The Postmodern Condition of the Police

EUGENE McLAUGHLIN and KARIM MURJI

THE POSTMODERN CONDITION OF THE POLICE

INTRODUCTION

Globalisation of economies and cultures, the advent of new informationand telecommunication technologies, unfolding Europeanisation, internalmulti-nationalisation, and the ‘new individualism’ means that the insti-tutional configuration of the United Kingdom is in the process of rapidtransformation. Amongst criminologists, there is a heightened sense thatalongside radically different forms of risk, uncertainty and instability,and the way they are perceived, an incisive re-ordering of the tech-niques and logics of social control is taking place. As a result, at variousmoments during the last decade, there has been a recognition of the urgentneed to rethink the assumptions and registers on which police studies,as a sub-field of criminological knowledge, has been premised. For cer-tain academic commentators, the surest way to get to grips with thesefin de siecletransformations is through utilisation of the general theoryof ‘late modernity’. More recently, discussion has moved on to cross-examining the relationship between policing and the risk society. Whilstwe acknowledge the important contribution of these lines of reasoning tothe theoretical revitalisation of police studies, the central aim of this articleis to argue that an important debate about the value of postmodern analysishas been closed down too quickly. The first parts of this article discuss boththe attempts to conjoin the postmodern with policing and the trenchantanti-postmodernist response. After providing readers with our own criticalassessment of these different perspectives, the final sections of the arti-cle elaborate on the ways we think that certain of the ideas most closelyassociated with postmodern cultural analysis provide an understanding ofcontemporary transformations in British policing.

THE POSTMODERN ANDPOLICING

For the past decade the terms postmodern, postmodernism and post-modernity have dominated many aspects of Western academic and cultural

Liverpool Law Review21: 217–240, 1999.© 2000Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

218 EUGENE MCLAUGHLIN AND KARIM MURJI

debate and fascinated the metropolitan popular imagination. However,there is no possibility of constructing clear-cut definitions of the termsnot only because of their interdisciplinary utilisation but also due totheir disparate origins. A quick survey of the vast literature tells us thatthe prominent practitioners of postmodern thinking exhibit considerabledifferences in the nature and scope of their enquiries, as well as theirparticular emphases. For the purpose of this article it is not necessary torehearse the complex differences. To date, in police studies, two main usesof postmodern ideas can be discerned, one analysing what the advent ofa postmodern society means for policing, the other concentrating on theunfolding relationship between the transnationalisation of policing and thepostmodern state.

The work of Robert Reiner illustrates the first approach most fully.Without trying to summarise a complex perspective, we would argue thatthe core problematic for Reiner is seeking to account for the dramatic ‘fallfrom grace’ of the British police that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Hisfoundational premise is that following the formation of the ‘new police’in the nineteenth century, a drawn out process of pacification and winningof public consent led to the high water mark of the late 1940s and early1950s, when the police were something akin to national heroes and anembodiment of the ‘citizenly ideal’:

The police’s role was as much symbolic as it was practical. Bobbies were walking embodi-ments of social authority, their uniforms were sandwich boards for society’s dominantvalues. They played a crucial role in the spread of social integration and a commonconception of citizenship.1

Indeed, Reiner believes that the symbolic status bestowed by the popu-lation on the police in Britain during ‘the golden age’ is unparalleled inany other country. Since that time there has been a haemorrhaging ofsupport for the police, particularly among the young, ethnic minorities,and marginal groups. This has been accompanied by the exposure of anumber of ‘skeletons’ in the police cupboard and the loss of unquestioninggovernment support. In accounting for this dramatic shift in public per-ceptions, Reiner2 argues that the high standing of the police institutionin Britain was due to its role in symbolising a unified nation and con-sensual social order. As this unity fragmented in the post-war period, soinevitably have perceptions of the police. In this sense, the police are likea ‘social litmus-paper’ reflecting underlying social changes. So what is

1 R. Reiner, “Selling the family copper: the British police plc”,The Independent12October (1995), pp. 2–3 at p. 2.

2 R. Reiner, “Policing a postmodern society”,Modern Law Review55/6 (1992), pp.761–81.

THE POSTMODERN CONDITION OF THE POLICE 219

the conceptualisation of postmodernity in this thesis? For Reiner, socio-economic re-structuring is part of a long-term shift in the ‘cultural logic oflate capitalism’ which produces:

• the advent of individualism and lifestyle trends, which through massconsumerism, generate increasing diversity, difference and fragmen-tation;

• economic change that has exacerbated the growth of mass unemploy-ment and the emergence of an ‘underclass’ of young men who havenever been employed and who are excluded from legitimate economicactivities;

• a shift in social attitudes and moves towards a less hierarchical, lessdeferential, more liberal culture with a resultant loss of respect forauthority.

These shifts fracture the traditional social order of which the police wereonce national symbols, and form a pincer movement in which the policehave been caught. Reiner’s thesis is encapsulated in the equation: ‘deepen-ing social divisions + de-subordination = declining consent.’3 He is onlytoo well aware of the fact that the clock cannot be turned back. As a con-sequence, there is a strong modernist sense of loss and anxiety woven intothe lucid historical sweep at the heart of his analysis:

The police will be replaced by a more varied assortment of bodies with policing functions,and a more diffuse array of policing processes: ‘pick-n-mix’ policing for a postmodernage. Police officers can no longer be totems symbolising a cohesive social order which nolonger exists. They will have to perform specific pragmatic functions of crime managementand emergency peace-keeping in an effective and just way, or forfeit popular and politicalsupport.4

It should also be noted that Reiner’s analysis crystallises many of the anxi-eties expressed by a variety of commentators in North America about theconsequences of the postmodernisation of policing. He believes that thereis the distinct possibility that the UK is moving towards a ‘Fortress L.A.’ or‘Bladerunner’ type of anti-society where the wealthy will take refuge ‘insecurity bubbles shielded by space, architecture, technology and privateguards, while the underclass are consigned to the dreadful enclosures ofthe urban ghettoes’. In this postmodernnoir scenario, the public policewill have the residual role of patrolling the frontiers between these two

3 R. Reiner, “From the sacred to the profane: the thirty year’s war of the British police”,Policing and Society5 (1995), pp. 121–28 at p. 125.

