Clarendon Studies in Criminology – serie

Constructing Victimhood seeks to go 'beyond innocence and guilt' to expand the criminological, victimological, and transitional justice image of who we 'see' as victims, what we 'hear' as experiences of victimisation, and who makes these determinations. The book argues that the construction, reproduction, and politicisation of victimhood is structured not only by notions of innocence and guilt and the existence of complex victims, but by larger questions concerning the existence of complex hierarchies of victimhood that supersede simplistic notions of 'good' and 'bad' victims. Lawther also considers the exercise of voice, the role of silence and the silencing of certain variants of victimhood (in gender-based crimes for example), the politicisation of victims' groups and the impact of unresolved legacies of violent conflict. The author argues that in the failure to cast the transitional justice gaze more widely it is not only the 'voices in the cracks' that will be overlooked, but entire experiences of victimhood and victimisation.If transitional justice is to live up to its claims of being 'victim centred', widening its conceptual and practical boundaries to recognise the multiple and overlapping variables that construct and reproduce victimhood is essential. Pursuing this line of enquiry, Constructing Victimhood aims to change our understanding of victimhood in post-conflict and transitional contexts.

Victims and Criminal Justice is the first study of its kind to examine both the origins and impacts of key legal, procedural, and institutional changes introduced in England and Wales to encourage and govern prosecution. It sets out how crime victims' experiences of, and engagement with, the process of criminal justice changed dramatically between the late seventeenth and late twentieth centuries. Where victims once drove the English criminal justice system, bringing prosecutions as complainants and prosecutors, giving evidence as witnesses, putting up personal rewards for the recovery of lost goods or claim rewards for securing convictions, by the end of this period, victims had been firmly displaced as the state took virtually full responsibility for the process of prosecution. Combining qualitative analysis of a range of textual sources with quantitative analysis of large datasets featuring over 200,000 criminal prosecutions, the authors explore how victims were defined in law, what the law allowed and encouraged them to do, who they were in social and economic terms, how they participated in the criminal justice system, why many were unwilling or unable to engage in that system, and why some campaigned for specific rights. In exploring the shift in victim participation in criminal trials, Victims and Criminal Justice places current policy debates in a much-needed critical historical context.

Drugs are pervasive in our everyday lives across cultures around the world. At the same time, they present one of the thorniest problems of twenty-first century policy, connected with concerns about crime, security, and public health. The global prohibition system, established a century ago, is widely seen to be failing and over the last decade alternative approaches have started to proliferate in some regions of the world, notably the Americas. Rethinking Drug Laws presents a radical intellectual reappraisal of how the international drug control system works, where it came from, and the possibilities for alternative futures. Drawing on an innovative interdisciplinary approach, the book develops new theoretical and conceptual tools for understanding how drug control functions, presents original archival research on the origins of drug prohibition, and explains ways that we can develop a better 'politics of drugs' that can reanimate drug law reform. Central to the book is the claim that to move beyond existing ways of seeing the global drug problem, we need to escape Western-centric thinking. In the Asian Century, will it be China that becomes the most significant player in shaping the future of drug policy and drug control?

Palestinian Political Organizations in Israeli Prisons examines the evolution and changes within the Palestinian Prisoners Movement and the structural opportunities and constraints that inform collective resistance today. Drawing on observation-based fieldwork and over 40 interviews with ex-prisoners and additional interviews with lawyers and advocates, this book presents a sociological account of Palestinian prisoners in Israel - an important reflection of the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Oslo Accords, the peace agreements between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel, transformed not only Palestinian politics but the entire prison environment. By exploring issues including the specific characteristics of women's resistance, the effects of the Islamicization, new hunger strike strategies, consumerism within the prison, parenting children, and escapes, Palestinian Political Organizations in Israeli Prisons offers a fresh analysis of political resistance in Israeli prisons.Applying a social movement approach and drawing comparisons to other politically motivated prisoner groups, the book traces the effects of changes from the Oslo Accords through to today, including the Second Intifada, the split between Hamas and Fatah, the co-option of the Palestinian Authority, and increasingly systematic prison management, explaining how these factors have affected life for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons and influence conflicts today.

