Recovering Police Legitimacy

Book excerpt: Transatlantic policing is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy, epitomised by public responses to the murders of George Floyd and Sarah Everard during the COVID-19 pandemic. Legitimacy is lost when the police either fail to protect the public or rely on coercion rather than consent to achieve that protection. Recovering Police Legitimacy challenges conventional criminological, political, and public solutions to the problem by approaching it from the bottom up, beginning with policing as a practice constituted by a unique set of excellences, skills, and characteristics. The author draws on his experience as a police officer and on the serial fictions of James Ellroy, David Peace, and Nic Pizzolatto to characterise the practice in terms of heroic struggle, edgework, absolute sacrifice, and worldmaking. These characteristics provide an analytic tool for revolutionising our understanding of the relations among policing as a situated practice, public protection, and police legitimacy and for identifying the different levels at which legitimacy is undermined. His conclusion is that recovery is possible but will be slow in pace and incomplete in scope. Written accessibly for students, police officers, policymakers, scholars, and anyone with an interest in police legitimacy, this is a groundbreaking study of a pressing social problem.