4 R. Reiner “Police and policing”, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds.),TheOxford Handbook of Criminology(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 1039.


worlds. In carrying out this role they will also be acting as the ‘sandwichboards for values of fragmentation and division’.5

The second strand of postmodern thinking is reflected in the work ofJames Sheptycki who argues that ‘to use the category of the ‘postmodern’is to accept that we have entered into something beyond mere refinement,reformation and re-articulation of what has gone before’.6 He utilises thepostmodern to explain several developments. First, he sees a theoreticalneed to move beyond narrow policy-oriented criminological perspectivesif we are to make sense of broader historical shifts and trends. Secondly,he conceives of postmodernism as a set of ideas and trends that allude to adeep historical fissure or fragmentation, a break with the past reflected inchanges in political economy, wrought by globalisation and transnational-isation. Like Reiner, he believes that the modern police emerged as part ofthe governmental project of the European nation-state:

The police agencies that came to life during the nineteenth century were the concreteexpression of the state’s monopoly of coercive forcewithin its territory, just as the branchesof the military were the expression of that power at the borders.7

As the hitherto fixed boundaries of states and law enforcement fractureunder economic and other pressures, the historical project is inevitablycalled into question, as is the role and scope of the nation state. Sheptycki’sargument is that police organisations around the world ‘have had nationstates as their nesting sites’ and that ‘character of the nation state system iscurrently undergoing significant transformation that is both visible in chan-ging forms of policing and constitutive of these new forms’.8 Sheptyckiacknowledges that transnationalisation per se is not necessarily new andthat there are also tendencies towards localisation of policing. However,‘the local’ is not his focus. Within Europe, transnationalisation is observ-able through the TREVI and Schengen arrangements, as well as variousmeasures and agreements through European Union treaties. Does this rep-resent a ‘hollowing-out’ or ‘thickening’ of state controls? For Sheptycki,the outcome is a ‘patchwork quilt’ of policing, reflecting unevenness in theextent to which the shift to a postmodern state has occurred.

In the wake of taking on board aspects of the governmentality literature,Sheptycki identifies ‘two dual processes or dyads’ at work:

5 Supra. n. 1 p. 3.6 J. Sheptycki, “Transnational policing and the making of a postmodern state”,British

Journal of Criminology35/4 (1995), pp. 613–635, at p. 614.7 J. Sheptycki, “Policing, postmodernism and transnationalisation”,British Journal of

Criminology38/3 (1998), pp. 485–503, at p. 488.8 Supra. n. 7 at p. 498.


• the marketisation of insecurity/the decline of state social control.The first part of this is reflected in the growth of private security,the second in strategies of ‘responsibilisation’ and individualisationthrough which the state increasingly places the emphasis on individu-als and communities to protect themselves from crime. For Sheptycki,the outcome of this could be a rump public police force, dwarfed bya much larger private sector, though he points out that others envis-age the emergence of a hybrid model in which there is some sort ofalliance between the two sectors.

• the transnationalisation of clandestine markets/transnationalisation ofpolicing. Crime beyond borders has been crucially assisted by thespread of neo-liberal free market ideologies, as well as by time-space convergence under globalisation. Both reduce the ability ofnational governments to shape regulatory systems and policing itselfis increasingly pulled into the transnational realm in attempting todeal with this. This is reflected in the growth of legal instruments andpolicing treaties between governments.

Although Sheptycki views some contemporary developments as essen-tially pre-modern (e.g. the new Feudal city), amongst an array of factorsthat makes the various trends postmodern, he sees the following as beingmost significant:

• accelerating changes in the freeing up of global markets is beingaccompanied by the globalisation of clandestine markets.

• a shift away from important characteristics of the Modern Age, suchas the decline of European hegemony and the resultant changes in thecharacter of nation states.

• increasing insecurity, uncertainty and fragmentation at personal, dis-ciplinary and social levels is such that choices are no longer basedupon rationalism.

• an increasing cycle of ‘panic scenes’ and corresponding folk devils isdriving insecurity discourses and the growth of transnational policing.

In many respects, given the nature and level of his analysis Sheptycki isdescribing a hyper-postmodern state-policing scenario.

THE ANTI-POSTMODERNISTRESPONSE

What is significant is that these ‘pomo-cop’ papers have not triggeredan extensive debate about the relevance of the postmodern within policestudies. This is not surprising if we take the following into account. For the


most part, British sociology, with one or two notable exceptions that provethe rule, has been extremely hostile to any form of postmodern theorising,viewing it, among other things, as politically compromised by its supposedcomplicity with neo-liberal commodification, multi-national capitalismand mass culture. Michelle Barrett has noted with a sense of bewildermenthow ‘some people seem to think that even to talk about postmodernism isto be guilty of some political crime’.9 Furthermore, within British crim-inology, a chorus of commentaries have rejected postmodern theorising.As a consequence, we have a variety of anti-postmodern criminologiesthat have opted for ‘late modernist order’ over ‘postmodernist disorders’.10

This should have been expected since all the main British criminologicalperspectives are in their own ways wedded to a social democratic under-standing of modernity as an ‘incomplete project’ still charged with thereformist potential of claims to universal citizenship, progress, justice andreason.11

Within the sub-field of police studies the response to postmodernismhas been twofold. Researchers working within occupational and organisa-tional culture perspectives and the various specialist sub-fields of policestudies seem to be of the opinion that, like other ‘easy come, easy go’theoretical ‘fads’, postmodernism will go away.12 The second response hasbeen to embrace Anthony Giddens’ totalising theory of ‘late modernity’

9 M. Barret, Imagination and Theory: Essays on Writing and Culture(Cambridge,Polity Press, 1999), p. 12.

10 As a consequence, whilst we may discern the outlines of a ‘criminology of thepostmodern’ in the UK, we do not have a renegade ‘postmodern criminology’. Mostnotable amongst the anti-postmodernists are D. Garland ‘Penal modernism and postmod-ernism’ in S. Cohen and D. Blomberg (eds.),Punishment and Social Control(New York,Aldine, 1995) and A.E. Bottoms and P. Wiles (1997), “Environmental criminology” in M.Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds.),The Oxford Handbook of Criminology(Oxford,Oxford University Press, 1997). Doubts have also been expressed by Left Realists. See, forexample, the chapters by J. Young and J. Lea in P. Walton and J. Young (eds.),The NewCriminology Revisited(London, Macmillan, 1999). It is remarkable that the postmodernis ignored by V. Ruggiero, N. South and I. Taylor (eds.),The New European Criminology:Crime and Social Order in Europe(London, Routledge, 1999). Amongst the very fewBritish criminology books to have given postmodern thinking an airing are D. Nelken(ed.),The Futures of Criminology(London, Sage, 1994); J. Muncie, E. McLaughlin andM. Langan (eds.),Criminological Perspectives(London, Sage, 1996).

