Righting the Police: How do Officers Make Sense of Human Rights?

Richard Martin

The British Journal of Criminology, 2022, vol. 62, issue 3, 551-567

Abstract: Human rights have become a dominant paradigm in police reform projects worldwide, championed by policymakers, legislators and campaigners alike. Such projects are often premised on, and evaluated according to, a conception of human rights as an autonomous, coherent and legitimate body of norms. It is a paradigm made real through formal training, procedures and oversight. This paper invites a different reading of human rights. Drawing on extensive interviews with junior officers, it reveals how human rights come to be emergent from, and embedded within, the minutia of their working lives. The presence and meaning of human rights are sustained through a series of ‘sensemaking’ narratives arising from the rich intermingling of legal and organizational representations of rights and officers’ own experiences. Subtle variations, inconsistencies and contradictions in officers’ sensemaking are revealed across a four-fold typology which disrupts the stability and coherency of the human rights paradigm, but also generalizations made about police culture.

Keywords: human rights; police; sensemaking; culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/bjc/azab067 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:crimin:v:62:y:2022:i:3:p:551-567.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The British Journal of Criminology is currently edited by Eamonn Carrabine

More articles in The British Journal of Criminology from Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().