Recovering Police Legitimacy: A Radical Framework

This book is a personal response to the loss of trust in the police as an institution whose purpose is to protect the public. I served as a police officer in the last decade of the twentieth century and am dismayed to see considerably less public support for the police a quarter of a century on, in spite of almost continuous reforms. More specifically, this book is about the crisis of police legitimacy in the US and the UK. Even more specifically, it is about how law enforcement agencies and constabularies in those countries can recover at least some of the legitimacy that has been lost in the last decade. As such, its purpose is to set out a comprehensive framework for recovering legitimacy. This framework is radical in at least two senses of the world. First, it cuts directly to the root causes of the Transatlantic crisis of police legitimacy by focusing on policing as a practice, beginning with an autoethnographic study and then deploying an autoethnographic analysis. Second, the framework occupies common ground between the conventional and critical traditions of criminology, seeking the solution to a conventional problem through a critical lens by exploring power relations with case studies that are complex serial fictions. My approach is to build the framework from the bottom up, from the characteristics of policing as a practice to the political context within which justice is administered.