Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically examines the everyday justifications and tensions of contemporary British public protection policing. Officials’ claims to care repurpose historic conceptions of policing from a welfarist golden age, combined with a humanitarian ethos in response to contemporary crises.

Paper long abstract:

This paper ethnographically examines the everyday pursuits of public protection policing officials to address the dual crises of austerity and police legitimacy. Successive Westminster governments over the past decade have promised to take ‘vulnerability’ seriously, pledging to relieve forms of re-discovered human misery. Similarly, British police forces, beset by legitimation crises, have asserted that the ‘protection of vulnerable people from harm’ is among their highest priorities, establishing public protection teams to signal this commitment. These crises serve as conscious resources for officials to articulate a will to care that blends post-war welfarist aspirations with contemporary humanitarian ideals. Positioning themselves as a last resort amid welfare retrenchment, public protection officials leverage public discontent with under-resourced services, asserting the comparative advantage of their own uniquely relational and compassionate style of working. They aspire to embody the nostalgic figure of the ‘noble bobby,’ assert their personal responsibility to alleviate suffering, idealise welfarist visions of reciprocal honesty and respectability, and embrace post-war psychodynamic models that attribute criminality to disrupted familial bonds and trauma. Pedagogical interventions feature prominently in officials’ evaluations of the success of their work—such as transformed relationships, reduced substance use, and increased school attendance—rather than simply securing convictions. At the heart of their labour is a preoccupation to demonstrate ‘care’, with the promise of rebuilding police legitimacy. Their will to care features a recursive logic that takes state failure as its condition of possibility and deploys officials’ emotional-moral labour at the coalface of multiple crises facing the British public sector.