eleven - Awkward customers? Policing in a consumer age

Summary

In this chapter we explore the problematic relationship between the consumerist orientation of New Labour's approach to public service reform and the organisation of the police as guardians of law and order. Police reform has always been a contentious issue, often provoking resistance and recalcitrance within the police service itself. In this case, the reform process creates potential tensions between the remit of serving the public and the responsibility of exercising legal authority. We draw on empirical work in two English urban settings to consider how both police and public view ideas of a consumer/customer orientation in policing to examine the unsettled relationships between publics and police. We give particular attention to how local communities may be engaged in the process of policing through more or less institutionalised notions of ‘voice’. In the context of this book, we draw attention to how both members of the public and police officers may be seen as ‘subversive’ citizens but may be subverting very different aspects of policy. As we indicate in the following section, practices of subversion – resistance, recalcitrance, negotiation and translation – take place within a complex field of forces. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the problematic relationship between publics, politics and power in policing.

Resisting reform

Policing has not been immune to the significant policy discourses of consumerism and choice that have shaped public service reform in the UK in the early 21st century. The longer history of police reform demonstrates a range of barriers to new policies and their implementation. The response of police officers to reform has involved an expansive repertoire of resistances: forms of occupational recalcitrance, the skilled mobilisation of public and political opinion, the judicious translation of policy into practice and, as we shall see, a thoroughgoing organisational scepticism about ‘reform’ in all its guises. Equally, this history of police shows that it is not only the street-level or ‘blue coated’ bureaucrats who can effectively block new policies and ways of working. Senior officers acting in defence of their jobs or their rank, status and titles have also been significant forces in shaping the course of reform.