Workplace violence: a social harm perspective

Anthony Lloyd is Reader in Criminology and Sociology at Teesside University. His research focuses on labour markets and work within an ultra-realist harm framework. His latest book, The Harms of Work (Bristol University Press) is out in paperback in October.

 

According to recent figures from the NHS staff survey and research by Unison, violence against NHS staff continues to rise.  Official figures indicate that nearly 15% of staff surveyed had been subjected to physical violence from patients, patients’ relatives or the public while numerous incidents continue to go unreported.  Although many assaults are clinical in nature and therefore take place in mental health settings, the Health Service Journal/Unison report found violent incidents growing in other settings.  Around one-third of staff reported an assault in the previous twelve months and the report draws a correlation between high levels of violence and NHS trusts with large financial deficits and poor performance on elective waiting times.  Could it reasonably be extrapolated, then, that services stretched to the limit generate frustration and dissatisfaction increasingly manifesting in violent outbursts against staff?

The reports of increasing violence against NHS workers follows growing evidence that school teachers face rising levels of physical and verbal abuse from pupils and parents.  Research conducted by NASUWT suggests that one in four teachers experience physical violence from pupils on a weekly basis, including being shoved, barged, hit, punched and kicked.  Almost half of the 5,000 teachers surveyed reported being verbally threatened by pupils. In 2016/17, nearly 750 pupils were permanently excluded for violence against an adult whilst almost 27,000 were given fixed period exclusions for a physical assault on an adult.

Police officers, prison staff and, increasingly, fire fighters are routinely assaulted in the line of work.  In 2017-18, one in five police officers were assaulted in the line of duty with 8,500 prison officers assaulted in the same period.  According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), 694,000 incidents of violence were recorded in UK workplaces in 2017-18 alone with 374,000 adults experiencing violence at work in that period, 41% of which reported injuries.

These reports and research show that workplace violence is prevalent across a range of occupations with employees often facing threats, intimidation and assault during the course of their work.  Criminology has a track record of investigating violent workplaces (Gill et al, 2002; Martin et al, 2012; Schindeler, 2013).  It is crucial that criminology continue to investigate violence in all arenas, including the workplace.  However, it is also vital to heed Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) warning that physical or subjective violence often masks or distracts from more pervasive and invidious acts of ‘systemic violence’ which underpin neoliberal political economy.  A focus on ‘spectacular’ violence should not detract from the wider violence inflicted upon individuals, communities and institutions through the normal functioning of capitalism.

In my work on service economy employees (Lloyd, 2018a; 2018b; 2019), I observed and interviewed call centre workers, retail employees, hospitality workers, couriers, bar staff and fast-food workers.  While physical violence was not observed and very rarely reported by contacts, verbal abuse from customers was endemic and routine while bullying, harassment and abuse from co-workers and supervisors was frequently reported.  However, the picture that emerged was also one of short-term or zero-hour contracts, minimum wage work, targets and performance management, inflexible work rotas, pressure, stress, instability and the sort of workplace precarity regularly cited within the sociology of work literature (Standing, 2011).

Analysing this research from a social harm perspective opens up the normal functioning of labour markets to a critique that highlights numerous problematic practices and, importantly, absences.

The social harm literature continues to struggle with the fundamental question of ‘harm from what?’ (Pemberton, 2016; Yar, 2012; Hillyard and Tombs, 2004; Raymen, 2019).  What harm occurs when employment contracts increasingly favour the employer over the employee?  What harm is inflicted on individuals and communities through austerity measures?  What harm do we suffer through climate change?  The debate around harm’s ontological grounding continues but my contribution, from an ultra-realist perspective (Hall and Winlow, 2015), suggests that harm can be the absence of positive rights that allow individual and collective flourishing.

Following critical realism, ultra-realist criminology posits the probabilistic causal tendencies of absences (Hall and Winlow, 2015).  For example, the absence of a welfare state would undoubtedly engender harmful consequences for individuals and families.  In this case, the absence of stability was evident through the presence of zero-hour contracts, on-demand work, short-term contracts, ‘flexible’ work arrangements that mostly favoured management, low pay, and often inflexible shifts.  The absence of protection was evident through the presence of unpaid ‘work trials’, failure to pay the National Minimum Wage, regular evidence of physical and mental health problems.  The absence of ethical responsibility for the other was evident in the presence of management bullying, colleague harassment, customer abuse and the ‘special liberty’ (Hall, 2012) or sense of competitive entitlement to act in one’s own interests regardless of consequence or damage to co-workers and employees.  The willingness to harm others is intimately connected to competitive individualism.  Within this theoretical framework, absences have consequences and systemic violence damages far worse than subjective violence.

If we return to the earlier examples of hospital and school violence and consider systemic violence, we see wider harms at work.  The same NHS staff survey that reported significant levels of violence also confirmed that 3 in 5 staff work additional unpaid hours, almost 40% reported feeling unwell due to work-related stress, 56% admitted working while not feeling well enough to perform their duties, 45% felt managers did not ask their opinions, 30% considered leaving their organisation.  One-third suggested they could not provide the level of care for patients that they aspired to, 20% reported bullying and harassment from colleagues and over 40% could not say they looked forward to going to work.

These figures indicate significant issues beyond the threat of physical violence.  Like all public sector organisations, the NHS has been subject to austerity, staff shortages, to the implementation of neoliberal managerialism, particularly the directive for efficiency, productivity and value for money, and to outsourcing and privatisation (Pollock, 2004; Davis et al, 2015).  The staff survey results indicate an absence of protection, stability and ethical responsibility for the other that requires further investigation but seems to suggest that positive rights or flourishing are lacking in a sector that demands more with less, stretches services to breaking point and ramps up dissatisfaction, from both employees and service users.  It is within this context that violent outbursts exist.

