scholarly journals Police Amalgamation and Reform in Scotland: The Long Twentieth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Davidson ◽  
Louise A. Jackson ◽  
David M. Smale

This article examines shifting debates about police amalgamation and governance reform in Scotland since the mid-nineteenth century in the light of the creation of a single police service (Police Scotland) in 2013. From a proliferation of 89 separate police forces in 1859, the number had been reduced to 48 by 1949 and eight in 1975. Yet the move towards a single police service was far from inevitable, as comparison with England and Wales demonstrates. The idea of a ‘single’ or national force was mooted from the 1850s onwards in moments of unrest, disorder and emergency, but for most of the twentieth century it remained anathema. For the Scottish Office and Home Office as well as for many police officers, the move towards larger policing units was seen as desirable on the grounds of economy, efficiency, and professionalisation. Yet the assumption that ‘local’ control of police forces through municipal and county councils best enabled accountability and hence legitimacy remained intact until the 1960s, whilst the regional model set up in 1975 persisted for forty years. The article explores the reasons for this, focusing on the changing dynamics of the relationship between central and local government across the last 150 years.

Urban Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou

Takis Zenetos was enthusiastic about the idea of working from home, and believed that both architecture and urban planning should be reshaped in order to respond to this. He supported the design of special public spaces in residential units, aiming to accommodate the inhabitants during working hours. This article argues that Zenetos’s design for “Electronic Urbanism” was more prophetic, and more pragmatic, than his peers such as Archigram and Constant Nieuwenhuys. Despite the fact that they shared an optimism towards technological developments and megastructure, a main difference between Zenetos’s view and the perspectives of his peers is his rejection of a generalised enthusiasm concerning increasing mobility of people. In opposition with Archigram, Zenetos insisted in minimizing citizens’ mobility and supported the replacement of daily transport with the use advanced information technologies, using terms such as “tele-activity”. Zenetos was convinced that “Electronic Urbanism” would help citizens save the time that they normally used to commute to work, and would allow them to spend this time on more creative activities, at or near their homes. The main interest of “Electronic Urbanism” lies in the fact that it not only constitutes an artistic contribution to experimental architecture, but is also characterized by a new social vision, promising to resynchronize practices of daily life. An aspect that is also examined is the relationship of Zenetos’s ideas and those of the so-called Metabolists in the 1960s in Japan, including Kenzo Tange’s conception of megastructures. Zenetos’s thought is very topical considering the ongoing debates about the advanced information society, especially regarding the social concerns of surveillance, governance, and sovereignty within the context of Big Data. His conception of “tele-activities” provides a fertile terrain for reflecting on potential implications and insights concerning home-office conditions not only within the context of the current pandemic situation but beyond it as well.


Author(s):  
Greg Thomas

This book presents the first in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s-70s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early-twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 social reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media, and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland also suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between those two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s-70s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard, and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research. It fills a gap in contemporary understandings of a significant literary and artistic genre which has been largely overlooked by literary critics. It also sheds new light on the development of British and Scottish literature during the late twentieth century, on the emergence of intermedia art, and on the development of modernism beyond its early-twentieth-century, urban Western networks.


Author(s):  
Louise A. Jackson ◽  
Neil Davidson ◽  
Linda Fleming ◽  
David M. Smale ◽  
Richard Sparks

This chapter analyses the formal rhetoric, mechanisms and structures of governance through which policing was organised in Scotland. It examines shifts in the tripartite relationship between the UK Home Office, the Scottish Office and local police authorities, highlighting the tensions between centrism and localism across the twentieth century, as well as the intersecting identities associated with British, Scottish and burgh/county policing. It also outlines modes of discipline through which police officers were themselves regulated: from training manuals and physical drill (which aimed to mould an idealised model of masculinity) through to the internal handling of complaints about officers’ conduct. Examining a small number of flashpoints relating to the official scrutiny of Scottish policing, the authors suggest that the narrative of more ‘benign’ relationship between police and community in Scotland conceals a more complex and chequered picture.


Author(s):  
Megan O'Neill

Chapter 5 describes and analyses the day-to-day encounters between Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) and police officer colleagues. These encounters are important to consider in order to understand fully PCSOs’ occupational experiences. The pluralized public police in England and Wales are often described as a police ‘family’. However, just how functional and harmonious a family this is is shown to be variable between and within police forces. The chapter considers the reasons for this from within a dramaturgical framework, to appreciate fully the nature and organization of these face-to-face interactions. In particular, Goffman’s concepts of performances, teamwork, and regions will be used. The chapter argues that police officers and PCSOs operate as separate performance teams, rather than as one unified one, and that the relationships between these teams varies. In some areas, the teams worked in a complementary way, whereas in others, the relationship was competitive.


Author(s):  
Mike McConville ◽  
Luke Marsh

The point at which the liberty of the subject can be subject to interference by force of the law is a critical issue and one reliant on the integrity of judicial oversight. Focusing on the start of the twentieth century, this chapter addresses the discontinuities in the then existing rules relating to the interrogation of suspected persons (embodied by the Judges’ Rules of 1912, whose obscure origins are discussed) and the divergent responses of different police forces to the cautioning and questioning process. From this it explores how the need for closer formal regulation arose and the role of Home Office officials (the very same as those involved in the Adolph Beck case) in drafting the first revision of the Judges’ Rules in 1918 which were to remain in force for almost fifty years. These inapt and inexpertly drafted Rules thereafter laid the foundations for policing regulation in jurisdictions around the world.