11 This is perhaps why the work of Jurgen Habermas plays such a prominent role in thewritings of certain social democratic British criminologists.

12 It should also be remembered that many of those who were involved in the debates ofthe 1980s left police studies at the same time as the Home Office’s Police Research Group(PRG) urged researchers to co-operate with police forces to produce policy and practicerelevant research that would help reduce escalating crime rates. The PRG had no time fordiscursive reflection.


TABLE I

THEORIST(S) KEY CONCERN EXPLAINED BY CONSEQUENCES

FOR POLICING

Reiner Fragmentation Postmodern society Declining consentConsumerisation Desubordination

Police ‘fall Economic De-legitimationfrom grace’ re-structuring De-sacralisation

Sheptycki Transnational ‘Stretching’ ‘Patchwork quilt’policing of nation-states of law enforcement

Postmodern state Trans-nationalisationMarketisation & globalisation

‘Panic scenes’

Loader Commodification Neo-liberalism Mixed economy ofConsumerisation Marketisation law & order

Social polarisation‘Yearnings’ for collectiveorder and security

Johnston Re-emergence of Neo-liberalism Hybrid policingprivate policing Privatisation Localisation

Late modernity Active citizenshipRisk society

Newburn New policing Late modern Public policingand Jones division of labour change thesis / is stretched

Postmodernisation New emergentpolicing networks

O’Malley Reconfigurations Post-Keynesianism Responsibilisationof crime control Neo-liberal New modalities of

rationalities of crime controlgovernance Community policing

and communitarianismManagerialisation

Ericson Re-organisation Risk as a central Policing as aand of police within feature of model of riskHaggerty emergent risk modernity communication;

communications new policing rulessystems and technologies to

meet externaldemands forknowledge of risk


as the way to explain contemporary transformations in crime, policingand security discourses, as well as turning to Ulrick Beck’s risk societythesis.13 (See Table I.)

Since we do not have the space to detail these various anti-postmodernists we concentrate on the analysis presented by Pat O’Malleyfor two reasons. First, we believe that he has presented the only seriousengagement with the postmodern and policing thesis. Second, the rejec-tionist nature of his critique effectively served to close down the questionof whether postmodern thinking could have any relevance to policing.

O’Malley’s basic contention is that there is ‘an enormous interpret-ative gap between the hypothesised operation of these global processesand the processes of public police reform’.14 For him, such approachesoperate on the basis of a homology between policing forms and the post-modern, but the process by which they are supposed to be connected isnot identified or explained. Two closely related criticisms are of particularimportance for this paper. First, echoing Bruno Latour’s ‘we have neverbeen modern’ thesis,15 O’Malley criticises the implicit assumption thatpolice forces are somehow ‘paradigmatic’ of modernist institutions. Heargues that, in key respects, the police deviate dramatically from modernorganisations. Secondly, he is not convinced that the host of micro-changescurrently ‘presenting’ themselves are indicative of a shift to postmodernity.Rejecting what he sees as the over-reach of postmodern theorising, heargues that changes in policing ‘are most clearly linked with, and taketheir character from, specific neo-liberal and ‘new managerial’ imperativesto apply market and strategic planning principles to police organisationsand the delivery of police services.’16 Neo-liberal governance entails theconstruction of a smaller, semi-privatised but much stronger state. Thismeans that a shift in responsibility has taken place with the ‘anti-welfariststate’ stepping back and transferring responsibilities onto the private sec-

13 L. Johnston, “Policing diversity: the impact of the public-private complex in poli-cing” in F. Leishman, B. Loveday and S. Savage (eds.),Core Issues in Policing(London,Longman, 1996); L. Johnson, “Private policing: uniformity and diversity” in R.I. MawbyPolicing Across the World(London, UCL Press, 1999); I. Loader, “Private security and thedemand for protection in contemporary Britain”,Policing and Society7 (1997), pp. 143–62; I. Loader, “Consumer culture and the commodification of policing and society”,Sociology33/2 (1999), pp. 373–392; T. Jones and T. Newburn,Private Security and PublicPolicing (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998); R. Ericson and K. Haggerty,Policing the RiskSociety(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997).

14 P. O’Malley, “Policing, politics and postmodernity”,Social and Legal Studies(1997),pp. 363–381, at p. 376.

15 B. Latour,We Have Never Been Modern(Brighton, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).16 Supra. n. 14, at p. 375.


tor and not-for-profit agencies, the community and the sovereign citizen.O’Malley argues that as a result, ‘the local’ becomes the key site of servicedelivery and determinant of the nature and content of service delivery. Toillustrate his view of ‘the local’ as a site of new forms of governmentalityvis-à-vispolicing, he identifies the rise, across a variety of jurisdictions,of ‘community policing’ in the 1980s and 1990s. New highly localisedpolicing relationships are being promoted which emphasise partnershipand shared responsibility with local communities. In the process, thecommunity is being responsibilised in ways that heighten awareness ofthe risks of criminal victimisation the limits of the police’s role. At thesame moment, new managerialist strategies are being introduced to trans-form late twentieth century policing not into a postmodern, but a modernorganisation with modernist sensibilities. Police leadership is being mod-ernised through on-going professionalisation and managerialisation, andactivities characteristic of ‘low policing’ are vulnerable to rationalist cri-tique, which is driving the identification of ‘core’ and peripheral activities.For O’Malley, this perspective, unlike postmodern approaches, provides atheoretically adequate conceptualisation of the nature of police reform andnew governmental technologies, and a framework for constructive politicalinterventions. Interestingly, he argues that we need to examine the variouspolice reforms carefully in order to identify ‘the possibilities for disag-gregating neo-liberal strategies and practices, and rendering their ofteninnovative developments available for appropriation and development by a‘progressive’ post-welfare politics’.