The workplace must continue as a site of criminological investigation but should also approach such research from a social harm perspective (Scott, 2017).  Widening the angle of vision to incorporate systemic violence as well as brutal outbursts of physical violence allows us to see the myriad harms of work that contextualise subjective assaults on doctors, nurses and teachers.  Many of our workplaces impede flourishing and well-being, both through subjective violence against the person and the systemic violence of neoliberal ideology.  As neoliberal capitalism continues to erode working conditions, conditions of employment and the social relations between employer, employee and consumer, the absences that emerge generate multiple harms, perpetrated by and against the individual.  It is incumbent upon Criminology to see the whole picture.

 

References

Davis, J., Lister, J. and Wrigley, D. (2015) NHS For Sale: Myths, Lies and Deception, London: Merlin Press.

Gill, M., Fisher, B. And Bowie, V. (2002) Violence at Work: Causes, patterns and prevention, (Eds) Cullompton: Willan.

Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism, London: Routledge.

Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective, London: Sage.

Hillyard, P. and Tombs, S. (2004) ‘Beyond Criminology?’ in Hillyard, P., Pantazis, C., Tombs, S. and Gordon, D. (Eds) Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously, London: Pluto Press.

Lloyd, A. (2018a) The Harms of Work. Bristol: Policy Press.

Lloyd, A. (2018b) “Working for free: Illegal employment practices, ‘off the books’ work and the continuum of legality within the service economy’, Trends in Organised Crime. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-018-9351-x

Lloyd, A. (2019) “Harm at Work: Bullying and special liberty in the retail sector”, Critical Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-019-09445-9

Martin, D., Mackenzie, N. and Healy, J. (2012) ‘Balancing risk and professional identity, secondary school teachers’ narratives of violence’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 13(4), 398-414.

Pemberton, S. (2016) Harmful Societies, Bristol: Policy Press.

Pollock, A.M. (2004) NHS Plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care, London: Verso.

Raymen, T. (2019) ‘The Enigma of Social Harm and the Barrier of Liberalism: Why Zemiology Needs a Theory of the Good’, Justice, Power and Resistance, 3(1) 134-163.

Schindeler, E. (2013) ‘Workplace violence: Extending the boundaries of criminology’, Theoretical Criminology, 18(3), 371-385.

Scott, S. (2017) Labour Exploitation and Work-Based Harm, Bristol: Policy Press.

Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury.

Yar, M. (2012) ‘Critical criminology, critical theory and social harm’, in Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (Eds.) New Directions in Criminological Theory, London: Routledge.

Žižek, S. (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, London: Profile Books.

 

Contact

Dr. Anthony Lloyd, Reader in Criminology, Teesside University

Email Anthony.Lloyd@tees.ac.uk

Twitter @lloyd_a1

Copyright free images courtesy of author and  Flickr

Do we know enough now?

Barry Godfrey is Professor of Social Justice and has published over twenty books on the history of crime. He is currently editing a Special Edition of the Howard League Journal on the impact of crime history.

 

 

There have been thousands of studies of criminal behavior and of society’s attempts to control it over the last two centuries. Academics think that even more research will enlarge, challenge, and refine our knowledge, and indeed it will. However, because – or perhaps despite of – the vast number of academics now involved in the criminological enterprise, there is considerable agreement about the causes and consequences of crime and punishment.

Historians of crime would find a similar consensus. The vast majority agree that crime is a social and historical construct; that institutions of control are shaped by their histories; that class, gender, and race all conditioned treatment in, and by, the criminal justice system (and still do); that economic inequalities were broadly linked to crime (and still are); and that society has long relied on ineffective nineteenth century forms of punishment (and still does).

I accept that these conclusions lack nuance. Different viewpoints, theoretical perspectives, and empirical wrangles are important, but I would suggest that any differences are dwarfed by the general agreement. Internal liturgical debates are important to us, but not to the general public and are confusing for policy makers (who often find our debates exclusionary, irrelevant, and frankly, bewildering). I am coming around to their point of view. At the very least, we should concede that our research is sometime incomprehensible to ‘outsiders’ and is not user-friendly to anyone who might transform it into practice or policy. Given that we have a common(ish) platform of academic understanding about crime, I would join others to argue that the greatest challenge for academics is for us to use our research to create a strong, meaningful, and persuasive dialogue which influences policy makers to improve the criminal justice system, and to engender more positive public attitudes towards offenders and ex-offenders.

In 2002 Paul Wiles noted that there was a growing gap between academic and public debate, lamenting that we have ‘lost the knack of engaging’. Sociology seems to do much better – according to Michael Burawoy in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association.  Later, in 2010, Uggen and Inderbitzen encouraged criminologists to follow the sociological lead in order to bring together “empirically sound research and comprehensible messages to diverse publics”. This meets the zeitgeist. The ‘impact agenda’ of various research exercises in the UK and elsewhere is of course a half-hearted and largely ‘half-arsed’ attempt to measure our worth in terms and criteria not of our choosing, but it has undoubtedly encouraged a greater level of engagement between academia and policymakers/practitioners. We are also in the business of making sure that our research ‘does something’ to improve policy and practice whether we like it or not. If we fail to engage with the policy realm, then are we at best academic parvenus, at worst a costly (remembering that most of our research is publicly funded) irrelevance?

