Police in England and Wales have long been upheld as a policing standard of excellence in part based on the police principles attributed London Metropolitan Police founder Sir Robert Peel. These ‘Peelian police principles’ emphasise crime prevention, restraint in the use of force, positive community relations, and operating with public trust and legitimacy. While inspiring, these ideas have been primarily aspirational, different from policing that occurs on the streets. Indeed, England and Wales policing has long struggled with its trust and legitimacy with many key constituencies, particularly in traditionally marginalised communities. My book Police Diversity: Beyond The Blue argues that reforms to England and Wales policing are urgently needed to improve community trust, and that police diversity can play an important role in increasing legitimacy.
Street Police Culture Norms
My book examines experiences of diverse UK and US police officers, finding that police organisational culture, particularly street police culture, is influential and harmful to police-community relations. Street police culture refers to the informal set of norms of patrol officers which influence police behaviours. Decades of empirical research suggests street police culture has core characteristics apparently even in different jurisdictions, including aggression, escalation, hierarchy, intolerance, masculinity, and biases including racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, among many others. It is characterised by a ‘warrior’ ethos, meaning a quasi-military structure, rewarding violence and escalation directed at local populations. This warrior policing model alienates police from the communities it serves, making them less effective. By contrast, the guardian policing model emphasises working in partnership with communities, building trust and mutual respect through dialogue and co-production of solutions to pressing crime problems. While many UK officers already adopt guardianship policing, it must be streamlined, systematised and rewarded across police services in England and Wales to improve police legitimacy in local communities.
Police Legitimacy & Police Diversity
The crisis of UK police legitimacy is particularly apparent in marginalised communities, many of whom do not see the police as fair and trustworthy. Decades of research show that racial and ethnic minority communities have lower levels of trust and confidence in police compared to other groups. Some of this is driven by disproportionate policing practices like stops and searches and arrests for crimes like cannabis possession. It is also driven by policing’s lack of representativeness, meaning police do not look like the communities it polices.
My book examines research showing that the more diverse a police department, the more fair and trustworthy it is perceived to be by the public. Studies also show more diverse police departments are seen as more credible. These effects are particularly apparent in minority communities. For example, when racial and ethnic minorities interact with ethnic minority officers in majority White departments, they see the police department as more legitimate. Ethnic minority people also tend to see ethnic minority officers as more legitimate than with White officers. More racially diverse police institutions are also seen as more accountable and more legitimate, particularly where officers of color comprise larger proportions of a police service. Having a police leader of colour or having a female police chief can also improve community perceptions of police legitimacy.
Reforming Policing to Improve Legitimacy
To improve police legitimacy in communities in England and Wales, increasing diversity quickly is one of the urgent reforms needed. To accomplish this, I have previously proposed adopting the approach taken by the Police Service of Northern Ireland in the 2000s – using positive discrimination to rapidly increase police diversity. I am not alone in calling for such measures – some UK police leaders and political leaders have similarly done so. And we know from the success of these programmes in Northern Ireland, the US, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere that this makes police forces rapidly more representative of police communities, which improves community trust.
Reforming England and Wales policing also requires fundamental changes to police recruitment, training and oversight to shift away from the warrior police culture toward guardianship policing. For example, while police academy training is traditionally designed and delivered by current and former police officers and emphasises street police culture norms, innovative departments bring in civil liberties lawyers and community citizens to also train police to understand the civil rights, responsibilities and lived experiences of community members.
Improving policing in England and Wales also requires increasing external scrutiny mechanisms for police misconduct. While the existing approach allows police forces to largely self-police misconduct, reform requires outsourcing this work to expanded independent oversight bodies like the UK’s existing Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). While the current IOPC is overworked and underfunded, this type of organisation can help UK policing increase accountability to the communities they serve.
In addition to these changes, expansion of legal avenues for addressing problematic policing is also needed in England and Wales drawing on the model of US Department of Justice lawsuits against police departments who engage in systemic misconduct. These lawsuits are typically settled and overseen by court-supervised consent decrees. These court orders can last years and mandate changes including new policies and practices, increased hiring, reductions in use of force, improved training, more robust accountability structures, among others. In cities like Oakland, New York, New Orleans and Ferguson, Missouri these court-ordered remedies can result in much improved police legitimacy in some departments. Similar legal measures must be introduced in the UK.
Thus while the landscape of England and Wales policing is complicated and the road to reform is long, implementing a variety of changes to shift the culture and diversity of police services is necessary to improve both community relations and police effectiveness in substantial ways.