The Script in Action

This chapter examines how the public order script, explored in Chapter 6, was performed by commanders. It begins by exploring how commanders sought to sell the script to the parade and protest groups commanders sought to ‘win over’. If such groups could be won over with the PSNI’s pitch, the likelihood of disorder was greatly diminished, and commanders could better control the event. In some cases, however, the sales pitch proved unsuccessful; marchers and protestors proceeded with their own agendas. In such instances, commanders proved reluctant to intervene too forcefully, for reasons that will become clear. In two high-profile cases, the police approach to disorder has led to legal challenges, both of which reached the UK’s highest court. This introduces the second audience occasionally in receipt of the police script: the courts that must assess the internal self-application of human rights law by police. In their review of police decision-making in these cases, though, the senior judiciary have proven reluctant to interfere, showing deference to officers’ relative expertise, their access to intelligence and the exigencies of operational situations. The final section asks what role human rights law has come to play in managing the kinds of ‘trouble’ that Waddington (1994) identified over two decades ago as crucial to commanders’ decision-making.

Feeling the Pressure

Similar to the street-level bureaucrats in Lipsky’s classic study, the custody officers met in the course of fieldwork for this study were faced with a dilemma emergent from competing occupational demands and police functions. On the one hand, they were conscious of their statutory duties under PACE to act as guardians of suspects’ rights, and that the routine practices of their fellow officers could undermine the right to liberty. On the other, they were confronted with considerable organizational pressure to process arrests in custody and, in doing so, help their over-worked frontline colleagues who tirelessly bounced from one response call to another. This chapter aims to answer the question emerging from the last chapter: how did custody officers respond to the pressure they faced to authorize the detention of suspects, especially where the arrest seemed to be on dubious grounds? Did they succumb to workplace demands and authorize detention, or did they feel able to push back and challenge arresting officers and their supervisors? By the end of this chapter, the reader will come to understand how and, more importantly, why, the former attitude prevailed and what this tells us about custody officers as human rights practitioners.

The Policing Board

The Policing Board sits at the heart of the intersection between human rights law and politics. As a corporate body, the Policing Board has a statutory duty to monitor police compliance with the HRA. This chapter argues that regardless of the Policing Board’s statutory duty to monitor policing based on the standards of the HRA, for the political members on the Policing Board, human rights are a vessel harbouring deep sentiments and concerns at the heart of which are competing histories of the conflict, legacies of policing and understandings of Northern Ireland’s imperfect peace. These narratives swirl around, and at times directly contradict, the official police voice, further demonstrating the elasticity of human rights to stretch to fit the visions of different actors. The examination of alternative official narratives by political parties in Northern Ireland is developed across three sections, inspired by the dimensions of the ‘political life’ of human rights set out in Chapter 1. These three dimensions are: the role historical context plays in structuring the ambit and style of human rights contestation involving social actors; human rights as an articulation of a much wider array of interests, fears and aspirations that find expression through rights narratives; and how human rights can be used by groups to actively construct claims with the hope of achieving legal gains in specific fields

‘Arrest, Arrest, Arrest’

The focus of the empirical account of human rights in Part IV is on the suspect’s right to liberty in the context of police custody. In keeping with the style adopted in Part III, the discussion that follows seeks to closely analyse how particular aspects of police practices and decision-making interact with human rights law standards. The aim in this chapter is to explore how the three statutory safeguards established in PACE to protect the suspect’s right to liberty have fared in the face of organizational pressure to detect and ‘clear up’ crime. Using the three due process safeguards established in PACE to form a framework for this chapter’s analysis, the chapter explores how officers apply, dismiss, interpret and reconstruct each of these safeguards in their everyday work. Once again, the richness of this analysis, specifically its appreciation for how law and practice do (or do not) interact, is enhanced by paying close attention to the development of lines of authority in the case law that have, it is argued, watered down the legal standards officers must apply. This analysis of the case law is based on recent judgments from the High Court and Divisional Court of Northern Ireland, as well as from the Court of Appeal in England and Wales.

