Abstract
Writing on human rights seems so often to fall into one of two categories: doctrinal legal analysis of treaties and cases; and philosophical debate, whether analytical or critical. Each includes fine, important work; but they have always left me looking for more. Where are the actors and the social processes? How do people understand and relate to human rights?
Richard Martin's book is, I now realize, just what I had been looking for. This is a sociology of human rights, founded in extensive empirical fieldwork with people whose work is structured around the directives of human rights. It happens that the people who inhabit this study are police officers. Richard Martin makes a great contribution to policing studies, on which more below. But his book is much more than a book about policing. It breaks new ground in the study of human rights, as well as providing an exemplar of how to advance theory and empirical research together.
Martin's field is law in policing. For such work to excel, several skills are required. You must know public law as well as the international literature on law in policing. You must be able to conduct empirical research and to theorize the results of empirical studies. In addition, the researcher must have the personal qualities to develop relations with research subjects (who are likely to be at best suspicious of him or her) and the eye and the ear to make sense of what is encountered. These qualities are hard to define, but essential. Martin's work demonstrates high-level achievement in all these fields. His doctrinal skill in public law and his knowledge of policing literature are first class; he explains and uses varieties of theory deftly and accessibly; he has conducted empirical research in what must have been challenging circumstances; he makes sense of the empirical material, connecting it well to the international literature; and he has the eye and ear of an outstanding qualitative researcher.
The field of law in policing has been lying largely fallow (with the exceptions of work by Layla Skinns and Vicky Kemp) since the extensive work conducted in the years after the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Researchers in more recent years have been more concerned with legitimacy than legality, all too often not appreciating that the former is secondary to the latter. Martin's work is distinctive and innovative as the first significant law in policing work to take full account of the human rights environment. When I did law-in-policing research, officers relied on a practical version of the old crime control/suspects’ rights dichotomy. The Human Rights Act means that UK officers ought to see due process, fairness and justice not as constraints on policing objectives but as positive drivers structured into them. As Martin explains ‘Individuals are no longer to be seen as subjects of executive power reliant on a cluster of residual liberties, or mere service users of the administrative state, but as holders of distinct claim-rights that the state must respect’ (p. 7). Human rights require police to make decisions that are more complex than the simple binary of power/no-power: necessity and proportionality involve ‘the subtle weighing and structuring of competing interests that mark the particular contribution of a human rights approach to decision-making’ (p. 8). This is chess, not checkers.
Showing how police officers make sense of their human rights obligations and how the policing environment has been radically altered by these normative requirements, Martin uses ‘a sociological approach to human rights law that strives to appreciate the variation, complexity and influence of legal doctrine while playing close attention to the real-world settings in which (human rights) law is invoked, encountered and engaged with’ (p. 38). He examines ‘how human rights law interacts with officers’ routine practices, the way they talk about and make sense of their working world and the social and organizational structures within it’, drawing ‘on works from law, anthropology, criminology and organizational studies to make sense of human rights law in policing as a vernacular used in official discourse, as a subject of sensemaking for officers performing routing policing, and as a body of principles and standards interpreted and applied by officers as practitioners’ (p. 61). He is no cheerleader for human rights. His work shows close-up the difficulties and limitations as well as the benefits of the turn to rights.
This is a study of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The construction of new policing arrangements when the unlamented RUC was replaced provided the opportunity for fundamental re-thinking and restructuring around human rights. One facet of English prejudice against Ireland is a lack of interest in its affairs: for a long time, it was easier not to look. It would be a great shame if this fine book attracts fewer readers than it should for this reason. There are four main empirical concerns: tactical patrol group policing; community policing; public order policing; and detention of suspects. Martin is alert to differences between groups of officers. He provides very perceptive analyses of the contrasting ways that Tactical Support Group officers and neighbourhood policing teams officers make sense of their human rights obligations, with surprising results: few would guess that it is the former who internalize rights more.
As Martin points out, most ‘law in policing’ scholarship has centred on street-level policing. It is hard – for many reasons – to conduct qualitative research on senior officers. By gaining access to training sessions and the Northern Ireland Policing Board, Martin has been able to observe command-level officers talking openly about integrating human rights law into policing practice. One gap that might be explained in a note somewhere is that the book is all about uniformed policing: the word ‘detective’ appears only twice in the text.
Martin writes very well – clearly and accessibly. Notably, he is able to integrate complex doctrinal legal material with socio-legal empirical analysis and sociological theory. He draws and uses theories of various kinds, combining jurisprudential theory with social construction. Sometimes theoretical pluralism produces an inconsistent rag-bag; but not here. The way theory is put to work (rather than just presented for display) would be a fine example for doctoral students. Martin's facility with theory is shown in an excellent section on ‘common sense’ in policing which draws on Geertz (pp. 152–157). He might have connected this to another excellent earlier section on ‘legal closure’, drawing on Cotterrell (pp. 34–38). One effect of appealing to common sense is to close off alternatives – who would argue against common sense? – just as the invocation of human rights legitimizes claims and closes off alternatives.
Like KC Davis, the doyen of law in policing research, Martin's contribution is not just to criminal justice but to public law more generally. While researching different types of public officials, Martin's work is of the same quality as Simon Halliday's work on street-level bureaucrats – which means that it is as good as the best around. He also argues that non-lawyers working in the field have to take legal doctrine seriously.
The chapter on how custody officers carry out the crucial task of admitting suspects to custody is of particular interest to those who were involved in the post-PACE research. At that time, the main issue for debate was whether custody officers were effective in protecting suspects’ rights (which they recognized to be their job (p. 338)) or were mere tools of a crime control-focused police culture. Martin describes and analyses a different but comparable situation in which custody officers are caught between the demands of human rights obligations and managerial pressure to maximize arrests and detentions in order to meet performance measures. He tells a depressing story, in which the courts, so often ignorant of policing practices, fail to provide the regulatory backing that would allow custody officers to do their job of protecting suspects’ rights. Custody officers may only very rarely refuse to accept an arrested suspect into detention; but in doing so, they are not the mindless tools of structural oppression as suggested by some writers on PACE. Instead, Martin describes officers who are well aware that their agency is inappropriately confined. This is a fine piece of work, combining incisive doctrinal analysis with perceptive empirical material from interviews with custody officers.
This a book buzzing with ideas. One that I would like to see Martin develop in a journal article is how human rights law is different from previous legislation. This is not as simple as I suggested above. As officers pointed out to Martin, PACE drew on a framework of principles (articulated by the Philips Commission). In turn, human rights develop into rules of a kind as courts apply them and police officers engage with them. Several officers stressed the continuity between law in policing before and after the PSNI's embrace of human rights. That is just one area for future inquiry and debate set up by this excellent book's path-breaking contribution.