Having influence over policy and practice is not easy to arrive by, of course. There are unforeseen consequences, and even the predictable outcomes are complex. Policy makers have different agendas, often serve political interests which are antipathetic to our own and require simplicity where we privilege complexity. For every example of the policy realm successfully using our research, there is a disaster story; yet for every disaster story, there is an example of our research being successfully used.

Teaching crime history and criminology may be the biggest impact any of us will have. Our lectures later become the common-sense attitudes towards crime that thousands of students take with them as they graduate from universities every year. However, we also know that sharper and more direct relationships with partners outside of the university can lead to more immediate positive impacts on society. Changing attitudes amongst the student body, hoping that our teaching will cause them to be more pro-social in the future, is a long game. To address the multiple crises society faces today, we need something quicker. We need to press our case. I am not, by any means, suggesting that we stop doing research. That would be perverse given the advantages and opportunities afforded by the second data revolution and the conjunction of readily available digitized crime records, the development of visual methods, and the number and increasing diversity of crime historians nationally and internationally. It would also, I suspect, go against the fundamental essence of being a researcher: research is what we like to do. However, we now have a broad consensus about the causes and consequences of crime, and the shaping of that consensus seems to demand action.  None of us are happy that there are still so many biases in the system, that Victorian penology still predominates, and that class and race still determine outcomes in the criminal justice process. So, is it now time to devote our efforts, not to collecting more and more evidence, but to use what we already know to influence others, and to bring about the change that we, and society, needs?

Contact

Professor Barry Godfrey, University of Liverpool

Email: Barry.Godfrey@Liverpool.ac.uk

Copyright free images courtesy of author

Celebrating Survival

David Best is professor of criminology at the University of Derby, Honorary Professor of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University and Chair of the BSC Prison Research Network.

 

Politically, we appear to be surfing a new wave of being ‘tough on crime’ with more prisons to be built and a growth in the prison population to be anticipated. Outside of the political posturing however, all of us who have spent any time in the UK prison system recognise that prison is a tough, miserable and potentially damaging environment for all of those who have to spend time there, including but not restricted to the prisoners.

This is captured in a wonderfully accessible way in Carl Cattermole’s ‘Prison: A survival guide’ a lived experience account of what life in a UK prison is really like, with the original draft written by someone newly released from a male UK prison. The book does exactly what it says, providing a largely chronological account of how to get through the experience with as little distress as possible.

Illustrated with cartoons from Banx (@banxcartoons), it also provides a sense of hope – particularly around the friendships that can emerge in prison and how they can endure ‘through the gate’ – and the humanity that is a theme of the book comes across incredibly strongly. The book is warm and at times funny and is easy and accessible, but what makes this survival guide so important is the multiple voices contained within it.

Watch a video of Carl talking on Straightline.

Carl is a fabulous narrator and story-teller but his voice is supplemented with those of the partner of a prisoner, the child of a prisoner, a child prisoner, a prisoner who has a child in prison and the experience of a prisoner from a member of the LGBTI community. Each of these accounts is incredibly poignant and insightful and the strength of feeling is intense and powerful.

It would be extremely difficult to read the book without realising the ripple effects of pain and misery that imprisonment causes to families and to communities, but it is also impossible to read the Survival Guide without acknowledging the resilience and strength that emanates from each of these clear and powerful voices.

As a criminologist, I would like to recommend it not only to all of the members of the Prison Research Network but also to all of their students as a rich and layered insight into the prison experience. But it should also be mandatory reading for all prison officers and prison governors.

Of course, expecting politicians to read something that is inconsistent with their own prejudices and soundbites is unrealistic but perhaps some of those working in the MoJ and the Prison and Probation Service may be swayed by the pain and the power of this book.

Whether you think prisons are a necessary evil or not, this is a book that confirms the harms that prison inflicts while clearly proclaiming that there are a group of people who can and will overcome that harm. Whether they should have to is a critical part of the debate ‘Prison: A survival guide’ should generate. And perhaps Carl could be encouraged to follow it up with “Community: A survival guide”?

Buy the Book – Prisonism website

BSC members can win a copy of ‘Prison: A survival guide’ together with a copy of ‘Pathways to Recovery and Desistance: The Role of the Social Contagion of Hope’ by David Best by emailing ‘Prison Book Draw’ to info@britsoccrim.org  The draw runs through September and October with a closing date of October 29, 2019.

Book Summary

Prison A Survival Guide (Penguin, 2019) is the cult travelogue for the obfuscated and complex British prison system. Its primarily authored by Carl Cattermole, a 30 year old ex-prisoner, based in South London and sometimes Latin America, but also features contributions from female, LGBTQ+ and child prisoners and their supporting family members. Its target audiences are anyone who contacts the system: prisoners and their families, criminologists and politicians, citizens who want to bust media myths and know where ‘criminal justice’ £billions are being thrown. The first print run sold out in 10 days. Carl and other contributors are currently touring to promote the book.

 

Contact

Professor David Best, University of Derby

Email: davidwilliambest@icloud.com

Twitter: @davidwbest12

Copyright free image courtesy of author

Cartoons courtesy of Carl Cattermole and Banx (@banxcartoons)

 

Justice must be seen to be done

Ellen Daly is a PhD candidate at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research explores the use of rape myths and other narratives in rape and sexual assault trials in England and Wales.

 

In recent years there has been a great deal of media attention paid to the prosecution of rape. Most recently criticisms have frequently centred around the falling prosecution rate in England and Wales. Although reports of rape are increasing, the number of prosecutions continues to fall. This means that many victims are not getting the justice they are seeking through reporting to the criminal justice system. Only a tiny portion see justice, and for victim-survivors from minoritised or marginalised groups the chances of seeing a conviction are even slimmer. This begs the question “why?” – why does it seem that victim-survivors from particular groups are more likely to find justice through the criminal justice system?

