628 research outputs found
Police discretion and the role of the ‘spotter’ within football crowd policing: risk assessment, engagement, legitimacy and de-escalation
No full textDiscretion is a key feature of policing, yet its surrounding research has historically been heavily reliant upon exploring interpersonal or dyadic encounters between individual officers and members of the public. More recently, studies have explored how discretionary decisions by police officers impact upon and interact with group-level and organisational processes but few studies have explored the relevance of discretion to debates in the literature on public order policing. Correspondingly, there is to date only a limited body of research exploring the nature and dynamics of dialogue-based football-related public order policing. This study addresses these combined gaps by drawing upon data from interviews with specialist football officers, referred to as ‘spotters’ or Dedicated Football Officers, from five English police forces. Our analysis critiques the idea that these specialist roles revolve merely around the surveillance, categorisation and enforcement of fans who are considered to pose a risk to public order. We highlight how these officers understand their roles in terms of the use of discretion. We argue that in a complex intergroup environment officers utilise discretion to manage perceptions of their legitimacy among supporters. This ‘social capital’ in turn enhances their capacity to de-escalate and avoid disorder through the promotion of self-regulatory behaviour. We discuss the relevance of our study for theoretical approaches to understanding discretion and consider the implications of our analysis for developing a more formal dialogue-focused and discretion-based approach to football crowd policing in and beyond England and Wales.</p
Six Radburn housing experiments in Australia 1961 - 1983: with particular reference to the Canberra experience
No full textThis work investigates six examples in the mainstream of Radburn planning in Australia. Four of them - North Pinjarra, Cartwright, Curtin and Charnwood - are developments which have been inspired by Radburn, New Jersey; their main planning objectives were taken directly from that prototype and their physical plans appear to emulate the original. Two others which are examined briefly - South Hedland and Crestwood - are experiments with "the Radburn Idea" in new forms. The author's five year involvement as project architect responsible for plan implementation and estate management of North Pinjarra, a Radburn based scheme fraught with difficulties of translation from the idea to reality, stimulated a deeper interest in the history of the Radburn concept, the evolution of Radburn in Australia, and in particular the problems generated by the implementation of the Idea in other Australian experiments. The North Pinjarra development is described and its main problems are identified. In light of his experience the author takes a deeper look at "the Radburn Idea" and Radburn New Jersey, and goes on to investigate the Australian pioneer scheme of Cartwright in New South Wales. The Canberra suburb of Curtin, another pioneer development, and its large progeny Charnwood are both examined in detail as these have a continuous history of development which spans the period of Australian Radburn's ascendancy, decline, loss of integrity, and eventual abandonment as a formula for suburban development. All were inspired by the perceived success of the New Jersey prototype and be Clarence Stein's writing. This study establishes a history of Radburn schemes in Australia and attempts to determine why the application of "the Radburn Idea" to suburban planning was not the universal answer that was expected
Covid-19: Is now the perfect time to fully implement procedural justice in the UK?
No full textUK police officers have been given unprecedented powers to curtail personal freedoms as the nation attempts to slow the spread of Covid-19. Former Ch Supt Owen West and Dr Matthew Radburn examine the potential for the principles of procedural justice to enable officers to exercise these powers without alienating the populace
Crowd policing, police legitimacy and identity: the social psychology of procedural justice
No full textThis PhD was motivated to explore the applicability and explanatory power of procedural justice theory (PJT) in the context of the policing of crowd events. It has been suggested that “questions of social identity lie at the heart of the theory” (Bradford 2016, p. 3). Yet PJT researchers have largely overlooked the insights of the ‘second stage’ of theorising that constitutes the social identity approach – self-categorisation theory (SCT) – and the subsequent application of SCT to collective action within crowds and public order policing. Because of this it is argued that there are certain conceptual and methodological limitations that relate to how PJT can ‘make sense’ of or otherwise explain police–public interactions within the domain of public order policing.
