Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
What do the public think of their police? This is a rather more complicated question than it appears. When public opinion polling was in its infancy, people were asked how they felt about ‘the police’. Perhaps training could make it look better, but that takes officers off the streets where the public demands to see them. To engage with controversy could, at least, elevate public debate.
The recently published ‘guidelines’ on police undercover operations prove to be just ‘business as usual’. The guidelines consist of 80 pages in which a new ‘alphabet soup’ of abbreviations describes each of a set of roles to be fulfilled by officers of given ranks.
Reports that luminaries of the ‘establishment,’ including Archbishop Carey, were queuing up to write letters directly to the Director of Public Prosecutions in support of Bishop Peter Ball, who was eventually convicted of numerous sex offences, is hardly a revelation. Bishops of the Church of England move in the rarefied circles of the establishment, such as the London clubs.
Hampshire Constabulary are the latest in a long line of police forces obliged to apologise to a victim of crime for failing to investigate an allegation properly. In this case, a young woman accused a man of rape. She was not believed; forensic examination of clothing was delayed; in the meanwhile, the complainant was threatened with arrest for ‘perverting the course of justice’ and she attempted suicide. Eventually, following belated forensic analysis, the man was arrested and has since then been convicted.
‘Never waste a good crisis’, or so Rahm Emanuel (President Obama’s former Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago) is reputed to have said. Well, whether Prince Andrew allegedly had sex with an underage girl at some time in the distant past looks like a crisis for the Royal Household. May be it’s an opportunity not to be wasted.
The recent announcement made jointly by the Home Office and College of Policing is a vacuous document that will do little or nothing to change police practice or promote better police-public relations.