Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically examines the everyday justifications and tensions inherent in contemporary public protection policing in the UK. It unpacks officials’ emotional and moral reflections on the competing values and objectives of their work, and historically situates their will to care.

Paper long abstract:

Successive Westminster governments over the past decade have increasingly committed to take ‘vulnerability’ seriously, pledging to recognise, criminalise and relieve various forms of re-discovered human misery. Meanwhile, law enforcement as an institution has faced heightened global public scrutiny, with its legitimacy cast as a subject of popular debate. In response, UK police forces increasingly assert that the ‘protection of vulnerable people from harm’ is one of most important goods that they pursue, blending this objective with more ‘classic’ law-and-order justifications. Moreover, a core benchmark in official inspections of UK police force effectiveness since 2015 is the identification, protection and support of ‘vulnerable people’. To this end, police forces have restructured, creating specialised public protection departments to operate alongside conventional patrol and investigative teams.

Based on ethnographic research in UK police forces, this paper examines the everyday justifications and tensions inherent in vulnerability policing. Public protection officials commonly assert the comparative advantage of their uniquely relational and compassionate style of working that differentiates them from typical manifestations of law enforcement; and they see their work as uniquely positioned to gain victims’ trust, transform their lives and, in the process, challenge discourses of the police as unresponsive and/or uncaring. As such, their will to care is part of a broader project of rebuilding legitimacy in contemporary policing across the Global North. It features a recursive logic that takes failure as its condition of possibility and deploys officials’ emotional-moral labour at the coalface of multiple crises facing the UK public sector today.