Introduction

British policing appears to be facing successive legitimacy crises. However, this experience is not confined to the UK. At least since the 1970s, police forces in the Global North seem to have undergone a relentless decline of legitimacy, expressed in a series of confrontations and convulsions. Indeed, the breakdown in the US of the relationship between police and the communities they serve has notoriously been such that some have called for the police to be defunded and replaced.

Some ascribe this loss of legitimacy to neoliberalism and patterns of globalisation, leading to the disincorporation of the working classes through high unemployment and social exclusion (Reiner, 2010). These are a result of economic changes far beyond the control of the police. The outcome has been a gradual disconnection of the police from communities they once served; as well as profound changes to those communities themselves, in a context of increasing democratisation and higher expectations of the police, particularly among marginalised groups.

Community policing has been one response to this rolling crisis. Intended as a way of reconnecting police with communities, it has developed in different shapes in different jurisdictions, and its definition is subsequently ambiguous. Neighbourhood policing is the UK version of community policing, originally rolled out in a three-year project from 2005 to 2008. Neighbourhood policing as a model has become institutionalised in British policing, though in recent years it has come under considerable pressure.

This book provides a critical analysis of neighbourhood policing: charting its peculiarly British roots; the mechanisms by which it was intended to support public confidence in policing; the evidence as to what activities work to do so; and the challenges, both to pursuing those activities and to confidence as a goal in itself. While community policing is a model that has been adopted in many different jurisdictions, this book is focused on the UK, to allow an in-depth understanding of a model that has been described as the ‘cornerstone’ of the unarmed model of British ‘policing by consent’ (HMIC, 2017).

This introductory chapter defines community policing and demonstrates how the UK model of neighbourhood policing is differentiated.