Criminal Justice Institutions, Processes and Actors Flashcards
What were the findings of the Lammy Review?
2017, chaired by David Lammy (Black Labour MP):
* Stop and search is often linked to suspicions of gand offending, such as drug dealing
* Black boys were more than ten times as likely as white boys to be arrested for drug offences
* Suggests race blind prosecuting where identifying information is redacted from case files passed by the police to the CPS
* Using modern slavery legislation to target those at the top of complex criminal hierarchies would be a more effective way of targeting gangs
* Over half of the people prosecuted under joint enterprise are BAME, unfair as it allows the secondary to be prosecuted as if they were the primary
How might individuals use the police for their own purpose?
Koch
Conducted research on council estate termed ‘Park End’ and the interaction with law enforcement
* People were using the police as personalised tools in pursuit of their own daily relations, e.g. threatening to call the police on teenage sons acting out
* The aim of calling the police was not to confirm an abstract state authority or its categories of right and wrong
Bell
African-American mothers in impoverished neighbourhoods involuntarily contribute to the criminalisation of black individuals by calling the police in intimate disputes with partners, sons and neighbours
What are Bittner’s central ideas about the police?
Police are called in situations in which ‘something that ought not to be happening and about which someone had better do something now!’
Bittners Three Points:
1. There is no public problem we could conceive that wouldn’t end up as a policing problem
2. What we do when calling the police is summoning coercion, a unique capacity that no other agency has and if this fails, they can use violence
3. Provided a provisional solution, ‘sticky plaster’, police intervention then allows other agencies to get involved
Where can the power of stop and search be found?
S1 Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
Provides the power to stop and search a person or vehicle where they have reasonable grounds to suspect they will find stolen or prohibited items
S60 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994
Provides the power for a inspector or above to stop and search without suspicion if there is an incident involving serious violence or a dangerous weapon in his locality
PACE Code A 2023
Test of reasonable grounds for suspicion has two parts: officer must have formed a genuine suspicion in their mind that they will find the object for which the power is being used, and the suspicion must be reasonable. Objective basis based on facts, information which are relevant to the likelihood something will be found
What are the justifications given for stop and search?
Loader
1. Criminal investigation, renders the success rate problematic since it does not lead to many illegal things being found
2. Deterrence / preventive effect, there is no power to make a search in order to deter someone, the point of the law is not to scare the individual or give the surronding area a feeling of ease
3. Tool for management of marginalised populations, might simply be thought that the power simply enables the police to obtain in routine order management of people who live in public spaces
What is the difference between police and policing?
Jones et al
* POLICING: Subset of social control that involves organised forms of order-maintenance, peacekeeping, rule inforcement, investigation and prevention undertaken by individuals or organisations
* POLICE: The specialist state agency tasked with crime control, order maintenance and emergency response
How does gender impact policing?
Loader
Domestic violence in the 1980s was coined ‘rubbish work’ by the police, with an informal practice of leaving the male in a rural area and letting him walk home being adopted (wide discretion, no real justice)
Koch
* Does not give more favourable treatment to one sex, but produces different issues and harm for men and women
* Men are more directly impacted on the council estate, likely to be stopped, searched or arrested
* One man recalls taking a young man to a police station before the end of their shift, before declaring no charge so it is easy for them to go home (4 mile walk for him)
* Impact on women is more indirect, e.g. police speak to other social institutions leading women to lose job for actions of their partner, or not warning women when a dangerous ex-partner is released from prison
Santos
* Talks about womens police stations in Sao Paulo, the first of which being set up in 1985
* Response to critique that policemen did not take complaints of violence against women seriously and were sexist
* 2003, 339 exist across Brazil and 8 other countries in Latin America, as well as beyond (e.g. India, Pakistan)
* Helped contribute to construction of gendered citizenship, recognising the social difference and inequalities between women and men
