Police station meaning, closure and (in)visibility

ABSTRACT

This article considers the visual symbolism of policing as reflected by the presence or absence of police stations. The focus is England where recent years have witnessed a prolonged period of police station closure. The article draws on interviews with police estate managers and considers their reasons given for closure and consequent impact on visibility. The discussion is influenced by visual criminology and semiotics, as well as the concept of the abstract police developed by Jan Terpstra and colleagues, that police officers are now more abstract from the communities they serve, and from each other. Station closure was explained as being due to austerity, but also the unsuitability of ‘legacy’ buildings, changes in demand, and changes in police models. In these contexts, some closures may seem appropriate with public engagement maintained online. Moreover, poor community relations mean some may prefer not to have a local station. Yet, we argue that the visual presence or absence of a local police station can be read semiotically as a symbol of the police’s investment, or conversely lack of interest, in the community. The significance of these debates is discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Police stations
• architecture
• semiotics
• visual criminology

Introduction

The police service is ‘by far the most visible of all criminal justice institutions’ (Chermak and Weiss 2005, p. 502). It is often assumed that this visibility is important in terms of public reassurance (Millie and Herrington 2005) and police legitimacy; as Waddington (1999:, p. 238) once noted, ‘symbolism permeates policing […] because of the need to legitimate and re-legitimate police authority.’ Put simply, if the police are not seen then public confidence in them to be there if needed is weakened. Yet, police visibility can be interpreted more negatively as well. Depending on current and historical engagement, some communities may feel safer if they see the police less rather than more. The visual symbolism of policing has been a theme in criminology for several decades (e.g. Bahn 1974, Loader 1997, Innes 2007), yet there has been very little focus on police buildings, although attention is growing (e.g. Millie 2012, Smith and Somerville 2013, Young 2022). This article contributes to this literature by considering police visibility or absence as signified by police stations.

Traditionally, visibility has most often been associated with police patrol, seeing a ‘bobby on the beat’, or perhaps witnessing a patrol car speeding past (e.g. Kelling 1974, Crawford et al. 2005) – the kind of activity often regarded as frontline policing. The definition of the frontline put forward in the UK by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Policing¹ (HMIC 2011, p. 6) is that it includes ‘those who are in everyday contact with the public and who directly intervene to keep people safe and enforce the law’. Locally based officers operating from police stations situated at the heart of communities might be regarded as part of this frontline; and yet across England and Wales many stations have had public access removed, or stations have been sold to be converted into domestic residences or offices, or demolished for redevelopment (see Pratt 2019). Rather than maintaining a visible frontline, it is possible that, by closing local stations, police services have become increasingly invisible. In the US post-Black Lives Matter and numerous scandals such as the 2020 murder of George Floyd (e.g. McClanahan 2021), and in England following, in particular, the 2023 Casey review into the Metropolitan Police, this absence might be interpreted as a good thing, although it does not mean the police will be absent from people’s thoughts. Yet for many a semiotics of absence might be read as the police lacking concern for an area, creating the opposite of a reassuring presence (Innes 2007). Concurrently, some police services have introduced ‘pop up’ police stations located temporarily in portacabins or vehicles in public car parks; or they have ‘drop in’ desks within other civic premises such as public libraries, or perhaps in supermarkets. These might maintain visibility, to some extent at least, but their significatory capability is likely to be quite different from traditional police stations more often associated with state sovereignty, power, and authority.

In this article, we consider the visibility of policing in England as reflected by physical buildings, through the presence and architecture of police stations and what symbolic meaning these might have. The context is a sustained period of police station closure, and so the article makes an original contribution by considering reasons given for closure and possible meanings attached to police invisibility. The discussion is supported by semi-structured interviews with police estate managers.

In the following sections, we outline the methodology used and provide theoretical and historical context. We then consider the views of estate managers, focusing on their perspectives on police station architecture and police station closure. Reasons for closure are given, including the impact of austerity, the unsuitability of ‘legacy’ buildings, changes in policing models, and changes in demand. The findings are brought together in the discussion and conclusions, where we also outline the significance of the work for future debates about policing.