AN ASSESSMENT

With Reiner and Sheptycki, we think that it is important to considerthe postmodern in relation to the displacements taking place in policing.Nation states and their institutional manifestations are becoming morefragmentary and decentralised as they try to respond effectively to increas-ingly global forms of order. ‘State’, ‘Nation’ and ‘Police’ are being, atone and the same time, separated and reconfigured in unprecedented ways.Police researchers also need to be aware of the implications of shiftstowards what has been described as ‘a police with no state’ and ‘beyondnation state forms of policing’. Certain conceptualisations and modalit-ies of ‘policing’ can no longer be considered exceptwithin the unfoldingEuropean framework in which they are being nurtured. Europeanisationis replete with possibilities for ‘spill-over’ into as yet unidentified newpolicing domains. For example, a recent consultation document for theEuropean Parliament details the emergence of a democratically unac-


countable ‘police-industrial complex’ and the proliferation of high-techsurveillance methods, which are global in reach and implication.17

However, there are problems with Reiner’s and Sheptycki’s concep-tualisation of the postmodernisation of policing. First, a very particularreading of postmodernity is employed in these accounts, because it istreated, for the most part, as a functionalist grand narrative. This modernistreading of the postmodern tends to believe that it is possible to find asocial scientific theory that is fully adequate to the task of explanationand analysis. Second, the ‘political’, ‘social’ and ‘economic’ are privilegedand the ‘cultural’ is treated as ‘surface’. For Reiner, attention to matters ofstylistic convention and image are part of the cultural logic of capitalismbut do not require any more attention or analysis than that. Sheptycki’stheoretically re-tooled political economy of policing tends to overlookcultural matters, apart from a reference to ‘panic scenes’. Third, bothexplanations also operate with a police-centred vision in which the publicpolice are the conjectural point of origin as well as the screen upon whichpostmodernism is projected to illuminate and make sense of observableshifts. Fourth, this is accompanied by a state-centred analysis in which theorigins of the police correspond to the modern nation state. For the mostpart, the definitional relationship between ‘modernity’, ‘the state’ and ‘thepolice’ lies unproblematised within both accounts. There is a very realdanger in both approaches of projecting a past when the definitional rela-tionship was authoritative and settled. Fifth, changes in policing are seenas the ‘surface’, reflective of deeper underlying social, economic or cul-tural changes. This ‘deep structure’ approach draws upon neo-liberalism,and more specifically, post-Fordism and consumerism/diversity (Reiner);plus globalisation/transnationalisation and shifts in the international statesystem (Sheptycki). As a consequence, this public bureaucracy is picturedas the victim of long-term structural shifts over which it has little con-trol, direction or agency. In contrast, we think that it is more fruitful toview changes and, perhaps equally importantly,non-changes in policingas both reflecting and affecting the large scale ‘turns’ associated with thepostmodern condition.

We can agree with much of O’Malley’s insistence that ‘the local’ muststand as a central starting point for analysing new police developmentsand his recognition of the important role being played by new manageri-alist discourses. There is little doubt, for example, that the emphasis inthe UK on local ‘crime reduction/criminal management’ and ‘problem-oriented/intelligence-led policing’ is generating a new wave of statutory

17 STOA, An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control(European Parliament,1998).


multi-agency partnerships and information sharing systems which havethe potential to operate across the interface of criminal justice and socialpolicy. As a result, we are witnessing in certain locales intensive ter-ritorialisation and inter-institutionalisation and this has the potential toproduce novel discourses of ‘policing’ premised upon the dispersal andmanagement of institutional risks, and to re-write the script of policegovernance and civil liberties. However, there are several problems withO’Malley’s ‘localist’ standpoint. First, in some jurisdictions, new policingframeworks and discourses are simultaneously emerging at the local, thenational and the transnational. It is important to realise what an extraordin-arily novel and potentially chaotic departure this represents. Second, incertain respects his analysis is not local enough to get to grips with what ishappening in certain neighbourhoods. For example, some police forces inthe UK have been moving towards what we might define as ‘in-your-face’policing strategies, involving overt video surveillance of known suspects.Third, O’Malley’s view of the postmodern is limited by an unwilling-ness to move outside Reiner’s grand narrative conceptualisation. O’Malleyassumes that the postmodern is a stage beyond the modern, an ‘over-coming’. But according to Lyotard18 and Bauman,19 the postmodern isnot a new age nor a sequential successor to modernity. It is not beyond,but within modernity. Consequently, there is no necessary contradictionbetween attempts to modernise a primarily pre-modern organisation in apostmodern world. Indeed, there is no essential reason why an institutioncannot ‘move’ in disarray back and forth between the pre-modern, modernand postmodern. Fourth, we have problems with his conceptualisation ofnew managerialism and the police organisation. For O’Malley, new mana-gerialism is virtually co-existent with, and subordinate to, neo-liberalism.He draws clear stable lines between this governmental ‘technique’ and aparticular ideological project. Although we have no wish to repeat herewhat we have set forth at length elsewhere,20 we must stress that newmanagerialisation of the police in the UK has been marked by critical ideo-

18 J.F. Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,1984).

19 Z. Bauman,Intimations of Postmodernity(London, Routledge, 1991).20 E. McLaughlin and K. Murji, “The end of public policing? Police reform and ‘the new

managerialism’ ”, in L. Noaks et al. (eds.),Contemporary Issues in Criminology(Cardiff,University of Cardiff Press, 1995); E. McLaughlin and K. Murji, “Times change: newformations and representations of police accountability”, in C. Critcher and D. Waddington(eds.),Policing Public Disorder: Theoretical and Practical Issues(Aldershot, Avebury,1996); E. McLaughlin and K. Murji, “The future lasts along time: public policeworkand the managerialist paradox”, in P. Francis et al. (eds.),Policing Futures(Basingstoke,Macmillan, 1997).


logical contradictions as well as organisational contestation. Furthermore,as we are seeing under New Labour’s ‘Third Way’, the re-inscription as‘modernisation’ means that the techniques most closely associated withnew managerialism are discursively relatively independent from particu-lar politico-economic rationalities. Finally, and as previously noted, thepopular cultural has virtually no analytical presence. O’Malley, like mostof the governance theorists, seems to be unconcerned with the vexingcultural complications of the postmodern condition. The idea that the cul-tural is merely a surface coating without analytical significance leavessomething of a theoretical gap at the heart of his assessment because iteffectively rules out the irrational, the unpredictable, the carnavalesque andthe absurd.

