Refiguring the community and professional in policing and criminal justice: some questions of legitimacy

Source: (2008) In Joanna Shapland, ed., Justice, Community and Civil Society: A contested terrain. Devon, UK: Willan Publishing. Pp. 125-156.

“This chapter explores one of the subterranean, and often unspoken, themes that permeate much of the debate concerning the linkage between ‘community’, ‘civil society’ and ‘justice’, namely questions of legitimacy. Behind diverse governmental attempts to develop a geographically closer or more socially proximate relationship between ‘community’ and ‘justice’ are concerns that the state-sponsored systems of policing and criminal justice have become detached from the publics upon which they rely for support in a manner that signifies authentic deficits in legitimacy.” (abstract)