Methodology

Six police estate managers were interviewed between 2019 and 2020 representing four different English police services. There are 39 territorial police services across England, many with just one estate manager. Those interviewed were therefore drawn from a very small pool of people who have the requisite specialist knowledge and experience for detailed insights into the changing police estate and reasons given for police station closure.² The participants had different titles, such as Head of Estates, or Principal Manager Estates. For simplicity and to maintain anonymity in this article they are all titled ‘Estate Manager’. Their role within each Police Service was to manage the police estate, including day-to-day issues of utilities and repairs, through to disposal of unwanted buildings, and procurement of new builds, including liaison with architects, planning authorities and the UK Home Office. Following austerity, some merged with other departments, for instance also taking on management of police vehicles. The interviews lasted approximately an hour each, were semi-structured and incorporated photo elicitation (Harper 2002) with participants asked to comment on a series of images of a range of police stations from their service area representing different size, age and architectural styles. Discussion was not limited to these images, but they provided a highly useful starting point. The interviews were conducted either face-to-face or virtually via Microsoft Teams or Zoom, with virtual interviews brought in after the Covid-19 lockdown was introduced in March 2020. The change in method had no obvious impact on data collection; in fact, it made the practicalities of interviewing a lot easier, a theme that has been picked up in wider research methods literature (e.g. Patel 2020). All interviews were recorded, transcribed, and then analysed for key and emerging themes. Ethical approval was granted by the project lead institution and all participants and police services anonymised, with participants given pseudonyms and police services labelled A, B, C or D. The four services included in the study varied in size and included both rural and urban areas.

Background

For this article, we draw on aspects of visual criminology (e.g. McClanahan 2021) and semiotics (e.g. Chandler 2017) to consider the impact of a visibly changed police estate. According to McClanahan (2021:, p. 12 emphasis in original), visual criminology is not ‘simply being visual […] visual criminology is about the visual.’ It is not criminology with added pictures; rather it is concerned with how our understandings of crime and criminal justice are shaped and informed by the visual. Whilst wider sensory and aesthetic criminologies have been suggested (McClanahan and South 2020, Herrity et al. 2021, Millie 2016; 2017), the visual is still important, especially in a policing context. As McClanahan (2021:, p. 111) has noted, police power is ‘largely imagined, expressed, materialised, reified, and resisted through processes that are, at least in part, theatrical, melodramatic, dramatological and, above all, visual.’ This can be through physical encounters with policing, through representations of the police online (Ralph 2022), the material culture of policing in terms of uniforms, flags, or emblems (Rowe 2023), or perhaps the visibility of policing on television and film, what Goldsmith (2010) regards as ‘secondary’ police visibility. In this article, we argue that it can also be through our encounters with the police estate and interpretation of what police stations might mean to the public and to those who use them.

This article is therefore also influenced by semiotics, which, according to Eco (1976:, p. 7), focuses on ‘everything that can be taken as a sign’, with a sign being ‘something which stands for something else’. For instance, a police station may be read as welcoming, or conversely as intimidating (Millie 2012). We adopt an interpretivist rather than a structuralist view of semiotic reading, acknowledging that signs, symbols, or icons can be read differently, even by the same person in different circumstances. In short, whilst the estate managers had their own understandings of police architecture informed by their professional practice and personal perception, it is acknowledged that there will be other interpretations as well, including by servicing officers and members of the public.

Whilst there is criminological interest in prison architecture (Piacentini and Slade 2015, Jewkes and Moran 2017), court houses (Mulcahy 2011, Toews 2018) and probation premises (Phillips 2014, Shah 2020), there has been less written on the police estate, although as noted, this area of research is growing. Holdaway (1980) has focused on the functioning of the police station and, by drawing on Goffman (1959), distinguished between the frontstage and backstage areas of the building. There has also been consideration of the scope for women only police stations (Nelson 2005, Carrington et al. 2022), the distance to local police stations (Stassen and Cecceto 2021), and access to police stations in rural areas (Smith 2010, Smith and Somerville 2013; Lindström, 2015). In the UK, one of the authors (Millie 2012) has previously considered the visual symbolism of the police estate and identified police stations as buildings where the public are welcomed, as secret places unknown to the community, or as intimidating fortresses. The station as intimidating fortress is demonstrated by the extreme example of Northern Ireland police stations that are a legacy of ‘the troubles’ and display a ‘sinister architecture of control’ (Carrabine 2012, p. 482). Such stations are an important site of visibility and meaning, and therefore attractors of protest. Police stations have also attracted protest in England, for instance with the 2011 riots evolving from protest outside Tottenham Police Station in North London (Newburn 2015). In the US, a survey of undergraduate students by psychologists Clinton and Devlin (2011:, p. 405) concluded that, ‘[i]f the stations look run-down, shabby, unprofessional, or impenetrable, the community may not feel safe, adequately protected, or welcome.’ Their study was limited by only canvassing the views of students but hinted at the importance of a welcoming shopfront. They also suggested that police stations should have a façade ‘that reflects strong modern architecture, and projects a sense of being governmental, well-funded, and high-tech’ (ibid, p.405), although it is unknown whether this would be the view of the wider population. Young (2022) has taken a different approach in considering the Japanese police box or koban. She concluded that, even if very little seems to be going on, the koban has a visibly symbolic presence that helps to create an affective atmosphere of order maintenance:

… on the street corner outside the koban, if we focus on policing-related events and activities, nothing is ‘happening’. The police officer sits at the desk, pedestrians occasionally walk past, trains trundle by. But when we consider the work being done by the koban as a built form with significatory capabilities, an atmosphere of order maintenance can be sensed. Every koban generates an affective atmosphere (Young 2022, p. 199).

