Policing & Society最新文献

Forensic medicine has traditionally been understood as constituting a tension between medical and legal roles: a care-custody paradox. Rather than reinforcing this paradox, however, in this paper I will draw upon a study of Healthcare Professionals working within police custody suites in England in order to show the ways that they coproduce [Jasanoff, S., 2004. States of knowledge: the co-production of science and social order. London: Routledge] their work with the aim of simultaneously meeting the requirements of both their police (for instance PACE codes) and healthcare (for instance the Nursing and Midwifery Code of Practice) responsibilities. Focusing on acts of 'mundane care' [Brownlie, J. and Spandler, H., 2018. Materialities of mundane care and the art of holding one's own. Sociology of health and illness, 40 (2), 256-269], the typification of detainees and the use of detention cells as risk management tools, I will show that rather than undergoing an existential crisis, Healthcare Professionals mobilise coproduced practices in order to perform their work successfully, thereby further enabling police and detention officers to achieve their custody objectives.

There are calls across America for police to re-imagine themselves as "guardians" rather than "warriors" in the performance of their innumerable duties. The contentious history of police attitudes and practices surrounding encounters with people affected by mental illnesses can be understood through the lens of this wider push toward guardianship. At least as far back as the de-institutionalization of mental health care and the profound lack of community-based resources to fill service deficits, the role of police as mental health interventionists has been controversial and complex. This paper reviews the first wave of reform efforts designed to re-shape police sensibilities and practices in the handling of mental health-related encounters. We argue that such efforts, centred on specialized training and cooperative agreements with the health care sector, have advanced a guardian mindset through improved knowledge and attitudes about mental health vulnerabilities and needs. Building on the progress made, we suggest there are critical opportunities for a new wave of efforts that can further advance the guardianship agenda. We highlight three such opportunities: (1) Enhancing experiences of procedural justice during mental health-related encounters; (2) Building the evidence base through integrated data sets; and (3) Balancing a "case-based" focus with a "place-based" focus.

Police investigations involve determining whether a crime has been committed, and if so what type of crime, who has committed it and whether there is the evidence to charge the perpetrators. Drawing on fieldwork in Delhi and Mumbai, this paper explores how police investigations unfolded in the specific context of women's deaths by burning in India. In particular, it focuses on the use of discretion despite its denial by those exercising it. In India, there are distinctive statutes relating to women's suspicious deaths, reflecting the widespread expectation that the bride's family will pay a dowry to the groom's family and the tensions to which this may on occasion give rise in the early years of a marriage. Often, there are conflicting claims influencing how the woman's death is classified. These in turn affect police investigation. The nature and direction of police discretion in investigating women's deaths by burning reflect in part the unique nature of the legislation and the particular sensitivities in relation to these types of death. They also highlight processes that are liable to be at work in any crime investigation. It was found that police officers exercised unacknowledged discretion at seven specific points in the investigative process, with potentially significant consequences for the achievement of just outcomes: first response, recording the victim's 'dying declaration', inquest, registering of the 'First Information Report', collecting evidence, arrest and framing of the charges.