'What Next, Dwarves?': images of police culture in Life on Mars

This article addresses the nature of police television dramas through an in-depth analysis of the characters and plotlines of the BBC show Life on Mars. It assesses how the series compares and contrasts with other cop shows such as The Sweeney and The Wire and questions whether the fictional representations of police and society in Life on Mars are indicative of what criminologists know about police culture from the 1970s onwards. The article also explores what this complex programme means for the general public with their anxieties about the efficacy of criminal justice agencies in a post-industrial society. The piece then addresses the representations of police occupational cultures depicted during the series (including elements of officer corruption, sexism, racism and homophobia) and how these help us to understand the changes in policing that occurred between 1973 and the 2000s. It suggests that, despite its ambiguities, Life on Mars in many ways acts as a paean to 1970s policing by appearing to reject the ‘politically correct’ strictures that surround policing in the 21st century

Calling in the Met: serious crime investigation involving Scotland Yard and provincial police forces in England and Wales, 1906–1939

The paper analyses the scheme whereby provincial chief constables, encouraged by the Home Office, could call in the help of Scotland Yard's experienced detectives to investigate serious cases, especially murder, that were considered to be beyond the capacity of the local force to solve on its own. While the scheme was on balance successful in that more than 50% of such call-outs between 1919 and 1928 resulted in convictions, it is suggested that its significance extended beyond the mere profit and loss accounting approach. For the arrangements cast a mirror on many of the conflicts and some of the developments in policing during this period. Thus they illuminated the tension between respect for local, even if inexperienced, police autonomy, on the one hand, and efficiency and expertise on the other; or, more broadly, between constitutional localism and central governmental direction of policing in England and Wales. But with the press campaigning for more efficient use of the scheme, its arrangements actually attested to the favourable prospects, in the late 1920s and 1930s, for inter-force cooperation in the form of national crime prevention schemes (such as that designed to intercept cross-country ‘motor bandits’). It was thus one of the unacknowledged elements in the forcing house for organisational change experienced by British policing before the war