Policing by Consent
By Mediocre Dave, 27 May 2021
For almost 200 years, ‘policing by consent’ has been the central philosophy around which policing in Britain is organised.1 This means that the police base their legitimacy on having the confidence of the public, rather than imposing order through sheer force alone. And yet for those used to witnessing police violence, and to having police power enforced against them, it can be hard to believe that their consent matters.
At times when police violence makes the headlines, whether from egregious brutality towards individuals, the repression of protests and public disorder, or the release of damning new statistics, police are criticised for disregarding public consent and confronted with demands to restore it.
Conversely, a common criticism from anarchists and libertarians is that whenever consent is lacking the police can always fall back on the use of violent force and punitive coercion.2 Consent, in this view, is a myth, a euphemism that disguises the violent reality. There is certainly some truth to the observation that if the public stopped consenting to state rule it could potentially be maintained through sheer force alone. But to focus on this imagined extreme is to gloss over the fact that this is not the situation that currently exists in reality.
Policing by consent is therefore treated by some as an ideal standard the police must be held to, and by others an impossibility. Both these criticisms miss the mark. The public truly does consent to policing and, in fact, this is fundamental to maintaining the state’s authority. The key things to understand are what this ‘consent’ means and how it’s brought about.
The Peelian Principles
Policing by consent is generally defined by the approach taken by Robert Peel, who as Home Secretary established the Metropolitan Police in 1829, and is encapsulated in the now famous and widely reproduced ‘Peelian Principles’ — nine short precepts for maintaining police legitimacy and effectiveness.
In fact, it seems these principles were never written by Peel himself, nor even during his lifetime. The nine principles were first drafted by the historian Charles Reith in 1948 as an attempt to describe Peel’s approach.3 Reith’s summary was reproduced and repeated until its origins became blurred and his text was attributed to Peel himself — including by many politicians and police officers who take this list to be their foundational document without fully knowing its origin. Despite this murky history, these nine principles continue to exert a significant influence on modern policing. They are the basis for the framework by which Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary assesses policing and are reproduced on the Home Office’s website to justify its claims to policing by consent.4 The London Assembly also championed these principles in a recent report on policing during the pandemic.
The Peelian principles suggest that, even as officers are sanctioned to use violence to maintain social order, the existence of the police is a strategy to make direct violence less necessary. The state could maintain its power through direct military oppression but, with a strategically deployed police force and the cultivation of a consenting public, it doesn’t need to.5 This approach to state power makes the police dependent on the public’s approval of both its existence and its actions. Furthermore, maintaining this approval means securing the public’s willing cooperation in the observance of the law: people must want the law to be upheld, and must take on some personal responsibility for following it and for preventing each other from breaking it. This leads to the calculation that, in Reith’s words, ‘the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion’.
The remaining principles in Reith’s list deal with some core strategies to secure this public confidence. These include maintaining political impartiality, using force only as a last resort after persuasion has failed, operating within the limits of police power, and serving members of the public equally regardless of their wealth or social standing. Finally, it is established that policing is to be judged by the ‘absence of crime and disorder’, and not by the visible prominence of policing itself. The ideal is an orderly population which aspires to lawfulness and requires as little intervention by the police as possible. Central to these principles is the claim that ‘the police are the public and that the public are the police’. Officers are not an occupying army extrinsic to the general population, imposing alien values and behaviours. Rather, they are citizens in uniform, ‘members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen’.
What public? What consent?
It is clear that not every individual is happy to be policed. Even the government doesn't pretend that this is the case. The Home Office website clarifies:
It does not mean the consent of an individual. No individual can choose to withdraw his or her consent from the police, or from a law.
Instead, the Home Office claims,
It should be noted that it refers to the power of the police coming from the common consent of the public
When we talk about what ‘the public’ wants we take all the people as one homogenised unit. Treating all the individuals collectively as ‘the public’ (or, indeed, ‘the people’) disregards the disagreements, conflicts, and competing interests among them.
It is important to recognise that this consent doesn’t necessarily arise from positive feelings about the police. It is often not even given much consideration at all; people take for granted that they will be policed, and so continue to agree to it.
Consent takes many other mundane forms, from reporting crimes and enforcing the expectation on one another that we must obey the law, to voting for parties which promise increased policing.6 Even inaction can contribute to this public consent. Following the bad press they received throughout 2020, the Met released a video justifying their use of force. Opening with a direct quote from Reith’s Peelian principles, this video ends with the plea that ‘we would ask you, the public, to support us’. What this support means is: ‘If you see officers involved in a situation on the street, please step back, give them space … don’t interfere or obstruct the officers’. Monitoring the police when they use force or harass people, filming them, and challenging their behaviour are an important way that consent is withdrawn. Walking by signals to the police that they have public endorsement.
What’s more, the vast majority of criticisms of police behaviour contain within them the consent to being policed. When people make demands of how the police should act, or how policing should be organised, they are first of all agreeing that police and policing should exist.
Members of the public do not generally consent to policing out of a real love of authoritarianism, or because they are hopelessly naive about the police’s activity. There are more fundamental reasons underpinning public consent which arise from the organisation of capitalist society.
In a world of privately owned property, a safe existence is not guaranteed, much less a comfortable or enriching one, and people are only able to access the things they need to live if they have the right money. This produces conflict between people. When faced with the threat of violence, or with the loss of their possessions, individuals have little recourse other than to rely on the protection of the state. In this way, capitalist society produces subjects who need the police. People are turned into independent individuals and forced into competition with one another, and the state exists to impose order and to ensure that this conflict is resolved on its terms (i.e. through its criminal justice system and civil courts). Power is maintained by making people dependent; state rule is not merely imposed from above but demanded from below. Consenting to being policed is a condition for participating in capitalist society.
