Abstract
This chapter looks back to the founding fathers (I regret the gender specific nature of this introduction the phrase is however accurate unfortunately; women’s highly important roles in adapting the culture of policing do not come for another century) of policing in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries and considers whether their thinking has any application in the governance reforms of the early twenty-first Century. Rather than history it is a practitioners reflective view of where policing came from and what is the significance for governance, leadership and management now of those earliest days?
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Notes
- 1.
This paper distinguishes between the use of the words ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ in a way that many writers have pursued and about which there is still considerable debate. In short, because the issues can be discussed in volumes, leadership is about taking people somewhere they may not otherwise have gone and management is about the resources required, which includes the training and recruitment of those people. The related concept of ‘command’ of military origin but of considerable relevance to policing is a subset of leadership. (See the section on Elliot Cohen (2002) below). I am grateful to my colleagues both police and academic, with whom I have had many discussions on these topics. In particular I am very grateful Dr Andrew Fisher who falls into both categories and who continues to contribute to the material considered here not least about the relationship of Peel to Reith.
- 2.
This concept of constant visibility is what must have attracted Edward Snowden to the word Panopticon, in his case relating it to the constant visibility to the surveillance of the state through digital data. Continuing that thought of visibility another early example of intelligence is Bentham’ close associate Colquhoun’s (see below) knowledge of individual rioters behaviour and their identities. He made known to them his “forbearance” and admonished them to make good use of his forbearance an early example of preventive intelligence led policing (see Stead 1977b, p. 59) and even an early form of cautioning!
- 3.
Not it should be noted Ireland as he is often described as getting his thinking from his experiences there. He goes on to cite his learning about the nature and behaviour of policing in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, (and eventually) Dublin and Edinburgh (“Parliamentary” Debate 28.2.1828 paragraph 788).
- 4.
See footnote 1.
- 5.
A senior officer said to the author of this paper in 1986 that “policing was a working man’s job that had been hijacked by intellectuals” he might have added, based on the authors assessment of his mindset “and women”. But he did not. This is not an attitude the author approves, nor holds as either helpful or correct.
- 6.
- 7.
Lord Scarman conducted three public inquiries. Red Lion Square. Northern Ireland. The Brixton Disorders. All of these could be argued to have a relevance to this discussion.
- 8.
A recent Commissioner to the Metropolis once told the author of the comment made by a very senior soldier to him “the trouble with the police is that they have no honour.” Perhaps he meant they are neither gentlemen nor ladies. The artisan model of policing was alive and well in some officers’ messes. Another recent commentator on an exclusive officers military club claimed “they did not want Plod in here” they were referring to counter terrorist specialists.
- 9.
David Cameron Prime Minister at the time of writing was part of Kenneth Clarke’s association to Patrick Sheehy’s Review of Policing.
- 10.
Damien Green MP was alleged to have been involved in the leakage of documents from a minister’s office whilst his party was in opposition. At the time of writing he had just finished a period as Minister for Policing in the Home Office.
- 11.
A contemporary analogy for the work of Bentham, Colquhoun, Peel, Rowan and Mayne, Chadwick and Mill in London and beyond might be the innovators who gathered at Stanford University and migrated to Silicon Valley in the 1980s. It is perhaps also relevant that Vollmer and Wilson in a later age came from California.
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Grieve, J. (2015). Historical Perspective: British Policing and the Democratic Ideal. In: Wankhade, P., Weir, D. (eds) Police Services. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16568-4_2
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