From Conflict to Modern Slavery considers the lives of people after they have fled conflict and arrived in the UK. The book draws on insights from interviews with those who have experienced the UK immigration system, and observations are made about how the country's government and its restrictive and hostile immigration policies can increase the risk of modern slavery in the UK. With a broad definition of conflict as an organising concept, and which encourages understandings that go beyond war, this work contextualises these stories to understand why some people appear to be more at risk than others when escaping conflict situations. The work considers the ways in which conflict can facilitate modern slavery and how conflict limits people's agency and the legitimate options available to them. It is this restriction of agency in the face of inherently risky options, coupled with a disruption in support networks, that puts them at most risk of modern slavery. From Conflict to Modern Slavery's strength lies in its unique empirical focus on a comparison between first-hand accounts. It offers personal insights into the experiences of asylum seekers, refugees, and victims of modern slavery, and situates these within extant literature to identify specific aspects of people's journeys that can make them vulnerable to exploitation.

Security has become one of the most important aspects of sport mega-event organisation. This book explores how Rio de Janeiro was imagined and transformed into a security fortress when the 2014 Men's World Cup and the 2016 Olympics came to the city and how the fortress was nonetheless permeable and porous. Dennis Pauschinger experienced exceptional backstage access at high level in the Brazilian mega-event security architecture as well as at street level with the local public security sphere. His ethnographic account takes us from the hidden world of surveillance and control centres, to the security perimeters around stadiums, and to the mundane routine of police officers during day and night shifts at local police stations or at the Special Forces' headquarters. This book shows how police officers' emotions and Special Forces' war narratives impact the static and technology-based security models at mega-events and how traditional patterns of police work, along lines of class and racial inequalities, still prevail and shape the city's public security. The book argues against the common narrative of the positive impacts of mega-event security legacies upon host cities by advancing towards a general understanding of how security governance is carried out in places where the use of digital security technologies co-exists with overly lethal and repressive forms of policing.

Children in Police Custody shines a light on the hidden experiences of children in police detention in England and Wales. An episode in police custody is the single most common sustained experience of the criminal justice system for children. Yet child suspects have previously been largely overlooked in criminological research. Drawing on the first comprehensive study in England and Wales to review the police custody process from the perspective of children, the chapters trace the child's journey from arrest, through detention and interview, to release or remand.Adopting a rights-based approach, this work investigates whether the present legal framework provides effective protection for child suspects. Utilising the detailed insights provided by young participants in the research, and supplemented by the author's fieldwork, this analysis reveals the complex challenges facing children's legal agency in the adversarial setting of the custody block. In so doing, it evaluates the capacity of the available protections to enable children's participation in that setting.A parallel criminological exploration examines the intersecting adversities experienced by child suspects, and the complex power dynamics they navigate in police custody, to arrive at an understanding of the particular harms of police detention for children and their longer-term impact. The book closes with a call for a retrenchment in the use of police custody for children, and a reappraisal of how those who must be detained should be supported to enable their effective participation in the criminal justice process, both in custody and beyond.

To honour the extraordinary contribution of Professor Anthony Edward Bottoms to criminology and criminal justice, leading criminologists and penal scholars have been asked to contribute original essays on the wide range of areas in which he has written. The book starts by reflecting on the depth and breadth of Anthony's contribution and his melding of perspectives from moral philosophy, social theory, empirical social science research, and criminal justice. This is no ordinary collection, because it also contains a major essay by Anthony Bottoms, on Criminology and 'positive morality', reflecting on social order and social norms. In similar vein, Jonathan Jacobs approaches criminology from a moral philosophical viewpoint, whilst Ian Loader and Richard Sparks ponder social theory and contemporary criminology. Topically, Peter Neyroud reflects on evidence-based practice and the process of trying to do experiments in relation to policing.In the second section of the book on Crime, Justice, and Communities, Loraine Gelsthorpe reminds us that justice is about people, in considering the treatment of women in community justice. Joanna Shapland draws parallels between the process of desistance from crime and the potential role of restorative justice in affecting offenders' journeys. P.-O. Wikstrom reflects on the social ecology of crime, whilst Antje Du Bois Pedain considers the theoretical and practical challenges of sentencing constructively.Finally, the book turns to Anthony Bottoms' major interest in punishment and penal order. David Garland puts penal populism under the microscope, whilst Alison Liebling explores the empirical evidence for theories of penal legitimacy. Mike Nellis looks back at the use of the creative arts in prisons in Scotland's Barlinnie Unit, whilst Justice Tankebe explores police legitimacy.

