The history of investigative interviewing in England and Wales has two distinct eras: one before and one after 1992. The era before 1992 was characterised by a lack of training and an over reliance on confessions from suspects, which led to the condemnation of police tactics by the Court of Appeal in high profile cases. Wider psychological research also revealed a general lack of interviewing ability amongst police officers with both suspects and witnesses at this time. This resulted in the introduction of the PEACE interview programme by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 1992. This was a oneweek national training course for all officers that covered both suspect and witness interviewing. By 2002 the 'one size fits all' approach of the original PEACE model had evolved into a tiered approach for officers dependent on their type of work. This approach included advanced interviewing for certain detectives involved in interviewing suspects and witnesses in major crime cases. The research in this thesis provides the first evaluation of the effectiveness of advanced interviewing through a series of empirical studies that followed a cadre of advanced interviewers through both training and real life interviews. The first study evaluated the training effect of an advanced suspect interview course by examining simulated interviews with suspects conducted before and after training. The second study assessed skills transference from training by examining post-training real life major crime suspect interviews. A third study, longitudinal in nature, then examined real life major crime witness interviews, for which the advanced interviewers had received further training. The fourth study was a qualitative study that focused on the questioning strategies used by the advanced interviewers, while the fifth and final study reported a thematic analysis of the patterns of question usage across different types of investigative interview conducted by interviewers with different levels of training using the Griffiths Question Map (GQM). The results of study 1 demonstrated that before the advanced training course the advanced interviewers were more skilled than other police interviewers. In particular they had good questioning and listening skills. Their weakest areas were rapport building and summarising. After interview training the advanced interviewers improved across all the areas of the interviews and clusters of behaviours analysed showing a strong positive training effect. The results of study 2 were varied. Initially the improvements in skill noted after training did transfer to real life successfully, although rapport building was notably weaker than the other behaviours examined. In addition, over time all behaviours then showed tangible skill erosion with the exception of legal behaviours, topic structure, questioning and listening. Study 3 revealed that the witness interviews conducted by the advanced interviewers were less skilfully executed than the suspect interviews. The advanced interviewers failed to use the enhanced cognitive interview effectively, preferring a conversation management approach which suggested an 'overshadowing' effect from the primary suspect interview training. The deeper examination of questioning strategies used by the advanced interviewers conducted in study 4 demonstrated that this approach to witness interviews was deliberate and reflected a preference for a probing question style regardless of interview situation. The final study identified the patterns of questions that were evident in different types of investigative interviews conducted by interviewers with different levels of training. Using a specially designed tool called the Griffiths Question Map (GQM) the results of study 5 are presented as visual representations of the different patterns of questions that were visible in investigative interviews conducted by interviewers with different levels of skill. The GQM introduces a new and unique method of analysing question use across all types of investigative interview. The final chapter is a discussion of the main findings and includes recommendations for future research. Overall the research studies indicate that advanced interview training does improve the interview ability of police officers. The studies also indicate, however, that further research is required into interview training design, the effect of time on skill and assumptions of competence for the same interviewers across witness and suspect disciplines. Advanced interviewing is a new concept, but one that is essential to the evolution of major crime investigation. This in depth evaluation of an advanced interview training programme makes a significant contribution to both overall knowledge of investigative interviewing and the effectiveness of modern day interview training.

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For four days in August 2011 there were widespread public disturbances in 66 locations across the country. Known as the ‘2011 English Riots’, they were estimated to have involved 15,000 participants, cost half a billion pounds and were associated with five deaths (Bridges 2012). The Prime Minister described them as ‘criminality, pure and simple’ (Cameron 2011). Consequently, there was no major official inquiry. An academic literature emerged, but this was theoretically driven and London-centric. The lack of an empirical evidence-base provided the rationale for this study. The aims were to understand why the riots occurred in some places outside London, but not others; to explore the role of police and partners in preventing and containing unrest; and, recognising that policing rarely takes place in a vacuum, to identify other contextual factors undermining and promoting social order at local levels. The case study method was selected for its ability to capture context. Cases included a riot affected city and an ‘at risk’ city, which were characteristically similar, to support a compare and contrast approach. Neighbourhood 'sub-cases' were used as a methodological tool to access community-level variables. The study drew on quantitative and qualitative data, but was primarily based on 45 interviews with police and partners involved in the public order response or working with affected communities. The study found that inequality, exclusion and poor treatment of communities provided motivation for rioting. However, the activities of police and partners were able to prevent and contain unrest. The involvement of neighbourhood police officers and practitioners in the main public order response offered greater chance of success, due to their local knowledge and rapport, but was dependent on pre-existing partnerships and the mind-set of police commanders. Informal social controls, underpinned by community attachment, played an important role in inhibiting violence, especially where supported by formal controls.

