Peelian Principles | Hacker News Reader

Peelian Principles

en.wikipedia.org

69 pointshosteur56 comments

There is a joke:

    Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and it's all organised by the Swiss.
    
    Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lover's Swiss, the police German and it's all organised by the Italians.

I've lived in Canada, the UK and the US. My experiences with the police in the UK were really very good. They are polite, affable, efficient and seem to care about their work. Canadian police are not quite as good, IMO, but still reasonably ok, although they do tend to have the "command attitude" and slight military edge that I associate with the US police. I did not have any contact with police in the six years I was in the US.

I'd say the same for Australian as you do for Canadian police: mostly good but with a 'command attitude.' The general feeling here is that police spend too much time 'revenue raising' rather than policing crime the community actually cares about, like theft and violence. I think this would be solved with a dedicated force for less serious offenses and fines. I think the best system is the UK where most police have no weapons and little power, but can call for an armed response if necessary.

The UK police do complain a lot about how ineffective the courts are at keeping reoffenders off the streets -- but at least they dont have to debase themselves by being "revenue raisers".

As a Swiss with an Italian partner we both agree about the Italian part but must protest about the Swiss part in hell and the French part in heaven! French food in Switzerland is excellent though.

> I did not have any contact with police in the six years I was in the US.

This actually sounds perfect.

I think, perhaps, the biggest difference is that in the US, it is common to talk about "police and civilians" and people being commonly arrested for "refusing a lawful order". Despite the nominal government structures, the US is more authoritarian with the jackboots and the UK is less so. I always found that funny. Not to say the UK is perfect but it's definitely better.

In Norway, if you're there when the kids finish school, you'll see them in their red jumpsuits/overalls and the interaction between obviously drunk young people and police is amusing to see. I saw a few with their arms around the police, sometimes playing by taking the police hats off and putting them on before returning them.

That is not a thing you would likely see in the US. Overall, I prefer living here, but I wish my children could have that sort of interaction with the police and not the sort you get in the US with dour-faced humorless golems ready to do violence at the slightest sign of personal discomfort.

"finish school" as in graduate (at age ~19), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russefeiring

Why would you prefer living in the US given choice? (Honest question, never been to either country)

Greater economic mobility. Better weather. And now, friends and family.

The UK has lots of advantages, just that these trump those. But as I think about raising children I'm definitely reconsidering the US because of the weird school culture here that allows violence and stuff. And I don't want all this school shooting drill stuff and lately they're teaching a lot of helplessness here.

Oh, I thought you were choosing between Norway and US.

Fair points.

Wikipedia doesn't have a page on policing models yet, but here's some more:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#Strategies

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_policing

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence-led_policing

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassurance_policing

And, most indexically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_law_enforcement

These models seem to just be fancy labels used to rebrand the approaches of beleaguered police departments (see history of 'Intelligence-led policing').

Police departments should have aspects of all of these: they should have a good relationship with the community they police, their work should be based on good intelligence, and their efforts should reassure the community.

Similar to 'evidence based medicine': the name implies evidence wasn't being used before, or is somehow being used more effectively. The truth is that it is just a nice sounding name chosen so that no-one can disagree with it on face value. This label is used to justify changes in health policy, but the policies shouldn't be questioned because they are now 'evidence based.' My local naturopath is now evidence-based too!

It's hard to even have a discussion about something without some label to distinguish it from similar things.

"Naming things" is famously one of the two hard problems of computer sxient.

I completely agree.

In this case the labels are arbitrarily created so as to convince people that progress is being made. The discussion becomes vacuous because the labels aren’t well defined. This is by design.

“Peelian principles” are a useful label because they mean something very concrete, they have some reasoning behind them, they have real substance.

Policy discussions should always be about effectiveness of current policy and ideas for reform. To be effective, terms need to be clear and simple.

From @nanovision's commment:

> The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

This is a great example of not falling for Goodhart's law, actually. (When a metric becomes a measure ...)

Number of speeding tickets handed out and many other such measures are proxies, not the real purpose of (traffic) policing. If everyone follows the limit and drives safely, the number of tickets handed out ends up being zero.

It's kind of like being an IT person.

When your systems are properly funded, your team properly trained, and your leadership is properly leading, then it looks like you do nothing all day when what you actually do is properly monitoring and maintaining the systems, then people outside of the group ask, "What are we paying you for?".

But when your systems are cobbled together, your team hired from craigslist ads and interviewed by an HR person who knows nothing of the job requirements, and your leadership hasn't seen a member on your team since 1988, and you literally spend your entire day running from location to location putting out fires, the people outside the group ask, "What are we paying you for?"

