Chapter 2 provided an historical setting to contemporary policing. How do police see their role today? If we take the mission statements of several large police departments, there is consistent repetition of a few themes. For example, the Chicago Police Department, ‘as part of, and empowered by, the community, is committed to protect the lives, property, and rights of all people, to maintain order, and to enforce the law impartially’. Similarly, the Maharashtra Police Service in India sees its basic duty and purpose as ‘to uphold and maintain the law fairly and firmly, to detect and prevent crime, to protect, help and reassure the community, [and enforce] the various laws of the land’, while the London Metropolitan Police’s mission ‘is to keep London safe for everyone’. Police define themselves primarily by their functions, including preventing, detecting, and investigating criminal activities, enforcing the law, maintaining public order, and ensuring community safety. In the spirit of Peel’s ‘New Police’, the mission statements in some form or another see police legitimacy as deriving from an amorphous and undefined community.

A limitation of seeing police work through what the police say they do is that the variety of situations in which police intervene is much greater than law enforcement, solving crime or even simply maintaining order. As we saw in the Chapter 2, the role of the police has always been expansive, in both colonial settings (for example, removing children from families, undertaking summary justice, banning ceremonies, and undertaking political surveillance) and in the metropole (from controlling the labour movement to apprehending ‘lunatics’, controlling the homeless, and policing school truancy). An argument we often hear is that the role of police has expanded significantly, and they are now required to respond to an increasing number of social problems. However, this argument needs to be read within the broader historical context. Part of the reading of this issue is that ‘crime’ and the necessity for a police response is contingent on the power to define the activities that constitute crime, disorder, and the social activities that necessitate police intervention.