There has been increasing pressure on police forces nationwide within England and Wales to utilise the various civil preventive orders and notices available to prevent sub-criminal and criminal behaviour, with the behaviour prevented using these powers often being immune from traditional criminal law. As a result, these powers follow a two-step legal process where the decision to issue is often based on the lower civil standard of evidence. However, where a recipient breaches the order, notice or any of the requirements, they often commit a criminal offence, leading to a potential imprisonment term of up to five years. Despite the increasing demand for their use, there is limited understanding of the data recording and sharing practices associated with these powers. Numerous Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are sent yearly to forces nationwide; nonetheless, the data held and shared concerning these powers is often incomplete and non-existent in others. Therefore, the following paper presents the first multi-order and notice analysis of the data recording and sharing practices associated with civil preventive orders and notices for sub-criminal (Anti-Social Behaviour) and criminal behaviour (Violence Against Women and Girls). Based on 100 hours of ethnographic observations, sixteen semi-structured interviews and a range of secondary data, including force policies and statistics, the findings raise significant concerns. In particular, around multi-agency partnership working, victim protection and compatibility of practice with mandatory data protection laws and broader legislation governing investigations and prosecutions.

This paper considers how the implementation of powers from the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act (2014) produces complex landscapes of social control in public spaces, particularly targeted at the exclusion of behaviours from certain groups in society.

Focusing on people experiencing street homelessness, we argue that the way in which the anti-social behaviour (ASB) powers are used within a spatial context creates sites where multiple layers of regulation inevitably result in the exclusion of this group, often resulting in criminalisation for non-compliance. This ‘surprising return of banishment’ through spatial and primarily civil powers, operates as a ‘contemporary social control strategy’ that is fundamentally punishing in practice, if not in intent (Beckett and Herbert 2010, p34).

Utilising data from two research projects, we interrogate how ASB powers are used in combination to develop enforcement frameworks that seek to preventively police behaviours associated with street homelessness, such as public drinking. In doing so, we explore how defined sites are policed in practice, both formally and informally. We also look ahead to the proposed powers to criminalise ‘nuisance rough sleeping’ and ‘nuisance begging’ contained in the Criminal Justice Bill, and how these additions might assimilate into the broader spectrum of spatial social control.

For the most part, we understand police encounters with the public through data on stop and search. In England and Wales, this no longer includes (and in Scotland has never included) so called stop and account incidents, or what police might call ‘engagement’. Nor does it include traffic stops (though this is changing in England and Wales). However, this is to see any such encounters from a police perspective. In this paper, we want to argue for a different lens through which to understand police stops and police-public encounters. In doing so, we will draw upon elements of Galtung’s (1969, 1990) theory of violence, focusing on cultural, psychological and latent aspects as much as any physical act. We argue that police encounters carry with them – at least the threat of - potential violence. Police officers are authorized to carry tools for violence, and their use is legitimated by the state. At what point is the latent threat coded in police power and, as such, encounters with police officers experienced by non-police actors? Is a police officer staring an act of violence? Is a police presence that causes a person to deviate from their intended course of action an act of psychological violence? In discussing the nature of such violence, we will reflect on ethnographic research with police officers in England and in Scotland. Vignettes of police-public encounters will problematize what we understand a stop to be, recognizing that even then this evidence is seen very much from over a police officer’s shoulder.

Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs) are spatial anti-social behaviour tools that were introduced by the Coalition government in October 2014. They contain prohibitions and requirements that govern the behaviour of all public space users within a restricted area, with punishments for those found to be in breach including an on-the-spot fixed-penalty notice of £100, or a £1,000 fine. Over the past decade, local authorities that introduced PSPOs have been subjected to intense scrutiny, primarily for their controversial interpretations of the broadly-worded statute that these orders derive from, alongside the potential for their imposition to disproportionately criminalise vulnerable citizens, notably people experiencing street homelessness.

This paper draws upon the author’s doctoral research, which directly engaged with local authority practitioners, police officers, and elected officials, to understand how the use of PSPOs has developed, and how they have been employed to tackle anti-social behaviour. It particularly sets out how practitioners’ interpretations of the statutory requirements represent ideas of majoritarian decision-making by failing to equitably incorporate the perspectives of vulnerable citizens, often those who are most likely to breach the restrictions that a PSPO contains. Consequently, the introduction of an order demonises the physical presence of such individuals within public spaces, which is compounded by an increasingly punitive engagement approach by policing bodies. From these discussions, this paper proposes recommendations for how PSPOs should operate in future, if their existence is to continue.

It also considers opportunities for further empirical research in this area of anti-social behaviour governance, together with identifying the potential impact of the proposed Criminal Justice Bill in the enforcement of street homelessness.