Policing a Safe, Just and Tolerant Society

Is public safety a prior requisite for tolerance - and how integral to justice are tolerance and safety? To build and sustain a society that is tolerant safe and respects other fundamental principles is a key challenge of the modern era: and the theme of this book. This title is from the authors of the acclaimed "Police Leadership in the 21st Century" (Waterside Press, 2003). With a Foreword by Conor Gearty plus other expert contributions . In "Police Leadership in the 21st Century", the authors argued that policing by consent and democratic leadership fit together and that autocratic leadership has no place in modern policing. Democratic leadership, however, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. The police service of a modernising democracy needs to be sure of its ethos and clear in its social philosophy if it is to assert and retain the operational independence from political direction that is needed for professional excellence.At the same time, a modern police service needs to be able to achieve success in co-operation with other agencies in order to promote and sustain public safety within the context of a just and tolerant society.
As Conor Gearty (Professor of Human Rights Law and Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics) writes in his preface to this volume: the reader will find in these pages an approach to policing that, though it may originate in critical thinking in Britain and the US, goes far beyond both jurisdictions in its implications and application. Such breadth is especially to be welcomed in this age of increased global co-operation in policing. The police officer wherever he or she might be in the world should wear the badge of virtue as well as of authority, and a great strength of this book is that it explains what this means while also showing that it is possible.This title includes work by Edwin Delattre, John Kleinig, Charles Heffernan, Alasdair MacIntyre, Seumas Miller, Milan Pagon and others explores the changing demands on police virtue and identifies the fundamental values that need to be re-appraised and if necessary re-asserted. Satish Kumar would prefer to see a society working towards compassion than one that rested at the half-way stage of tolerance.
From another perspective, Sir David Calvert-Smith, the former Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales, argues that there must be limits to tolerance: 'No society will wish to tolerate the intolerable'.David Canter compares the work of the police officer and that of the academic and points out how each needs the other, drawing on new and long-established work on the psychology of prejudice to illustrate how the transformation of an organization requires more than good intent, however necessary as an impetus to change. Garry Elliott, a serving police officer, examines the police approach to the sharing of Best Practice within public services, and Robert Panzarella explores the emerging model of public safety policing.