Police constable

Abstract: Although the foundations of today’s police service were laid with the introduction of Peel’s ‘New Police’ in 1829, it was not until after the end of the First World War that the first women were officially recognised as police officers. These early years of women in policing are revealing not only for the strength of feeling characterised by ‘the grudging admission of a limited number of female officers’,1 but also because they demonstrate the origin of the sexual division of labour which has in a large part persisted at least up until the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act. It was during these first years of the women police that their caring, nurturing and feminine role as ‘moral guardians’ to children and to fellow members of the weaker sex was established. Acceptance of even this restricted contribution to policing initially met with hostility and resentment, not least from the Police Federation who were ‘jealous of the introduction of women into a traditionally male occupation’.2 Indeed, the more recent debate which surrounded the inclusion of the police service within the Sex Discrimination Act was reminiscent of this earlier struggle to establish a role for women in policing.

Abstract: Socialization into an occupation proceeds through both formal and informal channels. In the case of the police, the formal agency is the training school, and the informal process results from assignment to operational service. In the UK, the latter begins early in the training period and occupies the bulk of the 2 years that a Police Constable is on “probation.” It is important to know how police training and the experience of policing affect the views of recruits if one is to assess the relevance of efforts at improvement and reform. There is a need to assess how the recruit acquires a “realistic” understanding of the police role. This article seeks to document in detail the evolution of the recruit's attitudes during socialization into the police role. The measures of attitude change gathered on a sample of recruits who were moving through the probationary period demonstrate a movement toward increasingly pragmatic conceptions of policing as work.

Abstract: In his boyhood, Edward “Ned” Kelly began “lifting” cattle and horses. His early convictions included assault (1870), “feloniously receiving a horse” (1870) and resisting arrest (1877). On 15 April 1878, a lone police constable who visited the Kelly home to arrest Dan Kelly for horse theft later alleged that Ned Kelly shot and wounded him and that he had been assaulted by Kelly's family members. With a warrant for his arrest on a charge of attempted murder, in October 1878, Kelly and his gang ambushed and shot dead three policemen in remote bushland near Mansfield. On 1 November 1878, as a result of the Felons’ Apprehension Act, the Kelly gang were proclaimed “outlaws” and initially rewards of £200 for each was offered alive or dead. After robbing banks in Euroa and Jerilderie in NSW, and murdering a police informant, Kelly and his gang planned to derail a special train carrying police and black-trackers. The derailment was averted and police laid siege as sixty hostages huddled inside the Glenrowan Hotel....

Abstract: Social workers have never had the positive public image that some other professions enjoy. For example, when 25-year-old Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher was murdered while carrying out police duty in April 1984, the media quite rightly brought the matter to the immediate attention of the public. Few people could have missed the newspaper headlines or television’s graphic account of the incident. However, when Norma Morris became the second social worker to be murdered within a matter of a few months, one of her former colleagues expressed views that were strongly held by many others in the profession: Had the social worker, Norma Morris, been a police woman I suspect that the national papers would have told the nation of this tragedy. Had Ms. Morris been accused of neglecting a client, it might well have been broadcast nationally.