The Public and the Police
- Harriet Sergeant

Expenditure on the police force is at record levels but there is widespread public dissatisfaction, while the police complain of being short of resources. They are not intended to be servants of the state, but of the communities they serve. Their powers are personal and derived from the crown, but this essential feature of British policing - policing by consent - is now in jeopardy.

Crime and Civil Society
- David Green, Emma Grove, Nadia Martin

An 18-month study of the British Government's policies for crime reduction found that it has failed to learn even the simplest lessons from overseas experience. Crime and Civil Society found that the most basic measures necessary to encourage a law-abiding life on release are not being taken: particularly getting prisoners off drugs and providing basic and vocational skills.

Cultures and Crimes
- Norman Dennis and George Erdos

There are few issues which raise more concern than the increase in crime and anti-social behaviour. In spite of attempts by criminologists to dismiss these concerns as "moral panic", and in spite of attempts by the government to massage the statistics, citizens feel increasingly threatened. Cultures and Crimes argues that this increase in crime is the result of profound cultural changes which occurred in the 1960s, creating a permissive society that gave us greater personal freedoms but at the expense of shared norms of behaviour.

Simple Justice
- Charles Murray

For over half a century violent crime has been rising in this country while the penalties for it have been falling. These two trends throw current sentencing practices into the spotlight of public policy concern. Charles Murray argues that criminal offenders deserve penalties of which the degree of severity matches the seriousness of their crimes.

The Failure of Britain's Police
- Norman Dennis, George Erdos, David Robinson

In January 2003 the Home Office claimed that the chance of being a victim of crime "remains historically low". However, the staggering rise in the volume of crime, within living memory, has been so great that it is difficult to convey the enormous shift in the law-abidingness and "policeability" of the English.

Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics
- Norman Dennis, George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi

The Macpherson Report (1999) produced no evidence at all of racist policies in the Metropolitan Police. The report did not even produce evidence of any racist "bad apples" among the officers who were involved in the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

See also the accompanying Institutional Racism and the Police below.

Institutional Racism and the Police: Fact or Fiction?
- David Green (Ed.)

The Macpherson Report (1999) was a watershed in British race relations and led to the adoption of policies by the Metropolitan Police and Home Office. Macpherson’s claim that the Metropolitan Police were guilty of "institutional racism" provoked considerable controversy at the time of publication and continues to be strongly disputed.

Civil Society and David Blunkett
- Kenneth Minogue

For hundreds of years civil society was "the arena of freedom", that network of free institutions made possible by the framework of law and order. As government grew, politicians took over many of the functions of those institutions. The state became the source of benefits, redistributing wealth and "crowding out" the institutions of civil society.

Zero Tolerance: Policing a Free Society
- Norman Dennis (Ed.)

This book brings together police officers from both sides of the Atlantic to describe their efforts to deal effectively with rising crime. New York achieved a significant reduction in its crime rate following the introduction of "zero-tolerance" policing under the leadership of William Bratton, while at about the same time, a similar experiment was being conducted in Hartlepool under the leadership of Ray Mallon.