This chapter addresses, as a third component of the proposed framework, the third constituent expectation of trust in the citizen-government relationship: fiduciary responsibility. Employing scholarship on both private fiduciary law and fiduciary political theory, it defines the expectation as an expectation that the elected branches will fulfil their fiduciary duty of loyalty to citizens. This duty translates, the chapter argues, into an expectation of non-corruption from the elected branches’ staff. The chapter also details how the courts can enforce the expectation. It explains that for this component, the courts aim to curb corrupt practices from the elected branches’ staff, and it identifies steps the courts can take to do so: greater probing into the state’s financial resources; strictly enforcing public procurement law; holding non-state actors accountable to the public; involving specialised anti-corruption agencies; and imposing financial sanctions on government actors. The chapter illustrates these steps using cases from various jurisdictions, including South Africa, Uganda and the UK.

This chapter lays the necessary conceptual foundation for the book’s proposed trust-based framework. It draws on theoretical and empirical scholarship on trust to offer a conceptualisation of trust in the social rights context. It first envisages trust as relational, meaning that trust may only arise in a relationship that contains three elements: control, discretion/uncertainty and vulnerability (a ‘trust relationship’). Secondly, it defines trust in a trust relationship as a set of three expectations held by a truster about a trustee: an expectation that the trustee will exercise goodwill towards the truster (‘expectation of goodwill’); an expectation that the trustee will exercise competence towards the truster (‘expectation of competence’); and an expectation that the trustee will fulfil her fiduciary responsibility (if any) to the truster (‘expectation of fiduciary responsibility’). The chapter then applies this conceptualisation to the relationship between citizens and the elected branches of government with respect to social rights (the ‘citizen-government relationship’), characterising it as a trust relationship and defining trust in it.

This chapter introduces the book. It expresses as the book’s principal objective the advancement of a normative argument regarding the judicial enforcement of constitutional social rights. This argument is that the courts, when enforcing these rights against government actors, should focus their analysis on public trust in government or ‘political trust’ – with the book’s proposed trust-based framework following on from this argument. As a starting point for this normative argument, and to address the broader question of why we should examine social rights law from the perspective of political trust, the chapter considers the relationship between political trust and public cooperation. Additionally, the chapter covers preliminary matters, defining the book’s scope, delineating the applicability of the trust-based framework, situating the framework in existing frameworks for social rights enforcement and outlining the book’s structure.

This chapter concludes the book. It stresses that with the global rise of constitutionalised and justiciable social rights, and the corresponding proliferation of social rights litigation, courts require guidance on how to enforce these rights. It summarises the proposed trust-based framework and how it addresses the drawbacks of existing frameworks for social rights enforcement. The chapter also discusses the framework’s implications, noting that the framework is not limited per se to social rights enforcement but may be applied, with appropriate modifications, to other areas of human rights law.

This chapter addresses, as a second component of the proposed framework, the second constituent expectation of trust in the citizen-government relationship: competence. It defines the expectation as an expectation of evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) from the elected branches in their exercise of control over social goods and services. Drawing on scholarship on EBPM, it argues that EBPM consists of three forms of knowledge: knowledge from scientific research, ‘political knowledge’ and ‘practical implementation knowledge’. The chapter also details how the courts can enforce the expectation. It explains that for this component, the courts incorporate EBPM into social rights enforcement. More specifically, the courts require the elected branches to provide evidence demonstrating that their decision-making vis-a-vis social goods and services is evidence based. The chapter offers illustrations from various jurisdictions, including Germany, South Africa, the UK and Latvia.

Introduction

This chapter tells the story of why and how neighbourhood policing emerged in the UK, and how it ended up in the particular shape and form we now recognise. It is important to understand this – and, crucially, what purposes it was intended to serve – to explain why some of the changes it has experienced over the last decade have been so damaging.

