Me, actually, mainly, you know, I think I'm going to reduce my position as chair briefly to introduce what he's going to say.
And actually, I don't need to do too much because a lot of things I might talk about in the next 5 minutes have already been covered,
which is the role and the increasingly guiding role of the quest for impact in academic research,
arguably, particularly in criminology and arguably particularly in policing studies.
And that's there in a nice area of research and we've been bandying this word around quite a lot.
Impacts, Chris mentioned it, Rachel mentioned it.
What does it mean for those of you unfamiliar with this, this research council terminology?
Well, here's an excerpt from the SC Economic and Social Science Research Council website.
What is impacts? Research Impacts embraces all the diverse ways that research related skills benefit individuals, organisations and nations.
So it's quite large despite big concepts.
And you can see they mentioned economic performance, they mentioned increasing the effectiveness of public services in policy.
They talk about enhancing quality of life, health and creative impact and they talk about impact being demonstrable.
So what you have to do when you have a research grant from the SC and from other funding bodies as well,
at the end of that grant you have to demonstrate to them in some way, in theory that your research has had an impact and they can't just say that.
So you have to give them evidence, evidence of Rachel's work. Such a huge amount of impact because it's actually changed policy in government.
That's what they mean when they talk about impacts. So enough not enough to say lots of people have downloaded my journal article.
You have to say this happened. This changed. I think that is that. Fair enough.
Karen, does that sound about right? Something about that. Yeah. And this, I think, as I say, has been taken to heart, I think,
by many people working on police and policing in particular, actually in other areas of criminology as well.
And you have to now design your research proposals with impacts,
as I've just described it in mind and specifically in the proposal in lots of different ways, actually.
And there have been some very clear benefits from this process, don't get me wrong,
is going to and identify some of the problems behind this, the increasing dominance of this kind of agenda within criminology.
But there have been clearly been benefits. So I think one benefit has been a greater emphasis on reliability and validity of research designs.
If you're going to want if you want your research to have an impact on you and policymakers or practitioners or whoever it is to pick up on it,
you have to make sure it's right. And I think you have to make more of an effort than you did in the past to make sure you're getting it right.
So make sure the claims you are making were in some sense valid.
I think there's been more engagement between academics and police organisations.
Chris's already talked a lot about that and the press that point out for one useful outcome
of that actually has been a declining propensity to see the police just as the enemy,
which many criminologists in the past were prone to do.
It's a bit more complicated than that, and of course, this is another way of accessing research funding.
So one of the reasons why we're interested in this, because it's just another way of getting money.
And again, Chris, it talks about the study and I always like to have a quote from Marx, if I can.
And this is the whole point. Right. The first is that in terms of the world, the point is to change.
If we think we're doing research, we want to change the world with this research, with this research in some sense.
And this kind of agenda has focussed people's minds more clearly on that.
But as I say, there are problems and again, Chris has already mentioned some of these much more eloquently than I could actually.
I think there's a risk of narrowing the field, narrowing the field in terms of the objects of the study and the motivations for that study.
I think there's a specific and particular danger within policing studies of parochialism, which comes out in many ways in policy,
it comes out tends to come in dominance of Anglo-American research and Anglo-American ways of
thinking parochialism in terms of focusing on the organisation itself in organisational practice,
rather than the context within which that organisation sits and functions.
There's an increasing emphasis on particular forms of methodology which can serve to exclude other
methodologies and here would be the dreaded randomised controlled trial would be one way to assign that.
And arguably I think this is inspired, this is well, I'll hand over to him.
There's a significant risk of too close the link between the academy and its objects of study.
And we start and there's an increasing recursively increasingly increasing risk that
we increasingly address someone else's research questions rather than our own.
And that was me abusing my role as chair. So now I'm going to hand over Swain for the rest of the talk.
One of the lessons I've just learned about this new world is never come after a film.
I also feel somewhat cautious and embarrassed about giving a talk whose title is doing research about
impact when writers just demonstrated just how creatively it's possible to do research with impact.
