ABSTRACT
Police forces possess wide and growing powers over the citizens of the industrial states they have been set up to serve. In England and Wales, the countervailing powers of the citizenry over the police, either directly or via their elected representatives, are restricted and ill-defined. Justices of the Peace are also the custodians of vestigial powers of police command, which have not been used since before the Police Acts of the early nineteenth century. Both the ‘centralized’ and the ‘specialist’ organizations for making decisions have two kinds of end product: a set of decisions; and equally important, a set of papers. Personal data, however, are assembled in a nonuniform way which has obvious implications for decision-making. Unrecorded data may of course affect the outcome in individual cases, particularly those where ‘consultation’ of either a formal or an informal nature has taken place between the police and any other agency.