Despite PJT being rooted in “in efforts to understand and explain riots and rebellion” (Tyler and Blader 2003, p. 351), there has been a paucity of research focussing specifically on the police’s management of crowds (Stott et al. 2011). This thesis used a mixed methods approach involving online experiments, semi-structured interviews and an online survey. The final empirical chapter then drew on a longitudinal secondary data analysis of a series of ‘real-time’ police-‘public’ interactions across multiple crowd events. The thesis suggests that it is essential that both PJT and its associated research are process and context orientated. A true process model of procedural justice is required to explore the interactive and bi-directional nature of the relationship between social context, identity, police legitimacy and action. It is argued that the current social psychological understandings of procedural justice do not adequately articulate this dynamism. Yet developing the process model of procedural justice is essential to avoid unintentionally ‘desocialising’ people’s experiences of policing and to therefore reaffirm the need to study the social psychological processes of PJT in context
Identity, Legitimacy and Cooperation With Police: Comparing General-Population and Street-Population Samples From London
No full textSocial identity is a core aspect of procedural justice theory, which predicts that fair treatment at the hands of power holders such as police expresses, communicates, and generates feelings of inclusion, status, and belonging within salient social categories. In turn, a sense of shared group membership with power holders, with police officers as powerful symbolic representatives of “law-abiding society,” engenders trust, legitimacy, and cooperation. Yet, this aspect of the theory is rarely explicitly considered in empirical research. Moreover, the theory rests on the underexamined assumption that the police represent one fixed and stable superordinate group, including the often-marginalized people with whom they interact, and that it is only superordinate identification that is important to legitimacy and cooperation. In this article, we present results from two U.K.-based studies that explore the identity dynamics of procedural justice theory. We reason that the police not only represent the “law-abiding, national citizen” superordinate group but also are a symbol of order/conflict and a range of connected social categories that can generate relational identification. First, we used a general-population sample and found that relational identification with police and identification as a law-abiding citizen mediated some of the association between procedural justice and legitimacy and were both stronger predictors of cooperation than legitimacy. Second, a sample of people living on the streets of London was used to explore these same relationships among a highly marginalized group for whom the police might represent a salient outgroup. We found that relational and superordinate identification were both strong positive predictors of cooperation, whereas legitimacy was not. These results have important implications for our understanding of both police legitimacy and public cooperation, as well as the extent to which police activity can serve to include—or exclude—members of the public. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved
Group processes and interoperability: A longitudinal case study analysis of the UK's civil contingency response to Covid-19
No full textOur case study explored a Local Resilience Forum's (LRF) civil contingency response to COVID-19 in the United Kingdom. We undertook 19 semistructured ethnographic longitudinal interviews, between March 25, 2020 and February 17, 2021, with a Director of a Civil Contingencies Unit and a Chief Fire Officer who both played key roles within their LRF. Within these interviews, we focused on their strategic level decision-making and how their relationship with national government impacted on local processes and outcomes. Using a form of grounded theory, our data describe the chronological evolution of an increasingly effective localized approach toward outbreak control and a growing resilience in dealing with concurrent emergency incidents. However, we also highlight how national government organizations imposed central control on aspects of the response in ways that undermined or misaligned with local preparedness. Thus, during emergencies, central governments can undermine the principle of subsidiarity and damage the ways in which LRFs can help scaffold local resilience. Our work contributes to the theoretical understanding of the social psychological factors that can shape the behaviour of responder agencies during a prolonged crisis. In particular, the implications of our analysis for advancing our conceptual understanding of strategic decision-making during emergencies are discussed
CCTV and the super-recognisers
No full textIn the past ten years, UK and international police, security and other businesses have increasingly drawn on the skills of super-recognisers, who possess exceptionally good face recognition ability. New jobs have been created and workplace practices changed. These innovations were initially driven by London’s Metropolitan Police Service, backed by the research evidence of Dr Josh P Davis at the University of Greenwich. This resulted in thousands of identifications of criminal suspects mainly from CCTV images. The establishment of the world’s first full-time Super-Recogniser Unit at New Scotland Yard led to international police, media, and museum interest, and has even inspired authors of fiction. More than 6,000,000 participants worldwide have since taken one of Davis’ face recognition tests, with a substantial proportion contributing to a growing body of research. This work will be assessed by the Research Excellence Framework (2021), which appraises the contributions of UK universities. Research impact is one of its key performance indicators, and the economic benefits from job creation and crime detection, as well as the public engagement, and cultural impact of this body of psychological research, enterprise and consultancy are likely to be recognised as having substantial international impact
Making an Impact on Policing and Crime: Psychological Research, Policy and Practice.
No full textMaking an Impact on Policing and Crime: Psychological Research, Policy and Practice applies a range of case studies and examples of psychological research by international, leading researchers to tackle real-world issues within the field of crime and policing.
Making an Impact on Policing and Crime documents the application of cutting-edge research to real-world policing and explains how psychologists’ insights have been adapted and developed to offer effective solutions across the criminal justice system. The experts featured in this collection cover a range of psychological topics surrounding the field, including the prevention and reduction of sexual offending and reoffending, the use of CCTV and ‘super-recognisers’, forensic questioning of vulnerable witnesses, the accuracy of nonverbal and verbal lie detection interview techniques, psychological ‘drivers’ of political violence, theoretical models of police–community relations, and the social and political significance of urban ‘riots’.
This collection is a vital resource for practitioners in policing fields and the court system and professionals working with offenders, as well as students and researchers in related disciplines
The social psychological processes of ‘procedural justice’: Concepts, critiques and opportunities
No full text Contemporary research on policing and procedural justice theory (PJT) emphasizes large-scale survey data to link a series of interlocking concepts, namely perceptions of procedural fairness, police legitimacy and normative compliance. In this article we contend that as such, contemporary research is in danger of conveying a misreading of PJT by portraying a reified social world divorced from the social psychological dynamics of encounters between the police and policed. In this article we set out a rationale for addressing this potential misreading and explore how and why PJT researchers would benefit both theoretically and methodologically through drawing upon advances in theoretical accounts of social identity, developed most notably in attempts to understand crowd action. Specifically, we advance an articulation of a ‘process-based’ model of PJT’s underlying social and subjective dynamics and stress the value of ethnographic approaches for studying police–‘citizen’ encounters. </jats:p
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