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Critical Policing Studies: Toward a “Fully Social” Framework

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Abstract

Despite mass protests, demands to defund the police, and a range of institutional reforms, historic patterns of abuse and violence in US policing persist. This article calls for a renewed and reinvigorated critical policing studies to give leadership in the search for remedy. Fifty years ago, Taylor, Walton, and Young envisioned a “fully social theory of deviance” to guide a new critical criminology. How do our policing studies frameworks—evidence-based policing, democratic policing, police abolitionism—hold up to a “fully social” standard? Here, the article critiques the extant frameworks and also proposes one possible new direction in policing studies that would incorporate insights from the field of labor studies and rank-and-file politics.

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Notes

  1. Police killed two people in Japan, three in England and Wales, and eleven in Germany, in the most recent year of available data (Jones and Sawyer 2020).

  2. One sharp and helpful exchange, on police defunding in the United Kingdom, did appear in the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice (Fleetwood and Lea 2022; McElhorne et al. 2023; Fleetwood and Lea 2023).

  3. Seminal left-realist works are Lea and Young (1984), and Kinsey, Lea, and Young (1986); critiques are Bridges and Gilroy (1982), and Gilroy and Simm (1985). On policing and moral panic in 1960s and 70s Britain, see Cohen (1972/2002) and Hall et al. (1978). A recent helpful application of left realism in rural policing contexts is Nolan, DeKeseredy, and Brownstein (2022).

  4. Currie (2016: 20–21) has written: “The most promising future for criminology involves the maturing and spreading of a truly structural and globally engaged work that not only puts the larger developments in world society at the forefront of analysis, but also works to create new and more effective ways of linking that intellectual work with movements for social change—which includes a concerted effort to move out beyond our usual academic and governmental constituencies to build stronger working relationships with people who are trying to make change from the ground up.”.

  5. Regarding such political processes at the state level, see Lafer (2017).

  6. In this regard, see the concluding section, “New Direction for Policing Studies?”.

  7. The last item refers to approaches that model or “prefigure” today the kind of future world we wish to build (see Raekstad and Gradin 2020).

  8. On theories of the state, and the continuing debates among Marxist and critical scholars, see Albo, Maher, and Zuege (2021).

  9. See Rushin’s (2017) broad study of DOJ interventions in American police departments.

  10. The Oakland project is detailed in Toch and Grant’s Police as Problem Solvers (2005).

  11. Helpful on police monitoring groups and their limitations in Toronto and London is Currie, DeKeseredy, and MacLean (1990: 41–43).

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Knapp Hall, 29 Beechurst Av, Morgantown, WV, 26505, USA

    Howard Ryan

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Ryan, H. Critical Policing Studies: Toward a “Fully Social” Framework. Crit Crim 31, 827–842 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-023-09712-w

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