After reading this list of basic yet primary principles on how to police, my first though is what changes would make sense in the age of technology -- almost none IMO.

Yet after that I'm thinking of how many layers of second or third order arguments I see from the US to deal with lawlessness is San Francisco for instance, and how that's altered even my views as far-removed Eastern European.

There don't seem to be obvious actions, but the US really needs to cut down on its layers of abstraction, since it's leaking then all over the world.

aka “policing by consent”

The gov.uk website says it quite well, “It should be noted that it refers to the power of the police coming from the common consent of the public, as opposed to the power of the state.”

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policing-by-conse...

I’d also like to add I’ve lived almost half my adult life in the US, being from the UK originally and encounters with the police in each country has a very different feel. It subjectively feels like the peelers in the UK have more latitude and responsibility than the cops in the US and I’ve often wondered if this was due to the Peelian Principles. It also feels like the US has cops everywhere, unlike the UK, though I suppose there are massive regional differences.

Policing by consent but you can’t withdraw your consent? I know a couple perpetually angry people on Twitter who’d be have a thing or two to say about this definition of the term “consent”.

The article even quotes an inofficial 10th principle, “No individual can choose to withdraw his or her consent from the police, or from a law.”

It’s a good set of principles but I fail to see what’s consensual about it.

As long as no one wants to withdraw, then there's no problem. And policing by concent puts the burden on achieving that state on the police.

It's consent on average. Of course no sane criminal is going to consent to being arrested, that's not quite the point this article is trying to make.

Ofc, but given that there’s no way whatsoever to withdraw consent, it’s meaningless.

It’s policing by democracy. That’s fine, and I know no better way, but it’s not consent. It’s just majority rule.

I think “Policing by majority approval” would be a better term. That’s also Peel’s main point I think: to not police in name of some sole ruler or small elite but in name of, and in service of, everybody.

I wonder whether in the 19th century “consent” meant something different.

Eh fair enough, but that's debating definitions which is not usually all that interesting. Seems like word choice aside we agree.

When you have millions of people, you need to form abstractions over large groups. The Majority of the Public is a million times better than The Whim of the King.

But it needs to be more than just "majority". I'm not sure Peelian policing can work if 40% of the society doesn't approve of them. 1%? Sure, that will probably work. 10%? Not sure. Somewhere well before 50%, it breaks down.

Society is package deal. In free world one can seek citizenship where rules appeal to them.

If none do, then that's a problem. But if every option is bad, then maybe the fault lies within the one common factor, ie. you?

Or maybe the problem lies with violent power-hungry cabals that dominate the Earth by force?

Governments aren't created democratically, they are created by the people with the biggest weapons and least hesitation to use them.

Indeed. No means no.

I took its discussion of consent to more mean something like "a democratic[1] police force can only be effective if the society it is operating in wants it to be successful". For example, there are currently significant segments of America where the social norm is to never involve or assist police except for the most extreme crimes[2]; this of course significantly impairs the police's ability to effectively respond to more minor crimes.

[1] I went back and forth on what to call this. Basically by "democratic police force" I mean one that doesn't adopt strategies that we tend to associate with a "police state" such as keeping the peace by crushing dissent, draconian punishments for any challenge to authority, pervasive surveillance, etc.

[2] I recently heard someone frame it as "you should only call the police when violence would help the situation".

Remember when Britain's American colonies made a whole new country based on the principle of government by consent? Thomas Jefferson remembers.

Sometimes it seems like the American Revolution liberated Britain more than the USA.

I know Charlie Stross reads HN, so I'm going to say that I really enjoyed his book The Annihilation Score, which uses Peel as a plot device.

It's book six or seven in a series, but all the books really stand alone.

Offhand remarks on HN is, without sarcasm, probably the best way to stumble across good great books.

For more of Stross on Peel, here he discusses Peelian principles after the Ferguson police killed Michael Brown - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/08/ferguson... . "It seems to me that if they’re not committed to the Peelian principals, then they’re not a police force: they’re something else."

Also, from http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/07/crib-she... :

> I will note that modern policing in the British Isles, as largely established by Sir Robert Peel with his reforms and the Peelian Principles, was in no small part a reaction to the previous practice of crime suppression via a system of badly-enforced but brutal and draconian punishments (the Bloody Code) and freelance thief-takers (such as Jonathan Wild, who per wikipedia "invented a scheme which allowed him to run one of the most successful gangs of thieves of the era, all the while appearing to be the nation's leading policeman").

> Seriously, go read up on Jonathan Wild and the legal climate he operated in. It wasn't so much corrupt as broken by design, and very badly so: the analogies with the private "corrections" industry in the USA today should be glaringly obvious.