Over the last few decades, the issue of historical/ non-recent institutional abuses has resonated in a range of Western states and churches. Despite the recent proliferation of 'justice' responses to such abuses including prosecutions and civil litigation, inquiries, redress and apologies, it is a subject which is insufficiently understood in the literature. Set against the complexities of the legal, historical, cultural, and political realities of addressing non-recent institutional abuses, Transforming Justice Responses to Non-Recent Institutional Abuses critically examines these justice responses across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Bringing together the voices of victim/survivors of non-recent institutional abuses with legal actors, academics, media professionals, and church and state actors on their experiences of justice processes, this book reframes discourses on accountability and responsibility and considers how to improve justice processes at the level of praxis and increase engagement between victim/survivors and institutional actors.Drawing on interdisciplinary literature related to restorative, transitional, and transformative justice and analysis of primary research, the book advances analysis of the role of innovative justice in this space and a new approach to justice which bridges the accountability gap between seeking and achieving justice for non-recent institutional abuses while improving outcomes for victims and survivors. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Scanning millions of faces each year, facial recognition technology (FRT) has become one of today's fastest growing and most controversial AI-driven surveillance technologies.Based on rare ethnographic access to police FRT deployments, Facial Recognition Surveillance: Policing and Human Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence delves into the profound impact of FRT on policing practices, surveillance capabilities, and human rights protections. It reveals how this technology shapes, and is also shaped by, the complex environments in which it is deployed, dramatically reshaping police-citizen interactions.This book exposes the selective scientific and legal narratives that justify the expansion of AI-driven surveillance. It draws on cutting-edge human rights theory to propose a due diligence framework tailored to police use of FRT and introduces the concept of 'compound human rights harm' to capture the multifaceted impact of surveillance.Integrating insights from the sociology of policing, science and technology studies, and human rights scholarship, this book advances a theoretically novel and empirically informed perspective that positions FRT as a socio-technical system capable of altering the fundamental nature of policing.

Grendon Prison opened in 1962, originally intended to investigate and treat prisoners whose crimes had recognisable psychiatric causes. Thirty years later, its radical ideas of the rehabilitation of prisoners through psychological or psychotherapeutic treatment have been embraced by the Woolf Report, which clearly committed the Prison Service to a rehabilitation ambition. Based upon interviews with prisoners and prison staff, this new study of a 'model' prison will be of interest to criminologists, penologists and prison staff everywhere.

This book presents a substantial new statement on the character of social life in confinement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in two contrasting English maximum security prisons, the authors systematically compare their institutional order, including the differing control strategies deployed in each, as seen by both custodians and captives, controllers and controlled. The authors discuss the implications of their research for the tradition of sociological concern within the`prison community'. They re-examine the resources of that rich but latterly somewhat dormant field in the light of some of the main currents in contemporary social theory, and thereby provide a new perspective on the `problem of order' in maximum custody. This book will have significant policy implications, and it will be required reading for scholars and students in criminology and criminal justice, as well as for administrators and reformers in penal system.

International co-operation in criminal law enforcement has become a centrally important policy issue for Europe in the 1990s. In criminal matters, when a decision is taken to go beyond the discretionary exchange of information towards institutionalized police co-operation, a whole Pandora's box of issues and problems is opened. This book, based on interviews in a wide variety of documentary sources, examines the progress of this co-operation. The authors cover all the major and theoretical issues associated with the emerging pattern of co-operation, including the harmonization of criminal law and criminal procedure, law enforcement strategies, police organization and discipline, and the politics of immigration and civil liberties. In a European Union without internal border controls there is widespread agreement on the objective of closer police co-operation. But prospects in some areas are not good and there are potential pitfalls, even dangers, along the road to more integrated arrangements. The authors conclude by making recommendations that proper accountability arrangements are a prerequisite of a balanced and efficient system of European police co-operation.

Community policing seems always in vogue, yet its essential qualities remain elusive. There has been a rush to evaluate community policing before commentators have got to grips with what community police officers do which is distinctive. This book demonstrates, in detail, how community police officers go about such matters as gathering crime-relevant information from people in the local community, how they apply informal social control to public disorder situations, and how they 'play' the police organization itself in order to obtain resources they need and to secure their own advancement. However, such a brief is not sufficient in itself. The point is to use such a discussion of working practices to assess the conceptual apparatus which has been developed to understand community policing, and to evaluate the potential of community policing to achieve the objectives which policy-makers have set for it. That is the agenda of this book.