Evidence suggests that victim-survivors from particular backgrounds have limited access to justice as a result of structural inequalities and various aspects of their perceived identity (see for example Lovett et al 2007 and Hester 2013). There is little contemporary research that addresses these issues, particularly in the context of criminal court. Criticisms of Crown Court responses to rape and sexual assault often focus on the influence of rape myths on trial practices and outcomes, but very little has been done to explore the links between what goes on in the courtroom and the differences in attrition rates for women from minoritised or marginalised groups. This is what my PhD research seeks to explore.

Rape myths are frequently pointed to as offering an explanation for the lack of justice for rape and sexual assault victim-survivors as a whole, and with good reason. It is well established, through a strong body of research from a range of disciplines, that rape myths are commonly accepted among the general population, including by those involved (or potentially involved) in the administration of criminal justice. This includes research that evidences the existence of rape myths at trial and their influence on jurors.

Rape myths have featured in every rape and sexual assault trial I have observed so far and have usually had the function of either blaming the victim or excusing the defendant’s alleged actions. They are utilised as a tool for casting doubt on victim-survivor testimony and to bolster the defence of the accused.

In my observations I have heard the behaviour of victim-survivors being questioned, implying that but for their actions the incident would not have occurred. I heard a victim-survivor being questioned on her drinking habits and binge-drinking, even though a central argument to the defence case was that she was not drunk on the night in question. These arguments draw on rape myths that seek to minimise the behaviour of the accused by positioning the victim-survivors as bearing responsibility for what happened to them.

I have heard victim-survivors being positioned as liars who are seeking revenge or are embarrassed and regretful. In the courtroom, these myths that position women as liars rely on the misconception that false allegations of rape are common, when actually we know that not to be true.  These lines of argument may be particularly pertinent to juror decision-making when considered against the backdrop of mass media coverage regarding collapsed cases.

These myths can be applied to all victim-survivors though, so their presence doesn’t necessarily answer what could be happening to impact specifically on those from minortised and marginalised groups. Provisional findings from my research indicate that one possibility is that narratives around social class are used in trial and that they intersect with the gendered rape myths that are already known to exist in the courtroom.

There are no direct references to social class, it is more subtly implied through small seeds sown throughout the trial. There are frequent references to victim-survivors and defendants being uneducated and unintelligent, which come against the context of evidence which establishes that they live in an impoverished town, on a council estate, that they receive state benefits, are unemployed or are in insecure work. All of which are things that are reflective of working-class stereotypes in our society. The work of Charles Murray in the 1990s on the so-called ‘underclass’ in Britain and its subsequent and continued uptake by the media and politicians, provides a starting point for arguing that stereotypes often portray working-class people as poorly educated or of lower intelligence compared to those deemed middle- and upper-class.

In my observations, defendants being of low intelligence was being presented by the defence as an inability to lie or pretend, positioning them as the credible party the juries should believe above the victim-survivors. To illustrate, two trials included text message evidence of what could be read as confessions to the events in question. In these trials the specific wording used by the defendants was thoroughly picked apart by both prosecution and defence, with the prosecution proclaiming that the defendants’ explanations were ridiculous. Whilst on the other hand, the defence in both cases rationalised the choice of words as being because the defendants are uneducated or unintelligent, that his words were not intended as a confession to rape or sexual assault and can simply be explained by his poor grasp of English grammar and vocabulary. These narratives are taking the counter-side of the ‘women lie’ rape myth, by suggesting that these ‘unintelligent’ working-class men are too stupid to lie convincingly and therefore must be believed.

Other narratives related to social class draw on middle-class ideals of respectability. Victim-survivors are portrayed as not conforming to these standards of respectability, whether that be through their drinking habits or the way they present themselves. We needn’t look much further than reality TV to evidence how young women, particularly those from working-class backgrounds, have been portrayed as heavy drinkers whose behaviour and ways of dressing are used to depict them as ‘easy’ and ‘up for anything’ (recent examples include Geordie Shore and TOWIE). This of course links to gendered rape myths around respectability, which are based on middle-class ideals.

The findings I’ve outlined here perhaps begin to answer how some groups of victim-survivors appear to have a lower chance of seeing a conviction in their cases. Narratives drawing on victim-survivors’ and defendants’ perceived identity or membership to a particular group, which in the examples outlined here related to social class, intersect with gendered rape myth narratives. Therefore it is not only rape myths that play a role in undermining the credibility of victim-survivors and bolstering the presumed innocence of defendants. The reality inside the courtroom is much more nuanced than that. Myth-busting measures are unlikely to have the desired effect without taking account of broader structural inequalities. Fair justice cannot come from a system where convictions and acquittals can be made based on myths and stereotypes.

Contact

Ellen Daly, Anglia Ruskin University

Email: Ellen.daly@pgr.anglia.ac.uk

 

Copyright free images courtesy of the author

 

 

Jostling for Space: ‘teaching about policing’ or ‘teaching for policing’?

Sarah Charman and Steve Savage are Reader in Criminology and Professor of Criminology respectively at the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth.

In this piece we situate ‘teaching policing’ within a longer term historical framework and on this basis reflect on the current challenges of teaching policing in the light of the Police Education Qualifications Framework (PEQF) and the status of higher education institutions (HEIs) alongside that agenda. In both respects we suggest a (soft) distinction between ‘teaching about policing’ and ‘teaching for policing’.