But as Ben alluded to, we don't think this essay is the main reason for giving this title The Talk.
This title was to advertise a book.
So I mainly want to talk about is the book that Ben and myself and Jonny Steinberg and an anthropologist called Beach,
our guy in Toronto is currently editing, but also to kind of set that book in some context and to say a little bit about what motivated us in my case,
to do something I never usually do, which is edit handbooks. So and Ben alluded to some of that motivation,
and it was a motivation generated by the fact that for all there have been many benefits from the ways, especially in the UK context.
The academics and police institutions have become much closer, have collaborated much more closely,
increasingly share a language and don't speak past each other, of which Ben is alluded to that that has come with certain kinds of costs.
And we I think we both say this has people in various ways engaged ourselves very closely in that kind of exercise of collaboration,
while also wanting to kind of just kind of think a bit more both about what it means to do that.
And I suppose importantly and as what happens to a field of inquiry collectively,
the more the centre of gravity shifts down that road so that we see the kind of what is to become clear be the
handbook of global policing as part of an attempt not to say to people that we shouldn't do research about impact,
but just to kind of realise that there are other kinds of questions that we want to keep him play that it's
possible to lose sight of when one focuses as we increasingly courage to do with doing research with impact.
Having said that, it should be said that we are not the only people to ever have thought of this question.
The impact agenda is not, though it is become much more dominant in policing studies in a very particular form in this country.
In other kind of forms, especially in the US,
say that that kind of proximity between the police institutions and those who study them have not exhausted
the kinds of questions that we might want to think about when one thinks about this idea of global policing.
So for all that been said, that the sociology of policing is a is an area of study dominated by Anglo-American
scholarship and a focus on English and American police institutions.
There is an increasing range of knowledge about police practices in institutions in other places and
the comparative literature about the differences between those places on various kinds of criteria.
We now live in a world in which one of the features of of policing policy and practice is this kind of circulation of policy of of rhetorics,
of motifs across jurisdictions, which is both involved certain police academics in the business of being entrepreneurs and exporters
of some of those ideas around community policing or problem orientated policing or zero tolerance,
but also some to engage in the kind of in the kind of critical analysis, both sociologically,
of what happens when those kind of ideas circulated and imported and exported or more critically,
to ask serious questions about the, as it were, the attempts to impose certain kinds of Western models of doing policing on the Global South.
It's important to say, thirdly, that the idea of global policing has come to mean the thing that you most commonly associated with,
meaning implicit in police scholarship, which is both the the emergence of increasingly thicker forms of international police cooperation,
the development of transnational police institutions,
in other words,
the way in which policing is kind of escaping its it's kind of modern happening within the boundaries of the nation state and the whole literature,
some of which is, is very policy oriented and close to subjects to be studied,
some of which is more critical on those processes of internationalisation.
And of course, there is a kind of final version of that kind of intimation of globalisation,
which is what we rather crudely and provocatively called here. Impact goes global,
by which we mean a kind of those coalitions of kind of police scholars and police police officers who are
engaged in trying to to to articulate and disseminate and spread some notion of evidence based policing,
which, in other words,
some some version of the relationship between or some version of policing, which has a particular conception of what good policing is,
or embedded in the knowledge of what works and choice to articulate in a particular
kind of way what the relationship between police institutions and police research is.
And if one of the worries about the impact agenda is it makes everyone very local in their orientations.
I think the evidence based policing movement is actually evidence that you
can think about these things and actually be very global in your aspirations.
Which brings us to this book, and what we've been trying to do is actually think about the different kinds of ways of all the
different kind of signals or references that this idea of global policing can bring into view.
And to think about this is the kind of this is the kind of slightly kind of pompous
and ambitious version of the book to not just kind of map a field of study,
which we in some sense think already exists, which is, of course, the thing that handbooks classically do,
but actually to try and to pick up signs of a different kind of way of thinking
about global policing and to and to bring it and to better bring it into view,
to give it some kind of orientations and shape with a view to trying to create a kind of enterprise around the sociology of the study of policing,
which is intellectually curious, methodologically pluralist, theoretically situated and civically engaged.
