senior officers for acts of alleged misconduct and corruption.
Allegations of rigged recorded crime statistics. The sacking of PCs Keith Wallis, James
Glanville and Gillian Weatherley after ‘Plebgate’.1 Worrying reports by the inspectorate about
stop and search and domestic violence. The Herne Review into the conduct of the Metropolitan
Police Special Demonstration Squad. The Ellison Review into allegations of corruption during
the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Further allegations that the police sought
to smear Stephen’s family. (May, 2014)
At this point the police had slipped not only from sacred to profane (Loader and Mulcahy,
2003), but to failing. Yet how might we understand and categorize these events that
encompass a range of different types of failure? Where does ‘scandal’ fit and does con-
ceptualizing something as a scandal help us to understand what is at stake, and how
organizations seek to manage their reputation through scandalous times? To explore
these questions, the next section considers the concept of scandal and how it has been
applied to the study of criminal justice institutions. From this, a model of scandal is
sketched out which proposes the necessary combination of attributes that distinguish a
scandal from other types of failure. This model draws on Sherman’s (1978) work on
police corruption and Thompson’s (2000, 2011) studies of political scandal,...
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