Fielding, Nigel G.; Professionalizing the Police: the unfulfilled promise of police training; Oxford; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018. Clarendon studies in criminology. 288 Pages, ISBN: 9780198817475, £70.00
Fielding´s book intents to evaluate police training, “grounded in analysis of the nature of the contemporary police mission” (website-text). The author deals with police training in the UK. Other countries are not covered, although in some parts of the book research from other countries and the situation there is mentioned very short and rudimentary. Second, the term “evaluation” must not be understood in a scientific way, e.g. an evaluation by scientific methods. There is no study quoted in this book, dealing with evaluation of the results of police training, although worldwide some do exist.
The book contains two main parts: The first part (chapter 2 and 3, p. 21 – 99) deals with results of police research over the last 50 years, the second part (chapter 4, 5 and 6, p. 100 – 200) with police training. The final chapter 7, titled “The New Policing Landscape” (p. 201 – 227) summaries what has been said before and tries to answer the question, which is indirectly asked in the title of the book: Is the promise of professionalization fulfilled by police training? Unfortunately, the author does not really answer this question, but the two main parts of the book are neither combined nor linked to each other. Instead, the author describes (not analyses) the results of many (not all) police research over the last decades.
The general editors of the series claim in their introduction that “(o)ne of the real strengths of this book is its in-depth discussion of the function of policing, how this has evolved, and the implications for the role of the police and their interactions and relationships with the public”. In fact, it is more a description than a discussion, although the book gives a good overview what aspects have been dealt with in police research.
To mention some of these topics:
- Officer´s time used: police officers are less often busy with crime related activities than usually meant (and the term “crime fighters” implies) (p. 17).
- Police presence as a chimera: research estimates that “to get one more officer permanently out on patrol five further officers would be needed” (p. 16). This figure might be true for the UK, but the necessary positions in the force are higher (up to ten for one available officer), taking into account vacation, illness, training, posts for detectives (with have to be increased, if you increase patrol) and so on.
- Police is an agency of first resort: Over a third of calls are social work-type issues (p. 21).
- Public beliefs about crime are inaccurate (p. 31): therefore, fear of crime is not related to the amount of crime, but to other societal factors.
- Police and disabled people (p. 43): In 2010, 19% of disabled adults were victims of crime in England and Wales, and over 80% of LGBT people have suffered harassment, insults, and intimidation.
- Police and mental illness: Police spend 15-25% of their time dealing with people with mental health problems (p. 86), with an average of 2.5 hours spent dealing with each call. Police often request other agencies assistance, but seldom receive it (p. 87).
- “Only” 9% of recorded crime results in conviction (p. 63): no comment is made on why this is the case, what this makes with officers, and what might be the consequences for the legal justice system as a whole.
- Body cams have different impact (p. 78).
- Women in police might have an impact too, but the explanations, why this is or might be the case are not discussed (p. 177).
- Defining and measuring police work (p. 24 – 32) come with many figures (e.g. on costs of the police force), but misses comparative data and a kind of assessment of these figures.
All these “results” of police research are taken from UK studies. There is no comparative assessment, no taken-into-account what researchers in other countries have found (with some examples for research from the United States). Nevertheless, the book claims to focus on contemporary police research, the theorization of police legitimacy, and community policing, and to draw on conceptualisations developed in socio-legal studies and in ethnographic studies of occupational culture. This is done, but only in a very fragmentary way. In fact, police professionalism has claimed to come increasingly to the fore in recent years following a succession of policing scandals – but the author does not provide us with a clear answer whether this has really happened, and if so (nor not), what the consequences are.
Evidence-based policing, hot spot policing and many other “modern” technics of policing (like community policing) are mentioned in this book (e.g. on p. 33 – 35). An account that presents both the pros and cons of given policies and practices are given, but very often one misses a clear statement or “evaluation” by the author himself and a definition, whether these are technics or philosophies, and what the consequences of this decision might be.
The author puts an emphasis on the importance and limitations of police training. This is good. He calls for curriculum – but for what kond of curriculum? Police training should to “take into account both policing needs as well as the wealth of knowledge from educational fields and sciences like criminology”. He mentions the different approaches both in time and intensity of training (p. 220), and he highlights the importance of both classroom and experiential learning, the balance of academic and vocational training in the police – but he does not let the reader know, why this can have an impact on policing and how training can be improved.
At the end of his book Fielding points out, that policing´s contemporary rhetoric of managerialism, consumer focus, and technological fixes is “an expression of unreconstructed modernism” (p. 226). Its vision of professionalism is “as mechanic as laying down `international occupational standards´ and providing checklists to show they have been met”. Unfortunately, he does not deal with a main consequence of police reforms in different countries, e.g. Scotland, where the police made a shift towards a fundamentally different kind of organisation. The increasing abstract character of police resulted in changes in the internal and external relations of the police. The police became more formalised and dependent on rigid systems and system information. Citizens and communities became more at a distance (see Jan Terpstra et al. 2019). This in fact already has and will have an impact on police work, police-citizen relation, and on police training and education.
The author summarise with saying: “Late modernity is a time of uncertainty and scepticism. In `post-truth´ times, professionalism must accommodate ambiguities of class, faith, ethnicity, and sexuality. Rather than `community policing´ there is `policing communities of risk´, in which a shared fear of crime does not imply shared community spirit. We now understand that the public assess risk not by the reality of crime but by imagined realities. Even sustained and substantial impact on crime rates does not improve public confidence. The police languish as last believers in a monochrome vision of society while the norms make for contemporary sociality have moved on to a multiplex of diversities that harbour new extremes both to tolerance and hate” (p. 226). In times of BREXIT, Trump, Salvini, Orban, and Bolsonaro one might expect some words on who is responsible for that move and/or how benefits. And – even more important – what the police can do or should do to cope with these developments, which are, by the way, not really new. Zygmund Bauman called it 2006 „Liquid Fear“: a liquid fear of crime in “liquid times” (Bauman 2007) “waft” over our societies, resulting in a century of (subjectively felt) risks and uncertainty. The signs and the “danger of deconsolidation” (Foa/Mounk 2016, 2017) are discussed, as citizens of mature democracies have become markedly less satisfied with their form of government and surprisingly open to nondemocratic alternatives. A serious democratic disconnect has emerged. If it widens even further, it may begin to challenge the stability of seemingly consolidated democracies. Either police suffer from this development, or they go with it. Most recent cases with right-wing activities of police officers in Germany (not only) hypothesize the latter. Our liberal democracy is in a crisis, and politicians in many countries not only benefit from this, they provoke this development. A democratic and liberal police is more necessary than even, and scholars should talk about how this can be accomplished loud, and intensively.
Literature:
Bauman, Zygmund (2006): Liquid Fear. Cambridge/Malden.
Bauman, Zygmund (2007): Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge.
Foa, Roberto Stefan, Yascha Mounk (2016): The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect, in: Journal of Democracy, July, 5 – 17. http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/article/danger-deconsolidation-democratic-disconnect
Foa, Roberto Stefan, Yascha Mounk (2017): Signs of Deconsolidation. In: Journal of Democracy January, 5 – 16 https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/article/signs-deconsolidation
Terpstra, Jan, Nicholas R. Fyfe, Renze Salet: The Abstract Police: A conceptual exploration of unintended changes of police organisations. The Police Journal: Theory, Practise and Principles, 1, 2019. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032258X18817999
Rezensiert von: Thomas Feltes