Towards a Sociological Approach to Human Rights Law

An overarching argument of the book, which connects its parts, is an epistemological one: to fully grasp the routine understandings, interpretations and practices that animate human rights law in policing, a sociological approach to law should be explored and experimented with. In sketching out what such an approach might look like, this chapter introduces the three conceptual foundations adopted and outlines the research methods deployed in the book. The first of these is how human rights law comes to be adopted and deployed as ‘vernacular’ beyond traditional legal forums and judicial audiences in order to both legitimate and challenge police power. The second is human rights law as a set of principles and standards that officers are socialized in, and engage in ‘sensemaking’ of, amidst their sub-cultures, everyday routines and organizational demands. The third is how human rights law comes to be ‘practiced’ by officers in specific roles in so far as they are professional actors required to bring a resolution to a specific factual issue through understanding, engaging with and applying human rights law principles and standards. Collectively, these features comprise the book’s sociological approach to human rights law.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to the book’s central endeavour: to make sense of, and critically examine, the social and cultural dynamics that animate human rights law in contemporary policing. The chapter introduces the reader to the general and specific context in which this project takes place. It begins by drawing attention to the emergence of human rights as a normative vision and regulatory basis for police reform across the world and considering the issues that arise from this phenomenon for scholars of human rights and criminal justice. The chapter proceeds to describe and explain the book’s case study of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, situating the study within the country’s post-conflict society, before summarizing how the book develops across its nine substantive chapters.

Community Work

This chapter engages in a detailed examination of how neighbourhood officers made sense of human rights in everyday work with communities. It begins by introducing community policing in Northern Ireland, as well as in the two towns where the fieldwork took place. The analysis is then developed across three sections, drawing on neighbourhood officers’ accounts, narratives and experiences. First, the chapter critically tests the two analytical bridges that have been constructed by the PSNI and the Policing Board to discursively connect human rights with community policing. Second, it examines how officers encountered, and responded to, the lay lexicons of rights that confronted them within communities, as juxtaposed with the official narrative of chief officers presented in Chapter 2. This analysis reveals how removed officers felt human rights were from their daily work; that is, rights could neither adequately account for, nor make sense of, their relationships or activities in communities. The chapter concludes by asking what this distance means for the protection of certain groups in society.

Dirty Work

The PSNI have promoted human rights as a central and enduring hallmark of con-temporary policing, proffering to junior officers what Ravasi and Schultz (2006: 435) describe as ‘legitimate and consistent narratives that allow them to construct a collective sense of self’. The focus of this chapter’s analysis is on how junior officers performing routine work internalized human rights, with sensemaking providing the process through which this took place. Sensemaking is a situated practice, taking place amidst individuals’ working lives and occupational settings and drawing on resources from each. In this chapter, the focus is on the Tactical Support Group. Drawing on Hughes’ (1958) concept of ‘dirty work’, this chapter introduces the occupational context within which TSG officers were making sense of human rights as a vernacular of police work. With this conceptual scaffolding in place, the chapter proceeds to identify and examine a series of counter-narratives officers attached to human rights as a normative vision for policing and a regulatory standard in their everyday work. This entailed officers re-interpreting and modifying the official rights narrative in various ways, such that the content of the narrative varied even if it served similar sensemaking goals to the official narrative: making the complex orderly, fostering self-esteem and maintaining self-legitimacy.

Righting the Public Order Script

Contentious parades and protests in Northern Ireland present a paradigm case of competing rights, requiring the PSNI to respond in ways that respect the human rights of the various parties involved. This chapter introduces and develops the idea of the PSNI’s public order ‘script’ which is used to manage contentious parades and protests. The script can be thought of as the organization’s carefully constructed template for managing public order events, especially contentious parades and protests. This script is written and promoted by public order commanders who are acutely aware of the political sensitivities of parades and protests and the formal oversight they face in policing them. In the material form of operational plans and briefing documents, the script is communicated to frontline officers – often the TSG – who are tasked with performing the police operation according to the script. The first two sections of this chapter provide the platform for the analysis of the police script by explaining the social and legal context within which it is written and performed. The production, promotion and delivery of human rights law as an integral part of the police script is then traced in detail, before the chapter analyses how public order commanders came to acquire the knowledge and expertise needed to become human rights script-writers and decision-makers. This hints at the movement away from the kinds of ‘common sense’ understandings described in Part III and towards a more legalistic, technical one reflecting the responsibilities commanders shouldered and the formal audiences they addressed.

Conclusion

By way of its concepts, methods and style of analysis, this book has aspired to embrace criminology’s interdisciplinary spirit to produce a sociological account that illuminates the empirical realities of human rights law in policing. Drawing the book to a close, this chapter reflects upon the substantive findings from across the four sites of policing. In particular, it summarizes the specific types of encounters officers had with human rights law and then considers what lessons might be gleaned from the Northern Ireland case study. But before doing so, a brief recapitulation on the type of sociological project the book has sought to advance across its chapters is given – and, in doing so, it is asked what this might offer in response to the ‘clear legal fault line’ that is said to crisscross academic criminology’s engagement with human rights (Murphy and Whitty, 2013: 569–70).