Such ‘atmospheres of order maintenance’ are not likely maintained following police station closure. According to Terpstra et al. (2019; 2022) over the past 10–15 years there have been significant changes to policing making the police more ‘abstract’ from the communities they serve and from each other, they ‘now operate more at a distance, are more impersonal and formal, less direct, and more decontextualised’ (Terpstra et al. 2022, p. 1). For instance, the closure of local police stations can be seen as part of a wider pattern of organisational change, including an ‘increasing tendency for single-crewed deployment, the disappearance of traditional ‘backstage’ spaces within police stations and the increasing centrality of digital devices’ (Rowe et al. 2022, p. 15). Being abstract from the public and from each other in this way is the opposite of being visibly present as demonstrated by a physical police station.

The context for police station closure was a period of enforced austerity following the financial crisis of 2008 (Millie 2012). As noted elsewhere: ‘For the police the boom years were over’ (Millie 2013, p. 144). Under these circumstances, the question for Chief Constables was how they could maintain their level of service with significantly less money. To complicate the issue, in November 2012 the first Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs)³ were elected across England and Wales, thus adding a further political dimension to decision making. Many PCCs wanted to protect their ‘front line’, a priority for police visibility that was already in place for HMIC (2011). Whilst there were cuts to frontline officers, there was a greater temptation to make cuts in places perceived to have less impact on the frontline and this included those interpreted as non-frontline personnel (Millie 2014), and the police estate (Millie 2012). The estate managers interviewed cited austerity as a cause for police station closure, but, as we go on to discuss, this was not their only justification, and police services were at the same time also willing to spend substantial sums on new ‘glass box’ divisional headquarters and force headquarters.

Police estate manager views on station architecture

If one imagines the typical image of an English police station it may include a traditional blue light, located beside a large blue wooden door. The building itself might be Victorian or Edwardian. Smaller stations could resemble a dwelling house of that period; as noted by Historic England (2011, p. 11), ‘domestic in character, usually Gothic in style, and rather like contemporary parish vicarages’ – an apt description as the British police of the nineteenth century had also been labelled as ‘domestic missionaries’ whose mission was to reach working class neighbourhoods as part of ‘a larger attempt to transform popular culture’ (Storch 1976, p. 484). In the city, larger historic police stations were like other civic buildings built at that time: solid grandeur, maybe gothic or neo-classical/Italianate and built to last (Historic England 2011). These properties have an iconic and totemic presence in the imaginary of English policing. Yet, over the past decade, many of these ‘traditional’ buildings have closed as operational stations. According to a police estate manager interviewed for this study:

… when I came to selling the buildings, our Chief Constable […] said to me, ‘Look, I’ll listen to everything you say […] but these are our flags in the ground, they mean something.’ And he was very much a traditionalist, blue light. I said, ‘That’s fine, but I can tell you that actually there’s four people in that building generally on a general day. There’s no public counter open and it’s costing you a hundred grand a year to run.’ The community may see it and they may see it as something safe, but if they feel that if they came running to the door in an emergency, which people don’t tend to do, loads of people come flocking out to help them, they’d be mistaken. (Mark, Police Service D)

For this estate manager, the traditional image of a police station was already consigned to history with many no longer having a public front-counter and were not somewhere the public could turn. However, it is still possible that there is something about the architecture itself that is read as visibly reassuring, irrespective of the level of service on offer. Bahn (1974:, p. 340) defined police reassurance as ‘the feeling of security and safety that a citizen experiences when he sees a police officer or patrol car nearby.’ It is possible that such feelings are also generated through encounters with police architecture (Millie 2012). Yet for some these Victorian and Edwardian legacy buildings, especially those built with civic grandeur in mind, could be read as intimidating rather than reassuring. According to Paul from Police Service A:

I think if you think back to when the police stations were built many, many years ago, […] Some of them were built as kind of a beacon for the community, you know, and the architectural style was quite, it was quite striking, it was quite imposing, it’s like the courts were built in a similar way and it was to portray an image of strength and discipline and authority.

It is possible that a police station that communicates ‘strength and discipline and authority’ is not the kind of welcoming building that some would feel comfortable visiting, especially if from a community with historically poor relations with the police. Other police stations are just as likely to be 1960s–1970s brutalism or perhaps 1980s–1990s postmodernism. An example of brutalist architecture in one of the police services included in our study resembled a large concrete bunker or fort looking down on the centre of town. This is now closed, replaced by a new out-of-town ‘glass box’ divisional headquarters. According to Patrick from Police Service B, there were rumours that some of the more austere brutalist police stations were built that way due to Cold War nuclear threat requirements – although he was not convinced. For this estate manager, they were ugly buildings:

… they’re all the same, concrete monstrosities built on stilts, slit windows, no ventilation, no fresh air, other than forced ventilation. Thankfully, we’ve none of those left now […] Built in the middle of the Cold War, a lot of them or they’re certainly designed in the middle of the Cold War, and I seem to remember some of the sort of gossip that went along with them, they were built nuclear blast proof, this is why they were up on stilts, so the blast wave could pass underneath the building, ‘oh right, okay. I’ll take your word for it’ (Patrick, Police Service B).

