NCJ Number
83117
Date Published
1981
Length
26 pages
Annotation
Manifestations of the politics involved in both expanding and limiting police powers in the United Kingdom are discussed.
Abstract
Over the past 15 years, there has been a growing politicization of police forces in the United Kingdom. This has taken two interrelated forms. First, the police have emerged as an overtly political pressure group, lobbying for enhanced powers and changes in legal and social policy which they view as important in making their job easier. Secondly, the character of police work in the last decade has become more overtly political, particularly as manifested in three interrelated areas: public order, preemptive policing and surveillance, and the increasingly acerbic relationship between police and blacks. Much political debate about police powers has centered in the 1981 report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure. The report was greeted with condemnation by the political left and civil liberties groups on the ground that it expanded police powers to intrude upon the privacy of citizens and detain them for interrogation. Critics assume that all the police powers recommended in the report will be used to the fullest and probably even exceeded, while the procedures recommended for controlling police abuse will remain hollow words on paper. While it is true that the report recommends the extension of police power in several directions, in most cases, it simply involves the structuring and formalizing of practices already followed by police. Critics further argue that the safeguards for police abuse are virtually all internal; however, the structure for external accountability does exist, both through the exercise of judicial control of police behavior and through the operations of the independent Police Complaints Board. A total of 66 notes are listed.