Restoring Trust in the Police
This dependency is a two way street. The state’s claim that consent is at the heart of its policing is an admission of what its rule depends on: the good will of the people being policed. Despite the dynamics just described, the police can’t take the public’s consent for granted; they must continuously work for it. The Metropolitan Police Service operates a dedicated public relations department, the Directorate of Media and Communication, at a cost of millions of pounds a year, handling not only press communication but also more than 600 official Twitter accounts. And, as part of the work of building consent, each egregious act of police violence that hits the news is followed by a fresh round of commitments to ‘restore trust’ in the police and ‘rebuild the relationship between the police and the community’.
Attempts to cultivate consent are at the heart of discourse around police racism. While the police are not in principle an occupying force, there are clearly areas where this is effectively the case, and where little effort is made to present the police as an extension of the people they are policing — there are populations whose consent is frequently not sought. One form that political and social marginalisation takes is to be excluded from the public who the police appeal to and instead to be recast as the threat from which the public needs to be protected by police. But this exclusion is not necessarily the most effective means of state domination. It is also by being included in the public, and invited to consent to policing, that people are brought under state power. Reith’s list makes no direct reference to race but does establish a general principle of equality when it says that police should offer ‘friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing’. The police dedicate serious time and resources to securing not only the acquiescence but also the positive good will of the very people they most brutalise.
A clear example is a 2013 Metropolitan Police recruitment campaign. Areas of London with long traditions of anti-police sentiment were targeted with posters showing smiling Black and Asian officers overlaid with the slogan ‘being you means that we can be us’ — a direct paraphrase of the Peelian mantra that ‘the police are the public and that the public are the police’. The police’s ability to do their work is contingent on being seen as an extension of the public, not a separate force.
This example, in the wake of the 2011 riots, is part of a longer tradition. Increased recruitment of Black officers as a means to restore public confidence in the police has been proposed throughout the Met’s history following moments of intense anti-police sentiment, as in the Scarman report on the 1981 Brixton riots. The overarching aim behind the recommendations of the 1999 Macpherson Report was not to eliminate racism, but ‘to increase trust and confidence in policing amongst minority ethnic communities’, one strategy for which was recruitment targets. Now, following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and increased publicly scrutiny on racial profiling and police violence, the Met has introduced fresh recruitment targets for Black and minority ethnic officers, while senior officers warn of a crisis of legitimacy.7 Even before Black officers were actively recruited, their presence was used in this way. Norwell Roberts received significant press attention in 1967 for being the Met’s first Black officer and, while facing vicious racism from his colleagues behind closed doors, he was quickly deployed to be a visible presence on anti-aparteid protests to demonstrate to Black activists that the police were an extension of their own ‘community’.8
Police racism is regarded as a problem when it risks costing them popular support. The fact that public consent is the priority gives the police just as much motivation to deny racism as to address it. Commissioner Cressida Dick has spoken out against the use of the phrase ‘institutionally racist’ to describe the Met — not because she can prove it doesn’t apply but because, she says, ‘It stops people wanting to give us intelligence, evidence, come and join us, work with us’.
Conclusion
Criticisms of the police that focus solely on violence miss the fact that police power is maintained through its absence. Popular consent is an incredibly durable basis for state rule. When the power of the police derives from public approval, successful public pressure to improve the police’s behaviour makes them more powerful. Abolitionists frequently discuss the problems with reform, demonstrating that efforts to address the harms caused by the police are usually aimed not at reducing but at improving policing, making it more efficient and extensive. There are many examples of how calls to reform the police usually translate into increased funding, training, technology, and recruitment, all aimed at expanding police power. Even without considering the specific arguments about resources there is a fundamental point here that the aim of reforms is to produce a police force that the public will consent to be policed by. This means that the more successful the public are at directing changes in police activity, the more secure the police’s position becomes.
To withdraw our consent from the police would mean abandoning demands for better policing, restored trust, or a force that better represents the people it polices. The recognition that consent arises not from naivety but from the relations people have with one another in this society reinforces the important potential of mutual aid as a way to resist this conflict that is imposed on us. By finding ways to reproduce our lives collectively, rather than competitively, we can refuse to be made dependent on the police to regulate our interactions. And by refusing to respond to police wrongdoing with demands for more and better policing, we can create real solidarity with the people most impacted by their violence.
1 This was generally not the model of policing which the British state employed to maintain order in its overseas colonies.^
2 See, for example, this classic anti-police pamphlet which describes policing by consent as an absurd ‘leftist fantasy’ and asks, in the face of daily police violence and repression, ‘How can we “consent” to this?’.^
3 For more on this, see: Susan A. Lentz and Robert H. Chaires, ‘The invention of Peel's principles: A study of policing ‘textbook’ history’. Journal of Criminal Justice 35, 2007. 69–79.^
4 HMIC’s assessment program is even named PEEL: Police Effectiveness, Efficiency and Legitimacy.^
5 For context, prior to the formation of the police the military was often called in to suppress civilian disorder, for example at protests by the Luddite movement (1811-16), the Peterloo Massacre (1819), or the Bristol Riots (1831).^
6 Every vote cast for any of the four major parties at the last UK General Election (2019) was a vote for the promise of increased police recruitment.^
7 The actual impact of such recruitment is an ongoing debate, but evidence tends to show that it does not reduce police violence.^
8 While at the time Roberts was believed to be Britain’s first Black police officer, historians have more recently discovered the stories of nineteenth-century Black officers John Kent and Robert Branford.^