Abstract
Ethnographies of policing have, over many decades and in several countries, explored the occupation in intricate detail. Skinns is unique in this broad field in her attention towards police detention. Police officers, while subject to internal policies and statutory procedures, do still have a significant degree of discretion in this setting. That this aspect of the policing craft has been skimmed over by policing scholars for so long is rather surprising.
Skinns presents in Police Powers and Citizens’ Rights a much needed international comparative work on police detention, drawn from 480 hours of observation and 71 interviews from four countries: the United States, England, Australia and Ireland. Her aim is to examine how elements of the law, police discretion and internal procedural rules influence police practice in detention sites, using these sites as a lens through which to view the broader relationship between the state and its citizens.
Chapter 1 sets out the purpose of the text and main concepts to be explored. Chapter 2 begins to outline the primary theoretical tools which Skinns will employ in her analysis. Unlike most policing scholars, Skinns examines this field from both socio-legal (whether the police abide by legal rules) and socio/criminological (how they abide by the legal rules) perspectives. From Packer (1968) she develops the concept of ‘compliance’: the intersection of police legal authority and citizen behaviour. Compliance includes coercive, normative, cultural/symbolic and manipulative compliance. Discretion is a second core concept in Skinns’ analysis and she utilizes Ericson’s (2007) five-point typology: following the rules, using the rules, beyond the rules, within the rules, without the rules.
Chapters 3 and 4 provide, in very impressive detail, the broader structural contexts for police powers and use of discretion in each of the four countries. Chapter 3 examines the social, political and economic conditions of each, and in particular, the role (or lack thereof) of neoliberalism in its systems and processes. Chapter 4 considers the policing system and its history in each country, and how they have influenced each other in their development. She also examines whether protections for citizens’ rights in policing exist in each and the historical nature of relationships between police and citizens.
The first of the data analysis chapters comes with Chapter 5, which describes the conditions and basic procedures of police detention. The conditions of the detention centres ranged widely, with an American and an Irish centre being among the worst. The English, Irish and Australian systems ensured detained persons were made aware of their rights at the point of being booked in, whereas the US sites did this just before interrogation started. While all four countries kept records of their detainees, the robustness of the procedure varied from one country to another. Skinns notes that police officers in all four countries tended to be suspicious of their detainees, and she found that sexism and racism were rife.
The next two chapters, 6 and 7, examine, respectively, the extent to which legal rules and procedures came into play in police detention and how the police used their authority to extract compliance from detainees. In Chapter 6, Skinns examines the right to silence, the right to legal advice in the police station and the right to appropriate detention time. These legal rights vary significantly between jurisdictions and officers in each could find ways to circumvent them. Chapter 7 builds on the theoretical framework set out in Chapter 1. Detention centres in all four countries demonstrated coercive types of police authority. However, symbolic authority was used most frequently in the US sites, and to a lesser extent the Irish sites. It is in this chapter that Skinns introduces the concept of ‘custodial citizens’, to describe how, African American men in particular, tended to accept their treatment and their situation in detention without question. This can be connected to the broader social and historical context of policing and racism in the USA in which non-compliance is at best futile and at worst, dangerous.
The penultimate chapter, Chapter 8, considers the extent to which police custody and police authority adapts to the needs of the vulnerable. Skinns found that even in the sites where there were clear procedures to follow, these were still subject to a degree of discretion. For Skinns, this reflects a clear influence of neoliberalism in police custody: it was the individual responsibility of detainees to make their vulnerability clear, in a convincing way, and not the responsibility of police officers to make a general assumption from the start that all detainees are vulnerable to some extent.
In the Conclusion of the book, Skinns argues that the varying influence of neoliberalism across the four countries explains the extent and the nature of the individualized and discretionary approaches to police custody that she observed. Police actions were subject to more legal constraints in England, Ireland and Australia than they were in the USA, and it is the USA that has the most developed neoliberal system. Skinns argues that the neoliberal context in the USA enables police discretion in a way not mirrored in the other jurisdictions, and is particularly apparent with vulnerable detainees.
Police Powers and Citizens’ Rights is an exceptionally thought-provoking book and demonstrably benefits from Skinns’ detailed knowledge of a number of academic fields. Her argument about the role of neoliberalism structuring police–public encounters in custody is an intriguing one. My concern with this thesis is that, as Skinns herself explains in Chapter 3, neoliberalism is a political-economic system which emerged in western democracies relatively recently. Were it to be the unseen guiding force behind the behaviour and the systems she witnessed in the custody sites, especially in the USA, then experiences in custody prior to the arrival of neoliberalism would have been different. I do not think the book has demonstrated this. There may be an alternative explanation that better explains why the USA is an outlier in its practices with detainees. Older than neoliberalism are the political structures of federalism and American wariness of strong central government. These systems of thinking will have structured behaviour and interactions between the police and the public far longer and more directly than will have neoliberalism.
Where Police Powers and Citizens’ Rights was particularly strong was in the discussion of ‘custodial citizens’, drawing on the concept originated by Lerman and Weaver (2014). This term refers to those individuals who have multiple contacts with the criminal justice system throughout their lives. Skinns draws on the concept throughout the text, but in particular in Chapter 7 to describe how these individuals become socialized into accepting their situation when they enter custody. The effects of this socialization were most pronounced with African American men, and reflect not only long-established systems of poverty but also systems of coercive control throughout US history. It is unfortunate that this concept and an analysis of how it structured encounters in custody was not developed in more detail.
Overall, I would recommend Police Powers and Citizens’ Rights to readers as a well-argued and well-researched text, which presents a detailed comparative analysis of police custody. Skinns has shown the value of international comparative analysis in criminological research to highlight particular relationships between the state and its citizens. This examination of a common police practice across four nations throws into sharp relief the lived outcome of particular political and cultural assemblages. This level of scholarship, conducted over a series of years with rich description and well informed by a diverse range of academic subjects, is unusual in contemporary police research, let alone on a topic as under-studied as police custody. Skinns invites us to consider more deeply the effects of macro-level structures in policing on micro-level encounters. This is indeed a bold challenge, but is one to which more of us could rise.