Whether this story is true or not, they were examples of defensive architecture (Coaffee 2004) displaying ‘an aesthetic of security, confrontation and dominance’ instead of being ‘accessible, friendly and welcoming’ (Millie 2012, p. 1101). More subtle versions of defensive architecture exist, for instance utilising strategically placed reinforced bollards or ‘defensive planting’ to create physical and perceived barriers, to create defensible space (cf. Newman 1972); as Mark from Police Service D observed, ‘The windows should all be bomb blast and shatterproof. You’ve got your things to stop people ram raiding into it and what have you, our safety bollards’. But like the police stations of Northern Ireland, as noted above, that were heavily reinforced during ‘the troubles’, some more extreme versions can reflect an architecture of fear (Ellin 1997). Another example of a police station as an intimidating fortress was given by Mark from Police Service D who recalled the views of a colleague who had lived in an area where there had been race-related rioting:

… an old colleague of mine who lived in [named area], a member of the Asian community. There’s a big police station there and it’s where they’d had the riots […] And he said, ‘This thing’s horrible.’ There was a big thing about ‘we couldn’t get rid of that police station because it’s there for the community’ and they sort of said it was a fortress built after the riots to almost, and it was designed with a lot of security in mind. Policing may have a view that this is something that the community love. Actually, if you speak to the local community, it’s almost like, ‘Right, we had a riot, we’ll plonk this fortress in the middle ready for the next time.’

A police station may be read as a reassuring presence in the community; however, it may also be interpreted quite differently as an expression of state power and contribute to the police’s negative symbolism and place-based antagonism (Keith 1993). How we read a building is influenced by the specific architectural style, but also by the history of police relations with the local community, both good and bad.

In England, there is no uniform architecture for the police estate with stations likely to follow the architectural fashions of the day – from Victorian vernacular or Italianate grandeur, through to brutalism, postmodernism and the new builds of today that are likely to be indistinguishable from other glass box office developments, typical of edge-of-town business parks. As Patrick from Police Service B observed, ‘they are a product of time, obviously designs come and go, and architects will go with that’. For Patrick a diversity of architectural styles is brought together through branding:

… there’s still that corporate branding and it is branding, if you look at all of them images [shared by the interviewer during the interview], you can’t see it on some of them, but they all still contain the blue and white signage with the chequerboard with the same font, the same RAL colours⁴, the same [named police service] badge, they all maintain that and in most instances, the blue lamp, which we’ve carried over, I mean blue lamps went out 30 years ago, but we still carry them over, we’ve moved them from the old stations and relocated them at new. It is about having that branding and [like a] 30-year-old Asda doesn’t look like a modern Asda.

Branding is clearly important for any business, whether an Asda superstore or police service; yet, how a building looks and feels will also impact that brand (Kirby and Kent 2010). A 30-year-old superstore will not just look different to one built today, but our affective and emotional engagement with it will also be different. Following Young’s (2022) research on Japanese koban, the look and feel of a police station could also have an affective impact on place, on neighbourhood. Alongside attempts at corporate branding, and our various histories of engagement with the police, a variety of architectural styles may have a bearing on what we feel about our local police, and in turn, our views on police legitimacy. Our semiotic reading of the police may also be influenced by the police’s absence, as reflected by the closure of a local police station, whatever architectural style.

Police estate manager views on station closure

For the estate managers interviewed, there were four interrelated explanations for the closure of police stations. As noted, austerity was given as a reason for closure, but also the unsuitability of ‘legacy’ police buildings, changes in policing models, and changes in demand. These explanations are looked at in turn, although they are neither mutually exclusive nor discrete.

Impact of austerity

It is easy to assume that at a time of budgetary cuts the main reason for police station closure was austerity. Writing for the House of Commons Library, Pratt (2019) similarly suggested that ‘Police forces cite budget pressures as the reason for station closures.’ She elaborated:

Whilst budgetary pressures may be the main reason police chiefs say they are closing stations, they also point to changes in public behaviour. Developments in technology mean that people can report non-urgent problems online or via phone and are often choosing to do so instead of reporting crimes at a police counter.