2005 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Loveday

This article considers the current decision of the Home Secretary to scrap the 43 police forces and replace them with 12–15 regional strategic police forces. This follows on from the recent report of HMIC, entitled Closing the Gap, published in September 2005, which was to conclude that as currently constituted the police structure for England and Wales was no longer ‘fit for purpose’. Using the ability of police services to provide an effective response to NIM Level 2 crime as a yardstick, HMIC was to find that any force with fewer than 4,000 police officers would be unlikely to be able to provide an adequate response. One consequence of the report and the Home Secretary's response to it has been the request made to all police authorities and forces to present a business case to the Home Office by the end of 2005 identifying the future structure of policing in the region and the pattern of amalgamation they might favour. In the course of this exercise it was to be found that alternatives to amalgamation, collaboration and federation, had both been closed down by the Home Secretary, who has concluded that only the option of amalgamation was now acceptable to his department. Subsequently it was to be learned that a number of factors influencing HMIC's 2005 report obtained that had not been taken into account. These included the decision on the part of HMIC specifically not to include the written section on force collaboration within the final report. Nor, it was also to be discovered, had recognition been given within the report to the expectation that implementation was to be carried out in conjunction with comprehensive Workforce Modernisation. A leaked memorandum from ODPM in late 2005 that local government reform was now under active consideration was also to undermine the earlier assumption on the part of HMIC that no plans for local government reform were currently planned and that unilateral police reorganisation was therefore appropriate.


Author(s):  
Edward Venn

Cornelius Cardew was a leading figure in British experimental music in the 1960s and a committed political activist in the 1970s. His earlier music, particularly that inspired by Cage, demonstrates on going concerns with the relationship between composer and performer, not least in the emphasis placed on improvisation. His later politically motivated music abandoned avant-garde and experimental principles in favor of a direct, tonal idiom. He died after a hit-and-run incident in East London. Cardew’s musical education was conventional; first as a boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral (1943–50) and then at the Royal Academy of Music (1953–57). He had a philosophical nature too, apparent in his enduring fascination with Wittgenstein’s Tractutus. Cardew familiarized himself early on with early-twentieth-century serialism and increasingly with the continental avant-garde: at nineteen, he gave (together with fellow student Richard Rodney Bennet) the London premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Structures I and taught himself guitar in order to participate in the 1957 London premiere of LeMarteau Sans Maître. Many of Cardew’s compositions of this era reflected such interests, as in his Piano Sonata No. 2 (1956).


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 366-377
Author(s):  
Richard Hester ◽  
Nick Pamment

Senior officers responsible for policing football highlight a concerning increase in football hooliganism involving young people in England and Wales. This study is specifically concerned with people under 18 years old that are engaged with hooliganism in connection with football matches, which is an under-researched problem despite recent high-profile incidents. Surveys and interviews with football club safety officers, and police officers involved in football policing were conducted to gain a first-hand insight into this issue. Freedom of Information requests were sent to the Home Office, to establish data trends in youth arrests, banning orders and disorder at football. Despite the concerns of senior police officers, it was found that there is no readily available Home Office data on football hooliganism involving young people. The study highlights that this issue is perceived to be increasing, with children as young as 10 being involved. Whilst there is some indication that football banning orders are being used on under-18s, this is currently seen as a last resort for police forces with a range of interventions being used to divert young people away from football hooliganism. However, there is no nationally adopted approach to managing this issue. Youth projects have had successful results in preventing under-18s from going on to reoffend in a football context. Best practice interventions are recommended, which if adopted by football clubs and police forces may help to minimise the impact of football violence involving young people.


2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (04) ◽  
pp. 1669-1685
Author(s):  
Laura Weinrib

This essay reflects on the relationship between the diffuse legal struggle to dismantle vagrancy laws during the 1960s and the larger history of twentieth-century social movement advocacy. In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff persuasively links the demise of vagrancy laws to the cultural and constitutional turmoil of the 1960s. It is possible, however, to interpret that decade's upheaval, which rendered explicit social stratification increasingly vulnerable, as an impediment to a budding anti-vagrancy law consensus instead of a prerequisite for legal change. On this alternative reading, the uncoordinated legal efforts to overturn vagrancy laws in a decade dominated by more contentious litigation campaigns may have contributed to a tepid decision by the Supreme Court, which ultimately invalidated vagrancy laws on narrow legalistic grounds. Indeed, the relatively protracted dismantlement of the vagrancy law regime raises the question whether bottom-up constitutionalism lacks potency in the absence of an intermediary organization with a well-defined litigation strategy.


Urban History ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 384-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Hourihan

Over the past thirty years, one of the fastest growing fields of urban history has been the history of planning. In some respects, this is surprising, as urban planning had existed on an institutional basis only since the early twentieth century. In other ways, though, it was a very logical development. Planning reached its high point during the 1960s, and by the 1970s was being condemned in many quarters, being blamed, for example, for disasters like high-rise tower blocks and sacrificing old cities to crude commercial and transport developments. Historical research was necessary to understand how a movement which promised so much at the start of the century had degenerated so badly in sixty years. Criticism became so severe that, in the words of one historian, ‘many planners have certainly thought in more pessimistic moments . . . that the past may be the only thing they have to look forward to’. For whatever reason, the Planning History Group was set up in 1974 and a massive body of historical research on planning has been produced. This paper reviews four recent books on planning, two from North America and two European. They represent different aspects of planning and different time periods and will be treated in chronological order.


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