Changing Policing by Studying History
How a Historian Is Helping Improve Policing in the United Kingdom
Paul Lawrence is a historian who works with police departments to educate officers about the history of policing. Most institutions and disciplines, when left to their own devices, tend to produce histories that are sanitised, progressive, and often neatly linear. Reality is messier.1
Lawrence says a strange thing happens when you ask a police officer about the history of policing.2 He is often met with blank stares or some references to “Peelian principles.” These officers tend to shrug and say their job is to deal with the present, and “what’s happening on the streets,” rather than the past. If you insist and ask about stop and search, about trust, and the sense that the relationship between the public and the police is broken, you are inevitably talking about the past, whether you would like to or not.
Missing Archives and Hidden Stories
The British Police Force is among the few public institutions in the United Kingdom that do not need to follow the Public Records Act. Thus, most of the forty-five forces in operation across the UK have no obligation to preserve their records. A subset of these have decided to maintain informal museums, whereas others bin their archives. Only the Metropolitan Police is formally required to make its records public, but the release of these records is selective and strategic. According to Lawrence, this reveals that these forces resist historical awareness.
Lawrence works as a historian at the Open University, and he has started collaborating with police officers to change how they approach their history. He sustained that this lack of historical reflection is a structural flaw, and that current police training is narrow, ruthlessly practical, and uninterested in context. These institutions have treated history and especially the history of race and policing as dangerous. He suggests that this ongoing practice could border on negligence.
Why History Matters in Policing?
A proper police history is not meant to turn police officers into academic historians. Instead, historising policing can help police officers understand the context in which they police. Namely, their jobs involve making decisions and taking actions that are loaded with meaning.
For example, Lawrence observes that when Black and Asian communities claim that they are being over-policed and insufficiently protected, they are expressing pre-existing anxieties reflecting decades of practice. Thus, each potentially conflictual situation is interpreted through a prism tainted by previous experiences. Recent surveys substantiate these claims, with close to 58% of ethnic minority Britons thinking that the Metropolitan Police is racist and misogynistic.3 Lawrence claims that history, when done well and used appropriately, can clear everyone’s view.
Lawrence sustains that a proper police history could help with forming professional identity and culture. More importantly, such a historical analysis can provide operational insights by revealing how tactics have worked across space and time. Such a history could guide ongoing and future transformations of policing by inviting those in charge to reflect on previous efforts to change policing.
Building Impactful Historical Training
Lawrence has been collaborating with the Thames Valley Police (TVP), which operates in a socially and economically diverse area West of London. TVP reached out for help as part of the National Police Race Action Plan, which called for efforts to address institutional racism. TVP asked Lawerence to help develop a training program that included videos, materials, and real stories to which their staff could relate.
Lawrence and his team spent six months delivering sessions to close to two thousand officers. The sessions began by looking at the present and focusing on racial disparities in stop and search, deaths in custody, and use of force. The instructors did so while allowing the discomfort to fester. Then, they asked their students whether these disparities were justifiable and whether they reflected the actions of a few individual bad apples. After introducing these present-day disparities, they began speaking about the past through testimonies, archival footage, and case studies from the force’s own jurisdiction.
These historians used juxtaposition provocatively. For example, they set footage from openly racist officers in the 1980s against contemporary interviews.4 They encouraged present officers to confront the past of their jurisdiction, and while not all officers liked it, the activity was very engaging. Lawrence claims that some officers admitted they had never considered the deeper history behind their daily routines. For others, it was the first time they considered what allyship might actually look like in uniform.
The program was successful, and three-quarters of participants reported that the training shifted their understanding. More than two-thirds said they were interested in more historical context. Finally, close to 40% said they might approach their job differently because of the training.
Contested History
While these numbers are not earth-shattering, they are significant, especially in a context where change occurs slowly. Lawrence suggests that historical knowledge can impact police practices, but only if it is made digestible for officers. He suggests that academic history needs to be adapted to better meet the needs of police officers. Police officers are practical, cautious, and often politically anxious; thus, reaching them requires finding stories that connect personal pride to institutional accountability.
After this successful program, the British Transport Police reached out to the same team. This police force is responsible for railways, one of the most surveilled terrains in the country. Lawrence and his team have designed an online, interactive program that helps users view history not as a distraction, but as a valuable tool.
What Comes Next
Lawrence argues that every act of policing is also an act of memory. Memories that speak to who is dangerous, who is innocent, whose complaints matter, whose deaths are routine. Thus, the crisis of police legitimacy cannot be solely solved by adding history modules to police training, but this can help.
Lawrence aims for a more profound reckoning, where officers are taught not only the procedures of their role but also the legacies they have inherited with the badge. He hopes that history can instil honesty in institutions and individuals, which is pivotal in a profession built on trust.
Conclusions: On the Uses of Historical Study
Academic history demands a degree of intellectual honesty and treating historical actors in terms of their own time. In contrast to many disciplines that write their history, trained historians avoid producing works of hagiography. This is much needed for institutions like the police force.
Curing Crime applauds Lawrence’s efforts in transforming academic history into practical, useful materials. Such an approach seems especially promising for institutions whose interactions with the public significantly impact the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Despite the publication posts being deeply sceptical of efforts to use scientifico-medical approaches to explain why people commit crimes and how to reduce Crime, Curing Crime strongly thinks that these tools are essential in our attempt to understand the causes of Crime and how to reduce it. Quantifying the effects of such training programs is pivotal in determining their utility.5 Such efforts to quantify should extend beyond surveys and investigate whether those who received training have changed their practice.
Lastly, we cannot emphasise how carefully such programs need to be designed. The historians in this case are making choices about which present problems to highlight, which case studies from the jurisdiction collection to utilise, and which kinds of materials to juxtapose. It is in this design that the power of the intervention lies, and such designs have, on occasion, had unintended consequences.
This was written and scheduled before my surgery of November 28th. I hope you enjoy it.
This post substantially draws from a talk given by Lawrence. Last April, I attended the ESSHC conference in Leiden. While I took notes on my iPad, the talks were short, and the pace was quite quick. Hence, I may have inadvertently made a mistake in transcribing or interpreting my notes.
In some ways, it does not matter if the Metropolitan Police is currently institutionally racist. What matters is how it is perceived, as this shapes how the public interacts with the police. A historical lens can help policing by enabling them to develop targeted interventions that help gain the public’s trust.
One could perhaps raise the spectre of Whig history, and doing history with a purpose. How are these historians selecting case studies, and to what end?
We are aware that such efforts are laden with assumptions and that there are problems with collecting data. Nevertheless, changes in practices are more important than officers claiming to have changed their minds. What does it matter if they think differently, but act the same?