"Police and People in London" is still the largest and most detailed study of a police force and its relations with the public that has yet been undertaken in Britain. The twenty years since the publication of "People and Police in London", it has seen a constantly-accelerating rate of change in the legal framework of policing, in the arrangements for democratic accountability of the police, in the technologies involved in crime and policing, in management structures and methods in the police service, in financial control systems imposed by central government and in methods of assessing police performance. Over the same period, crime control has moved from the bottom to the top of the political agenda, leading to increasing pressure on the police to be seen to be effective. "Transformations of Policing" returns to the central issues discussed in 1983 and considers whether the main conclusions need to be revised in the light of what has happened since. It also reviews areas of debate and research that have emerged more recently and highlights areas of turbulence that are creating fundamentally different patterns from before and raising genuinely new questions.

This is the first in the 2011 EPRPG series of seminars and hands-on workshops bringing academics and the police together to consider practice in community policing. The speakers at this session will introduce the year’s programme of activities and talk about their ongoing research with community police officers in A-division. The main objective of this seminar is to consider two things alongside each other. The first is our developing interview data collected from serving community police officers in the division about their work. The second is some contemporary academic theories of ‘community’, which identify different ways of constructing ideas about communities and the roles of those who work with and within communities.

This paper presents a neo-Durkheimian perspective on community policing. Drawing on work by Randall Collins it will argue that a crucial, but overlooked, dimension of community policing is that it acts as a ‘ritual of solidarity’ through which participants (including both the community and the police) construct and reconstruct local discourses and beliefs about security, wellbeing and community safety. It therefore aims to provide a 'thick', interactive account of CP which contextualises the symbolic dimension of policing.

This paper will examine the processes through which professional identities are configured around notions of ‘community safety’, and how they emerge through negotiations between the designed (including partnership structures, funding cycles, and occupational roles) and emergent structures of the field. It will argue that community safety partnerships have established new institutional spaces in which practitioners with diverse occupational backgrounds give meaning to the work of community safety through their interactions with one another in ‘communities of practice’.

This paper will outline a relational social learning perspective on community safety partnerships. Such perspectives acknowledge the importance of structural, organisational and cultural influences on actors (so important in this context where partners tend to be drawn from a diverse range of organisations that understand ‘crime’ and ‘community safety’ in different ways) but do not understand them in overly deterministic terms. By also giving emphasis to the everyday actions and activities of actors, social learning theories see them as being active and creative within recognised structural constraints. Therefore, within a social learning perspective structural impediments to practice, such as those found in partnerships, are not insurmountable. The paper will introduce Etienne Wenger’s ‘communities of practice’ perspective and will aim to show how it provides a useful lens through which to explore the problems, and the potential, of partnership working.

This presentation will outline work currently being carried out with Lothian and Borders police as part of an AHRC funded knowledge transfer fellowship on community policing. Knowledge transfer involves a two-way exchange of information. The idea is that the project will give police officers the opportunity to learn from the academics about ‘what works’ evidence, theoretical conceptualisations of community policing, and methodological approaches to documenting practice; and that the academics, in turn, will learn about the actual organisational and individual experiences of community policing, its practicalities, challenges and impediments, from those who are charged with delivering it. Possible mechanisms for facilitating and enhancing the process of knowledge transfer will be briefly outlined. The presentation will then review some of the emerging insights from the process by contrasting some findings from a review of the academic community policing literature produced in the early stages of the project with some of the basic perceptions about community policing expressed by officers in initial meetings. It will be argued that the academic and practitioner perspectives have much common ground (including ambiguity over definitions; contradictions at the heart of the role; the challenge of community engagement) and that an ongoing conversation between them has the potential to pose new research questions of mutual interest.

We report on the development of knowledge transfer activities in the first year of a three-year project on community policing. Knowledge transfer involves a two-way information flow. The police learn from academics about theories of community policing, the ‘what works’ evidence base, and useful practitioner research methods. Academics learn from the police about the practical routines involved in community policing, the culture of doing this kind of policing, the organisational norms and other considerations which either support or challenge the implementation of community policing, and individual subjective-level perceptions and experiences of life on the beat. We have adopted a participant-based research method called ‘systematic self observation’ in order to try to capture community officers’ own reflections on their role. We explain this method and our use of it, arguing that with proper planning and appropriate methodological rigour the processes of knowledge transfer can be used as highly effective research tools rather than - or perhaps as well as - being only about encouraging discourse between academics and practitioners in one of the manifestations of a public criminology.

