A question of scandal? The police and the phone-hacking business

Abstract

Scandals have featured consistently in the development and operation of public policing in England and Wales. However, criminologists have rarely explored scandal as a concept or its attempted management by criminal justice organizations. This article contributes to the filling of this gap with the intention of initiating debate on the utility of scandal as a conceptual tool for the analysis of policing and criminal justice. It identifies the core components of a scandal using an analytical framework informed by scandal research undertaken across disciplinary areas. Taking a case study approach, this framework is applied to the Leveson Inquiry which explored a combination of potentially scandalous episodes within the overarching scandal of phone-hacking. The article concludes that phone-hacking was a scandal at macro and micro levels under this framework yet damage to the reputation of the police was mitigated through active impression management and enduring characteristics of the police image.

Keywords

Leveson Inquiry organizational reputation police–media relations policing scandals reputation management scandal

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