There have been public demands for fairer policing, in response to concerns about discrimination and use of excessive force.
Although the public wants the police to be firm with criminals, as described above (5.2.5.2), there is justifiable dismay if they use disproportionate violence. And over-zealous policing can be counterproductive. Law enforcement requires public consent for it to be effective, so it is important that police are not seen as being unduly heavy-handed and that they are seen as treating everyone equally. Several high-profile examples illustrate these points:
· The Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, for example, revealed that the police in this Missouri town (population 12,000) were over-zealous:
“City officials have consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity” (section 3);
“Ferguson law enforcement practices violate the law and undermine community trust, especially among African Americans” (section 4);
“Between July 1, 2010, and June 30, 2014, the City of Ferguson issued approximately 90,000 citations and summonses for municipal violations” (section 2).
· Ferguson shot to prominence with violence against black people. There were riots in protest against the killing of a young black man. This theme that shot into global prominence as the Black Lives Matter Movement.
· The legitimacy of law-enforcement and national security forces depends partly upon them being seen to be representative of the population at large, for example Catholics underrepresented in N. Ireland police, quotas being considered:
“The old Royal Ulster Constabulary was only 8 percent Catholic and so had an unselfconsciously Protestant ‘ethos’, from which most Catholics felt estranged”.
The public demands for fairer policing are a response to these problems. People seek police reform, to make the service more acceptable and more accountable to the public. One approach is to have more local control, as recommended by the Stevens report on policing for example, which made “a case for the reinforcement of a social justice model of neighbourhood policing”.
(This is an archive of a page intended to form part of Edition 4 of the Patterns of Power series of books. The latest versions are at book contents).