Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

This study is available via the UK Data Service Qualibank, an online tool for browsing, searching and citing the content of selected qualitative data collections held at the UK Data Service. This research investigated public and professional understandings of policing in relation to English social history since 1945. The research explored the cultural and symbolic representation of English policing culture in the post-war period. They conducted documentary analysis of official 'representations' of policing, and carried out oral historical research with various strata of the public ('citizens'), retired and long-serving police officers and a small number of 'key players' in post-war policing debates (police spokespersons, civil servants and politicians). They sought to investigate how these different groups remember and reconstruct ideas around policing as well as looking at how policing is situated in relation to other aspects of English society and culture. The researchers explored substantive questions such as ‘why is it that people invest so heavily in policing as a – if not the – principal source of social order?’, ‘What anxieties, fears, hopes and fantasies underpin this attachment?’ and ‘how has English policing been officially represented since 1945?’ In so doing, the research drew on recent work in social theory, anthropology and social history in order to examine how policing serves as a vehicle through which people understand the society they live in, and interpret its past, present and possible futures.

Main Topics:

Topics covered in the interviews included police services; police, ministerial and political activities; police personnel; community-police relationships; social attitudes; social change; government policy; crime and social history in England.

Purposive selection/case studies

Face-to-face interview

individual interviews and focus groups