#19 Someone had better do something now

The strangeness, vagueness and ethical murkiness of policing

Dear friends,

With a fortnight until the paperback publication of Into the Night: A Year with the Police, I’ll share another extract today.

For a long time, the working title for my book was 'Someone had better do something now’. I took it from a quote by the pioneering criminologist Egon Bittner, who wrote that a suitable police task is simply ‘something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-someone-had-better-do-something-now!’

In the end, the phrase was a bit of a mouthful and we changed the title. But I still like the way it captures the simultaneous urgency and indeterminacy of questions about policing, community, care and social change.

Researching the police in the States in the sixties, Bittner perceived the fundamental strangeness, vagueness and and ethical murkiness of their role. One of his great realisations was how little we understand what the police actually do.

He became an important thought partner, as I describe near the end of the book:

In certain ways I felt a kinship with Bittner. He was a sociologist who had happened upon policing as an object of study. He had simply begun going out on night shifts with officers and his work evolved from there. It all started ‘in a quite unplanned way’, he wrote, ‘and remained throughout its duration an entirely open-ended ethnographic adventure’.

Part of what attracted me to policing was the fact that I had never been attracted to policing – and yet the police interacted with so many themes that I cared about. I also embarked on my night shifts unaware of what I would find, and I treated it as open-ended research and, yes, adventure too.

Bittner’s interest was piqued by the realization that we know very little about the police. The police are ‘the best known and least understood institution’, he wrote. Everyone in a society is acutely aware of them, knows how to behave around them, and yet popular beliefs about what police do are often limited to notions of crime fighting and law enforcement. Bittner’s fascination developed when he observed ‘the immense richness and scope of police work’. Law enforcement was a facade that masked a far wider and deeper role in society. The ‘range of police responsibility was virtually unlimited’, he realized, and yet the police’s reach and influence was little acknowledged, even by police officers themselves.

In London today, the shortcomings of the police seem to be due to a shortage of imagination as much as a shortage of money or talent. If we embraced ‘the immense richness and scope of police work’, what might the role become? Even looking at good policing, I could not help asking myself: Is this it? Faced with exclusion and isolation, with cycles of violence, damage and pain, was this the best we could come up with?

Bittner’s words still resonate today and I think he ought to be better known. The extract below describes my first encounter with his work, the morning after a night responding to emergency calls on blue lights.

Thanks to everyone who’s been in touch to share reflections on recent letters. I really appreciate it. As ever, do leave a comment or reply to this email if you’d like to share any thoughts or recommendations.

Warm wishes,

Matt

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When I woke, I could still feel the motion of the police car, the thrill of the speed. It felt as if the bed was moving beneath me. I liked the fast driving more than I had expected and felt a rush of excitement each time we put on the lights and siren. On blue lights, we got to drive the way joy riders drive. Out on shifts, I found myself craving emergencies.

For as long as I can remember, I have had dreams about running but not moving. I run to something I am late for, but I cannot reach it. In these dreams, there is always, somehow, more time before the exam or encounter I am running towards. More time, that is, for me not to be able to get there, for despair to mount, and frustration to shade into panic.

Racing around London on blue lights provided an unexpected antidote. Dream-like itself, it offered an experience of unobstructed speed and fluidity, of a world that, far from trying to thwart you, is responsive to your every move, opens wherever you turn and parts to let you pass.

I went into Brixton to have breakfast and type up my notes, grabbing a book about the police as I left the flat. On the way to the Phoenix, I thought about the night before: the visit to Jamie, the family being harassed, the noisy party, the lost daughter, the children’s home. Most of the calls had less to do with crime than with mental health and other people’s relationships. What did we have to do with all that? Were we the most appropriate people to deal with the issues we faced, or were we just the closest to hand?

I had begun reading about policing and crime to try and make sense of my new role, amassing an intimidating stack of books with names like Law and Order, The Great British Bobby, In the Office of Constable, Introduction to Policing, Aspects of Police Work, The Politics of the Police, Observations on the Making of Policemen, The Functions of the Police in Modern Society. I ordered them from second-hand bookshops and every few days another arrived, with a similar title, and a similar blue cover to all the others.

I had cleared a shelf and begun dipping in. At first it all felt new, but the more I read the more I noticed the same ideas and examples cropping up and I started to feel as if I was reading the same book over and over.

There was one voice, however, that immediately stood out.

Egon Bittner was a sociologist who, in the 1960s, studied the police in Denver’s skid row neighbourhoods, accompanying them on shifts and watching their work. Bittner observed what officers spent their time doing and compared it with the crime fighting they were ‘supposed’ to be doing. Constables were pulled into all sorts of situations: law enforcement, social regulation, dispute mediation, community support, care giving, providing help and advice . . . The institution’s tough talk might suggest otherwise, but police did much more than just chase criminals, even if the public, and even many police officers, saw that as their primary function. Bittner concluded that ‘no human problem exists, or is imaginable, about which it could be said with finality that this certainly could not become the proper business of the police’. Police are available at all times and in all places. A suitable police task is simply ‘something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-someone-had-better-do-something-now!’

The phrase made me laugh when I first read it. But then I realized it was spot on. The urgency of the ‘now!’, the vagueness of ‘someone’ doing ‘something’, capture the paradoxes of policing perfectly. There are problems that cannot be ignored – and the police deal with them because they are the around-the-clock stop-gap service. They turn up and do what they can, regardless of what is actually needed.

Drawing on his observations of policing, Bittner published a series of books and articles that outlined his ideas of what the police are for, what makes them distinctive and why their role can feel so blurry and problematic. Underpinning his investigations was a desire to determine ‘what police work could be at its very best’. Browsing my new books, I found Egon Bittner’s writing the most faithful mirror for my experiences, and a brilliant description of why policing is such a strange job – why it feels as if it is multiple jobs rolled into one.

What grabbed me first was his voice – it was wise, lyrical, impassioned, not at all what I expected. It was as though a poet or prophet had stumbled into a criminology department. No description of the police I had read compared with sentences like these:

[The police officer] is ambivalently feared and admired, and no amount of public relations work can entirely abolish the sense that there is something of the dragon in the dragon-slayer. Because they are posted on the perimeters of order and justice in the hope that their presence will deter the forces of darkness and chaos, because they are meant to spare the rest of the people direct confrontations with the dreadful, perverse, lurid, and dangerous, police officers are perceived to have powers and secrets no one else shares. Their interest in and competence to deal with the untoward surrounds their activities with mystery and distrust.

Bittner wrote about policing in mythic terms, highlighting the role’s inherent ethical murkiness. He looked directly at the crudeness and imperfections of police work, examining the way that they arise from the role itself, as much as from the people who perform it. And he confronted the irony that representatives of a tainted institution go out every day and tell other people they are doing something wrong. Few people, Bittner wrote, ‘are constantly mindful of the saying, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone . . .”, but only the police are explicitly required to forget it’.

Bittner became an important thought partner. Policing was not what I had expected and it was not what it seemed. Much of it appeared to be care work and youth work conducted bluntly, reluctantly, even punitively. A lot of the officers I met wanted to catch bad guys, not support vulnerable people. It was not that they thought that was unimportant – they simply did not think it was their job.