Policing by Degrees: Police Officers' Experience of University Education

Abstract

The British Police was established as an artisan organization that would develop its own leaders. This fostered continuous debate on the quality of leadership and proposals for lateral entry, which elicited sustained opposition from the Police Federation and politicians. By the 1960s, intense pressures to change led to an emphasis on recruiting graduates and support for university education. The Essex Police decided to send officers to university full‐time, gave them free choice of subject and did not require them to stay after graduation. This article draws on interviews with officers who attended Essex University full‐time and it analyzes their experiences as students, their return to operational policing and their reflections on the impact of having graduates within the police service. The material raises issues about policing, leadership and education, and illuminates how the police organization has changed to a more sophisticated institution with well‐educated leaders, but without bending to lateral entry.

Keywords:

• Police
• Elites
• University Education
• Leadership
• Occupational Culture

Notes

Maggy Lee is at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, UK. Maurice Punch is at the Mannheim Centre, London School of Economics, UK. Correspondence to: Maggy Lee, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK. The authors would like to thank all the respondents for cooperating so enthusiastically in our research. In particular, we are grateful to Sir John Cyprian Nightingale for granting us an interview even though he was in his late eighties (Sir John has since died—in 2002); he was a remarkable man and in many ways a highly enlightened chief constable.

In 1969, one of the authors (Maurice Punch) was a graduate student at the University of Essex in the Department of Sociology and a year later became a Lecturer in the Department. He became acquainted with a number of police officers from the local force who were then studying at the university. In 1975, he left to live and work in the Netherlands, but returned over 25 years later when he was invited to teach on a visiting basis at Essex. One of his colleagues there was Maggy Lee who was Director of the part‐time policing degree scheme and was involved in teaching the current generation of police officers and staff from the Essex Police. After two cohorts, the Essex Police announced that it would be discontinuing funding for serving officers studying for degrees. This meant that an interesting experiment was finally coming to an end after some 30 years.