Positive action paradox in UK police recruitment: A critical perspective

Police recruitment across the UK is under intense political and social pressure to increase representation and legitimacy. This layered in to a quest to raise the number of police officers in England and Wales by 20,000. However, despite decades of reform initiatives, police recruitment continues to be a challenging and potentially exclusionary process for candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds. Research in this area mainly comprises macro-level process evaluation and subsequent extrapolation of the results into positive action initiatives. There is a paucity of research at the micro-interaction level among social actors. In this paper, we present a case study of police recruitment in a large English Police Constabulary over four recruitment cohorts in 2018. We conducted 26 long-form, in-depth interviews with new police recruits. Utilising the embeddedness theoretical framework based on sociological studies of the labour market, we attempt to understand police recruitment at the micro-social interaction level. We demonstrate that police recruitment has a high level of social embeddedness within the Constabulary. Candidates utilise social connections throughout the recruitment process to develop competence in the recruitment stages, while also building their respective police social identities. Although positive action recipients also receive significant organisational and instrumental support, they build a relationship with the abstract organisation and not existing police officers. This creates an imbalance in social identity development and may have implications for how positive action initiative recipients may struggle within the policing environment. Further implications exist for positive action design and implementation.