HOMELAND SECURITY Policing by consent is not ‘woke’ — it is fundamental to a democratic society Policing by consent – rather than by punitive approaches – is entirely in step with the fundamental ethos of democratic policing, writes Massey University Associate Professor Bethan Greener in The Conversation.
Bethan Greener is Associate Professor in Politics at Massey University. Her books include The New International Policing (2009), Internal Security and Statebuilding: Aligning Agencies and Functions (with W.J. Fish in 2015) and an edited collection Army Fundamentals: From Making Soldiers to the Limits of the Military Instrument (2017).
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National Party justice spokesperson Simon Bridges has accused New Zealand Police Commissioner Andrew Coster of being a “wokester” whose commitment to “policing by consent” is out of step with the law. The claims were in response to Coster’s avowed belief that police need to engage with the community in a nuanced manner, which includes the wider principle of policing by consent. Coster has also recently said the police “can’t arrest our way out of the gang problem”. But Bridges should know consent is a fundamental requirement for democratic policing. In the absence of public consent, we would have an occupying force, not a police force. Modern police forces in liberal democratic states are a recent creation.
Unlike the standing armies that formed alongside the sovereign state in the 1600s, policing (at least in the way we understand it in Western democracies) came late to the fray. Policing by consent As European monarchs struggled to imbue diverse regional groups with a sense of nationalism and national loyalty, countries such as France, Spain and Italy created a more militarised and mobile “continental” model of policing. These utilised “gens d’armes” — armed people — to establish constabulary forces. In the UK, however, a different model of policing evolved. In the early 1800s, citing disorder and rising crime, British Home Secretary Robert Peel argued for the creation of a unified
Line of Defence
