Policing Beyond Macpherson: Issues in Policing, Race and Society by M. Rowe (Ed.)

Cullompton : Willan ( 2007 ) 196pp. £22.00pb ISBN 978-1-84392-212-4 This collection of papers on policing and racism since the Macpherson Report is a curate's egg. Several pieces are theoretically-informed, and noteworthy as key readings for students. Others are of an essentially administrative character, interesting to a lay person, while a final (small) group offers little of substance. It is a contrary text in which several papers demonstrate a clear analytical approach, problematising both the concept of racism and, sometimes, policing itself. But generally, the collection fails to recognise the contribution of criminological theory with regard to conceptualising policing itself. Take Chapter 1, by Whitfield. He furnishes a clear and comprehensive analysis of police reform with regard to ethnicity and racism since 1945. I have not seen a better administrative account of the process. But research periodisation cannot be taken seriously. Whitfield falls back on the myth that the primary function of the police is crime prevention and detection of crime. I had believed that, by now, such an official imprimatur had long been dispelled by historical research. The Peelite assumptions of the former have long been criticised. In intent, in practice, and in organisation, most Anglo-American policework has focused on the control of those people and practices that are perceived as constituting the disorderly (however narrowly or widely framed). Long before the Victorian writings of Henry Mayhew (recall the ‘Hindoo’ beggar on the London streets), it has long been appreciated that police work has commonly had little to do with the reified object of ‘crime’, and more to do with categories of people in particular contexts (Nijhar forthcoming 2009). The latter is rarified in the contrary recognition by Stenson and Waddington. The categories of the policed are constructed by often-intermeshed factors of socio-economic class, of ethnic labelling and histories, of gender, and of age, inequalities traditionally visible in the public space to which most police resources have been targeted. Unilateral explanation of tension between black people and the police are insufficient. Inter alia, Stenson and Waddington, drawing in part upon their own research, argue that without understanding this historically-derived matrix, proposals for reform cannot make progress. Chakraborti adds to this deconstruction of the police racism argument by documenting the disparate nature of the supposed ‘black’ population. Similarly, Holdaway and O'Neill provide a legitimate deconstruction of the Black Police Association, its many diffuse components, and the different types of racist discourse through which complex arguments are subsumed (though to this reviewer, there is something of a ‘blaming the victim’ in this focus). Chapter 3, by Rowe and Garland, furnishes as succinct and careful an analysis of the changes and varieties of police training since the Macpherson Report as I have seen. But within the parameters of that orthodox reform programme, there can only be marginal improvement. Having once been a training consultant to the late and unlamented South African Police (where racism was taught directly in a course module –Ethnology), the models practised in the UK which rebut such poison, are as good as anywhere in the Western world. But criminological scholarship on racism recognises it as sourced in police culture, which, in turn, derives from a confrontational state police model. Rowe and Garland signally fail to consider the key debate about the origins and sustenance of that culture. Is it aberrational (‘the bad apples’ approach), or systemic (the ‘rotten orchard’ of Maurice Punch's (2003) contributions). The systemic approach in its most cogent formulation argues that police racism is not the fault of wayward personnel, practices, and procedures but rather a necessary feature of policing. Given the classic dichotomy of law and order, culture from that perspective is a facilitating device to ‘get the job done’, of resolving the policing polarities. Without reconceptualising the very meaning of policing, discarding the anachronistic Peelite model (as, for example, in the recent heuristic works of Johnston and Shearing (2003)), and tackling police racism as a product of police culture through the technical medium of training reform, is Mission Impossible. Souhami's chapter on institutional racism is a welcome contribution to that critique. It also recognises other tensions in the racism debate. But why is this admission not grounded in the relevant structuralist literature? McLaughlin accepts that Macpherson had tapped the truth that key aspects of policing bear heavily on ethnic minorities. The upshot is that, ‘attention must focus on how and why policing acquires its racism’. He asserts that the analytical locus of police racism should be moved from the occupational culture, which he dismisses as rhetoric, to criteria by which officers use discretion to enforce the law. He is both right and wrong (see Brogden and Nijhar 2005). As structuralist critiques of black letter law have taught us, law is the enabling permissive instrument by which the racism of police culture is given statutory authority. Common law in particular, as historical socio-legal scholarship demonstrates to us, enabled the policing agencies to exclude the vagrants, the vagabonds, the criminal classes, and indigenous and ethnic youth from the social order. It is difficult to know what to say about the penultimate chapter by Roycroft, Brown and Innes, apart from applauding it as a good technical account of the failure of the Stephen Lawrenson investigation. Because of the quality and experience of the writers, I had expected more of a commitment to the theoretical problems implicit in their analysis. Brian Holland, as a coalface worker in the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) dealing with the aftermath of the ‘Invisible Policeman’ documentary, deserves personal praise for his perseverance. But working with the police in North Wales, where the personal embodiment of the documentary's focus was filmed, I encountered (as in the GMP) no serious understanding of the structural problem, merely much impassioned sincere rhetoric from senior officers, concluding with the import of the usual Home Office-approved trainers to technically rectify the ‘training’ problem. In sum, as an ‘Ultra’, to use the Italian footballing racist jargon, I had expected more from this book, given the qualities and different experiences of the authors. But they must be appraised by their own standards. However, for the careful reader, there is a reluctance which haunts this edited text. This collection mostly offers (perhaps McLaughlin, Stenson and Waddington aside), a technical response to a structural problem. Why are we surprised that a post-modern police force which remains embedded in Victorian mythology and organisation, cannot deal with racism?

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