To clarify, ‘teaching policing’ should be seen as much more than teaching police officers or police staff about policing. It is of course significantly concerned with teaching those directly involved in policing, but it also embraces teaching programmes concerned with policing and related subjects within other undergraduate or postgraduate degrees, most commonly criminology degrees – many students from which become police employees in due course. We would argue that the content of teaching policing to police officers (increasingly ‘for policing’) should not depart too much from the content on offer to the non-police officer students (‘about policing’). We will explain later.

To begin, we can look at the long history of teaching policing in the university context. As one of the authors has argued before, we can, at the risk of some over-simplification, periodise university provision for policing (and more generally police working relationships with universities) into three phases: the ‘sponsorship’ phase; the ‘partnership’ phase; and the ‘contract’ phase.

The ‘sponsorship’ phase dates back to the 1970s and ran until the late 1980s, and relates to the secondment of individual police officers to universities to study on a degree of their choice as a full-time (but salaried) student. The best-known scheme of this type was the ‘Bramshill Scolarship’, but a number of individual police forces, mainly the larger metropolitan ones, ran schemes of their own. Those chosen were typically at sergeant or inspector rank, and the ethos at the time was to give opportunities for university study for ‘high fliers’ who did not have that opportunity when younger – this was after all a scheme which ran at a time when the graduate was almost an unknown figure in the police. Often, they chose to study Law, and often at leading universities. A generous scheme indeed for the very small number lucky enough to be selected.

The ‘partnership’ phase ran from the late 1980s (the University of Portsmouth began its first such programme in 1988) and is only just being fully replaced by the machinery of the PEQF. This involved universities forming partnerships with police forces to deliver jointly designed or agreed policing related education to selected cohorts of police officers (whose fees were often paid by the force as part of continuing professional development), normally under the banner of degrees in policing or police studies. A key feature of such programmes is that they typically covered police-related themes that were not covered in police training itself. Subject areas such as criminology, criminal justice, the politics of policing and the sociology and psychology of policing were examples of this.

Growing financial constraints for police forces, rising part-time student fees and an increasing emphasis on ‘value-for-money’ meant that not only did partnership schemes lose the financial basis on which they partly depended – force funding for student officer fees – but all educational schemes were placed on a ‘return on investment’ basis, often narrowly so. This opened the door to the ‘contract’ phase in which a partnership relationship was giving way to a ‘client- contractor’ one, with the police as commissioning client and HEIs as contractor. Early versions of this appeared with some of the ‘foundation degrees in policing’ where the degrees in question were designed as integral to police training within the client forces. Furthermore, they were often delivered in the universities by recently retired police trainers. Was this in danger of becoming ‘business as usual’ as a form of ‘police training on the university campus’?

Of course, the PEQF has taken the contractual model very much further. Police forces, or groups of forces, have been putting the police constable degree apprenticeships and degree holder education programmes out to competitive tender with (some) HEIs competing to run them. More will follow with Masters level programmes.

We would argue that this longer-term trajectory has involved a transition from HEIs offering teaching about policing to them being increasingly contract-bound to deliver teaching for policing. Teaching-about-policing is about content being primarily academically driven according to subject disciplines and assessed primarily through theoretically informed critical analysis. Teaching-for-policing is about teaching being directly driven by police sector defined professional competencies and approved on the basis that it does so. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. Teaching-about-policing has usually had one eye on ‘what police officers might want to know’ to aid professional development. Furthermore, many recent teaching-about-policing programmes have included teaching-for-policing elements such as the pre-join Certificate of Knowledge in Professional Policing offered within criminology degrees. Nevertheless, there seems to be no doubt that the balance between the two has shifted towards the teaching-for-policing end of the spectrum.

Many within the HEI sector have welcomed this shift and some indeed have played active roles in programme design on that basis. The HEI sector, or at least parts of it, has exhibited support for this agenda shift by actively seeking to play a part in the PEQF. The PEQF, after all, does institutionalise and formalise a central role for HEIs in the police learning and development scene – in place of the voluntary and permissive relationship between the police service and HEIs typified even within the ‘partnership’ model outlined earlier. However, we would just urge that as the shift towards ‘teaching-for-policing’ progresses we should not lose sight of what ‘teaching-about-policing’ has contributed and continues to contribute to our understanding of policing and that we avoid as much as we can a continuation of existing models of delivery rather than transforming to alternative methods of delivery.

There is therefore a potential danger that what is taught and how it is taught within the ‘teaching-for-policing’ agenda may drift towards ‘business-as-usual’ and not the fully transformational shift which many of those behind the design of the PEQF have been seeking. Inevitably, the anchoring of policing degrees in pre-designed professional competencies places major constraints on the curriculum and its assessment with the potential to sideline critical reflection.  The achievement of these competencies becomes the only desirable outcome of the learning process; the ends are therefore all important, the means become largely irrelevant.   However, there is some degree of flexibility within those constraints in terms of what is taught and how it is taught and by whom.

There is a case for claiming that criminology should be as central to police education as medicine is to nursing.  Indeed, it is encouraging that criminologically driven concepts such as procedural justice and restorative justice are now mainstream within police learning and development design. These are theories whose origins lie in research allied to ‘teaching-about-policing’. As sociologists and criminologists (we would say this wouldn’t we?) we would make a plea that criminology, the politics of policing and the sociology and psychology of policing, all get fairly and fully represented in teaching-for-policing programmes, whatever the time and space constraints of a curriculum which must deliver professional police competencies.

