'New' police work with offenders? Exploring senior and strategic perspectives
type: CreativeWork
description: Police organisations spend a substantial proportion of their time and resources working with offenders. The nature of police work with offenders and in particular the strategic culture that shapes those working relationships deserves more attention. A series of developments over the past two decades, that can collectively be debated as representing a ‘new’ police work with offenders, has led to the police role expanding in mission and scope, undertaking different roles with offenders and working in novel partnership contexts. These changing modes of police work with offenders include in particular developments in youth justice, the management of prolific and priority offenders, approaches to drugs misuse, and managing those offenders who present a risk of serious harm. The objective of the thesis is to develop fresh insight through exploring these developments at a senior and strategic level. The thesis engages with these questions through a grounded theory methodology that encompasses an analysis of national policy documents and a case study based upon semistructured interviews with senior police officers and key strategic stakeholders from a small shire police area in England. The key findings identify that the changes in police work with offenders represent a big, ambitious and expansionist policy ambition, manifesting in a more proactive and partnering practice, and founded upon policy drivers of prevention and managing risk. The findings are suggestive of a somewhat chaotic and incohesive policymaking context for policing, suggesting the changes to be chaotic in their genesis and also partly accounted for by ‘gap filling’ in respect of other agencies. The developments sit in tension with short-termism and single-agency thinking, and there is a sense of a predominantly operational-level focus to senior-level thinking and of a ‘retro-fitting’ of legacy police roles to new practice settings. The changes in police work with offenders that are identified provoke con…
abstract: Police organisations spend a substantial proportion of their time and resources working with offenders. The nature of police work with offenders and in particular the strategic culture that shapes those working relationships deserves more attention. A series of developments over the past two decades, that can collectively be debated as representing a ‘new’ police work with offenders, has led to the police role expanding in mission and scope, undertaking different roles with offenders and working in novel partnership contexts. These changing modes of police work with offenders include in particular developments in youth justice, the management of prolific and priority offenders, approaches to drugs misuse, and managing those offenders who present a risk of serious harm. The objective of the thesis is to develop fresh insight through exploring these developments at a senior and strategic level. The thesis engages with these questions through a grounded theory methodology that encompasses an analysis of national policy documents and a case study based upon semistructured interviews with senior police officers and key strategic stakeholders from a small shire police area in England. The key findings identify that the changes in police work with offenders represent a big, ambitious and expansionist policy ambition, manifesting in a more proactive and partnering practice, and founded upon policy drivers of prevention and managing risk. The findings are suggestive of a somewhat chaotic and incohesive policymaking context for policing, suggesting the changes to be chaotic in their genesis and also partly accounted for by ‘gap filling’ in respect of other agencies. The developments sit in tension with short-termism and single-agency thinking, and there is a sense of a predominantly operational-level focus to senior-level thinking and of a ‘retro-fitting’ of legacy police roles to new practice settings. The changes in police work with offenders that are identified provoke con…
author: Britton, Iain
language: eng
date published: 2015
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:26:39Z
provider: University of Northampton
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Northampton