This part of the story begins in the mid-1990s, in the last years of a fading Conservative government, and a reformed Labour Party. Then-Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair, thought the party needed to recognise and address the real damage that crime caused to working-class communities who still made up the core of the Labour vote – but also to acknowledge that crime could not be addressed simply by locking more people up. This chapter explores the philosophy that grounded New Labour's policy on the police and which eventually produced neighbourhood policing as a model. This context matters: it is only because of the particular things that New Labour believed were true about communities, about the public sector, and about crime and the police, that funding and legislation was brought in that facilitated and shaped the Neighbourhood Policing Programme (NPP). This in turn affects policing strategy and practice to the present day.

The chapter begins by looking at the new government's focus on localism, a departure from previous assumptions of how public sector services should be delivered. It then explores the particular outcome of this focus on New Labour's policies for crime and policing – especially when coupled with the government's ‘What Works?’ agenda to improve public services through delivering evidence-based changes. It then touches on the roots of confidence as a policing metric (a theme which will be developed further in Chapter 3), and how that policy led first to Reassurance Policing, and then to the NPP, which ran from 2005 to 2008.

Continuing the narrative, the chapter then moves to what happened after the end of the formal programme and, particularly, after the change of government in 2010. It looks at the current state of neighbourhood policing and examines how neighbourhood policing became institutionalised in the UK, despite the major reforms affecting policing in the early years of the Coalition government.

Introduction

Visibility, community engagement and problem-solving remain central to good neighbourhood policing. This book has added the importance of good partnerships and the possibilities of building strong communities. All of these must rest on a solid understanding of the context in which neighbourhood policing arose and the evidence on which it was based; and an understanding of what police legitimacy and public confidence in policing consist of.

This final chapter draws out some of these themes further. It begins by exploring the importance of the political and policy landscape in establishing the context within which neighbourhood policing work takes place. It argues that despite limited short-term grounds for optimism, and below-inflation funding settlements, there may be longer-term reasons to be cheerful. In particular, the establishment of Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) has facilitated a range of work which has itself altered the conditions in which policing strategies are made; and the possibility of a change of government in the next several years may also enhance that environment.

This strategic level of governance is also crucial for neighbourhood policing. Recent years have seen something of a renaissance in neighbourhood policing and the seriousness with which these tasks are addressed, thanks to the development of College of Policing (CoP) guidelines (2018b) and the incorporation of community policing as part of the Policing Education Qualifcations Framework (PEQF) curriculum. However, confidence has not returned to its previous centrality as a policing purpose, and this seems unlikely in the current context. This means that the onus is on forces and on neighbourhood officers themselves to ensure that confidence is kept as a driving force behind neighbourhood policing activity.

Likewise, forces and neighbourhood officers can do little to affect the tension that exists between law enforcement and legitimation in policing; nor the cyclical nature by which this comes to public attention. However, they can remain conscious of it. This third theme identifies some areas in which this tension can manifest itself and some hidden dangers in trying to reconcile them.

Finally, the chapter re-examines the central role that relationships play in neighbourhood policing, through making police accessible and visible, to engaging with the community, solving problems and working with partners.

Introduction

‘A key criticism of police approaches to consultation previously is that it has been constructed within a mindset that sees its primary purpose as educating a misinformed public about the realities of policing’ (Jones and Newburn, 2001, p50). As this quote suggests, police forces want the public to understand their jobs better. However, it is the job of neighbourhood teams to understand communities better. Community engagement was one of the three core ‘mechanisms’ by which neighbourhood policing was expected to deliver improvements in public perceptions and confidence in the police. The Labour government's policy agenda prioritised the involvement of the public in the delivery of public services in general. It believed that the engagement of the public in policing had both instrumental benefits to the police, but also to communities in terms of capacity-building.

Nearly 20 years on from the original Neighbourhood Policing Programme, the necessity of community engagement is embedded in policy and College of Policing (CoP) guidance, but practice at neighbourhood level is variable. Officers struggle with resource limitations, a changing media landscape, and an often risk-averse organisational culture.