According to the estate managers we interviewed, if the aim is to cut costs, then closing police stations can have a sizable impact. For instance:

When I started, one of the first challenges I got was to reduce the estate’s costs. I said, ‘There’s various things I can do’. Looking at how our maintenance regimes work, trying a bit to influence energy but that’s a difficult one, making sure we sharpen our business rates. But actually, the way you’re going to do this is to get rid of a building. If you get rid of a building, you get rid of all the energy consumption, all the business rates. And I looked at it and I thought, ‘These buildings are vastly under-occupied’. (Mark, Police Service D)

Similarly, according to Caroline from Police Service C:

I think some of the decision making around, you know, the reduction of the estate, I think a lot of it was driven by the requirement to basically make savings. But it wasn’t done blindly, I think in parts the austerity forced some really difficult decision making, probably if we weren’t in that position maybe we wouldn’t have made all of those decisions, but I think we absolutely did consider the operational impact and sometimes when we’ve made a decision to close a site, it has driven, you know, sort of changes in the operating models, out on the frontline.

For Caroline operational decisions were dictated by the need to cut costs. Similarly, Mark from Police Service D said: ‘We shut quite a number of custody suites; we merged divisions, because the staff at custody suite is very expensive.’ According to Tanya from Police Service D, cost-cutting was with the aim to protect the ‘frontline’, although, as already noted, locally based and staffed police stations could also be regarded as frontline. For Tanya, ‘we’ve made such significant savings across the estate, obviously all focusing on benefiting the frontline and there’s been no major issue with that, so I think ultimately, people do get their heads around it.’ Mark considered the opportunity cost of keeping police stations open, in terms of how many frontline officers this would fund:

I think when I started, the cost of the police officer was 45 grand a year and we’ve reduced our estate’s costs here by over 5 million quid in the last seven years, so you can do that by £45,000, because say, right, if we hadn’t done what we’d done on the estate, you know, we’d have 120 less police officers now (Mark, Police Service D).

This is a simplification, but for Chief Constables it is compelling. It is also a view that assumes the net benefit of more frontline offices, or ‘bobbies on the beat’. Whilst politically attractive the crime reduction benefits of having more officers are far from certain; as Loader once noted (1997:1): ‘The weight of evidence now suggests that increasing the numbers of officers deployed makes little difference to crime rates, that more foot patrols reassure people but fail to make communities safe’ (see also Clarke and Hough 1984). Conversely, according to O’Neill (2011:, p. 33), ‘[f]ewer police officers alone will not lead to a sudden and chaos-inducing rise in crime.’

Suitability of ‘legacy’ buildings

According to Paul from Police Service A, the police estate is always having to adapt and change to the requirements of the day, and whilst austerity may have accelerated some closures many ‘legacy buildings’ were no longer deemed suitable for contemporary policing:

… the view of policing had totally changed, they were sitting in these older style buildings and there was a key question there, I don’t think the police service could keep buildings in little towns or, because they were seen as this public building which was visible, when essentially they were under-utilised and costing too much money. (Paul, Police Service A)

For Caroline from Police Service C, a survey of the condition of the estate had revealed that some legacy buildings were in a poor state and no longer deemed to be in locations of maximum demand. For instance:

So, [our survey] will look at things like health and safety compliance, […] water, air quality, that type of stuff. And then it also looks at the building fabrics, so the physical like construction of the building, you know, how old is the roof? Foundations, asbestos, that type of thing. […] then obviously we have the operational requirement which goes hand in glove with that. […] the numbers of staff, the location across [the police service] where those teams potentially need to go, and more often than not the buildings obviously don’t flex to meet the teams, because obviously the infrastructure [is] rigid and in parts its quite old. (Caroline, Police Service C)

Changing local demographics were recognised by Patrick from Police Service B who noted, ‘the difference in spread of a residential area now compared to 30, 40 years ago, what was an estate of maybe 2,000 properties, is now eight estates all interlinked and joined of 30 and 40,000 sort of properties.’

Legacy buildings were also sometimes regarded as inappropriate due to their inability to accommodate modern technology. For Patrick changes in technology from the 1990s onwards impacted design requirements and costs; that ‘[s]uddenly there was computers on every desk that hadn’t been there before.’ Reliance on computing also had an environmental impact:

… a load of people and a load of computers in an office, the heat gain goes through the roof. And a lot of these buildings you couldn’t cool, you couldn’t start throwing handling units on roofs and ducting through buildings, […] the buildings had to change to cope with new ways of working (Patrick, Police Service B).

According to Mark from Police Service D, the increased reliance on technology impacted sustainability: ‘we’ve had a big pull on our power, as well, because as, body worn video, more CCTV, more laptop[s], […] far more kit, equipment, […] And we haven’t done enough on sustainability, but we haven’t had the funds to do it and we haven’t had the time to do it and that’s one of our goals going forward.’ Changes in technology can have a noticeable impact on working practices and on what a police service requires of its buildings. At the same time – and in line with other public services – the police were also starting to perceive benefits of open-plan offices and hot-desk working. According to Paul from Police Service A this change started pre-austerity:

… like a lot of public sector estates, […] we had quite an aging property stock, […] this is pre-austerity, there was kind of a cultural shift in policing, they were becoming more aware around the need for more interaction in the workplace, so that was kind of linked in to more the open plan concept, our estate was quite cellular, so you had people working in silos […] and we worked quite closely with the Home Office at the time, […] we really embraced like a full open plan concept.