 

Contact

Dr Sarah Charman, Reader in Criminology, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth.

Professor Stephen P. Savage, Professor of Criminology, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth.

Emails:

sarah.charman@port.ac.uk

steve.savage@port.ac.uk

Twitter:

@sarahc2612

 

Images: courtesy of the authors

When Police Racism is Denied, Does it Go Away?

Dr. Lambros Fatsis is currently Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Southampton and the winner of the British Society of Criminology’s ‘Blogger of the Year Award’. In September 2019, he will join the University of Brighton as a Lecturer in Criminology.

 

Amid a plethora of Home Affairs Committees, events, debates, and impassioned commentaries that interrogate the legacy of the Macpherson report and muse on the current state of the London Metropolitan Police, as far as institutional racism is concerned, recent statements by the Met Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, do much to spark further interest in and controversies around the issue. During a Home Affairs Committee session on the Met’s progress in implementing the recommendations of the Macpherson Report, including steps taken to address that report’s findings on institutional racism in the police, Cressida Dick reportedly said that the Metropolitan Police is no longer ‘institutionally racist’ and stressed that the label itself is ‘toxic’ and ‘unhelpful’. Insisting that the force has been ‘utterly transformed’ since Macpherson’s time, the Met Police chief added that: ‘The label now does more harm than good, it is something that is immediately interpreted by anyone who hears it as not institutional but racist – full of racists full stop, which we are not. It is a label that puts people off from engaging with the police. It stops people wanting to give us intelligence, evidence, come and join us, work with us’.

The Met Police Commissioner, therefore, seems confident that: (a) institutional racism in today’s Met is a thing of the past, (b) that it harms the reputation of the force, and that (c) when the term is used we hear the word “racist” louder than the word “institutional”; thereby thinking that the police is populated by racists. She then reassuringly claims that not only is the Met not ‘full of racists’ but that this misperception damages the relationship between the public and the police and undermines citizens’ confidence and trust in the force, while also discouraging potential recruits to join. As a result, institutional racism is suddenly pronounced dead, the definition and meaning of the term becomes misunderstood, and we are left to consider the reputational damage of institutional racism on the Met, instead of worrying about its impact on those who suffer from its consequences. On all three counts, this is a deeply unsettling statement which denies the facts, distorts what words mean, and prioritises the public image of a civil force of the state over its accountability to the public that it ostensibly serves and protects.

Starting with the premature obituary of institutional racism within the Met, it should be read against the latest evidence which clearly points to its existence today. Relevant research findings unambiguously demonstrate racial disparities and disproportionality in the use of stop-and-search, the Gangs Matrix, or the policing tactics used to tackle knife crime and clamp down Black music genres like grime and drill. Last year alone, an influential report for Stopwatch and Release by LSE academic Michael Shiner and his colleagues did much to demonstrate the discriminatory effects of stop and search, echoing earlier evidence from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a Criminal Justice Alliance briefing, and other oft-quoted academic research (here, here, and here). The Met’s gang database (the Gangs Matrix) fares just as badly with two damming reports by Amnesty International and Stopwatch exposing its racist logic, as did the Information Commissioner’s Office which noted ‘the potential to cause damage and distress to the disproportionate number of young, black men on the Matrix’. Buttressing claims of the effectiveness of stop-and-search as a vital tool for fighting knife crime, a report by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies condemned the overall approach as ineffective, unjust and damaging to the people that it (cl)aims to protect, as did the Youth Violence Commission which advocates for a public health alternative. As for the policing of UK grime and drill music, my own research demonstrates how the discriminatory policing of both genres serves as a unique case study of institutional racism within the Met today.

Were this not enough, on her visit to the UK last year the UN Special Rapporteur on racism, appeared ‘shocked by the criminalisation of young people from ethnic minorities, especially young black men. They are over-represented in police stop and searches, more likely to face prosecution under the country’s joint enterprise provisions, and are over-represented in the prison system’. None of this is secret knowledge and even a cursory glance at the government’s Race Disparity Unit ‘ethnicity facts and figures’ on stop-and-search and arrests would suffice to convince anyone of the discriminatory treatment of Black people by the police and other UK criminal justice system institutions.

Factual evidence aside, the Met Police Commissioner’s comments are also striking for the way they misrepresent what institutional racism actually means. In Macpherson’s famous formulation, institutional racism ‘consists of the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people’. The institutional origins of racist behaviour and discriminatory outcomes are not separated in Macpherson’s definition, as they are in Cressida Dick’s interpretation of the term. Yet, she argues that people somehow mentally uncouple the two when the term is used, while also claiming that the term implies that the Met is ‘full of racists’ instead of pointing to a collective failure of an organisation whose processes and attitudes are to blame. The difference between Macpherson and Cressida Dick is that the former points to racism as a feature of the institutional structure and collective mentality of the Met, whereas the latter misunderstands racism as individual prejudice alone. In so doing, a structural characteristic of an entire organisation is denied, and attributed instead to a few individuals who independently act out their own prejudicial attitudes as individuals. Individual officers therefore appear unaffected by their socialisation into an institutionally racist mindset, nor do they act as a team in line with that institution’s logic and unwritten rules. Since racism, according to the Met Commissioner, is an individual trait it has nothing to do with the institutional make-up of the organisation, and since it does not characterise the entire force it cannot exist. The term institutional racism, however, refers to racist attitudes that are built into organisations by design, with the assumption being that individuals take on the prejudices of an organisation and do not act independently of it, especially when they work in groups.

