Differential treatment in the youth justice system - Equality and ...

UNDERSTANDING THE POLICING OF YOUNG PEOPLEThe typology in Figure 4.1 bears quite a close resemblance to that of Muir (1977).He derived a four-fold classification from two key dimensions that he observed inpolice personalities: passion (the motivation to achieve something) and perspective(a moral appreciation of the human condition). This yielded four types of officer: the‘professional’, the ‘avoider’ (with neither passion nor perspective), the ‘reciprocator’(with perspective but no passion) and the ‘enforcer’ – with passion but noperspective. This is a highly insightful typology for analysing individual policepersonality, but is less appropriate for describing the choices open to policemanagers in fostering policing styles. One axis of our typology, ‘Interventionist’ –the degree to which policing is proactive – overlaps with Muir’s one of passion.However, our personal/professional axis differs from his one of moral perspective.The result is a slightly different classification which allows for the possibility thatofficers can perform professionally even if they are personally short on moralperspective. Wilson (1968) used a threefold classification of policing styles,characterised as the legalistic, the watchman and the service styles. The latter twocorrespond roughly to the two bottom quadrants, while the legalistic style mapsroughly onto the top right quadrant – though it also has an element of the enforcerstyle about it.The top two quadrants of Figure 4.1 are of particular relevance to this report,because those officers or teams whose style favoured the reactive had less contactwith young people on the street, and considerably less contact through stop andsearch. We have characterised these as:• street control• rule of lawThe evidence to support the claims that we make in this chapter, especially aboutthese two styles of policing, is inevitably impressionistic. Assessing the dynamics ofpolice interactions with young people is a subjective process. However, we wouldstress that we are drawing on an extensive amount of observation of police practice.While field notes and interviews are used to illustrate points in support of ourargument, our analysis draws on a much wider collection of evidence.38