Police Leadership
| Author | Peter Villiers |
| Pages | 58-63 |
Page 58
Policing may be carried out for and on behalf of the state, in order to protect its identity and stability; or by the community, in order to serve its own local interests; or by any variation between those two extremes. It is therefore possible to contrast two very different types of police organization, embodying two very different forms of leadership. The first type of organization is the police force: A police force is an organization whose primary function is to serve the state. It may be a gendarmerie. It is likely to have some form of military leadership, perhaps of regular army officers on secondment. The second type of police organization is the police service: A police service sets out to serve the local community, often in partnership with other organizations, and its leadership is more likely to be a matter of negotiation and compromise than the supposed autocracy of military leadership.
The two types of police organization do not exist in pure form. All police forces provide a service and all police services use force. However, police organizations in general have tended toward an autocratic style of leadership that has hampered their ability to adapt to changing circumstances and is at variance with their espoused aims.
Policing itself is an activity as old as social life. All groups have some form of social control. How policing is organized has changed over time. The British statesman Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) created London's Metropolitan Police in 1829 as a quasi-military organization. He gave it uniforms, ranks, and the requirement to obey the lawful commands of senior officers—although its workforce was not placed under military discipline. At the same time, he was determined to ensure that the new police would be both acceptable to the public and distinguishable from soldiery acting to restore order by force. Peel saw the attainment of public acceptance as a challenge to character as much as organization, and laid down standards of behavior for his new "peelers" which are still applicable today.
Peel was determined that the new organization should develop its own form of leadership—except at the very top, where he appointed gentlemen as joint commissioners. However, Peel was emphatic that his new organization should not be generally officered by gentlemen and should have no officer or commissioned class. The ranks for the new organization were created as superintendent, inspector, sergeant, and constable, and only the word sergeant had a military connotation. Promotion was to be in force. Initial selections were of such people as former noncommissioned officers in the army: They were men with experience of authority, who knew their place in society and could be expected to not challenge prevailing mores.
The new police were intended to prevent or deter crime rather than investigate it once it had occurred, and they patrolled a fixed beat system under strict supervision. They had little legal knowledge, and there was no intention to create a police profession. The new police were expected to develop a working relationship with the public and not to act as bullies, cultivators of informants, or spies. To that end, they wore a conspicuous but not military uniform, and were famously, in truth as in legend, armed only with a truncheon—to be supplemented by firearms or cutlasses only when necessary. Supervision was strict and discipline harsh, mediated only by the inescapable fact that much police work must be carried out alone.
Page 59
The model of the new police service as an entirely male, almost entirely working-class organization with a single point of entry and no officer class was to last for a very long time. Indeed, in many aspects it is still the prevailing model today. Although the police service now includes women as well as men, it is no longer entirely working class, and includes a large percentage of university graduates in its ranks—as well as some very highly educated senior officers. However, entry is still only at the rank of constable, and there is no officer class or police equivalent of the army's general staff.
The British Home Office, the department of the British government that is responsible for domestic security, acting in a pragmatic way to improve the quality of police leadership, made three changes to Peel's model that are of significance in the continuing evolution of police leadership.
The national police college for England and Wales was set up in 1948 with the intention of developing the present and future leadership of the police service. Despite its extremely cautious beginnings, the creation of the Police Staff College (the name was changed in 1979) was an immensely significant event for the British police service and its leadership. For the first time, the senior officers of some 150 separate and entirely independent forces were to meet together in one place, exchange experiences and ideas, and begin to develop a common ethos. What the Police Staff College taught, for example by way of leadership theory, was not of the first importance. What was important was that it existed.
As the college developed, so did its senior command course: a lengthy, residential, and assessed course in which senior officers gathered to explore all aspects of policing. It has been a Home Office requirement since 1993 that all members of ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland) must have attended this course. The current generation of senior police officers in the United Kingdom are the product of the Police Staff College and its various programs.
Home Office regulations further stipulate that no police officer may rise in service from constable to chief constable in one...
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