I'd just caution that Bill Parker, police chief in 1950 Los Angeles, was also thinking he had consent of "civilization" in suppressing the "disorderly chaos", but which often really meant anyone not fitting certain stereotypes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line

This lead to extreme racial injustice/discrimination, which lead to the 1965 Watts riots. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_riots

We can say we are governing by consent, but we also have to ask, whose consent? I like the idea here. But it still requires more safeguards to be adequate.

You seem to have taken the words "policing by consent", applied your own interpretation of what that means and focussed on that. From the second paragraph, we can see that the actual meaning of that phrase is in this context is:

> "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.

So there's a bit more nuance and explicitly references transparency, integrity and accountability. If you keep reading there's a nice list of 9 principles in a pretty easy-to-digest form further down the page which set things out in a bit more detail.

This doesn't mean that the UK's police is perfect (see the recent report on the Met police down in London for one example), but it means that they're driven by different goals/principles and held to different (arguably higher) standards than those in, for example, the USA.

The police cars here have "Protect and Serve" decals. Saying it doesn't make it so. The proof is in the behaviors.

And the behaviour is guided by what they are legally allowed to do, or what they think they can get away with. It's pretty clear that the US is far more lenient on police and frequently lets them get away with murder, often quite literally. They're above the law.

As I said, UK police aren't perfect and tbh I'm sure they'd love to carry guns around and push people around a bit with a bit more impunity. But they aren't untouchable in their duties.

> I'm sure they'd love to carry guns around

Some of them would, but perhaps not a majority. When the Police Federation most recently surveyed their members on this question in 2017 [1], 66% were opposed to routinely arming officers with firearms (although that number is down from 82% in 2006).

[1] https://www.polfed.org/our-work/operational-policing/firearm...

Pleasantly surprised by that, though the decline is a bit concerning.

The police are part of a society, with it's culture, values, principles and so on. You can not divorce it from that and expect to take the principles of one country at a certain time and apply it to another country at a different time. Having unarmed police for example in a place where drivers pull guns when they are stopped for a broken signal is not really a recipe for success.

The police is a reactionary force by definition. They can not change the society, like education. The police are also recruited from regular citizens. You can not expect higher standards as there is no mythical perfect citizens pool to draw from. You still get them from the swamp, if that's what your society is.

Well, you should still try to get the best of the swamp. They won't be perfect. They're still human. But they should still be some of the best humans you can find.

The best you can find that are willing to join given salaries, working conditions, job satisfaction, public image of the job, etc.

Which is rather worrying considering the starting salary of a UK police officer has shrunk rather considerably in the last decade, as has general public trust in policing. Eg, in 2010 or so a cop in London would expect to start on ~30k, and that's pretty much where it is today.

""" As regards the police, the hatred of a costermonger to a “peeler” is intense, and with their opinion of the police, all the more ignorant unite that of the governing power. “Can you wonder at it, sir,” said a costermonger to me, “that I hate the police? They drive us about, we must move on, we can’t stand here, and we can’t pitch there. But if we’re cracked up, that is if we’re forced to go into the Union (I’ve known it both at Clerkenwell and the City of London workhouses,) why the parish gives us money to buy a barrow, or a shallow, or to hire them, and leave the house and start for ourselves: and what’s the use of that, if the police won’t let us sell our goods?--Which is right, the parish or the police?” """

Henry Mayhew, _London Labor and the London Poor_, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55998/55998-0.txt

Would someone from/in the UK/NZ/AU/etc. be able to say more about the outcomes of these principles, e.g. in the context of public protests? The Wikipedia page implies that police activity during protests are fundamentally different than those in other Western countries, but doesn't say what about them makes them different.

UK/AU here. It used to be different, but the increasing militarisation of police in both the UK and Australia is apparent.

The UK police are still unarmed, with armed response units that respond to any situation involving (or potentially involving) guns. Australian police are armed, and there's definitely a shift in attitude from that (though Aussies are generally have a more authoritarian outlook than Brits, so it may just be that).

The UK is fast turning into a fascist state [0] and the police there are being given new powers to deal with protests [1]. Australian police are always pleading for more powers, and already have more then they need (imho).

I was explaining to an American recently about Peelian Principles, and the idea that the police are just normal citizens who are employed to deal with crime and order blew his mind. I think the Peel attitude still resonates with both UK and Aus citizens, but I'm not so sure it's still the guiding principle of either police force.

[0] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/05/the-twilight...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Order_Act_2023

> I was explaining to an American recently about Peelian Principles, and the idea that the police are just normal citizens who are employed to deal with crime and order blew his mind.

