Description
David Noble, an historian of science and technology, began his most important work America by Design with the insight that we confront a world in which everything changes and nothing moves. He noted that "the perpetual rush to novelty that characterizes the modern marketplace, with its escalating promise of technological transcendence, is matched by the persistence of pre-formed patterns of life which promise merely more of the same" (Noble, 1977; xvii). His practical problem was to explain the role played by a relatively small cadre of scientists and engineers, the most famous of whom is probably Frederick William Taylor, in the industrial transformation of the USA during the years 1880 to 1930. The common sense that they pursued in the process of this transformation held that, as any enterprise grows 'more scientific', that is, "as it comes to fully utilize organized and recorded knowledge in place of empiricism resting on the personal experience of individuals or groups of individuals", it becomes "more and more conscious of the usefulness of precise methods and accurate measurement" (Noble, 1977; 71).
It would seem that Anglo-American policing has undergone precisely this sort of change and this has happened over the recent past. In what has come to be considered a classic sociology of the police, William Ker Muir, Jr. (1977) examined the factors that lead to the genesis of 'good' policemen. Some of the details of his study will be considered in later chapters, what is of interest here is that the police officers under Muir's observation based their knowledge almost entirely upon their own personal experience and on tales of their experience exchanged with co-workers, that is: an oral tradition. The teaching of a practical knowledge base in this era of policing was down to the "skill of the field sergeants in teaching the men of their squads on the job" (p. 226). The emphasis on face-to- face communication and on direct personal experience as the foundation for practical mastery of the police role can be seen in many contributions to the sociological literature on policing from both sides of the Atlantic.
However, even as Muir was writing in the mid-1970s the situation was changing. In 1965 the Law Enforcement Assistance Act was passed, marking President Johnson's declaration of war on crime. In a speech to Congress in 1966 Johnson noted that to actually vanquish such an enemy "we cannot limit efforts to enemies we can see. We must, with equal resolve, seek out new knowledge, new techniques and new understanding" (President's Commission on Crime, 1967, p. xii emphasis added). A number of institutions were established in the wake of this in order to further the prosecution of the war through the production of such knowledge. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was established within two years and the American Police Foundation, which was established with an initial grant from the Ford Foundation somewhat later in 1970, both arrived with the promise of a new 'scientific' approach to policing.
These research centres provided a focal point and knowledge base for what has been characterized as the most decentralized police system in the world. In fact, with thousands of separate police forces with staffing levels ranging from several thousand down to two (or even one) uniformed officers, American policing could not really be described as systemic (Bayley, 1977; p. 232). Given this sprawling amalgam of police forces it is easy to see how the emphasis had come to lie with less formal means of knowledge transfer. Much the same is true for the system of policing in Britain, which underwent a series of amalgamations after the passage of the Police Act in 1965; the most recent of which took place in 1974. These amalgamations progressively shrank the number of separate constabularies from 183 at the time of the second world war to the 43 forces of England and Wales today and there is every indication that this process is set to continue (Reiner, 1985; p. 213; 1991). British police forces have been characterized as "peculiarly tribal by nature" and it is held that many old hands still refer to the 'real police forces' of pre-1964 (Young, 1991; p. 68). It is also held that the deep rooted tradition of 'tribalism' has meant that the old ways of inculcating the practical mastery of police skills based on dissemination of an essentially oral tradition have held fast despite the efforts of scientific managerialism to rationalize the knowledge base. Nevertheless, social scientists in the United Kingdom have pursued efforts to introduce innovations in the practices of policing and struggled to produce new knowledge about the organization.
The extent of retrenchment or innovation that these processes entail is open to question. In the same way that Noble attempted to show the continuities and discontinuities wrought in the USA by the emergence of the professional engineer it ought, in principle at least, to be possible to ask similar questions about the practice of police social science. Taking a page out of Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization, Noble sought to argue that no matter how much technical innovation relies upon the objective procedures of the sciences, it does not form an independent system. Like the universe, it exists as an element in human culture and it promises well or ill as the social groups that exploit it promise well or ill. Noble sought to examine the nature of the industrial machine. This study seeks to explore one facet of the 'policing machine' and through that to gain an understanding of its practices more generally. The general question asked here has to do with the relationship between the police organization and social science - can the latter prompt innovation within the former? In order to answer this general question, efforts to innovate and reform a specific policing task - answering calls for service involving wife battery and other forms of 'domestic dispute' - will form the main focus of analysis. Through an understanding of this process, and by placing reform efforts for the policing of domestic violence within the more general history of the developing police social science, this study seeks to cast light upon the interface between two important social practices: policing and social science research. To paraphrase Mumford, like the industrial machine, the police system itself makes no demands and holds out no promises; 'it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises' (Mumford, 1934).
