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Against the backdrop of what seems like a perpetual cycle of crisis for policing in modern day England and Wales, this introduction synthesises some of the core challenges facing the police. A catalogue of crimes committed by serving officers, missed opportunities for reform, and a scathing review of the internal culture of the Metropolitan Police culminating in a recommendation for a ‘complete overhaul’, might initially leave some readers with the view that there is little hope for fixing an outdated and buckling police service. Yet this collection of articles, authored by academic experts, senior police—both current and former—and commentators, not only summarises some of the problems facing policing as the new Government beds in. The contributions also brim with a diverse set of ideas for changing policing for the better and rebuilding trust and confidence. We conclude with the idea that a fundamental review and reconceptualization of the police role, of the type that might be provided by a Royal Commission, is needed if we are to meet the challenges that lie ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much policy discourse concentrates on the contribution police make to keeping people safe. Often, this means minimizing fear of crime. Yet, more expansive accounts stress the extent to which deeper-rooted forms of security and belonging might also be important 'outcomes' of police activity. Using data collected from a survey of residents of a mid-sized English town, Macclesfield in Cheshire, we consider the extent to which evaluations of policing are associated with (1) a 'shallow' sense of security—roughly speaking, feeling safe—and (2) a 'deeper' sense of security—being comfortable in, and with, one's environment. Focussing more accurately on the forms of safety and security police can hope to 'produce' opens up space for consideration of the ends they seek as well as the means they use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, police services around the world were granted unprecedented new powers to enforce social distancing restrictions. In this paper, we present data from a rolling representative sample survey of Londoners (n = 3,201) fielded during the height of the first wave of the pandemic (April to June 2020). We examine the scale of public support for giving police additional powers to enforce the regulations, whether support for different powers ebbed and flowed over time, and which factors predicted support for police powers. First, we use interrupted time-series analysis to model change over time. Second, we pool the data to test the predictors of support for police powers. Aside from one lockdown-specific temporal factor (the easing of restrictions), we find that even in the midst of a pandemic, legitimacy, procedural justice and affective evaluations of pandemic powers are the most important factors explaining variation in public support for police empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]