9 A decline in ‘policing by consent’?

By the end of the 1960s the general acceptance of the police of the post-war period was changing. The quotation below, from a police officer looking back on his service, encapsulates this:

From the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century, confidence and trust in the police declined. This was partly due to wider changes in British society but due partly due to changes within policing.

The Unit Beat Policing initiative, for example, introduced from 1967, aimed to use cars and radios to make the police more responsive. This, it was hoped, would improve police/community relations. In fact, the opposite happened as it was seen to introduce a new ‘style’ of policing at odds with the localised, preventive style hitherto in evidence.

During the 1970s, a series of scandals pertaining to corruption, violence and malpractice rocked policing. Some of these involved detectives and criminals colluding to cover up serious crimes, while others involved the behaviour of officers during interrogations (leading, for example, to acquittals in high-profile terrorism cases).

Figure 8: A cartoon from the Daily Express, 24/7/1982, referencing police corruption [Description: A ‘Jak’ cartoon showing a uniformed police constable arriving home in his car and being greeted by his wife, two children and a poodle. However, the car is a Rolls Royce with the number plate ‘COP 1’ and the house is a huge mansion with sweeping steps and a large drive. His wife is dressed in pearls and an evening gown. The caption below the cartoon reads: ‘Did you have a corrupt day at the office, dear?’] Source: https://ukpressonline-co-uk.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/search/page

Declining levels of trust in the police were also related to much broader changes in British society. Recession/depression in the 1980s generated political and social unrest with the police often caught in the middle. Televised footage of violent police struggles with striking miners further eroded public confidence in the impartiality of the police.

While these factors were in large part beyond police control, as Tim Newburn notes:

Significant efforts have been made to reverse this. The Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, which led to the introduction of PACE in 1984, undoubtedly had a huge impact on the behaviour of police officers and police culture more generally. From ACPO’s Strategic Policy Document (1990) onwards enquiries, policy initiatives and legislative interventions related to policing have been ‘so extensive as to be almost impossible to summarise’ (Newburn, [year], p. 91). But while trust in the police has fluctuated in the early twenty-first century, it has never returned to the levels of the 1950s and early 1960s.