Policing Community: Race and Britain’s Community Cohesion Agenda

• In Event: Policing, Race and Communities in the UK

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the advent and development of community cohesion policy in the United Kingdom in relation to criminology. While there is a substantial literature on community cohesion as a social policy for the promotion of civil renewal and the management of diversity and racial animosity, criminology has had little to say about legislation that undergirds culturally-processed state-citizen engagement. Given the symbolic and physical power of the police in areas with high minority ethnic populations, the incorporation of community cohesion governmentality has complicated the role of police officers and bureaucrats. Community cohesion as a localized, interagency policy objective has created another means of police-driven racialization, especially in regards to British South Asian and Muslim populations. In this sense, community cohesion has challenged police forces to perform the cultural work of crime control. Moreover, the history of Britain’s race relations policy terrain over the past fifteen years reveals a shift from a focus on institutional racism, to community cohesion, to social integration, to counter-terrorism. Therefore, the community cohesion framework represents a policy priority dictated by national government that, in effect, spurred a shift away from interrogating institutional racism embedded in policing and towards the need for police to be actively involved in the local promotion of citizenship, Britishness, and interconnectedness in multiracial, multicultural areas. Such a de-racialized pivot ushered in space for re-racialization of British Asian and Muslim subcommunities under police implementation of the Prevent strand of counter-terrorism. This review of theory, policy, and other literature creates a foundation for much needed criminological studies on police procedure around community cohesion schema.

Author

• Jordan Rand Konell, University of Oxford