The rebuilding of Holloway prison announced in 1968 was intended to be of enormous significance for the treatment and therapeutic rehabilitation of female inmates. Reconstruction began in 1970 but the new prison was not completed until 1985. By this time penal ideologies had changed, and the Prison Department had revised its conception of female criminality. Thus, what was intended to be a new therapeutic prison became a place of conventional discipline and containment. These developments created serious problems within the prison and led to Holloway being identified as a public and political scandal.Using original documents and extensive interviews, the author traces the genesis and consequences of the decision to rebuild England's major prison for women, and shows how the experience at Holloway reflects shifting attitudes towards female criminals, and the relationships among penal ideology, architecture, control, and behaviour in a penal institution.

Using a detailed case study of an area of East London, this book documents the everyday abuse, assault and intimidation that is suffered by ethnic minorities in Great Britain. The author explains and analyses the process through which violence is targeted at these minorities, along with the role that the ideas and language of racial exclusion take in this process. The apparent failure of the police and "multi-agency initiatives" to respond effectively to this problem is then looked at in depth. This book is based on detailed analysis of official documents, a victimisation survey, interviews and direct observation, seen in the overall context of the history of race relations in Britain. It describes some of the many thousands of racist attacks that have occurred in recent years and the events in the last two decades that have shaped English racism and the political and policy responses to it.

The book poses the questions: how do law and policing relate; and can police practices be significantly changed by means of legal regulation? In examining these questions, this book deals with issues which are at the heart of contemporary debates about policing. It contains empirical research from England and Australia in the context of the international policing literature, arguing that studies of policing need theoretical and comparative development. The structure of the book is as follows. The first chapter provides a detailed critical reading of three theoretical conceptions of law in policing which the author terms legalistic-bureaucratic, culturalist, and structural. Chapter two examines the concept of police powers, using historical material from England and Australia. The way in which empirical work can generate theoretical reconsideration is shown in Chapter three, which considers the ways in which legal regulation of policing may be evaded by obtaining a suspect's 'consent' to policing practices such as search and detention, and considers the implications of this for conceptions of policing. Chapters four and five focus on the key policing practice of custodial interrogation in, respectively, England and Australia. This leads, in Chapter six, to the long controversy about the right of silence (and to its severe restriction in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994). It concludes with comments about the symbolic nature of the issue, the theoretical implications of the problems encountered in defining and counting instances of suspects using the right to silence, and the possible effects of the 1994 Act. The final chapter discusses how the practices and forms of law and policing intersect, relates law in policing to broader debates about regulation, the rule of law, and techniques of controlling power, and considers the limits and possibilities of using law to direct and control policing.

This book challenges the traditional idea that policing is the first stage in a criminal justice process, in which the police use their powers of criminal investigation to feed cases into the legal process for authoritative legal resolution. The author argues that the political space allowed to the police on the streets and in the police station allows them to pursue a different agenda of social discipline, targeted at certain sections of the community. This alternative perspective provides new sociological insights into the use of police powers in modern society. The book examines the fairness of police processes by using empirical data to analyse the impact that such powers have on the lives of those who regularly become the objects of police attention.

This is the first detailed account of the economic lives of women drug users. It is located at the boundaries of three disciplines - criminology, anthropology, and sociology - and based on three years of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in New York City. Set in a neighbourhood plagued by drug use and AIDS, the book reveals the economic lives of a group of women whose options have been severely circumscribed, not only by drug use, but also by poverty, racism, violence, and enduring marginality. It is a fascinating account, with Maher drawing extensively on the women's own words, describing how structures and relations of gender, race and class, are articulated by divisions of labour in the street-level drug economy. The book challenges the impoverished set of characterizations which dominate the literature, critiquing both feminist and non-feminist representations that view women lawbreakers as driven by forces beyond their control. It graphically illustrates the role of the drug economy as a site of cultural reproduction by drawing attention to the specific practices by which gender and race dimensions of inequality are constituted and contested in street-level drug markets. This is a rich, nuanced, and theoretically sophisticated study of "crime as work" which will be compelling reading for all those interested in the ways in which women deal with the intersection of gender, race, and work.

