Stevens, Alex, Agnew-Pauley, Winnie, Bacon, Matthew, Glasspoole-Bird, Helen, Hendrie, Nadine, Hughes, Caitlin Elizabeth, Lloyd, Charlie, Monaghan, Mark, Smith, Rivka, Sutton, Charlie, and others. (2025) Cascading constraint and subsidiary discretion: Perspectives on police discretion from police-led drug diversion and stop and search in England. The British Journal of Criminology, . Article Number azaf050. ISSN 0007-0955. (doi:10.1093/bjc/azaf050) (KAR id:110372)
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| Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azaf050 |
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Abstract
This article explores how discretion is managed and exercised across senior, middle, and street levels of policing. It uses qualitative data from two studies in England. The first, a study across three police force areas, involved interviews and focus groups with 221 people who were designers, deliverers, and recipients of police-led drug diversion. The second study used 354 hours of ethnographic observation and 21 interviews to examine stop-and-search practices in one other police force. Rather than a simply expanding scope of discretion at lower levels of the hierarchy, the findings reveal a multi-level process of cascading constraints and subsidiary discretion. At each level, we observe the exercise of occupational professionalism and autonomous judgement, but higher-level constraints shape how discretion is applied in pursuit of organizational professionalism.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| DOI/Identification number: | 10.1093/bjc/azaf050 |
| Uncontrolled keywords: | policing, stop and search, diversion, discretion, professionalization |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences |
| Institutional Unit: | Schools > School of Social Sciences > Centre for Health Services Studies |
| Former Institutional Unit: |
There are no former institutional units.
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| Funders: | University of Kent (https://ror.org/00xkeyj56) |
| Depositing User: | Nadine Hendrie |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jun 2025 12:33 UTC |
| Last Modified: | 23 Jul 2025 11:10 UTC |
| Resource URI: | https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/110372 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes) |
University of Kent Author Information
Hendrie, Nadine.
| Creator's ORCID: |
 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6437-0826
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