THINKING OTHERWISE: POLICING AND THE POSTMODERN

REVISITED

While O’Malley’s contribution is an important one, his response has servedto close down discussion of whether postmodern thinking, other than theideas that Reiner and Sheptycki have highlighted, could have any relevanceto policing. In seeking to re-open and broaden the nature of the debate,we should make it clear from the outset that we have no wish to identifyourselves as ‘postmodernists’ or indeed to enter into protracted argumentsabout what the postmodern is or is not. Indeed, the terms postmodern,postmodernism and postmodernity have moved in certain academic dis-ciplines from being intellectual buzzwords to becoming tired clichés. Forus, critical theorising necessitates something more sophisticated than easyacceptance, or indeed easy rejection, of academic labels. Most of thethinking for this paper has grown out of attempting to move between thefree flow of ideas that debates about the postmodern, in all their guises,have unlocked. With Hebdige, we believe that the degree of controversy ithas generated across many disciplines ‘signals that a sufficient number ofpeople with conflicting interests and opinions feel that there is somethingsufficiently important at stake here to be worth struggling and arguingover.’21 It is to some of the neglected analytical and political spaces ofpostmodern theorising that the following sections seek to reflect uponwith regard to current developments in policing. Two significant and inter-related fields not yet touched upon are postmodernist cultural analysisand organisational studies. We consider the former in relation to media-isation and the ‘death of the real’. The latter is connected with postmodern

21 D. Hebdige,Hiding in the Light(London, Routledge, 1988), p. 182.


organisational theorists who argue that the grand narrratives that previ-ously defined the ‘self-hood’ and ‘meaning’ of organisations are collapsingunder the contestation of a multitude of ‘little’ counter narratives, and theemergence of diverse and de-centred sources of knowledge and identity.22

We will argue that ‘crisis of representation’ is the concept that connectsboth the postmodernist cultural and organisational analysis, and that itsfullest expression can be seen in the public inquiry and report into policefailures in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

CRISIS OFREPRESENTATION

Whilst postmodernism can not be reduced to any one writer, it is Baudril-lard who has pushed postmodern theorising to the limit, coining keyphrases and soundbites that are endlessly parroted.23 All of his work isan attempt to theorise contemporary systems of communication and con-sumerism. Baudrillard’s theorising shifted to a different level with therealisation that modernity, defined through production of commodities,industrial capitalism and the political economy of the sign, had ended.A radical fissure occurred and the resultant postmodern era is constitutedthrough new media technologies and forms of consumption. Both play-fully and profoundly, he sketches out a history of signification in whichsigns have become increasingly detached from their referents until todaywe inhabit a universe made up entirely of surfaces, of signs and imagesproliferating and circulating with no reference to any ‘real’ world outsideof themselves and with no possibility of closure:

This also means the collapse of reality into hyper-realism, in the minute duplication ofthe real, preferably on the basis of another reproductive medium – advertising, photo etc.From medium to medium the real is volatalized; it becomes an allegory of death, but itis re-inforced by its very destruction; it becomes the real for the real, fetish of the lostobject – no longer object of representation, but ecstacy of denigration and of its own ritualextermination: the hyper-real. The unreal is no longer that of the dream or of fantasy, of abeyond or a within, it is that of a hallucinatory resemblance of the real itself. To exit fromthe crisis of representation, you have to lock the real up in pure repetition.24

22 C.J. Fox and H.T. Miller,Postmodern Public Administration: Towards Discourse(London, Sage, 1995); M.J. Hatch,Organisational Theory: Modern, Symbolic and Post-modern Perspectives(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997).

23 J. Baudrillard, “The implosion of meaning in the media and. . . ”, in K. Woodward(ed.),Myths of Information: Technology and Post-Industrial Culture(Madison, Coda Press,1980); J. Baudrillard,Simulations(New York, Semiotext(e), 1983); J. Baudrillard,In theShadow of Silent Majorities(New York, Semiotext(e), 1983); J. Baudrillard,The Illusionof the End(Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994).

24 J. Baudrillard,Simulations(New York, Semiotext(e), 1983), pp. 142–3.


Hyper-reality points, at the very minimum, to the blurring of the distinctionbetween the real and the unreal. When the real is no longer straightfor-ward or obvious, but is artificially reproduced as real, it becomes, as Bestand Kellner point out, ‘not unreal or surreal but realer than real – a realretouched and refurbished in ‘a ‘hallucinatory resemblance’ with itself’.25

With the advent of hyper-reality, which results from the fusion of the vir-tual and the real into a third order of reality, representations are devouredand simulations come to constitute reality itself: ‘Everything is transparent,everything is visible, there are no more secrets.’26

We do not need to concur with everything that Baudrillard writes torealise that his thesis can be seen most clearly in emergent media-scapeswhere the boundaries between fact and fiction, information and entertain-ment have imploded. For Baudrillard, the media fascinates not as a sourcefor the production of meaning and representation but because it is a sitefor their ‘disappearance’. Umberto Eco makes a similar point when heargues that the ironic articulation of the ‘already said’ is the distinguishingfeature of postmodern communication. We can no longer make innocentstatements but must inevitably refer to and work between the lines ofthe ‘already said’.27 Through repetition the ‘original’ is given an entirelydifferent cultural significance than when it first appeared. The media isconsumed in different ways because ‘the various pasts and presents of TVnow air simultaneously’ and access ‘the accumulated past of the popularculture’.28 This means that viewers must possess high levels of media liter-acy in order to ironically ‘know’ and recognise the hyperconscious cross-and self-references. It is this ‘loss of reality’ / ‘primacy of the image’ /‘ironically knowing’ analysis that allows Baudrillard to argue, for example,that Disneyland presents itself as an imaginary space in order to makeus believe that the rest is real, ‘when in fact all of Los Angeles and theAmerica surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyper-realand of simulation’.

What does this have to do with policing? Once upon a time whenthe world was ‘real’, the police could rely upon a symbolic cluster oforganisational storylines that encapsulated the cherished everyday ‘worldview’ or mentality of police officers. We suggest that the storylines wereframed by an overarching grand organisational narrative that emphasized

25 S. Best and D. Kellner,Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations(Basingstoke,Macmillan, 1991), p. 119.

26 W. Leith, “In conversation with Baudrillard”,The Observer, 15 February 1998.27 U. Eco, “ ‘I love you madly’, He said self consciously”,Postscript to the Name of the

Rose(New York, Harcourt Brace and Co, 1984).28 J. Collins, “Television and postmodernism”, in R. Allen (ed.),Channels of Discourse

Reassembled(London, Routledge, 1992), p. 334.


