Description
Since the early 1980s in Britain, community policing has been held up as a new and important way forward, aimed at the ideals of service and rejecting coercive police styles. The centrepiece of this initiative - Neighbourhood Watch is today depicted as a great success by both government ministers and senior police officers. In Watching Police, Watching Communities Mike McConville and Dan Shepherd test the validity of such claims and ultimately reveal them to be myths.
Their controversial findings are based on extensive interviews with police and citizens and demonstrate that the public have little commitment to Neighbourhood Watch. Crime is not in general so central to people's thinking as other issues such as employment, education and housing, and the focus of Neighbourhood Watch on crime has resulted in extensive scheme failure. This lack of commitment by the public is matched by the police: the weight of policing is still massively focused on officers engaged in traditional 'fire brigade' styles of operation, and in big cities the emphasis is on heavy-handed policing. targeted on poor areas and those occupied by black people.
McConville and Shepherd argue that the strong police occupational culture, marked by aggression, racism and sexism, denigrates those aspects of policing ideals - including Neighbourhood Watch - which involve positive relations with the public. They also explore why the actions of senior officers reinforce rather than undercut entrenched rank-and-file culture, and show why public confidence in the police in Britain is declining.
