ABSTRACT
The two broad forms of public disorder – dramatic, temporary and discrete events, and mundane, enduring and cumulative processes – both express social conflict. This chapter examines the experience of different policing techniques by police and public, contrasting the apparatus of forceful social control with contemporary approaches to community policing, and considering their points of convergence. Placed deliberately between discussions of the paramilitary apparatus of policing and discussions of partnership work and community policing, a discussion of internal divisions within forces and the stressful effects of police work represents the police workforce as the locus of unresolved tensions between the competing approaches. Graphic testimony that a weak force enjoying public support is more effective than a powerful force without is conveyed by the England and Wales police ratio of 2.4 officers per 1,000 population compared to 5 officers per 1,000 in Northern Ireland (Department of Justice, 2003); in the late 1970s, though, the ratio was 2 officers to 1,000 on the mainland, 20 to 1,000 in Northern Ireland (Alderson, 1979).