TABLE II

THE STORYLINE UNMADE BY

The ‘Bobby on the beat’ Specialisation; bureaucratisation; depersonalisation

Non-political Political partisanship

Vocation Instrumentalisation

Local democratic accountability Centralisation and autonomy

Local basis of British policing Regionalisation, nationalisation and

transnationalisation

Unarmed policing Paramilitarisation

Fairness, honesty and decency Intolerance, violence and corruption

Occupational solidarity Racial and sexual victimisation of fellow officers

Effectiveness Rising crime rates and falling clear-up rates

Public consent Abrasiveness, incivility and disrespect

the ‘uniqueness’ of the English police.29 The English bobby was unques-tionably the prototype of the community police officer, ruled by a senseof duty to the public and recognised all over the world for possessing aspecial temper and high moral principles. The relationship between thediverse ‘storylines’ nestling within this grand organisational narrative wasnever fixed but capable of being invoked in different ways within partic-ular conjunctures. Self-representing and self-legitimating, they unfolded‘naturally’ within the English cultural, political and indeed academic ima-gination. For a host of reasons, during the 1980s and 1990s the grandnarrative came under considerable strain as the storylines began to workloose one by one. (See Table II.)

It is no coincidence that this is also the moment when police forcesbegan to invest extensively in media and public relations work. Virtuallyevery force developed a well-resourced press office staffed by civilianpersonnel with experience in journalism, public relations and/or mar-ket research. Professional public relations consultants were employed toover-haul the police’s ‘corporate image’ and given the licence to spendconsiderable amounts of money on advertising. Certain forces forged ever-closer links with crime-fighting television programmes, including stagingdramatic reconstructions, providing CCTV footage, and allowing cameras

29 For further details see, E. McLaughlin and K. Murji, “Resistance through represent-ation: ‘storylines’, advertising and Police Federation Campaigns”,Policing and Society8(1998), pp. 367–399.


and news reporters to follow police officers during raids. And of courseforces spent a considerable amount of time advising seemingly ever morerealistic, but formulaic, ‘already said’ / ‘still-being-said’ television copshows and movies. This brought both benefits and uncertainties for the‘real’ police. Since the predominant ‘viewpoint’ of many such programmes(literally, the position of the camera and the journalist) was usually frombehind real or fictional police lines or the back seat of a police vehicle,the audience was routinely positioned definitionally on side ‘with thepolice’. Popular cop shows naturally privileged the detective capabilities ofpolice forces, spinning the storylines alongside ‘flat’ representations of thepoliced, inevitably placing the criminal ‘other’ outside the moral narrativeand the organisation.

However, as the 1990s drew to a close, the police increasingly foundthemselves intertwined in a set of high-risk media contradictions with thepotential at any moment to trigger an uncontrollable crisis of the hyper-real. Pre-eminent media representations may, in certain circumstances,undercut, stand-in for and/or replace the foundational narratives of thereal police. A combination of audience demands for cop shows, an ‘overflowing’ of media spaces to be filled and the consequent over-productionof ‘fly on the wall’ programmes has generated pressure on the police forever greater media access, producing unpredictable results. For example,the BBC seriesMersey Blues, which was broadcast in January 1999,made very uncomfortable watching for the Merseyside Police and broughtcomplaints from the Chief Constable. Another development, equally wor-rying for police public relations departments, is that the commercial mediarecognise that changing racial, gender and age demographics, and culturalshifts in public attitudes, must be taken into account in the construction ofnew cop shows. As a consequence, unconventional, counter or marginalnarratives which could not previously be represented are being docu-mented and authenticated. These range from unflattering or ambivalentfictional representations such asBetween the LinesandThe Cops, both ofwhich played with layers of ambiguity and foregrounded images of moraldisorientation and organisational lawlessness, through to the various docu-dramas highlighting miscarriages of justice and police malpractice. Chiefpolice officers and staff associations protested about alterations in viewingposition and the impact of this intolerable, uncontrollable excess of real lifeclaims on public opinion. It also creates difficulties for relatively ‘straight’cop shows. For example, ITV’s prime-time programmeThe Billengages inmultiple contortions in attempting to cope with the burden of representingthe policing of London in the late 1990s, as episodes have to inscribe andsubvert, assert and deny, the generic narratives, conventions and stereo-


types of police work. Newspaper advertisements for the programme evensuggested that it is more ‘realistic’ than actual police work. Hence, withinthe police entertainment complex we can observe a dual shift. Firstly, ofsetting, displacing monolithic images with fragmentary ones, and blurringthe boundaries between fiction and reality; and secondly, ofperspective,where the police rather than the policed are the object of the swivellingrepresentational gaze of the hand-held camera. In sum, and to state mat-ters over-simply, the circulation and proliferation of hyper-real imagesof public policing in various media spaces means that old distinctionsbetween the real, fictional and indeed fantasy are rapidly collapsing intoa new police entertainment simulacrum. Step by step, representations ofpolicing are flickering at such an intense rate on the television screen thatthe traditional organisational ‘storylines’ are in danger of ‘disappearing’.

The Metropolitan Police was the force above all others that was cent-rally involved in both the construction and unmaking of these storylines,as well as the desperate attempt to re-impose grand narrative order throughvarious reform programmes and public relations initiatives. However, the‘crisis of representation’ expanded and intensified as the MetropolitanPolice attempted to get to grips with the fall out from the unsolved murderof Stephen Lawrence. In certain aspects the intense coverage of this caseprovides a key example of just how unstable both police storylines andrelations between the police and media are. Because the campaign to bringthe murderers of Stephen Lawrence to justice was largely fought out in themedia it provides us with a classic example of how a local tragedy can betransformed into a prime-time crisis for a police bureaucracy.

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME: THE STEPHEN LAWRENCE INQUIRY

The report of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, published in February 1999,presents a largely chronological account of the evidence presented to iton a day by day basis.30 What the text is unable to capture is the pic-ture that the inquiry team saw before their own eyes. Almost every partof the Metropolitan Police and every level of its personnel was foundwanting in some respect. The extent of the organisational disintegration,particularly the catalogue of failures, mistakes, misjudgements and lackof direction and control, is something that the inquiry’s report is almostunable to comprehend. Hence, there are repeated expressions of incredulityand disbelief. The public inquiry was something more than an investiga-

30 The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson ofCluny (Cm.4262-1, 1999).


tion into the failings of the Metropolitan Police. It exposed the entrailsof the (dis)organisation and, as the inquiry proceeded, the organisationalstorylines literally stopped making sense. The well-honed techniques ofdenial, neutralisation and dispersal of responsibility either imploded, orwere shredded with legal precision. The inquiry team, public gallery,journalists and senior police officers were confronted with a disintegrat-ing world that had lost its unifying principles, meanings and purpose. Itspersonnel were not merely unable to ‘sing from the same hymn sheet’ butthrashing around in vain for a script or some forms of words and account-ing that would make sense to anyone other than themselves. The accountsoffered by some officers could be compared to a theatre of the absurdin which ‘the audience is confronted with characters whose motives andactions remain largely incomprehensible. With such characters it is almostimpossible to identify. . . [and] the more difficult it is to be carried awayinto seeing the world from their point of view. Characters with whom theaudience fails to identify are inevitably comic.’ Even when the subject mat-ter is sombre or violent, the impossibility of identification makes situationscomical: ‘That is why the Theatre of the Absurd transcends the categoriesof comedy and tragedy and combines laughter with horror.’31

