The death of Ian Tomlinson last week encapsulates many pernicious and alarming trends in policing. It came minutes after a brutally hefty push from a police officer, caught on dramatic video footage from the G20 protests. The officer sported the full Darth Vader regalia to which we have become desensitised, after a quarter of a century in which militaristic riot control has displaced the thin blue line of George Dixons linking arms to pacify the crowds at Grosvenor Square and other 1960s demos.
Police powers have expanded remorselessly in the past quarter of a century. Widespread hostility to the early 19th century "new police" meant that special police powers were initially restricted. A legitimating myth that the police were merely "citizens in uniform" prevailed in official ideology right up to the 1962 report of the Royal Commission on the police. The 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) gave the coup de grâce to "citizen in uniform" mythology. Massively controversial at the time, and opposed by a bitter campaign characterising the 1984 act as the harbinger of George Orwell's police state nightmare, PACE clearly expanded police investigative powers. But deeply entrenched suspicion of police powers meant that a complex network of safeguards was also put in place. Civil libertarians castigated these as paper-thin, based primarily on internal police record-keeping. But a key factor creating a rough balance for citizens was a more severe attitude adopted by the courts towards police breaches of PACE procedures.
With scarcely any public discussion this era of "fundamental balance" (in the words of the 1981 Report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure which preceded PACE), has been swept aside in an accelerating rush of new police powers since 1994, and a growing dilution of safeguards. Most alarming of all from a civil liberties perspective is the blessing of this trend in a series of House of Lords judgments (on asbos, on the use of terrorism powers against peaceful protesters not remotely suspected of terrorism, and most recently, accepting the legality of the controversial public order tactic of "kettling" crowds, which has been implicated in Tomlinson's death).
Traditional forms of police accountability, never very vigorous, have become increasingly moribund or transformed. The once sacred legal doctrine of "constabulary independence", which shielded the police from control by local police authorities when they questioned the militaristic tactics that crushed the 1984-05 miners' strike, has been eroded. But the increasing answerability the police face is managerial and financial, and – with the dominance of the politics of tough law and order – predicated on populist crime control, not due process values.
Against the main Orwellian narrative, however, there are two counter-trends, encapsulated in the Tomlinson case. The Independent Police Complaints Commission now has the power to investigate serious cases such as this one. Perhaps even more significantly, the spread of video and other recording equipment has created an informal means of opening police malpractice to public scrutiny. New surveillance technology has prompted fears of the realisation of the Benthamite dream/Foucauldian nightmare of the ever-seeing Panopticon policing the population. But the spread of video and digital cameras provides a small counter-trend, the recording of official wrongdoing by citizens, dubbed "Synopticon" by the Norwegian radical criminologist Thomas Mathiesen.
As we see the bitter fruits of the neo-liberal consensus signified by New Labour's acceptance of Thatcherite economics, and we face several likely summers and winters of discontent, the police will become increasingly embroiled in controversial political and social control tactics. Synopticon offers a fragile check on Panopticon.
