How did we get to “know nothing?” Why the search for progressive policing insights must not go down the old postmodern ‘rabbit hole.’

Professor John Robertson

I submitted this to Policing Insight: : Global progressive policing last week. It was rejected. I complained. The dark but comic response is after the piece I wrote below:

Some weeks ago, I saw in Policing Insight: Global progressive policing, a piece suggesting that the Scottish Government’s new gender recognition reforms posed a serious threat to ‘biological’ women’s safety and would also present a new and significant challenge to policing. The research methodology upon which the three authors based their premise was impressionistic and completely free of data on, for example, the tiny size of the trans woman population and their statistically almost zero risk to women, outside of prisons, by contrast with the risk from ‘straight’ males. There was no mention in their report of the 18 expert and activist groups, many of them women’s groups, wholly supporting the reforms, thus apparently rejecting, in their research, long-established norms of balance and evidence expected in educated writing on public affairs.

Then, taking my breath away somewhat, in another article, the suggestion that police officers might be ‘strung up’ for the ‘merest whiff of misogyny, sexism, islamophobia, transphobia, or any other perceived hurt-feeling invoking remark’ was presented uncritically. No independent, reliable, evidence was presented to quantify this dramatic claim, reminiscent of the comedian Stuart Lee’s line – ‘These days, if you say you’re English, you’ll be arrested and thrown in jail!’ The choice of ‘whiff’, too, is interesting. Does a whiff of something not suggest helpfully that a larger and rotten object lies behind the mere whiff and requires further investigation and treatment?

More recently, I saw the Scottish Government’s recently approved Hate Crime Laws, supported by all but the Conservative Party in the Scottish Parliament, directly accused of being likely to further distract police officers from their ‘core purpose.’ The article did not offer any balancing comment from the many researchers and human rights groups in favour of the new laws nor it did it offer the data needed to contextualise the debate, such as the scale of and trends in, hate crime –  falling for race, stable for religion at an historically low level, climbing from a very low level for sexual orientation and disability –  but, critically, stable at a very, very, low level for transgender identity. An early and striking indicator of the actual extent of increased pressure upon officers has just emerged in the wake of the recent Rangers/Celtic football match attended by 48 000 fans. The former Rangers player and TV pundit, Ally McCoist, had ‘guaranteed’ that he and all of the 48 000 fans, would be ‘breaching’ the new law at the game and BBC Scotland’s Head of Legal, suggested that, based on behaviour at previous games, almost everyone would need to be arrested. The next day, Police Scotland reported no arrests at the stadium (16 last year) and that ‘a small number’ of reports were being assessed. The head of the Scottish Police Federation, trade union, severe critics of the legislation beforehand, admitted that the (his?) ‘anticipated spike’ had not materialised.

All three articles were headed with the word ‘opinion’ but in quite small lettering. Then, however, we see, immediately below the headline, the authors credentials, former senior police officers or academics listing PhDs or professorships and host university names. Even if the reader notices the opinion ‘flag’, I feel sure that most will think that the author, based on title, is likely to know what they’re talking about, that Policing Insight has approved publication of the comments and is by no means suggesting, ‘just an opinion.’ This status-flagging will unavoidably change how many readers think and risks softening any healthy reserve.

All three pieces, and others I’ve seen, are I’m sure, well-intentioned efforts in support of groups feeling they are under unfair pressure from ‘top-down’ change, and at risk of worsened professional lives, due to central government policy initiatives imposed upon them. In two of the articles, the authors argue that policy development has neglected to properly consider the views of dedicated, hard-working police officers who, in practical as opposed to merely theoretical ways, somehow ‘know’ better what the priority tasks should be and how they can best be delivered. In the other article, the views of biological women have, it seems, been similarly neglected by politicians and so-called experts, in developing reforms that may put these women in danger,

With time, I argue, these concerns will be revealed to have been media amplified moral panics, along the lines of earlier crises around the banning of corporal punishment in schools or the adoption of children by gays. Already, the gender recognition controversy has faded from the media as the trans community lets them down by being amongst the most law-abiding in the country. The threat of reduced police effectiveness in ‘core tasks’ too, due to new hate crimes law, will, I predict, fade as hard evidence to support negative media coverage does not emerge in official statistics.

