Based on qualitative empirical research on two major police forces in England and Wales, the paper arrives at three main conclusions. This paper examines the impact of police performance management on the ‘occupational professionalism’ of British policing actors with a particular focus on organisational units concerned with criminal investigation. It is suggested they may play out in ways that frustrate their architects’ hopes, due to the continuing baleful consequences of neoliberalism.Īs with other parts of the public sector, policing has had to confront the principles and processes attached to new public management. These claims are critically analysed in principle, but how they work out in practice is hard to prophesy. The Coalition purports to be democratizing police accountability through elected Police and Crime Commissioners. The current British Coalition government’s tendentious ‘austerity’ measures make these perennial problems especially acute. Accountability has become accountancy, under the auspices of New Public Management. The complex role of the police has been distilled down to criminal catching. The article focuses on how this has developed in England and Wales, although there are parallels with other jurisdictions. Both issues have been radically altered through the profound transformation of policing produced by the last three decades of neo-liberal hegemony.

This article critically analyses two key debates about police and policing: the problematic definition of their role, and how they can be rendered democratically accountable.

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