Police-community consultative committees: a response to paramilitary policing?

Abstract

Several writers have argued that police forces in places like Australia and the United Kingdom progressively adopted more militaristic styles of policing during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This paramilitary style of policing reduced the legitimacy of police forces and initially led to even more militaristic styles of policing. By the middle 1980s police forces in Australia and the United Kingdom had initiated policies of community policing in an attempt to increase their legitimacy by increasing their contacts with the community. Many of these policies claimed that such community contact would increase com munity input into policing decisions and priorities. This paper considers these issues and examines one form of community policing: police-community consultative committees. The stated purpose of these committees is to involve community members in the setting of priorities for their local police division or patrol. Observation of consultative committees in England and New South Wales indicates that the committees tend to focus on police priorities and objectives, to involve only respectable members of the community, and to co- opt them to the police point of view rather than acting as a conduit for community input.