And I'll come back to that point in the end,
because part of the point might be that though there can be an overlap between civic engagement as researchers
and the thing we call impact that that they might not necessarily mean or entail the same kinds of things.
So how many how much when we how we got from this point.
Okay. So the notion of global policing for us in this text is kind of meant to signal the following lines of questioning.
First, an attempt to very consciously make the study of policing more intellectually global,
by which we mean to kind of to to to spread it beyond the fields of inquiry in which it has come to be located.
And now, of course, there is a there is a. To plural history to this.
The study of policing in the Western world, as it were, started in sociology.
It's been informed in all kinds of ways by law, by psychology, by history.
It's increasingly, however, in recent years itself, almost morphed in various places into a subdiscipline of its own.
The danger of that being that it then starts to erect barriers between the wider forms of disciplinary inquiry that generated it in the first place.
So part of what we've been trying to do in relation to first those questions is to try and get people from a wider range of fields philosophy,
political theory, geography, English, literature.
I've got a rest. I'm on my list.
There's a longer list which I've now forgotten, who might not necessarily have thought very much about policing before,
or thought about it only tangentially to think about the question about why policing
matters from someone who thinks about this question as a philosopher or as a geographer,
and to think about what kinds of questions of the policing institutions and practices you might ask.
If you analyse it from that perspective.
Now, that, of course carries all kinds of risks that we're constructing disciplines as fixed categories in themselves.
We think there is a risk worth taking. And secondly,
we've we've tried to mobilise a range of authors to think about the relationship between police institutions and
practices and a series of concepts that have to do with the organisation of social relations and political life.
Now as well the standard and reduced way in which that connection is now made.
Well, it principally takes the form of a kind of talk,
a kind of endless and recurring debate about whether the police are primarily interested in crime and it's control narrowly
conceived or about whether they're concerned with the maintenance and reproduction of order rather than more broadly conceived.
And Ben and I have done our best in this book to keep that tradition alive. But then our attempt has been strong,
widen the lens in terms of the kinds of concepts in social and political theory with which through which you might think about policing.
Now, there's been some of that in recent years inside police studies,
most obviously in relation to legitimacy to some extent in relation to democracy.
We've tried to extend that both by encouraging people to return to a kind of
classic question to do with the relationship between policing and the state,
but also to think about a wider range of police concepts dignity, difference, inequality, rights, war, and so on.
Thirdly. I think there's a common way in which the notion of globalisation mainly signals and mainly signals,
an emphasis on questions of space rather than time.
And the way there's a way in which the even in the context of thinking globally about policing,
the bulk of attention is still focussed on Anglo-American scholarship or increasingly the EU.
Because when people think about globalisation of policing in the standard sense, the EU is a place to which you turn.
By contrast, we've tried to introduce this notion of transitions and legacies as a way, firstly,
of trying to to lift policing scholarship out of the kind of frame of mature liberal democracies,
and also to think about the consequences for policing institutions of various kinds of ruptures in social relations.
And this is both centres to back or encourage people to go back and think about a series
of of no unstudied things to do with the consequences for policing of of colonialism,
of post authoritarianism, of escaping from conflict,
of the consequences of revolution, but also polity to bear and to avoid the risk that this becomes the place where we talk about other places,
to think about certain kinds of transitions that can happen inside standard democracies.
So we have a chapter on policing after universal suffrage, for instance, a chapter on policing after civil rights.
And then finally, we wanted to encourage and reflection on both on what happens to a series of of a rather standard
series of problems or themes in relation to policing under conditions of globalisation.
We are not just focusing on how this is articulated in an Anglo-American context.
