You work at the Home Office in their Policing Research and Analysis team. The Minister of State for Crime, Policing and Fire is concerned about the wide range of recent controversies around policing in the UK in general, and London in particular. The Minister has asked the Policing Research team to compile a series of reports into policing practice in a range of areas of controversy, and they are looking for volunteers to produce the first draft of one of these reports.
The report will be presented to the Minister, who is currently Chris Philp. He is a busy person and he is not a specialist in this field, so the report should not be too long, a maximum of 2,000 words long (+/- 10%) and it should communicate the findings of your academic research in a way that is clear and easy to understand.
The areas he is interested in are:
- The policing of protest curing Covid-19
- Police interactions with, and responses to, female members of the public
- The impact of stop and search on crime and public opinion
- Police corruption
- Values, culture and behaviour within the police
- Police legitimacy and authority in a plural policing environment
Your task, then, is to select ONE of these subjects and produce a 2,000 word report (+/-10%, not including the reference list at the end) for the research team.
Your report must contain the following sections and headings:
- Introduction: an explanation of the social, political and policy context of the question: what is the problem, and why is it a problem?
- Literature review: a review of the existing academic literature on the subject, explaining the different positions that various authors have taken: who has argued what and why? What do we already know about the subject and how do we know it it? You will need to critically evaluate the material you are discussing, comparing and contrasting the academic arguments and analysing the kind of evidence on which they are based.
- Findings and evidence: this contains a summary and analysis of the evidence available on the subject. This section can include secondary material from academic sources, but it can also include primary material from the media or other publicly available information. However, you should not conduct any primary research yourself here, as we don’t have ethical approval for this. Note that the findings can be qualitative, quantitative, primary or secondary, or a mixture of all of these.
- Discussion: in this section you should connect the evidence from the ‘finding and evidence’ section back to the academic sources you discussed in the literature reivew. Consider either using the evidence from the findings to make a judgment about a debate you referred to in the literature review, or use the academic literature you discussed in the literature review to explain the material you presented in the findings, or perhaps a combination of the two. Note that you can combine the ‘Findings’ and ‘Discussion’ sections if it makes more sense for you to do so.
- Conclusion and recommendations: this summarises your overall argument and draws attention to any recommendations you might have (you don’t have to have any, this is not compulsory). Note that any recommendations should emerge very clearly from, and be justified by the findings and discussion, not just opinion.
Successfully completing this assessment will show that you have met the following learning outcomes for the module:
- Have a critical appreciation of contemporary issues in policing and penology
- Critically engage with the theoretical underpinnings of both police and penal policy
- Have knowledge of the way in which police and penal policy impacts on practice
- Critically reflect in developing alternative policing and penal provision
- Have a broad base understanding of major debates in policing and penal policy in relation to the delivery of ‘justice’
- Have strong research, analytical, writing and presentation skills