There is, of course, an underlying political dimension in Scotland to these highly mediated ‘crises’, as opposition politicians, often in cohort with some academics, trade unions and mainstream media, feast upon the supposed controversial nature of new SNP policies such as the named person scheme, the banning of alcohol in football stadia, the minimum unit pricing for alcohol, the gender recognition reforms and the new hate crime laws. All of these initiatives have been overwhelmingly supported by a range of professional bodies using hard evidence from research in the UK and elsewhere, but an often incoherent coalition of trade unions, religious groups and politicians or academics on the make, has required them to face intense negative media scrutiny and, in some cases, cancellation, with the help of either hypocritical political groups in Holyrood or in the UK Government, ever keen, regardless of the costs, to remind the Scottish Parliament of its subordinate status.

Why do the above three articles worry me?

I’m nearly 73 and I witnessed something similar 50 years ago which did serious damage to academic debate and research, which some disciplines are still recovering from, and which policing theory and research can learn from, before it falls down a ‘rabbit hole’ leading to nowhere useful.

I first met research methodologies in 1969. I was 18 and not ready for that confrontation but 15 years later, I was teaching about them to equally unready undergraduates and, over the next 32 years, published peer-reviewed research making them explicit and supervised PhD students developing new ones.

In 1969 and for much of the following five decades I confronted an initially and dramatically popular fashion for methodologies described loosely as postmodern or deconstructionist and largely qualitative in collecting evidence, which sought to replace the dominant structuralist and quantitative methodologies that had dominated physical and social science since the 19^th Century.

In the wake of the mass deaths in World War I, the World War II Holocaust and the exposure of Stalinist communism’s horrors, there had been a wave of disillusionment with the metanarratives of religion, socialism and empirical science as all three of these catastrophes had taken place in technologically and politically advanced, educated, cultures. In Art, surrealism challenged realism. In music, Jazz challenged classicism and in the social sciences, especially in sociology, psychology and philosophy, the work of such theorists as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault challenged the dominance of quantitative approaches for the explanation of social events and trends.

This was not an entirely unwelcome development at the time as the major disciplines had become over-reaching and complacent. Post Modernism might have usefully been just a ‘broom’ sweeping away all that but, regrettably, it then became the new dogma and settled down to direct debate and research in conformity with its once radical imperatives to relativise truth.

Within a few decades, the fashion was dying in the social sciences, after Derrida’s ideas were exposed as derivative of the Nazi philosopher, Martin Heidegger’s rejection of science and reason for spirituality and racialised knowledge and as spoof articles were accepted for publication in academic journals edited in faculties where postmodern ideas had come to dominate. Throughout, the great linguist and media theorist, Noam Chomsky, had repeatedly and accurately demolished that uncontrolled relativism, where we were told one ‘man’s’ perceptions were as good as any other ‘man’s, and that we could never know anything with certainty.

In my latter days in Higher Education, I witnessed the arrival of professional or vocational subjects into universities as those occupations became all-graduate entry. Teacher education, nurse education, and media education/practice staff began to feel the pressure to publish research and often seemed, late in the day, attracted to the qualitative softness of postmodernism as, shockingly, an alternative to having to spend months gathering data and having to deal with mathematics for 11-year-olds, in the form of percentages, averages and graphical forms, such as scatter graphs.

Guiding these staff, I had to work hard to offer an alternative to an overwhelming  preference for representation, literary and visual style, individual meaning and subjective interpretation, in the study of, for example, cultural phenomena such as soaps, music genres, computer games addiction, or youth fashion, which was then causing the serious neglect of key structural themes such as economic power distribution, media ownership, inequality, exploitation and class.

There are now clear trends in the UK toward all-graduate entry to policing careers. Consequently, the debate and research to support its implementation in Higher Education needs to be scientific to be useful for graduates.

Finally, returning to the three examples I opened with, I’m not saying that there should be no opinions, only hard statistical evidence, but if the author is keen to project an academic status to further authenticate their opinions, along with policing (the second and third) or activist credentials (the first), they need a higher standard of academic discourse, backed up by a balanced reading and presentation of prior peer-reviewed research and, critically, written in a less dogmatic manner.

Stop now and think what you make of all this. Was I persuasive or do you think it’s all nonsense?

No read on.

Footnote:

I’m a 73 year-old retired Professor of Media Politics, Faculty Research Ethics Chair, formerly Associate Dean for Quality Assurance, former Head of Department, Senior Lecturer, lecturer, schoolteacher, leftie sociology student, motorcyclist, failed architecture student, failed long-haired Art student, dog-owner, left handed etc, etc, and I’ve got another six postgraduate awards, but no policing experience, so I’d rather you read the above, in no way influenced, either way, by any of that.

Martin Gallagher comments:

While I always welcome comment on my articles I think yours is now going beyond being helpful or informative, and that you should perhaps reflect on your purpose in commenting. Perhaps writing an article refuting my arguments (with plenty of good referencing that you are fond of) would be the way to go. Hope so, I look forward with gusto to reading same.

My complaint:

Dear…
I write to complain about an editorial decision to refuse a submission to publish a piece despite it being in response to a direct invitation to do so by one of PI’s editors and on the basis of misunderstanding the important points it makes about how PI can deliver its commitment to progressive rather than regressive policing.

“On the 4th April 2024, after an exchange with your editor Martin Gallagher in which I questioned his use of, perhaps more lack of, evidence, he wrote:While I always welcome comment on my articles I think yours is now going beyond being helpful or informative, and that you should perhaps reflect on your purpose in commenting. Perhaps writing an article refuting my arguments (with plenty of good referencing that you are fond of) would be the way to go. Hope so, I look forward with gusto to reading same.”

My submission is attached.
After spending some time writing the attached response, I got this from your editor Keith Potter:
“Thanks again for the contribution; on this occasion though I didn’t think it’s something we’re going to be able to run. I realise it was prompted by the debate between you and Martin Gallagher, and that you reference his and other articles from the site in your piece. But our remit first and foremost is to share good practice, research and opinion that focuses on initiatives, issues and challenges for policing, and I think the main thrust of your article is around the argument about academic approaches, and the clash between post-modernist methodologies and qualitative research as opposed to structuralist approaches and quantitative research. All interesting stuff, and well argued, but given that we’re already tight on space to get in the coverage of policing issues that we need to address (and would like to do more of), I don’t think the article quite fits with what we’re trying to give our audience.”

I replied:
“Hi KeithThanksI’m very disappointed with this given it was directly requested by one of your editors and that it addresses a serious concern about the value of much that you do publish in that ‘tight space’ (eg the three I refer to) in terms of actually revealing useful insights rather than parading old frankly regressing habits.Please reconsider this decision and get back to me.John.”
I’ve had no reply.
It’s hard to see this other than as suppression of legitimate ideas because they are uncomfortable in some way but uncomfortable in research is a healthy sign.
Please reconsider the decision and publish my paper. 
I look forward to your response.

The sole owner’s response:

Dear John

Thank you for your email of complaint.

I run the Policing Insight business as Publishing Director including setting the parameters of the editorial strategy.

I employ Keith Potter as our editor to deliver/publish editorial within those editorial parameters which he does very well despite our limited resources as a small business.

I have reviewed both your article submission and your correspondence with Keith and I agree with Keith that your article is not something that we would publish on Policing Insight and I entirely agree with his response to you.

I am sorry if this is a disappointment to you but we are an independent publisher free to publish what in our view best serves our subscribers and works best for us as a publishing business.

As Keith says, you are welcome to submit constructive articles/article ideas on policing topics around policy, practice, research etc but they will be assessed for suitability to be published on Policing Insight on our terms – you do not have any right to insist on publication.

Your correspondence also asserts that one of the editors invited you to write an article and that this means it must be published. Firstly the person concerned (Martin Gallagher) is not one of our editors; he is a freelance contributor to Policing Insight and has no authority over our editorial decisions. He both submits free ‘opinion’ articles under his own personal byline as a policing commentator and is also commissioned by us to write journalistic features under a separate Policing Insight byline.

I note that Martin does respond to you in a comment on his opinion piece about EDI.

“While I always welcome comment on my articles, I think yours is now going beyond being helpful or informative, and that you should perhaps reflect on your purpose in commenting. Perhaps writing an article refuting my arguments (with plenty of good referencing that you are fond of) would be the way to go. Hope so, I look forward with gusto to reading same.”

Martyn is simply inviting you to submit an article to Policing Insight instead of trolling him on the comments section of his own article (something which we have warned you about previously). Note that Martyn is placing this comment under an article under his own personal byline and is not representing Policing Inisght in any official capacity. Also as previously stated, writing and submitting an article does not mean we have to publish it just because you insist the topic is important for your agenda.

I hope my response in rejecting your complaint is clear and I would emphasise that it is my final response on the matter.

My last words on the matter 🙂

Hi Ian

I thought PI was a reputable journal with a board and an ethics committee.

It’s not. It’s a fraud.

Just you and whoever you like making decisions based on your ‘track record for driving revenue through business and product development.’

Judging by the three pieces I critique, any excrement can get in as long as it rocks no boats.

Trolling? you need to get out more if you think criticising with evidence is trolling.

I’m used to better, so much better, in HE.

I won’t be submitting anything in future thanks. I have a sensitive nose.

That’s my final word!

Professor and Research Ethic Faculty Chair, Dr John Robertson

I kind of enjoyed that. Is it an age thing?