Crime, Policing and the Provision of Service

Abstract

Every public service has been subject to the reforming zeal of a Conservative government committed to marketing the public sector in the name of improved efficiency. Yet it was not until the 1990s that the police were subjected to a similar experience. The police service was deemed to be an essential public order force and tool for the government as it embarked on a programme which would inevitably lead to confrontation with public sector unions in the 1980s. As Howard Davies was to argue succinctly in his Social Market Foundation pamphlet on the police: Until the end of the miners’ strike in 1985, there was perhaps a sound political reason for leaving the police undisturbed… The industrial relations confrontations of the early 1980s certainly placed a high premium on the maintenance of an unquestionably loyal, disciplined and strike free police service. Subsequently the logic of non-intervention became less clear. (Davies, 1992: 28)