Police Professionalisation : Some Cultural, Structural and Pedagogic Issues

1. Police Professionalisation: Some Cultural, Structural and Pedagogic Issues Dr Katja Hallenberg, Canterbury Christ Church University Dr Tom Cockcroft, Leeds Beckett University

2. Contents • Background • Foreground: ‘What’s so new about the New World Order?’ • Structural Challenges • Cultural Challenges • Pedagogic Challenges • Conclusion: key issues “to speak about the process of professionalization requires one to define the direction of the process” (Freidson, 1983: 21)

3. Background Sociology of professions (from Durkheim to Johnson) (Re-)Professionalising the Police • Structural functional approach • Socio-economic approach • Traits approach • Expert services: market monopoly and service orientation • Legitimation and regulation of power: accountability, responsibility and ethics • Professional-client relationship: structured situations, entrenched positions of power and dependence, maintenance of social order • Governance and socio-cultural authority • Other qualities: competence, interprofessional relationships, specialisation, life-long career • Reducing ‘unprofessional’ behaviour (Punch, 2003) • Increasing quality of service (Savage, 2007) • Laying claim to professional characteristics (Neyroud, 2011) • Achieving alternative institutional regulation (Fleming & Lafferty, 2000) + • The symbolic benefits of redefinition, relegitimisation and the ability to shape discourse (Abbott, 1988; Bourdieu, 1987; Hallenberg, 2012; Hallenberg Cockcroft, 2017)

4. Foreground: ‘What’s so new about the New World Order?’ • Why? • The police need to develop to remain effective in a changing world (Flanagan 2008; Neyroud, 2011) • Keeping up with the Kardashians other professions (Fortenson, 2015) • What? • College of Policing • PEQF and new entry routes • Policing Vision 2025 • ‘The New Professions’ & Professionalisation as disciplinary mechanism (Fournier, 1999), ‘professionalism from above’ top down bureaucracy (Evetts, 2011), • Neoliberalism, Post NPM Managerialism and ‘Hybrid’ organisations (Noordegraaf, 2006, 2011, 2015) • Organisational ‘Isomorphism’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997) • From professionalisation to McDonaldisation(Heslop, 2011, Goode & Lumsden, 2018)

5. Structural Challenges • A modernist institution in a post-modern world • “Ongoing police reforms are invariably mooted in a modernist light, with a firm belief that changes to procedures will yield improvement in services and efficiency. Discourse is overwhelmingly modernist…” (Waters, 2007: 263) • The structure of policing remains largely unchanged. Rank hierarchy and privilege of quantity of experience (service years) over quality (role specific experience and evidential knowledge) is not flexible or responsive enough for the new environment, or for the professionals working in it. • Lack of organizational infrastructure to meet CoP vision, limiting application of taught (as opposed to experientially gained) knowledge (Norman and Williams, 2017, Fleming and Wingrove, 2017)

6. Cultural Challenges • The theoretical context (from Bourdieu to Schein) • College of Policing as a socio-cultural authority (e.g Leadership Review, 2015), control of professionalisation, monopoly of knowledgebase • From 'resistance’ to 'risk aversion' to 'isomorphism’? • Charman (2017) ‘#newbreed’ officers – focus on ‘safeguarding’, ‘communication’ and the welfare role. • A shrinking of the ‘cultural repertoires’ (Hendriks & van Hulst, 2016: 173)? • Hybrid culture for hybrid organisation? • HE engagement shifts from cultural defiance, to one of ‘disciplinary mechanism’ (Fournier, 1999: 281)?

7. Pedagogic Challenges • What ‘kind’ of professional knowledge is needed for professional policing? • Evidential or Experiential (Williams and Cockcroft, 2018; Hough & Stanko, 2019)? • Stratified nature of police education: producers, wholesalers and retailers (Manning, 2010) • Implementation: not enough time to plan and reflect on the profound transformation to learning approaches needed from both the police and HEI, risking outcome where theory and practice remain too unconnected (Hough & Stanko, 2019) • Prescriptive curriculum resulting in very narrow view on what counts as knowledge and learning (Goode & Lumsden, 2018; Brown et al, 2018; Fleming & Rhodes, 2018) • For Rogers (1973: 382), the greatest and inevitable result of setting up professional standards and competencies was to “freeze the profession in a past image”

8. Conclusions: Key issues • Structure of the police not fit for purpose of solving (not just managing) current challenges... But neither is CJS, or public sector, or nation state • Culture of the police shaped by broad neoliberal context and public sector isomorphism and the lived reality of officers. Tension between outdated negative view of lower rank culture and #newbreed. • Pedagogy: Uncritical HE compliance risks unauthentic and restricted practice that serves the rhetoric of professionalisation (disciplinary mechanism of accreditation) but not the needs of individuals (as professionals or their clients)  need for radical pedagogies

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