Charles Wegg-Prosser, The Police and the Law, Oyez Publishing Limited, £1.25p.
The Law Society has launched a series of volumes on the law under the misleading heading 'It's Your Law'. This is the second volume and purports to explain the 'powers and duties' of the police and 'their place in contemporary society'. It does the former very well, setting forth in ordinary language the wide powers available to the police, explaining powers of arrest, entry, search and seizure, the scope available to the police to control 'public order'. However, in the latter aim, the book falls down heavily, though it is no more than one would expect from a bourgeois lawyer and a member of the Council of the Law Society.
Wegg-Prosser deals briefly with the development of the police force, but fails to identify the main reason for the establishment, in the early nineteenth century, of an organised and regular police. The creation of the 'new police' coincided with the rise of capitalism at a time when the working class was beginning to organise as a class. It was also a time when the wage relationship was not yet fully developed. Thus, many workers were not completely tied to the money wage, taking part of the product of their labour into wages. In the Port of London, for instance, dockers often worked without wages, relying instead on the proceeds of widespread and well organised plunder of cargoes. It was to deal with this situation that in 1798 the first modern police force was set up in Wapping, financed by West India Merchants. Not only did it concern itself with the detection and apprehension of offenders, it also regulated and controlled by licence the labour on the quayside.
This was also a period when people were flocking into the slums from the countryside and being forced into the factories. The reaction of the people to their conditions of impoverishment was expressed through such scenarios as the Pentridge Rising and Peterloo, and through such movements as Chartism and the development of the trade unions. It was essential for capital that these conflicts be resolved in their interests and it was on this premise that the modern police force came into being, a class force, with its ranks drawn mainly from the working class, having as its prime functions the regulation of the conditions of the class struggle and the enforcement of the wage relationship.
This still remains the function of police today, though of course the methods used change as the form of the class struggle changes. Recent years have witnessed some ominous developments in the police force as the crisis facing British capital has deepened. The creation of the [illegible] picket squads and the formation of an intelligence unit to deal with industrial unrest, all reflect the heightening level of conflict that characterises the present epoch. Further developments have been the appearance of closer links with the armed forces, the most recent manifestations of this being seminars on police-army relations at Whitehall and the proliferation of combined police-army exercises. The police, through the medium of Sir Robert Mark, have also launched an attack on the right to trial by jury, for, in the words of Mark, '. . . the proportion of those acquittals relating to those whom [illegible] guilty is too high to be acceptable'.
Wegg-Prosser fails to identify these relationships because he views the police as an independent and impartial body whose function is the maintenance of the Queen's peace and the enforcement of the 'rule of law'. He is unable to [illegible] that in a class society, law is class law and is the legal expression of the interests of the ruling class. It is therefore the rule of bourgeois law that the police enforce. In its enforcement, the police enter into the class struggle at the point of production only on relatively few occasions. The record of the police as strike breakers has been well documented in the past but the general role the police play in the community, ensuring that it functions in the best interests of capital at any particular time, is often ignored. Recent years, however, have witnessed some more spectacular examples of this (for capitalism) important function in the harassment of black people under the auspices of the 1971 Immigration Act and the attacks that have been made on squatters.
It is because of the present nature of their role in the community that public relations is considered more important than previously and Wegg-Prosser devotes a complete chapter to the topic. The whole idea of public or community relations of course is to present a picture of the police as favourable as possible to the police, designed to increase public confidence in them, thus making their task easier. This necessarily means a masking of the real function of the police in society. Wegg-Prosser concludes his chapter on police relations with the public by advocating that '. . . instructions on the duties and functions of the police, and their need for [illegible]'. Perish the thought.
If you wish to know that there are over 100 offences where an arrest may take place without there being a warrant in existence; that entry under a search warrant is provided for by over 50 Acts of Parliament, the rules that should govern interrogation of suspects; the principles upon which the police are entitled to seize and detain property—then the book is worth reading. But do not expect to find a cogent and clear analysis of the function of the police in a capitalist society, it is not there.
Brian Rose-Smith