What makes all the above so difficult to stomach is not a logical fallacy, which mistakes something structural and systemic for something individual or (co)incidental, but a dangerous argument which shows little regard for the casualties of such structural arrangements. To perceive institutional, structural, systemic racism merely as a ‘toxic label’ is to deny how toxic the reality of it is for the people and communities that are disproportionately affected by it. Worse still, it reveals a denialist logic which refuses to admit the existence of institutional racism, thereby discounting the relevant evidence. Such a stubborn stance contradicts the Met’s self-understanding as a professional police force which acts on the basis of evidence in order to oversee public safety. On the contrary, such statements give the impression that the Met chooses to defend itself instead of protecting the public to whom it is accountable, and that it chooses to tackle crime by strangling the facts that should guide its mission, its ethos, and its conduct.

Pretending that institutional racism is a thing of the past, is to fail to see how and why it is present today. Yet, the Met chief seems either unable to see all this or willfully blind to it all. If it is the former, she could be dismissed as inadequate. If it is the latter, she might be suspected of being dangerous. Either way, she seems disconcertingly vulnerable to the siren call of hawkish policing and deaf to the evidence that renders it illegitimate. Her pledge to ‘relentlessly’ pursue gangs through increased stop and search doesn’t simply clash with evidence that this police power is ineffective, discriminatory and unjust, but also jars with the lack of concrete evidence to link knife crime and gang membership. Such a stance does chime well, however, with the government’s recent promise to increase stop and search powers and relax rules of conduct to make criminals ‘literally feel terror’. Similarly, the Met chief’s refusal to acknowledge institutional racism as a reality within the force that she leads, eerily echoes statements by the new head of No. 10’s Policy Unit, who famously dismissed institutional racism as a ‘myth’ and decried the establishment of the Race Disparity Audit as serving a ‘phoney race war’ that is ‘dangerous and divisive’.

Twenty years after Macpherson diagnosed the Met with institutional racism steadfast refusals to see it, point to a reluctance to see what is evident through facts. We should, therefore, be reminded that when ‘racism is how the world is seen’, as Sara Ahmed brilliantly put it, ‘it remains possible for racism not to be seen’.

This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the institution he works for.

 

Contact

Lambros Fatsis, University of Southampton

Twitter: @lfatsis

Copyright free image courtesy of Pexels

 

 

 

Academic Integrity and making a difference

 

Emma Williams is the Director of the Centre for Police Research at CCCU. Her interests are police professionalism, rape investigation, gender and policing and police legitimacy. Previously Emma worked as a principle researcher in the Metropolitan Police Service.

 

 

The Police Education Qualification Framework (PEQF) has fundamentally changed the approach to police recruitment and the conversation about how new officers embark on a ‘professional’ career. Three entry routes dictate that ALL joiners must now have a degree (a College of Policing approved degree no less); or they will undertake a conversion programme through the higher education diploma in policing (DHEP); or the police constable degree apprenticeship (PCDA) which ultimately gives them a degree at the end of three-year probationary period.

I use the term conversation above in the context of the recruitment issues. However, there have been an abundance of conversations about this huge change to policing which have been difficult, controversial, challenging and personal. There have been disputes between police and academics, academics and academics, police and police and policy makers and all of us. Whatever the longer term outcome of this reform, there continues to be a binary conversation about what should and should not be considered as credible and useful knowledge in the practical policing world.

In academia what counts as ‘credible’ knowledge and research in the police service has been debated extensively (Chan, 2003; Charman, 2017; Fleming and Wingrove, 2017; Williams and Cockcroft, 2019). Indeed, the drive to professionalise the police through academic qualifications is certainly not new. Some universities have been delivering police education for many years both within the UK and internationally. However, this is the first time that an organisation overseeing a wider professionalisation agenda in policing has provided a platform to formalise this, standardise it and roll it out nationally for all officers.

There are so many issues that feature within the debates about this decision. They range from the curriculum content being too prescriptive and not academically independent, academic work not being practically relevant, too many cops being involved in programmes and therefore the PEQF being a recreation of police training, de-professionalising serving cops through this process, not encouraging diversity and limiting accessibility to the service: these are just a few of them. This article covers some of my own concerns about a number of these issues.

Essentially the aim of both education and research, in a policing context, is about enhancing reflective practice and informing decision making. It is not about replacing the learnt, tacit knowledge held by officers, it is about incorporating something different to better understand wider context and the complex environment within which they operate. Unfortunately, many have conflated the PEQF with the evidence based policing mantra and the notion of introducing a pure scientific and prescriptive approach to encourage compliance in police officers. The top down curriculum requirements that universities have to sign up to in order to gain COP approval doesn’t help this perception and therefore universities involved in this new era of police education need to ensure that there is integrity in the delivery of the programmes and reflection of where academic theory meets police practice.

Central to all our research and teaching at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU) is the practitioner. We use their experiences to enhance and develop what needs to be a flexible curriculum that meets the fast changing nature of the policing world. Yes, part of the curriculum will be focused on imparting knowledge of ‘what works’, originally seen in the application of new public management to policing in the 1980s. However, universities have a responsibility to additionally impart to police students the invaluable work of police sociologists such as Punch, Holdaway, Heidensohn, Muir and Bittner whose insights remain imperative to the constitution of police knowledge and understanding. The topics of their work remain prominent in policing today: Discretion, mental health, community policing, race and gender. Indeed, as Jock Young (2004) argued, the role of criminological research as an administrative method to consider ‘what works’ in crime prevention and reduction reinvented and narrowed the discourse of criminology. We have an obligation to make sure the same thing does not happen in teaching and researching policing studies.

