Recent Book: Another Way: Policing Freedom
| Author | T. A. Critchley |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X8005300214 |
| Published date | 01 April 1980 |
| Date | 01 April 1980 |
| Subject Matter | Recent Book |
RECENT BOOKS
ANOTHER WAY?
JOHN
ALDERSON:
Policing Freedom.
MacDonald &Evans. £7.50
Boswell: "So. Sir.
you
laugh at
schemes
of
political improvement?"
Johnson: "Why. Sir. most schemes
of
political improvement are very
laughable things."
So, no doubt, they were to the
comfortably-off in the un-policed
eighteenth century, fearing loss of
pleasance.
They
had
reason
for
optimism. We do not: this is the central
message of
John
Alderson's timely book.
Hestates bluntly(page 220): "Society can
no longer be policed solely by the police."
Other senior police officers have been
saying this for years, but less forthrightly.
The distinguished Chief Constable of
Devon and Cornwall has written an
important book, but the reader must be
warned that it makes for heavy reading.
It tends to be discursive and repetitious.
True, there is no reason why an
imaginative thinker should also be a
lucid writer, but it is a serious handicap
to the reader to have to swallow at a gulp
this sort of sentence: "To set up. appoint.
equip and direct a powerful instrument
like the police without those who fill its
ranks having a meaningful under-
standing
of
the nature
of
power. its uses
and abuses and its potential
for
harm as
well as good. is not 10 equip the police as
wellas it might otherwise be done." (page
3.)Enough, however, of carping. This
book is very welcome as a genuine
attempt to understand the role of the
police in society as a whole and to offer
positive ideas for its evolution to meet the
needs of an uncertain future. Alderson
writes from practical experience in
pioneering ways of involving the public
in ways of community policing. He is
realistic about the difficulties: "Police are
comfortable in an authoritarian world
..
The key
[10
reacting 10 changes in
society] will obviously lie in the ability to
police the changes. which is almost a
contradiction in terms." (page 219). He
argues (rightly) for more adademic
concern about the philisophy of policing
and (optimistically, given the nature of
Police Journal April 1980
the raw material) about the value of
including a much enlarged social content
in the training of recruits.
If
the author's dream of the police as
leaders of local communities may seem
visionary, his views on the need for closer
co-operation between the police and
other social agencies are not. They are
shared with the Government (Home
Office circular 211/ 1978) but not, I
suspect, with all his fellow Chief
Constables. Yet it is here, surely, that
progress must be made if, in a declining
economy, society is to get the maximum
value for the vast sums spent on our
complex of social services.
It is impossible, in the space of a short
review, to do fulljustice to this book. The
best compliment I can pay to
John
Alderson is that he is a brave pioneer in
carrying forward, into late 20th century
thinking, consideration of the dilemma
posed two hundred years ago by Dr.
Johnson: "The danger
of
unbounded
liberty and the danger
of
bounding it
have produced aproblem in the science
of
government which human under-
standing seems hitherto unable to solve."
Alderson's intellectually stimulating
colloquy will be dissected by study
groups at the Police College (of which he
wasan outstanding Commandant) with a
mixture of admiration, profit, and -
among "practical coppers" - degrees of
scepticism. It ought also to be read by
everyone concerned about the changes in
society that are placing new pressures on
a baffled police service honourably
groping its way towards a new, more
flexible, constructive role.
Yet how many questions arise! Are the
police realistic or idealistic in thinking
that the Government would wish them to
modify their traditional duties -
in particular those of containing crime
and supporting the Government's own
authority to govern? Are the public less
eager to encourage their "social" role
than to be satisfied about the effect-
iveness of democratic and judicial
control over their power? And can the
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