Talking Cop: Discourses of Change and Policing Identities

This paper presents empirical and theoretical analysis of the enactment of New Public Management (NPM) within the UK police service. It draws on empirical material gathered in a two-year study that explores the ways in which individual policing professionals have responded to, and received, the NPM discourse. Theoretically informed by a discursive approach to organizational analysis, the paper focuses on the new subject positions promoted within NPM that serve to challenge traditional understandings of policing organization and identities. The paper examines the implications of this for policies that promote community orientated policing (COP) and increased inter-agency partnership. The paper argues that the promotion of a more progressive form of policing, based on community orientation and equality principles, may struggle to gain legitimacy within the current performance regime that legitimizes a competitive masculine subjectivity, with its emphasis on crime fighting

Forcing the issue: new labour, new localism and the democratic renewal of police accountability

The purpose of this article is to evaluate proposals contained in the government’s Green Paper Policing: Building Safer Communities Together (Home Office 2003) and the White Paper Building Communities: Beating Crime (Home Office 2004) to re-invigorate the structure of police governance in the UK. After providing a brief overview of New Labour’s initial attempts to modernise British policing, I analyse why and how the broader political discourse of ‘new localism’ came to frame the unfolding debate about the need to revitalise police accountability. The article then offers a critical evaluation of the latest Home Office attempt to reorganise the democratic structure of police governance in the UK