Myself, Jennifer Norman and Mike Rowe (2019) recently wrote an article addressing these issues and one concern we raised was that the PEQF has been perceived by many as a method of de-professionalising the personal identity of police officers by teaching a curriculum that is about compliance, risk aversion and prohibiting innovation. There are police officers who firmly believe that the PEQF is trying to drive a future of cloned police officers who will all leave university with exactly the same blueprint of police knowledge ready to deliver a certain ‘type’ of policing when they enter the working sphere. It is vital that higher education institutions offering the PCDA, DHEP and preservice degree maintain some independence in the design of their courses. It is the WAY they are delivered that is key. It is our role as academics to give officers the tools to think critically, problem solve and be reflective – it is not to give them information about what they should do and when, or, as some commentators believe, turn them into managers by Mcdonaldising police knowledge (Heslop, 2011).

As Brown et al (2018) argue policing is a social institution that deals with both developing legitimacy and public trust and with processes such as deployment, operational practice and workforce planning. The latter and its association with accountability, targets and rational process is just one part of what officers do. Innes (2010) described police research as either being focused on the ‘motors’ that drive change and reform or on the ‘mirrors’ which deepen contextual understanding of ‘real’ police work through reflection. Those who perceive the PEQF as offering only a tightly defined curriculum with the research components being focused on efficiency and understanding ‘what works’ argue that the importance of richer ‘mirror’ research is diluted down. Arguably, it is this contextual knowledge that will aid officer reflections when they make decisions about their behaviour and actions: this is what is ethical and moral here for police legitimacy.

I am not suggesting that these concerns will play out in the delivery of all programmes nor am I suggesting that it is simply the content of the programmes that need debating in this conversation. Indeed, our own research at CCCU with our police students found many organisational factors that inhibit officers even being able to apply their new knowledge in practice (Williams et al, 2019). However, the fact that these structural issues are reported to relate to factors such as hierarchy, risk aversion, performance measures and prescriptive tool kits does leave me asking: Is the critique of the curriculum actually right and does it actually reinforce or justify current police processes? Our respondents saw these organisational factors as obstructing discretion and limiting the use of the reflective methods we encourage in our classrooms. If we as academics delivering these programmes want to change this, we need to be creative in the way we deliver the content, and diverse in the approach we take to covering notions of ‘good’ police research. Indeed, we need to not recreate the status quo but influence officers’ ability to challenge it, be different and furthermore, work with organisations to develop environments where they staff feel safe to do so.

Finally, and I guess this is the most controversial part for us all, is my hope that universities don’t become driven by the commoditisation of police knowledge. We need to ensure universities do not deliver prescriptive courses which do not make translatable the important theoretical criminological and sociological perspectives that are so critical to understanding police business today. This also relates to how the PEQF may impact on current officers’ sense of professionalism and the value placed on their own experience. Reinforcing the application of top down processes within the police organisation through top down learning and tightly defined notions of knowledge may constrain the use of new ideas and personal expertise. We must not deliver ‘off the shelf’ teaching which restricts understanding and the application of the type of situated knowledge that is so pertinent in the police environment. We do need to capitalise on the ‘diffused and seminal intelligence of the rank and file’ (Sklansky, 2008:11), allow for their reflections and the wider use of various forms of academic knowledge.

I very strongly support the drive to encourage further collaborations between the worlds of academia and policing but I hope we can remain objective and independent. That is our role. Universities are about learning, thinking differently and testing new ideas. They are not about delivering teaching methods that promote a equals b – in fact we should be problematising those notions. If we really want to recognise and support the role of the professional here we need impart rich knowledge that allows them to apply their own professional knowledge to a wide range of situations alongside the reflection of academic learning.

The PEQF has a real opportunity to instil new knowledge in the police organisation. Qualifications are not in place to deliver an army of ‘narrow minded experts or scientific freaks’ (Jaschke and Neidhart, 2007: 306). If the content is not delivered ethically and in diverse ways, it might be that the PEQF becomes viewed as yet another prescriptive tool to govern officers’ behaviour and confirm the status quo.

 

Brown, J., Belur, J., Tompson, L., McDowall, A., Hunter, G., and May, T. (2018). Extending the remit of evidence-based policing. International Journal of Police Science & Management Volume 20 (1), 38-51.

Chan, J. (2003) Fair Cop: Learning the Art of Policing. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Charman, S. (2017) Police Socialisation Identity and Culture: Becoming Blue London: Palrgrave

Fleming, J. and Wingrove, J (2017) ‘We Would If We Could … but Not Sure If We Can’: Implementing Evidence-Based Practice: The Evidence-Based Practice Agenda in the UK.  Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Vol 11 (2): 202–213.  https://doi.org/10.1093/police/pax006

Heslop, R., (2011). The British police service: professionalization or ‘McDonaldization’? International Journal of Police Science & Management, 13 (4), 312–321.

Innes, M. (2010) A ‘Mirror’ and a ‘Motor’: Researching and Reforming Policing in an Age of Austerity, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Vol 4 (2): 127–134, https://doi.org/10.1093/police/pap058

Jaschke, H.G. & Neidharte, K. (2009). A Modern Police Science as an Integrated Academic Discipline: A Contribution to the Debate on its Fundamentals. Policing & Society, 17 (4), 303-320.

 

Contact

Dr Emma Williams, Canterbury Christ Church University

Email: emma.williams@canterbury,ac,uk

Twitter: @emwilliamscccu

Website: https://cccupolicingandcj.wordpress.com

 

Images: courtesy of the author and Unsplash