So for example, in relation to technology or protest policing or gender or terrorism,
but also to think about the new kinds of problematics and themes that emerge under those conditions of globalisation in relation to things like,
for example, environmental harm and mobility.
So it is very briefly, this is ended up looking a bit like this.
Firstly, this is a handbook of policing in which criminology is represented only very tangentially
and gets and gets accompanied by authors from a whole series of other disciplines,
including, I'm ashamed to say, a whole bunch of people I didn't even know existed six months ago and an attempt.
But there's still a fairly good representation of people from the US and American Canada attempt
to actually mobilise both established and younger scholars from different parts of the world.
So we can actually make real this in a sense, in terms of the book itself, this idea of global policing, this book is currently in process.
We have most of the chapters in which no one's missing in action.
All that kind of stand to things about is in books, are in process, but so far what have we learned?
Firstly,
I think the thing I think we've discovered partly is that the study of and this this is what kind of worth thinking about in relation to some of the
dangers of Christmas is looking to that if you if you think more globally in
terms of discipline and in terms of jurisdiction about the study of policing,
the picture becomes a much more optimistic one because in all kinds of ways, it seems that the study of policing is alive and well,
both in different parts of the globe and in different disciplines, but unevenly.
So. So one of the things that we've discovered in the context of writing this book,
for example, is a kind of a kind of an offshoot, a dramatic word like explosion.
I can't think of a better one, a kind of explosion of interest in police and police practices in anthropology.
So there's now a thriving subfield of the anthropology of policing,
which gets fairly well represented in this book, which I'll come back to in a minute.
But there have been other areas of the kind of social sciences where we've struggled.
So, for example, we have we spent many a long our trying to find an economist to write about policing.
We eventually tracked down one economist who in the end was unable to deliver from the book.
No, no, not have a chapter on economics. And that's that's I don't say that for as a kind of individual thing.
I say that as a kind of reflection on as a way of reflecting on where in the social sciences the study of policing is currently taking place and.
The second thing to say,
it's partly about method and I slightly worry we've kind of inadvertently reproduced an unfortunate methodological division because Chris
was saying in his talk that there's a kind of there isn't much space for ethnography in the world of a police academic collaboration.
And in fact, conversely, we've discovered and this is partly a consequence of the renaissance of policing in anthropology,
a kind of renaissance of ethnography in the way in which policing is studied, which is reflected in the book.
And conversely, there's not many chapters of the all in the book which are quantitative.
Rather surprisingly, I find myself to be the co-author of one of them, in fact, the only one.
So we've we've inadvertently, I think,
generated a kind of the methodological flipside of what one tends to find in studies of the police that are much more action research based,
which I think is just as entirely inadvertent to be avoided,
because it seems to me the kind of project that we're engaged in would be enriched by more quantitative work simply
as the kind of action research policing in all kinds of ways can be enriched by all kinds of qualitative work.
Final point. And again, this has been a this has been a kind of accident.
But one of the things we've observed reading the drafts of the paper is that when you give people a kind of wider brief to think about policing,
that what's coming through is not a focus on the police,
understood as a narrow agency of crime control, law order, maintenance,
but a kind of recovery of an older conception of policing, which has to do with governance much more broadly understood.
In other words, policing as as as an institution that is concerned with the administration of people
in things or with the the welfare and regulation of populations and communities.
And I, I think all of us as editors think that is a kind of welcome thing, one,
because it is a reminder of why policing matters and what's at stake when you study it.
And it's also a reminder about there are all sorts of good reasons why you want to make the study
of police somewhere close to the centre of multidisciplinary social science in the 21st century.
And at that point. And I think that's.
They weren't to take it lying down. Well, I mean, I guess this just I'm just,
I guess interested in the development of the project in terms of how you approach people from other disciplines.
What kind of brief do you give to someone who doesn't study police and doesn't, you know,
hasn't read Manning and Reiner and all that and say, we're doing a book on policing and we'd like you to talk about it.
I mean, what's the kind of the common thread that they're all working from here? Is there one else that.