Working Together: Governing and Advising the Police
| Author | Karim Murji |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1350/pojo.2011.84.3.530 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
DR KARIM MURJI
Senior Lecturer, Sociology, The Open University, Milton Keynes
WORKING TOGETHER:
GOVERNING AND ADVISING THE
POLICE
Drawing on the ideas of critical friendship and the ladder of
participation, this article seeks to characterise and comprehend
both statutory and voluntary working relationships the police
are involved in. These ideas are widely used and their useful-
ness and limits are explored through a focus on community
engagement and independent advisory groups (IAGs), and
governance through a police authority. These two cases reveal
that various ‘steps’ on the ladder can be applied and that
critical friends can play various roles but that there are also
numerous complications around that. One of these is applying
critical friendship to groups ‘inside’ and outside’ the police.
While there is a lack of information about the content of
critical friendly advice and no way of assessing its impact,
this article concludes that the term is of some value for what
it suggests about what makes for more effective critical
friendship.
Keywords: consultation; London; Metropolitan police;
partnership; politics
Introduction
One of the many controversies in Sir (now Lord) Ian Blair’s
three-year tenure as the Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police occurred on his first day in office. On 1 February 2005, he
changed the logo on the famous roundel outside New Scotland
Yard by adding the word ‘together’ to it, so that it read ‘Working
together for a safer London’. In his many subsequent battles with
the media (which he looks back on in his book, Policing
Controversy), it was one of the first things that he was mocked
for as a ‘politically correct’ police leader. A myth grew that the
change had been made because people with sight impairments
had difficulty reading the italicised font of the old logo. Yet, for
anyone who had read or knew Sir Ian’s inauguration speech in
February 2005 it was clear that ‘together’ had a far wider
meaning. He intended it to refer to a new ethos of teamwork to
be inculcated in the Met by a programme of cultural change
called Together. Furthermore, it signalled an emphasis on work-
256 The Police Journal, Volume 84 (2011)
DOI: 10.1358/pojo.2011.84.3.530
ing together in partnership with communities, agencies and
organisations in London. The idea of partnership in policing is
hardly new; indeed, the legitimacy and effectiveness of the
police has always depended on collaboration from and the trust
of the public. The police are embedded in a wide range of
partnerships that make ‘working together’ their modus operandi,
rather than something exceptional. Crime and Disorder Reduc-
tion Partnerships (CDRPs) and other multi-agency arrangements
in criminal justice coordination, child protection and offender
management are some examples of that.
There are other kinds of formal and informal partnerships or
collaborations that the police engage in. These come with
varying degrees of public visibility from open public meetings to
closed inter-agency ones. This huge range makes it challenging
to generalise about working together per se. Like many partner-
ship issues, it is what goes on in practice that matters far more
than what appears on the surface. In this article I focus on two
kinds of partnerships or collaborations, both centred on the
Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). One the one hand there is its
formal relationship to its governing body, the Metropolitan
Police Authority (MPA), on the other its appointed and informal
advisers in the form of independent advisory groups (IAGs). The
former is largely public in the sense that formal meetings are
held in the open and the processes are governed by instruments
such as standing orders and local government policy and pro-
cedure. Furthermore, police authority members are either local
councillors or public appointees with their names published on
websites. In contrast, IAGs are a form of non-statutory engage-
ment between the police and communities. Independent or lay
advisory groups were the product of the Stephen Lawrence
Inquiry (Macpherson, 1999). These are almost always private
meetings and their minutes, membership and procedures are not
published. These two cases are therefore very different kinds of
arrangements for ‘working together’ through governance and
advisory roles. After setting out a couple of explanatory
approaches or models, the aim of this article is to elucidate some
of the products and pitfalls of each of these ways of working
with the police. Although the UK coalition government’s Poli-
cing Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, currently before
Parliament, will remove police authorities and replace them with
Policing and Crime Commissioners (see Home Office, 2010), the
underlying issues about police engagements with politics and
with communities will continue to apply in almost any conceiv-
able governance framework.
The Police Journal, Volume 84 (2011) 257
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