Self Check Q&A

Consider the below questions to check your understanding of topics covered in the book. Click on the question to reveal the answer.

1. How can narrow and broader definitions of policing be characterised?

Answer: narrow set of functions performed by the institution of the police service and the broader processes of social regulation and reproduction that govern everyday lives

2. What agencies, apart from the police service, play a role in regulating social life?

Answer: among others, schools, religious groups, health providers, business sector, and the media

3. Why did Mawby (2003) argue that media images of policing are important?

Answer: media accounts provide the authoritative narrative of policing for large sections of the public

4. Who provided a ‘classic’ definition of state sovereignty?

Answer: Max Weber: state sovereignty as the possession of a legitimate use of force over a given territory

5. Why might the ‘use of force’ offer only a limited understanding of the police function?

Answer: among others, the police tend to under-utilise their potential to use force, and other agencies have coercive powers over citizens

6. In what, very broad, terms did Bittner (1974) define the police task?

Answer: ‘… no human problem exists, or is imaginable, about which it could be said with finality that this certainly could not become the proper business of the police.’

7. What proportion of public calls to the police did Bayley find were related to crime?

Answer: seven to ten per cent

8. How did Ericson and Haggerty (1997) characterise police officers?

Answer: ‘knowledge workers’ who’s primary role was to communicate risk

9. What two factors explain, according to research published in 2001, the significant amount of time officers’ spend within the police station?

Answer: processing prisoners in custody and ‘other paperwork’, such as completing crime and intelligence reports, dealing with missing property and persons

10. What relation does the police service have to the criminal justice system more generally?

Answer: it acts as a ‘gateway agency’