A2 Crime and Deviance – Methods in context essay plan

Examine the strengths and limitations of using Covert Participant Observation to research the extent to which Racism exists in the Police Force (15)

Research is needed on this topic is because it would help us to answer the question of whether ethnic minorities are over represented in the prison population due to their having higher underlying rates of offending or whether this is because the police over-policing minority groups.

As things stand at the moment – we cannot be sure of the extent to which police racism exists – the police themselves claim they are not racist, and direct observations such as those carried out by Waddington et al (2004) suggest that police stop and searches are proportionate to the visibility of ethnic minorities. However, self-report studies suggest that underlying rates of offending are very similar across ethnic groups and the idea that black people are seven times more criminal than white people doesn’t seem right at an intuitive level, so there is still a very big question mark over whether the police actually are Racist. Given that official statistics and previous research tell us different things, there is urgent need for further, valid research on this topic, and covert PO is typically regarded as yielding data that is high in validity.  

Covert Participant observation is one of the few methods, if not the only method, whereby we would get a valid insight into the extent of police racism because the police should act naturally because they do not know they are being observed. If you were to use any kind of overt method – be it overt observation, questionnaires or interviews, to investigate Racism, you would not get valid data because not only are Racist practices socially undesirable, any policeman found to be discriminatory would be dismissed, so even if they were racist, they would not act racist when researched. 

One problem of using this method for this topic is gaining access to the police force in the first place – this would either involve gaining permission from the police authorities to pose as a police officer for the duration of the research or to apply to the police force and go through the training process as one documentary maker did for the BBC in 2004. The problem with the former route is that you would probably not be allowed access by the police because they might argue that this could harm the public; the police may also be worried about your findings – in the wake of Stephen Lawrence and the McPherson enquiry the police are very sensitive about their public image over Race Relations and would probably not invite any research that might undermine this. A problem with the second methods, of covertly accessing the police is that it is both unethical in that you are deceiving everyone, and posing a as police officer is illegal.

Whatever way you did this research it would also be time consuming – in the case of the BBC documentary the researcher spent more than a year gaining access and his cover was blown after only a few months ‘on the beat’. A second limitation is that you can only do this method with a very limited sample of police officers would negatively affect the representativeness of the research – even over the course of a year you are only likely to become intimate enough with a handful of officers for them to ‘come out’ as Racists. One could thus in no way generalise one’s findings to the whole of the police force across the country, or even to the police force one conducts one’s research within.

Furthermore, while one may find evidence of racist attitudes, or hear tales of racist practices, you would have little or no control over the sample of police officers who you came into direct contact with are only ever likely to be ‘on the beat’ with one other officer at a time, and you would have no choice in who that officer was, so you would not be able to verify any reports of racism first hand. This would be a problem as racist officers may exaggerate their racist behaviour to others they think are racist to gain status, meaning that the data gained here is no more valid than that gained through interviews or questionnaires.

Covert Observation is also unreliable – given that one could not record data easily we are totally dependent on the researcher’s own definitions and interpretations of what constitutes racist attitudes and practises and these interpretations would, practically speaking, be unverifiable.

Finally, because racism is such an emotive issue, and this type of research is extremely draining, one would assume that any individual doing this research would have strong feelings about it, thus there would be a danger of researcher bias exaggerating any slight act that could be interpreted as racist. This fact, combined with the extreme unrepresentativeness of this method means that any evidence of Racism uncovered should be treated with extreme caution.  Given the problems of researching this topic it would appear that one may not gain a valid picture of the nature and extent of police racism by using this method after all!

This is just one possible essay!

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