The Crime Scene

The report describes an unfolding picture of disarray and confusion. Twoofficers said that they did not even have any information about why theywere there. This illustrates just ‘how little information was given to officerswho were at the scene, many of whom appear to have been left in almosttotal ignorance of even the limited information which was then avail-able.’32 Inspector Groves, the officer in charge of the Territorial SupportGroup unit at the crime scene, was ‘hideously confused’ about his per-sonnel and left the scene without having established what had happened.‘It is apparent to all of us that the direction and control exercised by MrGroves at the scene was non-existent. Nobody gave proper instructionsto the officers in the earliest stage of the investigation, and no plan wasmade. . . ’33 The report’s overall view of the police shows them to be almosttotally lacking in any management, supervision or control of the crimescene, multiplied by the absence of record keeping: ‘The standard of com-mand and co-ordination during the first two hours after this murder was inthe opinion of the Inquiry abysmal.’34

31 M. Esslin,Theatre of the Absurd(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968), p. 401.32 Supra. n. 30 para.11.47.33 para. 11.32.34 para. 11.36.


The Investigation

The subsequent murder investigation reveals more disorganisation. Exper-ienced senior detectives are criticised for having no plan or strategy forpursuing the investigation. There was an absence from the policy file andrecords of any reference to the decision that there should be no immediatearrests. No senior supervisory officer ever appears to have looked at thepolicy log or made any comment whatsoever upon it.35 Two officers saidthey had never seen their own job description. Other officers said that theydid not know what their official tasks in the investigation process were.Senior officers ‘drifted’ into the surveillance operation without much ideaas to what it might achieve and ‘were in a sense allowing the tide to rollover them and they were simply not analysing and planning the actionswhich should be taken properly.’36 The surveillance operation was ‘ill-planned, badly carried out, and inadequately documented. If it was partlya substitute for arrests. . . we conclude that the decision-making in thisregard was flawed and incompetent. . . . All those who heard the evidenceabout this aspect of the case were understandably aghast.’37 The handlingof witnesses and informants was, according to the report, ‘highly unsatis-factory’ and multiple basic failures were uncovered, including (a) failing tointerrogate differences in statements of people observed at the scene whowere known to have far right/racist connections; (b) absence of follow-upof one attacker, with a description not matching that of the main suspects;and (c) evidence of breaches in the PACE Codes of Practice in connectionwith the running of the ID parades.38 The mistakes continued even whenthe decision to arrest was made. The officers involved were not properlybriefed or debriefed. For example, despite information that knives mightbe hidden under floorboards, these were not lifted. Indeed no check seemsever to have been made whether this obvious task had been performed. Thecommitment of the interviewing officers’ varied. Interviews showed ‘littlesystem or method or depth that would indicate an objective based briefing’.One consisted of ‘ineffective formalities with no other objectives than togo through the motions and get it over as quickly as possible.’39 Flawsin technique and approach are evident with the repeated ‘use of closed or

35 para. 13.35.36 para. 15.29.37 para. 18.19.38 para. 21.3.39 para. 23.16.


unproductive questioning’.40 The inquiry concluded that ‘lack of planningand persistence are solid criticisms of these interviews.’41

Management

The report offers unprecedented condemnation of the management of theMetropolitan Police. It had difficulty in establishing the exact nature of therelevant chain of command in 3 area at the time of the murder investigation.The officer who had overall responsibility for supervising the investigation‘tried to pass off his own responsibilities, and perhaps to make excusesabout manpower in order to avoid criticism.’42 He is said to have ‘exag-gerated and distorted the problems’ faced by the police. DAC Osland, thethird most senior officer in the force at the time, confused considerations of‘arrest with considerations of charge’43 and ‘evidence with information’.44

It was a matter of concern to the inquiry that Osland (along with the seniorinvestigating officer) seemed to lack a clear knowledge of basic policepowers of arrest. An internal review was used to assure the Lawrencefamily that a professional investigation had taken place. Its author – aformer head of the Flying Squad and a senior detective – was dismissedby the inquiry as an unreliable and incredulous witness. His review was,according to the inquiry, indefensible ‘flawed in both in its recitation ofthe facts and in its conclusions’. It contained no significant criticism of anysingle decision made, and concluded that everything had been progressedprofessionally, efficiently and satisfactorily. The report details how thereview was uncritically accepted at all levels of the organisation, includingby the Commissioner himself. Not a single question was raised by anyofficer receiving the review. The report concludes that it was ‘difficult tounderstand how senior officers involved in its reception could fail to raise atleast some of the significant and obvious questions generated by the reviewin order to satisfy themselves as to the adequacy of the investigation, andtherefore of the adequacy of the assurances that they might give to other’sbased upon it. The fact is that they failed to do so.’45 It was also discoveredthat the box of documents handed over with the review had disappeared.The inquiry had no choice but to conclude that in the investigation of theracist murder of Stephen Lawrence:

40 para. 23.18.41 para. 23.17.42 para. 27.11.43 para. 29.11.44 para. 29.12.45 para. 28.49.


There is no doubt that there were fundamental errors. The investigation was marred by acombination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadershipby senior officers. A flawed MPS review failed to expose these inadequacies. The secondinvestigation could not salvage the faults of the first investigation.46

Throughout the inquiry, the Metropolitan Police also stood in the unpre-cedented position of having allegations of incompetence, corruption andinstitutional racism regularly flashed across the front pages of newspapers,and in editorials, commentaries, news broadcasts, documentaries as wellas in a detailed docu-drama and a popular play.The Murder of StephenLawrence, a factual dramatisation employing various realistic devices wasgiven a prime-time slot on ITV on 18 February 1999, one week beforethe inquiry report was published. It centred the perspective of Stephen’sparents, Neville and Doreen Lawrence, and the switch in viewing perspect-ive and the rigorous naturalism both broke the conventional narrative of‘Blacks as trouble’ and threw into sharp focus the indifferent, suspiciousand patronising attitude of police officers. Although newspaper coverageof the programme was overwhelmingly positive, the Metropolitan Policefelt the need to issue a press release stating:

This is a compelling docu-drama that has had to compress five years of events into twohours of television. It conveys vividly the tragedy of Stephen’s murder by racist thugsand the trauma faced by his family and friends. However, it does not provide an accuraterepresentation of the facts as far as the Metropolitan Police is concerned.

