Author: David Wilson, John Ashton and Douglas Sharp
ISBN No: 1 85431 736 9
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 224
Publisher:
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
What Everyone in Britain Should Know About the Police (July 2001) by David Wilson, John Ashton and Douglas Sharp. 224 pages, £12.95, paperback, ISBN 1 84174 261 9. Wilson and Ashton wrote What Everyone in Britain Should Know About Crime and Punishment (1998), ISBN 1 85431 736 9.
Security industry regulation will rid us of the cowboys, so the argument goes. A chapter in a survey of UK policing, What Everyone in Britain Should Know About the Police, suggests that the reality could be more messy. The section ‘Private Policing and Vigilantism’ tells the story of Household Security, based in Balby, Doncaster. Its founder Malcolm Tetley, an ex-offender ex-doorman and ex-street fighter, ‘at its height in 1996 had a series of private foot patrols, employed 11 staff, deployed a fleet of six vans, and developed plans to extend into Milton Keynes.’ He is still going today, but much reduced, ‘partly as a consequence of concerted police pressure to discredit the founder of the firm’. As the authors add, that was not difficult – Tetley’s offences included assaulting a police officer. However, as the book says, while many private security firms knowingly or not employ ex-offenders, Household’s brochures promote the fact. Householders, mainly elderly, paid œ1 a week for patrollers, precisely because, the authors suggest, Household staff did not have their hands tied by the law as the police do – and the police seemed unable to stem vehicle crime and burglaries anyway. Will the Security Industry Authority give Mr Tetley a licence’ Note that Mr Tetley has a clinetele disenchanted with formal police and is good at publicity (isn’t he’!). This book could have advanced the public-private policing debate if the authors had studied any number of UK local authority warden or contract guarding schemes … in Sedgefield and the Goodwin Project, Hull, to name two featured lately in Professional Security. They quote a Doncaster police document that calls on everyone to play their part in fighting crime, and ask: </br><br>
who is a vigilante?
</br><br>
(The convicted farmer Tony Martin’) The book jolts rather when the next chapter, ‘A Vision for the Future’ argues that policing must be international to fight international organised drug-crime. And yet, the authors add, policing must be visible – the torchlight through the window that Household staff shine in Doncaster. Police are faced with a vicious circle of sensationalist media reporting of crime, and must avoid politicians seeking to ‘do something’ and not turn into Robocops. Strong stuff. Let’s introduce the authors: Prof David Wilson, a co-presenter of BBC1’s Crime Squad series, resigned as a prison governor in 1997 in protest at the state of British jails and is a criminologist at the University of Central England in Birmingham Douglas Sharp, Course Director of the Criminal Justice and Policing Degree at UCE, is a former Chief Superintendent of West Midlands Police. John Ashton is a TV journalist. Distinguished people. They cover the lat 150-odd years of the police, modern performance, governance, and malpractice, race, and ‘cop culture’. On the prestigious Thinking Aloud programme on BBC Radio 4 on August 1; What Everyone won praise as an effort to put current academic thinking before a mass audience, though the likeliest readers are students and (I suggest) security managers with a non-police background who might want to gen up. Admirably, as the title implies the book has strong arguments – that the police are unaccountable and losing the trust of the public, as crime rates (despite massaging) and fear of crime rises. The authors are not ignorant or anti-private security (indeed, nor anti-police). Prof Wilson admitted on Thinking Aloud that there is a place for private policing of communities. But like so many crime and security-related books, What Everyone … is not for everyone. It overlooks the corporate world. Private security is booming because retailers in their shops, FTSE 100 companies at their offices and factories, even universities like Prof Wilson’s, see the need for security, that police cannot or will not satisfy. A previous book was called What Everyone in Britain Should Know About Crime and Punishment; maybe the authors will twig that private security is deserving of recognition.</br>
