The politics of police reform
| Author | David Dixon,Janet Chan |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895807082068 |
| Published date | 01 November 2007 |
| Date | 01 November 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
© 2007 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and the British Society of Criminology.
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 7(4): 443–468
DOI: 10.1177/1748895807082068
443
The politics of police reform:
Ten years after the Royal Commission into the New
South Wales Police Service
JANET CHAN AND DAVID DIXON
University of New South Wales, Australia
Abstract
In 1997, the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales
Police Service concluded that a state of ‘systemic and entrenched
corruption’ existed in the police organization. Major reforms
were introduced in the wake of the Commission, including the
appointment of a new Police Commissioner, organizational
restructuring, a complete revamp of recruit education, as well as
increased monitoring and accountability. The magnitude and scope
of the Commission’s reform programme was bold and ambitious by
international standards. This article takes stock of the impact of the
Commission 10 years after the publication of its Final Report.
Drawing on interviews with key informants, official reports and
other documentary sources, the article analyses the activities of
the Commission, the intentions of its recommendations and the
implementation and consequences of reform. The lessons of
the NSW experience are salutary not only for understanding the
vagaries of police reform, they also demonstrate the complex
relationship between police organizations and the volatile
political environments in which they increasingly need
to operate.
Key Words
criminal justice policy • cultural change • police accountability
• police reform • Royal Commission
ARTICLE
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Introduction
Major public inquiries, such as royal commissions, play diverse and often
significant roles in the governance of criminal justice. Some come to act
as key historical markers: people who may never have read a page of their
reports refer to Wickersham, Knapp, Scarman and Macpherson. Such
names provide a condensed reference to problems of corruption and mis-
conduct addressed by particular inquiries or, as in the case of Scarman’s
endorsement of community policing, to proposed remedies. Such inquiries
are rarely appointed during periods of calm and stability for the purpose
of considered reflection.1Much more commonly, they are a response to
problems which have reached a scale or achieved such prominence that
governments feel obliged to seek external, considered advice. Typically,
such problems and responses to them come in waves of scandal and reform
(Sherman, 1978).
It is trite to observe that governments take the political heat out of issues
by appointing inquiries, thereby diverting calls for immediate action, diffus-
ing responsibility and legitimizing state action (Herbert, 1961). While such
cynicism is often justified, the role of official inquiries is more complex and
contested and their effect less determined than such accounts allow. As Pratt
and Gilligan suggest, official inquiries are better seen as processes in which
authoritative definitions of reality are reconstructed (or reaffirmed), poten-
tially providing ‘an official, objective truth about crime, criminal justice and
punishment which puts a particular stamp on the available beliefs that indi-
viduals and social groups have of such matters’ (2004: 2). Truth becomes a
‘contestable space’ (Gilligan, 2004) and the outcome may be inconvenient
and challenging for the authorities.
This article is concerned with one such inquiry, the Royal Commission
into the New South Wales Police Service, which reported in 1997 after three
years of inquiry and investigation. We examine the Commission’s activities,
its reports and its consequences over the last decade. This Royal Commission
produced a new authoritative truth about policing. However, it proved to be
a truth that government, police and the public came to find troublesome and
challenging. This Royal Commission’s story throws a bright light on some
key contemporary issues in criminal justice and policing. Notably, it shows
how international policy transfer can affect policing. In this case, growing
police confidence in their ability to tackle crime challenged the Royal Com-
mission’s conventional assumptions about the limited potential of police as
crime-fighters (Dixon, 2005). The dominance of law and order politics in
contemporary criminal justice is also illustrated by the way in which political
rhetoric undermined the Royal Commission’s truth. Indeed the fate of the
Royal Commission indicates the incompatibility between the traditional offi-
cial inquiry and dominant modes of governance. Finally, our analysis of key
informants’ assessments of policing over the last decade indicates crucial
strands of both resilience and change in police culture.
Criminology & Criminal Justice 7(4)
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