ABSTRACT
Calls for governments and government agencies to be ‘human rights compliant’ have a long history, and since they were established in Britain in the nineteenth century, the ‘new police’ have been in the sights of rights activists. This chapter deals with a brief review of recent developments in understandings of conceptions of ‘human rights’ and ‘policing’, including the proliferation and diversity of policing providers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It considers the history of calls for ‘human rights compliant’ policing, and how the emergence of ‘plural policing’ has necessitated a rethinking of what ‘human rights compliant policing’ means and requires, in terms of re-theorizing and reforming the governance of policing. Police accountability mechanisms have largely grown out of concerns about the activities of public police. Sociological studies have highlighted that surveillance is not a neutral watching activity but a targeted strategy of control.
