Taking care of business : police detectives, drug law enforcement and proactive investigation

321 Pages·2016·2.067 MB·English

by  Bacon, Matthew

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TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS
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CLARENDON STUDIES IN CRIMINOLOGY
Published under the auspices of the Institute of Criminology,
University of Cambridge; the Mannheim Centre, London School
of Economics; and the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.
General Editors: Jill Peay and Tim Newburn
(London School of Economics)
Editors: Loraine Gelsthorpe, Alison Liebling, Kyle Treiber,
and Per- Olof Wikström
(University of Cambridge)
Coretta Phillips and Robert Reiner
(London School of Economics)
Mary Bosworth, Carolyn Hoyle, Ian Loader, and Lucia Zedner
(University of Oxford)
RECENT TITLES IN THIS SERIES:
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Dangerous Politics: Risk, Political Vulnerability, and Penal Policy
Annison
Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-I ndustrial City
Fraser
Punish and Expel: Border Control, Nationalism,
and the New Purpose of the Prison
Kaufman
Speaking Truths to Power: Policy Ethnography
and Police Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Blaustein
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Taking Care
of Business
Police Detectives, Drug Law Enforcement
and Proactive Investigation
MATTHEW BACON
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First Edition published in 2016
Impression: 1
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v
General Editors’ Introduction
Clarendon Studies in Criminology aims to provide a forum for
outstanding empirical and theoretical work in all aspects of crimi-
nology and criminal justice, broadly understood. The Editors
welcome submissions from established scholars, as well as excel-
lent PhD work. The Series was inaugurated in 1994, with Roger
Hood as its first General Editor, following discussions between
Oxford University Press and three criminology centres. It is edited
under the auspices of these three centres: the Cambridge Institute
of Criminology, the Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the
London School of Economics, and the Centre for Criminology at
the University of Oxford. Each supplies members of the Editorial
Board and, in turn, the Series Editor or Editors.
Matthew Bacon’s book, Taking Care of Business:  Police
Detectives, Drug Law Enforcement and Proactive Investigation,
is an accomplished account of the professional and moral worlds of
police officers working within contemporary drugs policing. The
title itself offers a subtle acknowledgement of Dick Hobbs’ classic
work, Doing the Business, and it is pleasing to be able to report
that this, too, is a detailed ethnographic study of the working lives
of police detectives. Much of the academic work on policing of the
most lasting value has been based on ethnography. Sadly, and no
doubt reflecting some of the less positive trends in the academy in
recent decades, this breed of work has become increasingly rare—
to the point where one fears imminent extinction. Taking Care of
Business is therefore a welcome sight in a number of ways.
The book begins by noting an important paradox. Detectives
and criminal investigators are the stuff of an almost immeasur-
able quantity of fictional portraits. Crime fiction, be it books, TV
or film, more often than not translates into detective work of one
form or another. Yet ironically, academic interest in this field has
been occasional and often fleeting, particularly in recent times.
The nature of detective work is also characterised by something
of a paradox. On the one hand, it is regularly depicted as a craft,
learned on the job, and often involving underhand techniques and a
culture of deceit. On the other hand, from a different perspective it
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vi General Editors’ Introduction
is also viewed as highly professional, involving quite sophisticated
technological and scientific methods. Under such circumstances
ethnography, with its promise of getting ‘beyond the formal rules
of the game’, offers much.
Bacon’s study focuses on two specialist detective units assigned
with investigating drugs offences, in two Basic Command Units,
one in the South of England and one in the North. In the main
the detectives employed in such squads are experts in drug law
enforcement. The nature of their working lives enables them to
devote the bulk of their energies to ‘utilising the art, craft and science
of criminal investigation to monitor drug markets and make cases
against suspected drug dealers’. If ethnographic fieldwork with the
police presents many challenges, then drugs policing undoubtedly
adds to them. Predictably perhaps, officers were wary of their new,
young charge and his motives, and Bacon’s account of the slow
breaking down of barriers is hugely informative. Key in the pro-
cess of getting officers to talk appears to have been ‘ditching the
Dictaphone’.
Whilst the study of any area of policing offers insights into the
moral perspectives of officers, this is perhaps especially so of the
policing of drugs. The potential futility of attempting to police
something so obviously beyond the control of the constabulary
also throws into sharp relief officers’ attitudes toward their role
and the nature and impact of police work in this area. Bacon’s
study shows that officers’ attitudes toward drugs were predict-
ably complex. On the one hand, and in some ways only super-
ficially, most took the straightforward view that illicit drug use
was self- evidently wrong and harmful and needed to be stopped
wherever possible. Supply was always viewed as more serious than
use, though ‘social supply’ was significantly less serious than those
who were in it for profit. Yet many officers clearly had experience
of drugs themselves, either personally, or via members of their
families and, in practice, had a much more nuanced sense of where
intervention was felt necessary. Reflecting on the fact that they
would be unlikely to take action against a relative or friend, the
popular sentiment appears to have been “you can’t be a bobby all
the time’. Thus, although they tended otherwise to take a fairly
straightforward prohibitionist view of illicit drugs, they accepted
that many were the source of less harm than alcohol. Indeed, the
brief references to officers’ attitudes toward, and use of, alcohol in
this study point to an area ripe for further research.
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General Editors’ Introduction vii
The policing of drugs, as with much investigative activity, has
changed considerably in the last decade or two. A more problem-
oriented approach to policing has been promoted— under various
guises— and the impact of both the National Intelligence Model
(NIM) and restrictions imposed by the Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) are discussed in some detail. As is so