According to the estate managers interviewed, many of the older buildings were not suitable for conversion to open plan or were not able to affordably cope with the newer technologies, and so there was a push for estate reorganisation to fit the new requirements. According to Caroline from Police Service C, their service’s newly built divisional headquarters:

… it’s got really agile working to places inside, so as we have an investigation that hits, we can [have] stand up and sit-down space, when we could never do any of that at [named station]. Teams can integrate, because it’s so open plan inside. […] And I think, you know, it’s really light and [named station] was very dark. Air quality is better, air flow is better, things like the catering provision … 

Agile working may be a challenge for a service that has traditionally been hierarchical; yet such flexibility may be beneficial for collaborative working. For this divisional headquarters, it is an example of new spatial design being put in place with the aim to reshape working practice. For Patrick from Police Service B, many of these changes started in the early 2000s – predating austerity – when his service embraced the Private Finance Initiative (PFI)⁵ being promoted at that time to fund new purpose-built premises. According to Patrick:

… the big hit of austerity started just prior to 2010, that resulted in quite a few building closures […] Our biggest round of closures came probably around early 2002/3, we went into a major PFI contract to build 16 sort of PFI buildings, and I can’t remember the exact balance, but there was probably something in the region of 40 or 50 buildings went as a result of those 16.

Changes in policing models

The estate managers also justified such rationalisation in order to streamline provision. All four services included in the study had shifted their model of policing over the period 2010–2020, from having numerous smaller, local police stations – in line with a neighbourhood policing model (Quinton and Morris 2008) – to having fewer, but larger, divisional headquarters, and maybe augmented by some smaller bases. For the estate managers interviewed, there is difficulty in responding to changing police models which can shift with policing fashion. Changes to the fabric of the police estate take a lot longer. For instance, according to Patrick, Police Service B:

… from initially deciding you need something to get it through the funding streams, the approvals, planning applications and build, it can take a good five to ten years, depending on the size and complexity of it. And the policing model can change every four or five. […] you can be completely out of synch with the policing model and your estate strategy, so it’s very difficult to sort of anticipate what the policing model might be in five years’ time when you suddenly decide we need to build a new building. So, flexibility now is, if we’re going to build something, is the key to how quickly and how cost effectively could you adapt a building for purpose without knocking walls down all the time.

According to those tasked with managing the police estate, key considerations have been flexibility, provision for technology and demand for open-plan offices. Along with the price and availability of land, this has meant any new build properties have tended to be located at edge-of-town locations with cheaper land, easier vehicle access, and space for parking; as Mark from Police Service D noted,

Somebody said to me when I joined, ‘If you shut a police station, the local people complain’, […] but queues of people at police stations isn’t really where it works now. But for us it’s about response time. We want deployment bases where our officers can get to quick enough. We try and keep them on the road all the time, or on the beat. They’ve got agile hand-held devices, mobile devices.

Following patterns in retail that shifted to out-of-town thirty-plus years earlier (Thomas and Bromley 1993, Millie 2012) there may be benefits for public access in similarly moving police stations out-of-town, although less so for those without their own transport. A downside of such a move is the loss of a symbolic visible presence in the heart of the community, being instead shifted to an anonymous retail or business park location – although as noted, this visible presence may be interpreted in different ways. As observed elsewhere (Millie 2012, Smith and Somerville 2013) the closure of a police station is also part of a pattern of withdrawal of services from local communities, along with the closure of post offices, banks, and doctors’ surgeries, and contributes to a pattern of abstract policing, with the police being physically more distant from communities.

Changes in demand

As noted, the estate managers did not believe the public were using the existing stations. There is a logic to this, with crime reporting and other interactions with the police easier and more convenient online or via telephone. Data to back this assertion is not readily available, although figures for the Metropolitan Police offer support (MOPAC and Metropolitan Police Service 2017).⁶ As a measure of public use of police station front counters, figures for crimes being reported at each Metropolitan Police front counter were recorded for May 2017. This was a crude measure as the public may use front counters for other reasons, and a single person may report multiple crimes (and, as we argue, there may be other benefits in having a visible police station, even if it is not used by the public), but it does provide a rough guide. For 71 police front counters in London where data were available, for May 2017 there was an average of just 2.5 crimes reported per day. Of these front counters, 30 were set to remain open which had an average of 4.0 crimes reported each day. The remaining 41 front counters were due to close and had an average of only 1.4 crimes reported per day, with some not seeing any reported. According to Catherine from Police Service D, many police station front counters closed because, ‘basically, the demand of people going in was that low that you just can’t, I mean, there was no point in having it open.’ Mark from the same police service noted that, ‘by the time they came to being sold, policing had changed, so the help desk in [named station] probably hadn’t been open for 15 years. There was one police station we saw […] there hadn’t been a single pick up of that phone on the wall for four years.’ Public interactions with the police have changed; to use the language of Terpstra et al. (2019) they have become more abstract. Crime reporting does not need to be face-to-face and so there are fewer reasons for the public to physically interact with the police by visiting a police station; and perhaps police social media accounts have become the new (virtual) front counter. As Catherine from Police Service D observed:

… people are more interested in seeing somebody or knowing that through social media they can get hold of somebody if they need to do. I don’t think really the younger generation would think, ‘Oh, there’s no police station’, because they’ve never really known that. You know, I might hear my dad say, ‘Oh, you never see any local bobbies’, but at one time, you couldn’t just go onto your phone and go onto an app or a Twitter site and get somebody to react, so it’s getting that balance, isn’t it […] what young person would ever really just walk into a police station? They wouldn’t, would they?

If the public are not visiting their local stations, then why keep them open? It is a logical argument but again ignores the symbolism of having a police station physically located within a community rather than somewhere out-of-town, or in a different town entirely. The police station may be read as representative of the service’s interest in that community, irrespective of whether the public visit it, or whether officers would come from that station or from elsewhere if called upon. Furthermore, if the community is not using a police station, perhaps the answer is to find other ways for stations to engage with their community rather than for the police to withdraw. Engagement matters along with the symbolism of being present; yet, according to Mark from Police Service D most people did not even notice their local station:

I know there’s a view of, there will be some people if a police station closed, may feel a little less confident. I think most people just would even have walked past the police station in the old days, unless it was a town centre one with a blue light, and not really known it was there and not used it.

This estate manager suggested that police station closure could have a detrimental impact on public confidence in the police, but for him a bigger issue was having fewer officers visibly working on the street: ‘Does it make people feel less safe? I suppose it probably does, but the biggest thing that we’ve always got, you saw less police officers on the beat and that’s probably what really shows people more, seeing people in and out in their community.’ It is a classic ‘bobbies on the beat’ argument; but having a local police station where local patrol officers are based might be part of the solution, although this is the type of neighbourhood policing that the various services had moved on from.

If local police stations are closed, so-called frontline officers are then based at stations more removed from many citizens, often in out-of-town locations. This may or may not impact crime rates, but there is a visual symbolism of such withdrawal. Furthermore, following advances in technology officers can now spend a lot of their time working from a police car remote from any station, a development that ties in with the notion of the abstract police (Terpstra et al. 2019). For instance, according to one estate manager from a police service that covers a large, mostly rural area, there are challenges to such a policing model:

… we’ve invested heavily in the technology side, and it has been very successful but just because of the geography of the county and the coverage of the network, there are still some challenges and frustrations there. So you’ll get officers who are working remotely, they’ve got their remote device, they’ve got their laptop, but sometimes their coverage is causing challenges and frustrations, so it’s, you know, the service to what they would want to provide in those communities isn’t necessarily there. Through just technology alone. But then some of the things which are often forgotten about like the welfare breaks and similar, even needing to go to the likes of the toilet and similar. […] so we’ve done quite a lot of work around trying to partner with other partners around sharing buildings and similar. (Paul, Police Service A)

Austerity certainly influenced closure, but it was not the only explanation. Others highlighted how changes to the model of policing were happening anyway and that some closures pre-dated austerity. According to Paul from Police Service A:

… austerity came and probably added weight to that argument because at the same time then, our policing model changed. So, we went from being a community focused police force, where we had deployment models around the county, to being more of a town focused, so we rationalised our deployment model, to what we call these key centres, which kind of added an extra weight to the argument to build these new larger more modern police stations. So, I think, you know, austerity certainly drove it later on, yes.

In some ways, the background of austerity made a convenient excuse, informing the public that a local station must close due to cuts in government funding. But, as highlighted by Paul from Police Service A, at the same time as closing local police stations, money was found to invest in ‘new larger more modern police stations’, the kind of glass box divisional headquarters built at the edge of town.

Discussion and conclusions

This article contributes to visual criminology by highlighting the communicative properties of police visibility, that there is more to visibility than ‘bobbies on the beat’ and police vehicles. The article also provides greater understanding of the justification given for police station closure, that it was more than a simple response to austerity. There is a semiotic symbolism of police presence in having a visible local police station – and this can be interpreted both positively and negatively. But just as significant is a symbolism of absence when a station closes, a semiotics of police invisibility. For the few new builds that occurred in the four police service areas, these tended to be larger divisional or headquarter buildings out-of-town on anonymous business parks, with their new location contributing to police invisibility downtown. Millie (2012) has suggested previously that some stations can be secret places due to their location and design. Similarly in the US, Shah (2020:, p. 137) argues that the design of community correction offices makes them ‘intentionally obscured’ secret places. These new glass boxes are not designed to be hidden away, but being away from population centres may contribute to a perception of invisibility, of the police being more ‘abstract’. These changes relate to wider concerns about police legitimacy. Police visibility – in the form of a visible police estate – may contribute to legitimacy; yet trust and confidence in the police in England and Wales have been eroded by scandals relating to misogyny, racism, and wider misconduct (IOPC 2022, Casey 2023), as well as by an apparent ‘withdrawal’ of service. Improving reassurance, trust, and legitimacy is always going to be more complicated than having ‘more bobbies on the beat’ and more visible police stations.

The interviews with estate managers further highlighted how estate strategies can barely keep up with changing policing models. In 2019, police services had to respond to a central government announcement that, following a prolonged period of austerity cuts, it wanted to recruit a further 20,000 officers across England and Wales over the next three years (Home Office 2019). According to Paul from Police Service A, the policing model was forced to change again, but the estate strategy was in a difficult position as so many stations had already been sold off:

Because officer numbers went up again the policing model is in the process of being changed again. So, we are now going more community focused. Now a challenge with that of course is that some of our estate has been sold off, so we do have some gaps in providing that community focused model in the future. I think the big one for me is, and we knew this at the time, is you can’t switch the tap on and off quickly with buildings. Whatever you do has longer term implications, you know, if you sell something off to generate some savings, it’s very, very difficult to then get it back, you know, without pumping lots of capital in. Whether it’s been the right, was it the right thing to do? I suppose that’s a personal view, as a member of the community living in it, I don’t think it was, no. I think it was purely driven by the need to do it financially. As someone who pays my bills, the council tax, where I live, no it wasn’t the right thing to do. (Paul, Police Service A)

It is possible that by the time a police service invests in new buildings to reflect a shift back to a community-based model – as suggested by Paul – then policing fashions, models, and funding may well change again.

In line with developments in the abstract police (Terpstra et al. 2022), facilitated by enhanced technology, the aim has been for officers to be out-and-about as much as possible, away from their home station but connected through mobile devices. Yet, as Patrick from Police Service B observed, there is a cost to not having locally based officers operating out of local police stations:

… the policing model is, your police are not sat in the police station, your police are out where they need to be within your local sort of environment. And would you rather they were out walking the beat, driving the beat in a car, or all sat in a police station waiting for a call? And I think it is that focal point, that reassurance of, ‘Ah there’s a police station there, therefore there are police’, in a lot of cases some of the smaller buildings, they’re not there because they’re out doing the job that the public expect them to be doing. […] As a member of the public, would I want police officers sat in a building or would I want them out visible on the streets patrolling, dealing with crime, preventing crime, but there is that, it’s a focal point, we have a village, we have a little village police station.

The closure of a local police station removes that visible focal point, that semiotic signal to be read that the police are invested in a neighbourhood, whether or not the police station is actually visited by the public – although as noted, some communities may not want a local station due to poor relations with the police. The public’s engagement with their local police station may be influenced by its architectural style, but also by positive and negative histories of interaction with the police. Nonetheless, by physically turning away from communities there is a semiotics of absence, that the police lack interest in the area – that they are the opposite of a reassuring presence (Innes 2007).

It comes down to what a police station is for – and, by extension, what the police are for. If the priority is effective response deployment, then the economies of scale that come with centralisation and the closure of smaller stations may make sense. If the station is there for public reassurance, then its closure can mark the withdrawal from a community and impact public trust and confidence that underpin legitimacy. Policing models that make officers more abstract from communities further the divide between the police and the public, although it is acknowledged that a move to the online world may offset some of the potential loss in legitimacy and reassurance (e.g. Bullock 2018; Ralph et al. 2022). Despite changes in models of policing, there is still a place for the local police station, and even more if thought is given to what stations are for, to community engagement, and to architectural style – with stations read as welcoming rather than intimidating. It is possible that a visible local station could be the true front line within a community, but a front line where the divide between police and public is more blurred, where, like the Japanese koban observed by Young (2022:, p. 199), ‘an atmosphere of order maintenance can be sensed’, that the symbolism of the local police station ‘generates an affective atmosphere’ for the local neighbourhood.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 From 2017 known as Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, and in 2022 renamed again as ‘His Majesty’s’.

2 Of those interviewed, three were female and three were male. Not everyone stated their length in post, but those that did represented a range of experience from 18 months to 10 years.

3 Directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) were introduced across England and Wales with the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 (see Lister 2013).

4 RAL is a standard European classification of paint colours.

5 PFI (Public Finance Initiative) – a government method of procurement popular in the early 2000s where private companies complete and then manage public projects.

6 MOPAC and Metropolitan Police Service (2017) - data derived from ‘Annex 3: Front counters set to close and remain, with average daily crime reports’, p. 48.