Moving Beyond Bad Apples Towards The Rotton Orchard in Police Deviance: A case study of recent UK Inquiries

• In Event: POL Panel 12. Police integrity and accountability: exploring why and how to implement change

Abstract

The heinous crimes committed by 2 former service police officers in the Metropolitan Police Service uncovered in the early 2020s in London sent shockwaves across the UK. How could two individuals continue to work for the police while carrying out such violent and harmful acts. Recent inquiries following the crimes most notably that by Baroness Louise Casey and Dame Angiolini hint at organisational culture as a determining factor in precipitating the deviant acts carried out by these officers and other misconduct uncovered in recent years. The Angiolini Inquiry suggests this is not just about ‘Bad Apples’ but more a ‘rotten orchard’. However, while the analysis of organisational culture in these inquiries move beyond focusing of individual typologies of police misconduct they fail to understand the individual action of officer fully. Drawing on these reports as case studies, this paper argues that the definition of culture is still narrowly focused on core characteristics of police culture and that a broader lens is required to really understand what drives police misconduct. Using a situated action theory as suggested by Vaughan (2002) this paper argues that to understanding individual police officer misconduct we need to apply multi-level analysis. While not trying to excuse individual acts of misconduct, this paper seeks to explore how we can better understand why the pattern of police misconduct might be repeated through applying a different analytical lens.

Author

• Denise Martin, University of Northumbria