common in police practice, Bacon illustrates how the best inten-
tions of reformers are regularly mitigated by the interpretative
actions and day- to- day practices of officers engaged in the inves-
tigation and enforcement of drug- related offences. In one of the
fieldwork areas, for example, the approach to intelligence- led po-
licing is described by the officers themselves as ‘NIM- lite’, indi-
cating a willingness to engage in at least superficial compliance,
whilst continuing to engage in elements of traditional practice.
Similarly, the detectives in Bacon’s study had developed a range of
informal practices to circumvent the regulatory controls imposed
on the use and handling of informers imposed by the much hated
RIPA (known to some as ‘the grim- RIPA’).
The belief in the primacy of learning and practising the craft of po-
licing also underpinned the occasionally disparaging attitudes that
Bacon reveals some officers held toward intelligence analysis. Viewed
sceptically as being ‘academic’, ‘all about performance management’
and ‘pointless descriptions of what we already know’, officers were
especially resistant to the idea that civilian analysts might contribute
toward discussions of tactical solutions in particular cases. As one
officer is reported to have said, ‘It’s like a spectator giving advice to a
professional athlete’. At heart, drugs policing comes to look like so
much else in the police world. Fundamentally, as is all policing, drugs
policing is about the maintenance of order. Bacon talks of regulating
the drugs trade via an unwritten ‘code of practice’, using a suite of en-
forcement interventions, graded and utilised to reflect the particular
local diagnoses of the problem, with an eye to both symbolic (drugs
raids to send a message) and practical impact.
Dr Bacon’s study of drugs policing is a significant empirical con-
tribution to the field of police studies, and represents a pleasing
return, centre- stage, of detailed ethnographic work in this area. We
hope it will stimulate further, similar endeavours, and are pleased to
welcome it to the Clarendon Studies in Criminology series.
Tim Newburn and Jill Peay
17 February 2016
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Preface
If you write a novel, spend weeks and then months catching
it word by word, you owe it to both the book and to your-
self to lean back (or take a long walk) when you’ve finished
and ask yourself why you bothered – why you spent all that
time, why it seemed so important. In other words, what’s it
all about, Alfie?
Stephen King (2000, p238), On Writing
Deliberately altering states of consciousness is part of the human
condition and an almost universal phenomenon. Indeed, it is not
an exaggeration to claim that every second of every day, men and
women around the world are using a cosmic array of drugs and
getting ‘high’ for various reasons. Drugs can be a source of pleas-
ure, have cultural value, and symbolic power. They are big busi-
ness and the profits can be considerable. But so can the costs. It is
widely acknowledged that certain drugs and drug markets cause
enormous harm and need to be controlled. At the same time, it is
increasingly apparent that current drug policies are comparably
harmful in their ineffectiveness and excesses. Drugs, drug deal-
ing, and efforts to control them are vast and fascinating topics of
great consequence that pose strenuous intellectual puzzles and
bring to the fore the complexity of defining and solving social
problems. As Kleiman et al. (2011: xxi) make clear, the issue of
drugs ‘touches on poverty, disease, race, crime, and terrorism, not
always in obvious or expected ways, and thinking about drugs,
and rules about using them, forces us to consider what it means
to be fully human, and what it means to be free’. Few policy areas
are underpinned by more myths and misconceptions or generate
more heated debates.
This book aims to advance understanding of local drug law en-
forcement and investigative practice by offering an ethnography of
specialist detective units assigned to the task of investigating drug
offences and gathering evidence to support the prosecution of the
persons who perpetrate them. The lack of contemporary research
on detectives and drug investigations was compelling enough as a
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Preface ix
reason for doing the legwork and the writing. There were knowl-
edge gaps to fill and crucial questions about policing and drug con-
trol policy that needed answering. Academic justifications aside,
however, this study stemmed equally, if not more so, from personal
curiosity. Long before entering the hallowed halls of higher educa-
tion, I was struggling to make sense of the rhetoric of prohibition,
wondering where my own experiences fit into the bigger picture,
and wanting to find out if media representations of cops and crimi-
nals were anything like reality. Based on extensive fieldwork under-
taken in two English police service areas, Taking Care of Business
provides an in- depth analysis of the everyday realities of the ‘war on
drugs’ and the associated working rules, tacit understandings, and
underlying assumptions that operate beneath the presentational
canopy of police organizations. It also critically examines the most
pertinent legislative initiatives, organizational reforms, and shifts
in thinking about the values, objectives, and norms of policing that
have occurred over recent decades, which, between them, have con-
tributed to some significant changes in the ways that detectives are
trained and investigations are controlled and carried out.
The book begins in Chapter 1 with a review of the existing lit-
erature on drug detectives. They are the protagonists of this story.
It analyses the nature of detective work, from the origins of the
police detective through to the current context of criminal investi-
gation, and begins to consider key issues associated with changing
the ways in which investigations are conceived, conducted, and
controlled. It also explains why police organizations set up spe-
cialist squads to deal with certain forms of criminality and high-
lights the special features of drug law enforcement. The aim of
Chapter 2 is to establish the parameters of policing in the drugs
field and build a theoretical foundation for explaining the policing
of drugs and new directions in drug control policy and practice. By
critically analysing the construction of specific drug problems over
time, it uncovers the logic behind some of the most pertinent gov-
ernmental responses and questions whether they serve the needs
of society or the interests of powerful groups. Chapter 3 reviews
the literature on the illegal drug business in order to explore this
subterranean world of work and play and paint a picture of what
the police who deal with drugs are up against.
Moving on to the empirical components of the book, Chapter 4
answers standard methodological questions and elucidates the busi-
ness involved in undertaking this particular research endeavour. It