Perceptions of Security and Reassurance at the ... - School of Law

Tuesday 16 th March 2010 at 5 pm‘Theorising and Researching Police Legitimacy’Dr Justice Tankebe, Institute of Criminology, Cambridge UniversityLegitimacy is something of a contemporary shibboleth in police studies. Yet it remains undertheorised.This presentation provided some preliminary thoughts on the subject. The main claimadvanced was that a full explanation of police legitimacy entails dealing with three necessarydimensions: the judgements of citizens about the moral validity of police practices (externallegitimacy); the police’s own assessments of their legitimacy (internal legitimacy); and, a higher-orderlegitimacy against which both external and internal legitimacy may be assessed.Dr Justice Tankebe is a British Academy Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Criminologyand a fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. He is originally from Ghana, where hestudied for his first degree in sociology before moving to Cambridge for his doctoral studies. Hisresearch interests are in the fields of policing, corruption, legitimacy and procedural justice,comparative criminology and social theory. His current research is focused on constructions oflegitimacy in ethnically-diverse boroughs in London.Thursday 17 th June 2010 at 5.30 pmThe Centre for Criminal Justice Studies Annual Lecture 2010‘The Spirit Level:Why Equality is better for Everyone’Professor Kate Pickett, University of YorkSocieties which tend to do well on a variety of measures of social, physical and psychological wellbeingtend to do well on all of them. The key is the amount of inequality in each society. The moreunequal a society is, the more ill health and social problems it has. Inequality has always beenregarded as divisive and socially corrosive. The data show that even small differences in theamount of inequality matter. Material inequality serves as a determinant of the scale andimportance of social stratification. It increases status insecurity and competition and theprevalence of all the problems associated with relative deprivation. Particularly important areeffects mediated by social status, friendship and early childhood experience. However, althoughthe amount of inequality has its greatest effect on rates of problems among the poor, its influenceextends to almost all income groups: too much inequality reduces levels of well-being among thevast majority of the population. In this lecture, Professor Pickett related issues of inequality toquestions of trust, social capital, crime and punishment.Kate Pickett is Professor of Epidemiology at York University and a National Institute for HealthResearch Career Scientist. She studied physical anthropology at Cambridge, nutritional sciences atCornell and epidemiology at Berkeley before spending four years at the University of Chicago.Kate co-wrote The Spirit Level with Richard Wilkinson and is a co-founder of The Equality Trust.Tuesday 5 th October 2010 at 5pm‘Police in the Network Society: The Rotterdam Harbour’Professor Bob Hoogenboom, Nyenrode Business University and Free University of AmsterdamDrawing on insights from his recently published book The Governance of Policing and Security: Ironies,Myths and Paradoxes (Macmillan, 2010, with Maurice Punch) Bob Hoogenboom argued thatpolicing today involves many different state and non-state actors. His presentation traced theprocess of unbounding policing, exploring the way that boundaries between public policing,35