In this provocative new book, Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty contend that the police have become information brokers to institutions such as insurance companies and health and welfare organizations that operate based on a knowledge of risk. In turn, these institutions influence the ways that police officers think and act. A critical review of existing research reveals the need to study police interaction with institutions as well as individuals. These institutions are part of an emerging "risk society" where knowledge of risk is used to control danger. The authors examine different aspects of police involvement; the use of surveillance technologies and the collection of data on securities, careers and different social, ethnic, age and gender groups. They conclude by looking at how police organizations have been forced to develop new communications rules and technologies to meet external demands for knowledge of risk. This is the first book in this field to include detailed evidence of some of the central tenets of the risk society. It also includes a sophisticated examination of the risk society theory that will advance readers' knowledge considerably. With this book, the authors revolutionize the study of policing, and their work will impact heavily on scholars in criminology, social theory, and communications as well as policing and the public.

In this first major empirical study of its kind, the authors examine the growth of 'private' policing and its relationship with, and implications for, the public police service. Beginning with a critique of the sociology of policing, the authors then provide a detailed analysis of the concepts of public and private, and examine the boundaries between different forms of policing. Using data from the first ever survey of the private security sector in Britain, the authors provide estimates of the numbers of employees and firms in the industry; the range of services and products offered; and the attitudes of those at senior levels in private security organizations. Competiting theoretical explanations for the growth of private policing are then considered. The book then examines policing at the local level. Using a case study of the London Borough of Wandsworth, the authors examine the range of individuals and organizations involved in policing on the ground. They describe and analyse the activities of the full range of 'policing' bodies, including the public police force, investigatory and regulatory agencies attached to national and local government, and private security organizations. Using this analysis, the authors offer a thorough reconceptualization of what is meant by 'policing' in the late modern era, and consider the implications of this for the public police service and for the future of policing generally.

This book establishes Ireland's unique contribution to criminological research, addressing the effects on crime of its peculiar patterns of industrialization and social change, as well as the effect on ordinary crime of a quarter of a century of civil unrest and terrorism. Crime trends are explored over a fifty-year period between 1945-95 at the national level for the two countries as a whole, and at a city level for Belfast and Dublin. Trends in specific categories of crime, from murder to rape and drug crime, are also explored over the same period. The book makes a significant contribution by supplementing statistical material with ethnographic data. It reports on in-depth interview material among residents in two areas of Belfast, one in largely Catholic West Belfast and the other in largely Protestant East Belfast. In these interviews, those questioned speak of their own experiences of crime, the police, and the paramilitary organizations.

In this provocative new book, Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty contend that the police have become information brokers to institutions such as insurance companies and health and welfare organizations that operate based on a knowledge of risk. In turn, these institutions influence the ways that police officers think and act. A critical review of existing research reveals the need to study police interaction with institutions as well as individuals. These institutions are part of an emerging "risk society" where knowledge of risk is used to control danger. The authors examine different aspects of police involvement; the use of surveillance technologies and the collection of data on securities, careers and different social, ethnic, age and gender groups. They conclude by looking at how police organizations have been forced to develop new communications rules and technologies to meet external demands for knowledge of risk. This is the first book in this field to include detailed evidence of some of the central tenets of the risk society. It also includes a sophisticated examination of the risk society theory that will advance readers' knowledge considerably. With this book, the authors revolutionize the study of policing, and their work will impact heavily on scholars in criminology, social theory, and communications as well as policing and the public.

This book examines the factors which shape the criminal justice response to domestic violence in the light of policy changes at the beginning of the 1990s which aimed to increase arrest rates. In particular, the book discusses the needs and expectations of victims and examines how their choices impact on decisions made by police and prosecutors. Many books on the criminal justice response to domestic violence start from the premise that withdrawal of complaints by victims and the subsequent discontinuance of cases, represents some kind of failure on the part of the agencies involved and that victims would benefit from greater determination by police to prosecute offenders wherever possible. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the criminal justice system as it presently operates is capable of responding effectively to the needs of victims of domestic violence. This book throws doubt on the validity of these assumptions.

After Homicide describes the collective responses of bereaved people to the aftermath of violent death, a subject not dealt with in any detail in the literature that is currently available. The book concentrates particularly on the birth, development and organization of the self help and campaigning groups that emerged in the last decade. The author examines these as attempts to give institutional expression to interpretations of grief, and shows us that these attemps, in their turn, are implicated in a potent phenomenology of mourning. In addition, the author had special access to a number of groups and uses the infomation that he gathered through this access to discuss the practical and political importance of the work of these groups, and their affects on policing, the media and the law.

