After an introduction, the second chapter deals with the history of policing. Comprising eleven pages, the
treatment of the history of law enforcement is broad rather than deep. Many of the sources cited are not historians.
Three of the eleven pages are taken up with an analysis of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. The events discussed,
ranging from 10,000BC to the present, are crammed into the author's ideological framework.
The chapter concerned with the function of police presents both functional and conflict perspectives, favoring
the latter. Law enforcement, in this view, exists to maintain the status quo and to minimize the movement between
social classes. Here, as in the subsequent sections of the book, it is not Stansfield's theoretical framework
that is troublesome, it is the reliance on deductive reasoning and the lack of empirical evidence to support the
author's assertions that may overwhelm the undergraduate.
In the fourth chapter, Jungian archetypal psychology is the system used to discuss the symbolic roles of police
officers. Apparently boys socialized as "warriors" are attracted to policing because they envision
themselves participating in battles and exercising power. They tend to marry women who fall into the "martyr"
or caregiver/innocent archetype.
How police are selected and trained are the subjects of chapters five and six. Here the author employs Spectrum
Psychology, which is based on the premise that humans are made up of body, mind, and spirit. Both the selection
and the training processes are found to place a disproportionate emphasis on the physical skills and to neglect
the spiritual.
Chapters seven through thirteen end with case studies. These are useful devices to draw students into a discussion
of the themes--authority, use of force, discretion, corruption, accountability, secrecy, and stress-- which are
covered in those sections. This part of the book includes some helpful definitions--distinctions between legal
and moral authority, guidelines for the use of force, formal and informal, internal and external systems of police
accountability. Some of the charts are quite comprehensive, other graphs and figures are remarkably simplistic.
In the final chapters, Stansfield examines community policing as a response to crises created by changes in
Canada's economy from industrial to informational. He rejects community policing as a solution, finding it a
regressive attempt to replicate the vigilante style of law enforcement more appropriate to the agricultural era.
He concludes that private police will be the mode of the informational age. These organizations will grow as
public space and public funds become more scarce while private spaces and corporate resources increase. Private
police are reputedly inclined to use "instrumental discipline" rather than force. Instrumental discipline
is "preventive, subtle, co-operative, and apparently non-coercive and consensual." Left unaddressed
is the question of whose interests private police represent. The answer-- that they would be even less responsive
to the non-elite and to racial and ethnic minorities--seems unavoidable.
Students reading Stansfield's book will not come away with an overly optimistic view of Canadian policing.
They will become familiar with some very provocative criticisms of the system. What they will not see modeled
in this book is the process of deriving those criticisms from empirical evidence.
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