Right. The classic legal view of police power is that the only extra authority police have is the authority to arrest on suspicion. Anyone has the authority to arrest if they witness a felony. This worked in the UK until the second half of the 19th century, before handguns were common. A group of citizens could detain a crook. See "Hue and cry".

(Handguns didn't work very well until the second half of the 19th century, with the development of all-metal cartridges and revolvers. Handguns before that were single shot, high-maintenance, rather fussy to use, and often misfired. Most criminals used reliable knives or clubs.)

Honestly, I think "fast turning into a fascist state" is... a bit strong. Yes, the government is passing laws that reduce the threshold for protest to be stopped, but we still have free elections and stuff.

I was quoting Craig Murray, kinda. I remember the Poll Tax riots, and how they affected the decision on that policy. Real, substantive, change to the government's thinking based on public protest. That couldn't happen today because of the change in laws - the protests would be stopped before they ever started, and wouldn't turn into riots (in part because police tactics have changed and they no longer try to turn protests into riots).

I'm a huge optimist about the future. I believe the world is a better place, on average, than it used to be and getting better every year. But the trend to authoritarianism in the West, together with the increasing wealth gap, is worrying. Historically this produces violent revolutions - the rich get richer, and pass increasingly draconian laws to contain the anger of the rest of society, until the point where it cannot be contained and the rich get slaughtered in a revolution. I find it unbelievable that we're headed there, and yet cannot deny the evidence.

I cannot comment on public protests, I think we fail (for political reasons) to use policing by consent in that area.

I was arrested a few years back though so I can answer questions about that. Having an expectation of being treated reasonably meant I could have an honest and up-front discussion with them over what happened including admitting to some possible crimes and they could save both their and my time dealing with nonsense. I was treated well throughout the process and annoying as it was to be detained overnight, I can't complain or blame the officers. I'd be happy to assist them in future.

I am a Londoner.

I'm Norwegian, but have lived in London the last 23 years.

In Norway, May 1st is more celebration than protest. So imagine my shock walking home my first May 1st in London and encountering the Met kettling protestors with riot units with shields and horses... Norwegian police does not handle demonstrations great either, but I've never seen anything in Norway like the way the Met handles demonstrations unless/until things get violent. At least in London they seem to often presume demonstrations will get nasty ahead of time, but the problem with that is that it's far easier for people to justify e.g. throwing stuff at a police unit in riot gear hiding behind shields and trying to kettle you than regular police units keeping to the sidelines unless/until something happens.

Not been arrested, but had a few interactions with police here as a witness or because they had queries, and similar feeling that I wasn't putting myself at risk by being open and honest. Of course, I'm white and live in a relatively middle class area and while that makes less of a difference here than it appears to do in the US, the Met has a pretty poor record in that respect too.

It's worth pointing out policing in the UK deploys horses really rather rarely...they're not part of routine protest policing, and will generally only be deployed where disorder is anticipated. Same thing with helmets and shields: they're both the preserve of specialist trained officers who won't be deployed unless they expect to be needed.

I agree with other replies that UK policing of protests is deeply flawed. Especially in Northern Ireland where policing is done completely differently. But apart from NI, there are several ways that UK policing differs from the US:

- They basically never use weapons like tear gas or rubber/plastic bullets to control crowds. There is limited use of pepper gas, but generally it's criticised when it happens.

- They do not ordinarily carry guns. Some specialist units do, but it's rare. Even heavy duty riot control police will have batons and shields at best. It's easier to feel comfortable about a police force that won't kill someone due to an itchy trigger finger.

- Community focus. In the UK the police will engage with local authorities, community leaders, residents etc in a polite and respectful way in order to support the reduction of crime in the area. If you are lost or need any kind of assistance, asking a police officer for help is always going to result in a positive outcome. It's very common to come out of a train station and see a couple of police happily chatting away with some of the locals.

This webpage is pretty good for more detail: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education-development/race-an...

TLDR;

The Peelian principles are a set of nine policing principles developed by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, which laid the foundation for modern law enforcement. These principles are still relevant today and provide a code of ethics and conduct for police officers. The following are the nine Peelian principles:

The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of their existence, behavior, conduct, and the willingness of the public to cooperate with them.

Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.

The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law.

Police use physical force only when necessary, exercising restraint in such use and using only the minimum degree of physical force necessary in any particular circumstance.

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police arethe public and that members ofthe publicarethe police.

Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functionsand never appear to usurpthe powersofthe judiciary.

The test of police effectiveness is not measured by individual officers or units but rather by how effectively society is brought into accord with its laws through its members’ voluntary compliance with them as well as by efficient enforcement where necessary

Is this a gpt summary

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