All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
|
|
Constables for hire: the long and significant history of private 'public' policing in the UK
| Current theoretical discussion of policing in the UK tends to define one of its important characteristics as 'rebirth of private policing' (Johnston, 1992). It also assumes the fragmentation of public police forces, as they re-position themselves to cope with a 'post-Keynsian' mode of operation in a post-industrial society. These developments are seen as eroding the hitherto dominant model of a unitary public force responsible for order and law enforcement and insulated from the demands of the market.
But in England and Wales, the practice of private individuals or corporations employing and paying for the services of sworn constables dates from before the start of the 'new police' as a recognisable entity. It continued within most police forces throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and appears to have involved a significant number of policemen. Usually, it involved performing guard duty at a certain point, but in some cases complete in-house police stations, staffed by police officers, were funded by external bodies such as ICI and the British Airports Authority. The issue of police forces demanding payment to police certain large public events (such as football matches) has reached the public awareness, but the longevity, ubiquity, and theoretical significance of this practice has yet to be fully appreciated, let alone systematically explored or modelled.
Drawing on a wide variety of sources (largely secondary, but including the HMIC reports, and the archive of the Association of Chief Police Officers) covering the period between 1780 and 1990, this paper will attempt a preliminary definition of the scope of this 'additional constable' system, looking at the points where it was most visible, giving examples of the way that it has been used, and pointing out the implications of this knowledge for our understanding of policing today.
|
|
|