Though the Metropolitan Police Federation complained about that theprogramme was mixing fact and drama, Mark Redhead, the producer, saidthat he was not concerned about what the police thought of the film.47

On 21 February 1999, the crisis of representation deepened further whenthe BBC broadcastedThe Colour of Justice, the dramatised reconstruc-tion of key moments of the public inquiry that had previously played topacked houses in various London theatres. Television audiences watchedand listened to the surreal, and sometimes comical, testimony given bypolice officers to the inquiry and the Metropolitan Police had to bearwitness to a further devaluation of its storylines.

CONCLUSION

In police studies, postmodern frames have been employed to argue eitherthat structural and social shifts have trapped the public police into a nar-rative of declining consent, or that the emerging mix of institutional and

46 para. 46.1.47 London Evening Standard, 19 February 1999.


cross-national arrangements is a signifier of the postmodern state. While itis possible to concur with some aspects of these arguments, we have arguedthat they contain a number of defects, among which is an overly structuraland statist approach that neglects police agency. These approaches havealso tended to overlook the multiple localisations and contradictions inthe unfolding field of policing. O’Malley’s use of neo-liberalism as analternative framework for making sense of developments has been moresensitive to localisation. What has been marginalised or neglected in allof these accounts are the postmodernist cultural and organisational dimen-sions. These cannot be either over-looked (as in most of the late modernityand risk society approaches) or dismissed as an epiphenomenon, as in thecase of those accounts that privilege a political economy reading.

We have argued that the cultural and organisational dimensions ofpostmodernity produce a different picture and conception of the state ofpolicing and used the notion of ‘crisis of representation’ in an attemptto broaden the field of vision. Popular culture is saturated with multipleimages of the police and police work; and the ‘real’ police extensivelyuse media strategies to ‘sell’ reform packages through granting privilegedaccess to particular journalists and programme makers, as well as throughadvertising, interviews and press conferences. The difficulty for the policein a media-saturated environment is that the boundaries of the ‘real’ havebecome heavily blurred and, to some extent, erased. In these circum-stances, it is not surprising that the police are having to pay considerablymore proactive attention to ‘policing the image’. The irony is that in doingso, the ‘crisis of representation’ is confirmed rather than resolved.

A postmodern cultural environment is highly unstable and unpre-dictable, characterised by fragmentation and diversity of organisations,rhetorics, and identities. ‘Traditional’ boundaries and sources of authorityand legitimisation are questioned, or even disappear. There are no guar-antees that any ‘old’ order can be recreated, except as nostalgic or ironicpastiche, or that there will be a ‘return’ to stability and predictability. Thereis no state of being ‘beyond the fragments’ – there are only the fragmentsthemselves. A postmodern ‘bricolage’ of images and discourses defiesattempts that claim to make sense of the whole via an over-arching logic,whether that comes from those who conceptualise postmodernism as a newgrand narrative, or theories of late modernity or risk society. In what looksand sounds like a contradictory and chaotic babble, ‘small’ events and‘local tales’ have the capacity to destabilise grand organisational narrativesand storylines.

We believe that in the wake of the exposure of its failings in the StephenLawrence case the Metropolitan Police has embodied this postmodern


condition in a variety of ways. The inquiry and the response to its reportwitnessed the exhaustion of virtually every police discourse about policing.A desperate search is underway to rebuild the organisational narrative andrevitalize the storylines. The Metropolitan Police has publicly committeditself to ‘Policing Diversity: Protect and Respect’, a sweeping reform pro-gramme which will involve turning itself ‘inside out and outside in’ in anattempt to regain public trust. In thinking about how to tackle ‘institutionalracism,’ certain senior officers, with an almost evangelical sense of mis-sion, seek to draw on the divergent legacies of Martin Luther King on theone hand and Stokely Carmichael on the other. The overall force plan isto rebuild the normative basis of the organisation on the basis of ‘humanrights’ ‘diversity’ and ‘transparency’. The human rights principles of leg-ality, proportionality, subsidiarity, relevance and remedy will constitute theoverarching framework for all aspects of law enforcement. The force willalso recognise the diverse needs of different groups, and police serviceswill be relevant, accessibleandappropriate. Transparency is to be realisedthrough setting up lay advisory groups and partnership approaches. Whatthe impact of all of this will be no one can say. It is undoubtedly the casethat the previously marginalised is now centred in organisational discourseand there is the possibility of greater accountability to a number of diverseaudiences.

What is notable for the arguments of this paper is that in trying to ‘re-make’ itself the force acknowledges the ‘fact’ of its postmodern condition:fragmented, divided, de-centred and desperately aware that it needs pos-itive media coverage if it is to have any chance of conveying a stablerepresentation to the public. It has attempted to salvage the myth of theScotland Yard detective by establishing a Racial and Violent Crimes TaskForce under the command of DAC John Grieve. The public relationsoffensive that the Metropolitan Police has attempted to construct aroundthis officer and this new unit is quite remarkable. The force also launcheda ‘charm offensive’ involving ‘continuous targeting’ of government minis-ters, civil servants, media figures, the clergy and community leaders. Theforce even let television cameras into Scotland Yard to record the effortsof Sir Paul Condon, the Commissioner, and his public relations strategiststo limit the damage from the fall out of the Stephen Lawrence case. Inaddition, the Met has launched a new advertising campaign with the strap-lines: ‘We’re positive about the future’ and ‘Looking Deeper. ListeningHarder’. The text in one of the earliest advertisements states that beinga police officer ‘means working in a service where change is the onlyconstant. And that’s what intelligence-led policing is all about: lookingdeeper, listening harder, changing faster. . . ’. A later advertisement states:


‘These are revolutionary times for the MET. We’re facing some of thebiggest challenges in our history. . . ’. But here the Metropolitan Policecrashes into a postmodern blindspot of its own making. The media andpublic relations counter-offensive stands as both critique and celebrationof the ‘never changing/forever changing’ ‘inside out/outside in’ dissonancewhich now echoes throughout the organisation’s public statements. These‘fatal strategies’ bespeak a postmodern condition from which there may beno resolution, escape or ‘beyond’.

The Open UniversityFaculty of Social SciencesWalton Hall, Milton KeynesMK7 6AA, U.K.

Documents

The Postmodern Condition of the Police