This chapter sets out the benefits of community engagement and what is known about particular methods of engaging. It begins with a discussion of the context of community engagement; the legislative requirements and the current status of guidance and training in this area, given the uncertain future of the Police Education Qualifications Framework (PEQF) and its limited reach to serving officers.

It then offers some frameworks for understanding police– community engagement. This begins with a discussion of the purposes of community engagement, and the need for officers to be clear and transparent as to why they are engaging in the first place. It discusses some different typologies for community engagement, and why some of these are more useful and others, given the restrictions within which the police operate.

The chapter then discusses the strengths and weaknesses of public meetings as a way of engaging with the public, and offers some suggestions as to how meetings can be organised and run in a way that supports the work of neighbourhood officers.

Introduction

Partnerships are central to neighbourhood policing. As seen in the last chapter, problem-solving in particular cannot be effectively undertaken alone. It is reliant on the police working closely with partner agencies whose responsibility it is to respond to many of the issues that are raised with the police. Residents do not always distinguish between the specific responsibilities of the police as opposed to local councils, for example. In raising issues, they are stating the existence of a problem that is affecting their sense of safety in their community. Good neighbourhood policing should therefore respond to these issues on these terms, while ensuring that these problems are passed to the partners who can resolve them.

Involving partners in crime prevention work has been encouraged in British policing since the 1984 issue of Home Office Circular 8/84 (Singer, 2004; Bullock and Tilley, 2009), which stated that many of the factors involved in crime were outside the control of the police, and thus ‘all those agencies whose policies and practices can influence the extent of crime should make their contribution’ (Home Office, 1984, cited in Singer, 2004). However, the last couple of decades has seen enormous growth in partnership working, to the point where it is now institutionalised.

This chapter begins with an account of that institutionalisation in policy, legislation and guidance, and the requirements placed on forces now to work in concert with other agencies. It unravels the narrative of partnership working from the early 1980s onwards, and describes the broad benefits that it was believed partnership work could provide for the police and other agencies.

Partnerships have now been embedded for sufficient time to have a good idea from research evidence about what makes them work effectively. The next section therefore looks at partnerships in practice, and the centrality of trust and continuity to ensure good relationships. Much evidence points to the importance of informal connections; and the chapter touches on the strengths and weaknesses of co-location as one means of embedding this. The chapter also looks at the problems inherent in partnership work, from the inconsistency in relationships that can stem from abstraction, to the difficulty of managing multiple expectations.

The Key Themes in Policing Series aims to provide relevant and useful books to support the growing number of policing modules on both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The series also aims to support all those interested in policing from criminology, law, and policing students and policing professionals to those who wish to join policing services. It seeks to respond to the call for research in relevant and under-researched areas in policing encouraged by organisations such as the College of Policing in England and Wales. By producing a range of high-quality, research-informed texts on important areas in policing, contributions to the series support and inform both professional and academic policing curriculums.

We are delighted to welcome Neighbourhood Policing: Context, Practices and Challenges by Carina O’Reilly to the Key Themes in Policing Series. This book comes at an important moment for policing in several areas of the globe. The early 21st century has already brought many challenges to the legitimacy and practice of policing, from events such as the movement to defund the police to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Questions are being asked about what we want the police to do and how best this should be achieved. Community policing, and the UK version ‘Neighbourhood Policing’, is often cited as a possible solution to rebuilding trust between the police and the communities they serve. In this book, O’Reilly charts the effects of these events and the wider changing political landscape on the practice of neighbourhood policing. She notes how the original goals of the practice have been reframed, considers how the practice can operate now, especially in a context of reduced funding, and looks to the future of this much-loved but often ill-understood ‘bedrock’ of policing in the Global North. Specific elements of neighbourhood policing are considered in detail, including visibility, community engagement, problem-solving and partnerships. This text will be essential reading for both researchers and practitioners alike.