From police brutality in the United States, to an 'institutionally sexist, racist and homophobic' police in the UK, policing faces an uncertain future. Professor Mike Hough offers his insight into the damning Casey Review as a missed opportunity to engage with key issues, and proposes how a better engagement with procedural justice and combatting ‘warrior mentality’ might restore legitimacy.

The Casey Review of the MPS was commissioned in the wake of the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens. It is clearly an important and valuable document. However, it fails to use a rich research literature which addresses the legitimacy of policing through the lens of procedural justice theory. Its analysis of the problems of the Met is sharp and accurate, and I hope it will prove helpful in the process of reforming and rebuilding the Met. It has significant recommendations about organisational changes that are needed. The following comments are not intended to detract from its value, but to suggest ways in which its impact can be enhanced. Attending to the findings of procedural justice theory would permit greater specificity and clarity in proposals for rebuilding trust in the Met.

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The intellectual underpinning on which the report is built is policing by consent –  the principle upon which Robert Peel and his first Commissioners Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne founded the Met in 1829. The Casey report takes this principle as self-evidently important, with public consent flowing from the legitimacy that the public confers on the police, and the trust in the police that builds this legitimacy. I have no problem in agreeing with this, but over the last twenty years, policing scholars have built up a substantial evidence base about: the various forms that trust in the police takes; the relationships between different forms of trust in the police and police legitimacy; and the relationships between legitimacy and compliance. This body of work offers clear pointers to ways of rebuilding trust in the police when it has been squandered, and it is a shame that the report fails to engage with it. Whilst the report’s call to rebuild trust and foster police legitimacy is absolutely correct, procedural justice theory can help to identify the dimensions of trust that can realistically be strengthened, and the ways in which this can be done.

Louise Casey and her team will most certainly have been aware of procedural justice theory, but the report is strikingly silent on any reference to it. They may well have taken a decision to avoid any ‘intellectualising’ tone in the report, and to settle for a report that used direct and plain language that will best reach their key audiences – something that they have certainly achieved. Embracing the academic evidence might have strengthened the report, however, in spelling out more clearly how trust needs to be rebuilt. The obvious model is the President’s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing.

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There needs to be procedural justice within police departments if treatment of the public is to improve

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This report was commissioned by President Obama in the wake of the killing by a police officer of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It was a response to events different from – but not totally dissimilar to – those that led to the Casey Review: an unjustified killing by a police officer of a vulnerable person, in the wake of a number of previous scandals. The following quote is from the first page of the report: