This study explores value conflicts in community or neighbourhood policing from a perspective of political realism, which suggests that such conflicts are inevitable and can only be resolved in temporary and contingent ways. However, less attention is given to conflict between values, either within communities or between communities and the police. Research on police legitimacy and public confidence underlines the importance of the police demonstrating moral alignment with the communities they serve. Discussions on the broad subject of leadership also tend to involve successful military, political, business or social leaders – for example, Hannibal, Margaret Thatcher, Steve Jobs and Gandhi – or legendary sport coaches such as Vince Lombardi or Sir Alex Ferguson. The subjects are typically successful or controversial politicians, generals or business executives. It may be based on published profiles and/or interviews with leaders by journalists or academics using structured interviews for research purposes. In the area of leadership studies, much of the available material is historical, biographical and psychological. The position taken is that a number of leadership styles are required to direct the police organisation and to take charge of operations that leadership is required at all levels throughout the organisation and that far more attention needs to be paid to shaping leadership development geared to the specific mandate and unique nature of policing and the need for different approaches at different times. Having explored the general leadership material, the second part of this chapter is dedicated to leadership development and how police leaders make it to the top in England and Wales and the Netherlands. Following on from that – and illustrated by the examples of serious incident management in Chapter Four – there would seem to be a need for officers who are competent, confident, tried and tested, and, importantly, whose leadership is rooted in the values of an accountable public service within a democracy. In Chapter One the authors opted for viewing leadership pragmatically as what is needed given the nature of the police organization and the challenges it faces operationally and institutionally. It is, then, an infinitely elastic concept that confusingly stretches across diverse disciplines. Indeed, there are, according to Alison and Crego (2008), as many definitions of leadership as there are authors on the subject. A leading authority in the area, Manfred Kets de Vries (of INSEAD, the prime European business school), once stated at a conference that no-one really knows what the term means. Yet ‘leadership’ remains one of the fuzziest concepts in social sciences. There is an immense literature on leadership of varying quality and in different disciplines, along with a range of popular books, courses and gurus informing people how to become a successful leader. This chapter deals with leadership and leadership development, which are key matters in policing (Adlam and Villiers, 2003). It is suggested they may play out in ways that frustrate their architects’ hopes, due to the continuing baleful consequences of neoliberalism. 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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