Policing and the Power of Public Debate

Abstract

In the UK and the USA alike policing has had to come to terms with the powerful influence of political ideology. This has interacted with academic and public commentaries in the creation of social policies. For example, thinking about poverty, such as the idea of an ‘underclass’, has been influential in determining the response of some police policymakers to increased social divisions and exclusion and specifically the problems of crime and disorder which flow out of these (Scarman, 1981: 2.11; Alderson, 1984: 171, 107; Newman, 1983). Since the early 1970s, under the influence of American thinking, the post-war consensus on welfarism in British society came under attack. This coincided with an increase in poverty as well as rising crime, but especially urban unrest. Throughout the 1980s there were outbreaks of public disorder in some of Britain’s inner cities which, for some scholars, were a consequence of these changes (Benyon and Solomos, 1987). Some observers regarded these conflagrations to be the British equivalent of the ‘race’ riots which occurred in the US during the 1960s, and in certain ways the response to the former was conditioned by reactions to the latter.