Since the 1980s crime prevention and community safety partnerships in Scotland have developed in a manner that shows striking similarity with developments in England and Wales. However, an examination of recent Scottish legislation, and the institutional structures within which partnership working has developed and is developing, supports
the view that the approach taken in Scotland has not been identical.
This paper shall provide an outline of the development of community safety partnerships in Scotland within the context of recent debates about the effects of devolution in Scotland and the convergence/divergence of policy agendas throughout the UK.

This paper is contributing to a panel on multi-level governance and its impact on crime control and penal practice in advanced liberal societies. It focuses on a case study exploring the implementation and development of community safety policy in Scotland. The paper will develop an analytical framework through which to examine the ways in which the interactions of individual partnership members, both within the context of the partnership and also in relation to the parent agencies and organizations within which they are embedded, may be constrained or creative in ways that sometimes do, and that sometimes do not, fit with the stated goals of the partnership. It will draw from a number of social learning perspectives (such as Wenger 1998 and Bandura 1997) that have thus far had little influence within criminology but which have had substantial influence within the fields of business studies, management theory and organizational learning. The paper will use these ideas to positively critique contemporary criminological theorizing.

Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge University Press.
Bandura, A. (1997), Self Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W.H. Freeman and Co.

In September 2001 the report of the independent evaluation of the experimental Public Defence Solicitors’ Office (PDSO) in Edinburgh was placed before The Scottish Parliament. The PDSO had opened three years earlier as a pilot scheme in which the salaried model of legal aid provision could be compared to the criminal defence services provided by the private Bar under the legal aid scheme. The comparison was undertaken with reference to four criteria: the quality of services provided; the cost-effectiveness of the different models; client satisfaction; and the wider impact of the different legal aid delivery models on the efficiency of the criminal justice system.

The study produced a wealth of detailed information on around 2,600 summary cases (the pilot scheme was limited to the summary courts in Edinburgh) from court files, legal aid records, interviews with key actors throughout the system, and a client satisfaction survey. This rich body of data on case trajectories, legal representation, client satisfaction, case outcomes and sentencing decisions provided a comprehensive insight into the effects of different models of legally aided representation on the processing of summary criminal cases through the courts. However, the study also has the potential to add considerably to our understanding of case processing in general and it is upon this wider application of the PDSO data that this paper will focus.

The paper is entitled Revisiting the Metropolitan Court, a reference to some of the classic and still influential literature on the sociology of the court. Key works by Blumberg, Carlen, McBarnet, McConville and others have, to varying degrees, drawn out and shaped the central components of a sociological understanding of the court: the conflict between due process and crime control, negotiated justice, the rarity of the ‘day in court’ and the contested trial, the accused as a ‘dummy player’ in a process made incomprehensible through ritual, performance and technical language. The list could, of course, go on. Certain findings from this recent Scottish study of the summary courts, such as the virtual absence of a real culture of sentence discount for early guilty pleas and the apparent viability of a defence strategy which holds off pleading guilty in the expectation that the prosecution case will collapse, for example, add a number of new themes to explore in relation to the sociology of the courts. Although this paper will not contend that the classic literature needs to be overturned as such, it will begin to outline ways in which the PDSO study may be utilised to add a certain contemporary colour and nuance to key aspects of it. It will also be noted that the PDSO study serves as an illustration of the fact that the peculiarities of individual legal jurisdictions (in this case Scotland) underpins the distinctiveness of the operations its criminal justice institutions.

As in many other jurisdictions throughout the world, crime prevention in Scotland is now largely being developed and implemented through a ‘multi-agency’, or ‘partnership’, approach where it is envisaged that government, voluntary, and private agencies will collaborate to identify and prevent local crime problems. Unlike some other jurisdictions, however, the approach remains ‘voluntary’ in Scotland. Participant agencies are not statutorily required to engage in partnership work (the sections of the Crime and Disorder Act which create this requirement in England and Wales do not apply to Scotland) although there are strong pressures from policy levels to do so. It should be noted that the ‘partnership’ approach also extends to other policy agendas such as ‘community safety’ and ‘social inclusion’ which, although potentially broader in scope than crime prevention, also include crime control and fear of crime issues within their remits.

Based upon qualitative interviews with actors from different agencies, working at different levels within the emerging partnership structures, and within both urban and rural communities, this paper will firstly seek to describe the contours of multi-agency crime prevention in Scotland within the context of broader multi-agency social policies of community safety and social inclusion. The paper will then move on to explore some of the perceived benefits and problems inherent in the approach focusing, in particular, upon issues of communication and conflict both within and between different multi-agency networks.