12/18/2023 0 Comments Plutocracy government definitionNew boundaries of tolerance and influence need to be negotiated for the Scottish Police Authority to be able to play a more meaningful and independent oversight role in police governance. This raises important questions in relation to the essence of operational independence, when it is invoked and crucially who it is invoked against. Conversely, and contradictorily, the influence of Ministers and the Scottish Government has gradually expanded. On the one hand, the Authority have attempted to challenge the scope of operational independence but with limited success. The analysis suggests that the reform agenda did not seek to address the broad interpretation of operational independence that played a key part in diminishing the influence and performance of the local police boards. The discussion draws on the 2012 reform legislation, official policy agenda that led to the creation of the Scottish Police Authority ( Malik, 2018 ), a select number of interviews with key architects of the Scottish police reform conducted between 2013–2016, official parliamentary reports, public meeting minutes, and HMICS and Audit Scotland inspection reports. It revisits the Scottish Police Authority’s attempts to negotiate its own boundaries of influence since its formation. This paper examines the nascent police governance arrangements by shining a spotlight on the status of the operational independence doctrine in the post-reform era. In Scottish Affairs in 2001, Kenneth Scott and Roy Wilkie, while discussing the appointments of chief constables, noted that ‘the real power in Scottish policing is probably revealed where those elements in the tripartite system interact’ (2001: 57) irrespective of the constitutional and legislative boundaries. We conclude that this situation is akin to the ‘managed professionalism’ found amongst many other public service professions. Third, and building on this finding, varied modes of professional adaptation to the police performance regime have occurred in which some sectors, notably those involved with high profile serious criminal investigations, have worked to win professional space and exploit a hierarchy of prestige in order to actively interpret and shape agendas. In particular concerns are expressed at various levels over the dangers of ‘short-termism’ in police decision-making. Second, despite this overall trend, tensions and professional rivalries remain between police frontline officers, supervisors and middle managers around the perceived virtues and practices of performance management. This takes the form of what others have seen as a shift from ‘occupational professionalism’ to ‘organisational professionalism’. First, there appears to be a clear impact of police performance management, with its instruments of standardised operational procedures, performance monitoring and strengthened internal accountability, on the professional autonomy given to police actors. Based on qualitative empirical research on two major police forces in England and Wales, the paper arrives at three main conclusions. This paper examines the impact of police performance management on the ‘occupational professionalism’ of British policing actors with a particular focus on organisational units concerned with criminal investigation. It is suggested they may play out in ways that frustrate their architects’ hopes, due to the continuing baleful consequences of neoliberalism.Īs with other parts of the public sector, policing has had to confront the principles and processes attached to new public management. These claims are critically analysed in principle, but how they work out in practice is hard to prophesy. The Coalition purports to be democratizing police accountability through elected Police and Crime Commissioners. The current British Coalition government’s tendentious ‘austerity’ measures make these perennial problems especially acute. Accountability has become accountancy, under the auspices of New Public Management. The complex role of the police has been distilled down to criminal catching. The article focuses on how this has developed in England and Wales, although there are parallels with other jurisdictions. Both issues have been radically altered through the profound transformation of policing produced by the last three decades of neo-liberal hegemony. This article critically analyses two key debates about police and policing: the problematic definition of their role, and how they can be rendered democratically accountable.
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