Black people in Britain have historically been over policed and under protected. Legislative and policy intervention in the past three decades has not brought about any significant change and, as evidenced by the post-August 2011 riots research, those racialized as Black still have low levels of confidence in the police. Contemporarily, most of what is understood in the field has emerged from statistical analyses of survey and statistical data on stop and search. Qualitative understanding is limited to the experiences of young people across Black and other ethnic minority groups. Within the existing research there is scant attention given to the racializing processes which shape police encounters. This research, grounded in a Critical Race framework, seeks to prioritise the stories and counter- stories of those marginalised by racializing processes. Based on semi structured interviews with twenty individuals who identified as Black or Black and white mixed-‘race’ the emerging counter-stories enable an understanding of ‘race’ and processes of racialization in police/citizen contact. This thesis examines both police initiated and citizen initiated contact and analyses ‘race’ contextually as it intersects with class, gender and Black masculinities. It illuminates how the whiteness of the police institution and processes of institutional racialization and racism, evident within contemporary policing practices, shapes police encounters. Further, it proposes that an activist agenda which makes racism visible can contribute to disrupting power structures and surviving racist affects.

This dissertation contributes to Brazilian public security studies from the perspective of critical criminology. It examines public experiences of insecurity and the social impacts of security programmes that aim to address violence in one Brazilian city: Recife. Between 1982 and 2007, Recife had one of the highest homicide rates in Brazil. Between 2008 and 2012, homicide rates declined in Recife in tandem with the implementation of a public security intervention entitled Pacto pela Vida or Pact for Life (PPV). However, few studies have examined this programme, the relations between urban marginalised communities and the public security system in Recife, or how the daily experiences of the urban poor in Recife are affected by violence and public security provision. This dissertation addresses this gap in the literature drawing on ethnographic methods to examine existing interactions between residents of lowincome communities and institutions of the public security system, especially the police and the prison. The research is based on data gathered through interviews, observations, focus groups and secondary sources, such as official data about levels of incarceration and homicide. It poses questions about the social effects of existing security policies, arguing that the emulation of mainstream criminological theories of crime control from the Global North produces large-scale perverse effects in the context of countries of the Global South. The findings are based on interviews with the police and data gathered in two low-income communities, one of which is located around a large prison. The data show that managerial police reforms and security programmes have not addressed long-standing issues of sexism, racism, classism and brutalising training in the police force. Moreover, through the increasing use of policing and hyper-incarceration as methods of crime control, security programmes have failed to inhibit diverse forms of violent and organised crime and exacerbated existing inequalities affecting the most marginalised populations.

Police officers are distinct and unique actors in public spaces. They experience a peculiar familiarity with wider society: they often do not personally know the citizens in the areas they patrol but everyone knows that they are part of the police by their uniform. Beyond the visual iconography of the basic clothing that police officers wear, the characteristics of ‘the police’ are embedded in everything that police officers use to do their job effectively: clothing, equipment (including discretionary equipment) and vehicles. This thesis examines the construction and communication of the police uniform and how this is conveyed through individual roles, ranks and gender. In recent years the police service has undergone a number of changes with the introduction of neighbourhood policing (NP) being one of the most significant. The arrival of neighbourhood police officers, neighbourhood beat officers and police community support officers have enabled a new position from which to analyse the uniform. Within this context, the thesis utilises an in-depth ethnography to examine the practical and symbolic uses of officer uniforms. The research involved approximately seventeen days on patrol (equating to roughly 140 hours) over a period of four months across four research sites in a northern police force. The findings reveal the strength of dominant policing discourses linked to the uniform, gender, identity and performance show the ways that these discourses are also infused and subverted by different sets of meanings and behaviours. The police constables (PCs) and police community support officers (PCSOs) involved in the study were seen to manoeuvre and navigate these contested discourses and fragmented nature of policing culture through the lens of their uniforms. Using Erving Goffman as a theoretical framework, along with the complementary work of Judith Butler (1993; 1999) and Malcolm Young (1991; 1992), this thesis contributes to the theoretical debate on the influence of the police uniform on the wearer; provides a gendered analysis of how equipment, vehicles and accoutrements are used to feminise and masculinise ‘unisex’ police clothing; and it provides an account of how rituals of purification are used in an attempt to avoid the symbolic, moral and physical contamination of the police occupation. The concluding discussion of the thesis presents a number of contributions in relation to contested binaries and polarities present through the use of occupational uniforms in neighbourhood policing.

