3 - Understanding police legitimacy and public confidence

Summary

Introduction

Neighbourhood policing was a programme developed, like other models of community policing, to fix a problem – a distance and disconnection between the police and local communities that was seen by policy makers as undermining police legitimacy. Legitimacy is particularly important in the British model of ‘policing by consent’. Without legitimacy, it is hard for the police to function, especially in the UK, where the police are largely unarmed.

Consent is a central idea in British policing – what Reiner (2009, p52) calls the ‘animating idea of official discourse about British policing’, one that still provides it with a ‘legitimating philosophy’ (McLaughlin, 2005). The idea of policing by consent can be traced through British policing history. Accounts of the establishment of the New Police in 1839 are laced with violence, often on the part of citizens and aimed towards the police. There was significant hostility and mistrust towards these new officials. The government made concerted efforts to try to gain the consent of the public to being policed: officers were issued with truncheons, rather than armed, and dressed in blue, rather than red, in order to distance them from the armed forces who had been responsible for massacres such as that at Peterloo.

These early confrontations underline that consent is variable, must be earned and is never complete. Policing by its nature is inherently conflictridden, always containing the threat of coercive force: no police force can ever be entirely legitimated, because somebody is always being policed (Reiner, 2009). Yet, nevertheless, the police have to try. Particularly in the British model, this ongoing effort to negotiate legitimacy is central to the police being able to achieve their purposes; without consent, policing as we recognise it could barely happen at all.

This chapter begins by exploring the state of police legitimacy today. It examines some of the most high-profile recent crises of legitimacy, by looking at what happened, why it matters and what story each of these incidents and the responses to them tells us about policing in Britain today, and the trajectory of public confidence.

There is significant overlap between confidence and police legitimacy, and the chapter moves on to establish what each of these terms means.