The Politics of Protection in British Policing

• In Event: Protection and Prevention in the Governance of Crime: Historical Perspectives from Sweden and Britain

Abstract

The concept of protection is central to the rhetorical framing of policing in contemporary Britain, in both policy discourse and public relations. The language of protection is closely associated with well-known shifts towards ‘public safety’ and risk management and is now central to the legitimation of policing in public discourse. This paper traces the genealogy of ‘protection’ as it relates to policing, focusing on the ways in which the concept operates as a form of power, discursively shaping both agencies and vulnerabilities for the police and the policed. The paper will give an overview of the place of ‘protection’ in contemporary policy discourse, before contextualising this in the long historical run, drawing on a long-term research project into gender, role and identity in security provision in modern Britain. Drawing on both published and archival sources from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, such as handbooks for constables, the records of policing authorities, and wider public debate (newspapers, pamphlets), it will be argued that the concept of protection has historically been closely associated with patriarchal forms of authority and the paper will explore how far this remains the case in the contemporary context, before addressing the wider consequences of this framing for police legitimacy. Protection, it will be argued, is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, the desire to play the role of protector has clearly been fundamental to the attraction of policing as a role and is central to police identities; on the other hand, however, it could be argued that the rhetorical focus on protection sets police forces up to fail, creating an unachievable set of public expectations that are beyond the ability of police forces to achieve in principle, never mind in the constrained practical context of austerity and tightening public finances.

Author

• Francis Martin Dodsworth, Kingston University London