This book examines a range of criminal activities conducted in different European contexts. Offences committed by individuals and groups endowed with different resources and status are examined. Each chapter contains an implicit rejection of generalizations and attention is paid to variations and differences. Rather than searching for a unified theory of crime, the author highlights the interpretive oscillations, which always occur when we are faced with criminal behaviour. In other words, each time we subscribe to one cause of crime we may realize that also the opposite cause possesses some reasonable validity. The originality of this book consists of the `causality of contraries' running through the chapters, whereby a tentative aetiology identified in one context finds its complete overturning in anther. The author regards the `causality of contraries' as a crucial aspect of the anti-criminological tradition to which he claims affiliation. These `essays in anti-criminology' deal with crimes of both the powerless and the powerful, and seek to demonstrate that both the deficiency and the abundance of legitimate opportunities may lead to crime. In the first part of the book a conventional criminal activity par excellence is examined, namely activity related to the economy of illicit drugs. In this economy the author notes a shift from a Fordist to a Toyota model of criminal activity, a shift determined by the expansion of demand and the growing variety of supply of illicit drugs. The second part of the book addresses specific cases of elite criminality, including illicit trafficking in arms and human beings. The chapters devoted to the analysis of political and administrative corruption in Italy, France, and Britain provide yet other examples of how illegal practices may be imputed to one cause in one context and its opposite in another. Two Intermezzos complete the book, posing more general questions, respectively, around the very concept of illicit `drugs' and the evasive character of illicit economic behaviour.

The book considers recent trends in the local governance of crime. It examines the growing appeal to `community' and `partnerships' in criminal justice policy and the involvement of actual communities and partnerships in criminal justice practices. The book makes sense of ongoing transformations in the relations between the state, market, and civil society in the governance of crime and personal safety. It draws upon the findings of two empirical research projects, conducted by the author, in the fields of community-based crime prevention and local victim-offender and community mediation. The overall aim of the book is to answer, both theoretically and empirically, a number of interrelated questions, namely: How do we make sense of appeals to `community' and `partnerships' in criminal justice policy? What are the implications of actual involvement of `communities' and the establishment of inter-organizational `partnerships' in crime control initiatives? Is crime control an appropriate vehicle around which to (re)organize communities? Finally, if so, what sort of communities are we generating through such a focus?

This fascinating book documents the everyday abuse, assault, and intimidation that is suffered by black and Asian people in Great Britain every day, using information gathered in an East London London case study. The author explains and analyses the process through which violence is targeted at these minorities, and the role that the ideas and language of racial exclusion take in this process. The failure of the police to respond to this problem is then looked at in depth. This book is based on detailed analysis of official documents, a victimization survey, interviews, and direct observation, seen in the overall context of the history of race relations in Britain. The author describes many of the thousands of racist attacks that have occurred in recent years and the events in the last two decades that have shaped English racism, and the political response to it. In this paperback edition Ben Bowling's Preface examines the racist murder of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, whose killing in cold blood on an ordinary English street in April 1993 did not hit the headlines until February 1999, causing reverberations across the whole body of British politics and beyond.

Citizens, it is said, have 'lost faith' in the English police. Opinion polls repeatedly show that trust in, and respect for, the police have declined precipitously from the historically high levels achieved during the 'golden age' of the 1950s. Successive decades of rising crime, political violence and urban disorder, miscarriages of justice, and declining effectiveness have left the police in what seems like a permanent crisis of legitimation. A once revered national institution has become thoroughly profane.In this major new work on the relationship between English policing and culture, Ian Loader and Aogán Mulcahy reassess and revise this received sociological and popular wisdom on the fate that has befallen the English police. Paying close attention to the symbolic and cultural significance of the police, Loader and Mulcahy document the mix of profane and sacred sensibilities that struggle with one another to determine the contours of what they call English policing culture. They draw on documentary analysis of official 'representations' of policing, and oral historical research with citizens, police officers, former government ministers and civil servants, to show that, far from being 'demystified', policing is a cultural institution that remains deeply entangled with questions of subjectivity, recognition, belonging and collective identity.This cultural sociology of English policing sheds new light on the social changes and conflicts that have called police authority into question in the decades since 1945 and offers an important appraisal of what is at stake in the contemporary cultural politics of policing.