Policing has been reconstructed from state provision to a mixture of public and private police providers. Bayley and Shearing (2001) have called for continuing research to enable a better understanding of the reconstruction. In addition, the transnational threat from organised crime groups (OCGs) and terrorists has increased (Lilley 2009). Therefore, this thesis examines a transnational police response to that threat and any resulting reconstruction of policing that occurs within a context of global policing theory. Transnational policing has previously been analysed by developing the Weberian theory of bureaucratisation. Police officers, with operational independence from their democratic nation state, meet to create transnational policing processes. This is known as 'Policeization' (Deflem 2002, p228) which is viewed by some critics as generating a loss of sovereignty and an increase in the global police state (Westmarland 2010). That tendency towards the global police state is confirmed more recently with a theory of global policing (Bowling and Sheptycki 2012). The increased threat from OCGs and terrorists has been accompanied by their increasing use of firearms (Bruggeman 2008, Jojarth 2009 and Rollins 2010) and my epistemological standpoint (Corbin-Dwyer and Buckle 2009) relates to the development of policing and intelligence gathering on the firearms threat. Therefore, this professional doctorate thesis has focused on the police transnational firearms intelligence network (the Network). Qualitative data has been gathered to establish whether the Network contributes to a reconstruction of policing. That data has been analysed using adaptive grounded theory (Chamaz 2006) and nodal network analysis (Shearing and Johnston 2010). As a result, this thesis articulates the UK firearms threat and the police response. The indications are that the Network is contributing to a glocal reconstruction of policing. The reconstruction includes pluralistic transnational action in partnership with other UK public organisations. There is no evidence of any privatisation of policing at the transnational level or any global control of UK policing through the Network.

The Police Service has a strategic priority to improve approaches to progression forunder-represented groups; however, it is facing continued challenges for this priority, as there is a lack of progression for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) officers. There are implicit suggestions in policy that increasing BME officers in the police would improve police culture in the form of attenuating the racism that may be creating barriers to recruitment and progression. Reform efforts have taken place in the UK Police Services in the last decade to have a more diverse workforce, especially with regard to race, sex and sexual orientation. However, contemporary research has repeatedly demonstrated that there are inherent problems in assimilation of officers that are not white males (Holdaway and O’Neill,2004; Bolton and Feagin, 2004; Cashmore, 2001). The common themes from previous research are that BME officers face barriers of stereotyping, police culture and racism that affects their working environment and prospects of progression. This thesis examined BME senior officers perceptions of progression in the British Police Service. The research was conducted within a qualitative paradigm to examine barriers to career progression that affected BME officers so that professional knowledge is improved for police leaders to consider alternative employment practices. This thesis focused on BME and white Superintendents working in the United Kingdom. BME Superintendents were excluded from the sub-culture of progression, which contained informal practices that were rooted to covert institutional racism. The predominant informal practice found was networks that operated covertly and were linked to chief officer sponsors who could provide mobility. Within the networks there was axiomatic knowledge providing vital dissemination of information for progression. BME Superintendents were negatively impacted by exclusion from these informal practices and exhibited physical and psychological behaviours such as working hard,anxiety and having a lack of confidence. A model describing the cause and effect of BME progression in the British Police Service was developed through this research and is presented as new professional knowledge.

The past two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in Knowledge Management, a concept which has been recognised as key to the success of an organization’s overall strategy. Public organizations have also come to realize the importance of managing data and information and of building an efficient knowledge base to achieve effective decision making which in turn increases organizational performance. Knowledge Management in police organizations is particularly important because police officers rely heavily on information and knowledge to perform their work. Despite the growing rate of adoption of Knowledge Management practices by both private and public organizations the literature shows that many Knowledge Management projects fail to achieve their assigned goals (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). This is because management neglects to determine the critical dimensions that influence the success of their Knowledge Management implementation initiatives. This study identifies and examines various factors that influence the success or failure of Knowledge Management initiatives as manifested in the Dubai Police Force, an Arab public-sector organization. Conclusions from the literature review and the pilot study found four main dimensions which are critically influential in the implementation of Knowledge Management in the Dubai Police Force, namely organizational culture, leadership style, information and communication technologies and training. This study examines the correlative relations of these critical dimensions, and of their collective association with regard to the Knowledge Management initiative. The findings conclude the validity of all the variables that were investigated, confirming a positive correlation between these critical factors and Knowledge Management practice. This study therefore contributes to Knowledge Management literature from an Arab public sector perspective by measuring the most critical factors in Knowledge Management implementation from within. It also proposes a model of critical success factors for Knowledge Management initiatives in this particular context.