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Abstract

The legitimacy of policing across Britain is under attack. Like governmentality, British policing as ‘the art of managing life and the well-being of populations’ is being questioned from every quarter. The media has drawn attention to catastrophic deviations from this bio-political norm, in the literal sense of catastrophe as one system invading another. Civil society’s response to Sarah Everard’s murder and the findings of the Casey Review (2023) ‘into the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police Service’ has added to the sense that MacPherson’s seventy recommendations to combat institutional racism in the police in the wake of Stephen Lawrence’s murder are also a dead letter. The identification of misogyny, racism and homophobia in police practice appears as a problem of the uncertain, the aleatory facing the apparatuses (dispositifs) of security. Using evidence from applicants and new recruits to the service, this qualitative study shows how the maximal art of governing conflicts with the public rationale for policing with consent, where the managing of populations is supposed to be a pastoral vocation.

Course: Sociology and Criminology - BSc (Hons) - C0979

Date Deposited: 2024-11-07

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14488.html