The limits of legitimacy: power, racism, and the policing of youth in inner-city London

Drawing on findings from three years of ethnographic fieldwork and two years of Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects, this thesis investigates the various ways in which the authority of the police is cultivated, challenged and disrupted in an inner-city London Borough. Working and researching alongside youth practitioners, community activists, local politicians, police officers, senior police leadership, and a small cohort of young people who see themselves as both ‘overpoliced’ and ‘under protected’, I explore the contestation of the police’s ‘right to power’. Observing what Beetham (1991, p. 20) has termed ‘legitimacy deficits’, I suggest that contestations of the police’s ‘right to power’ in these contexts are characterised by large ‘discrepancies’ between the shared beliefs/values of policing authorities and the shared beliefs/values of ‘policed’ populations. I also explore the way in which young, policed populations contest the authority of the police through a series of what I term ‘delegitimation practices’, that is, practical acts that express a withdrawal of consent from the legal system and the state. In addition to these findings about policed young people, I also explore the ways that police officers and police leadership attempt to cultivate legitimacy in the face of these challenges to their authority at the interorganisational level, in a setting beyond the street and between power-holders. Building on in situ observations and first-hand recollections about the cultivation and contestation of legitimacy, I argue that the police’s ‘right to power’ in these contexts cannot be understood solely in isolation as a set of abstract or quantifiable beliefs, values or behaviours. Rather, I advocate for an understanding of legitimacy as embedded within wider social processes of meaning-making. These processes, I argue, take shape following the uneven distribution of policing power across intersecting racialised, classed, gendered and place-based forms of social stratification.