Authority is the legitimate right of one person or group to exercise power over another. The sociologist Max Weber identified three main types of authority: traditional, charismatic and rational-legal. The clearest examples of authority derived from tradition can be found in hereditary monarchies and the authority that religious leaders such as the Pope can command by virtue of tradition and rituals of appointment. Charismatic authority exists where an individual leader has extreme and rare powers of attraction. The impact of charisma can be benign or malign, and it clearly carries political risks, as exemplified by the rise of right-wing populist political leaders since the turn of this century. Rational-legal authority is derived from coherent systems of rules and regulations, whose value can be demonstrated or at least argued for.

Politicians, political scientists and commentators are all centrally preoccupied by the processes by which political power is legitimated and therefore sustained. They take for granted that power relations achieve stability only if naked power is transformed into authority by processes of legitimation. Surprisingly, given that the police are that arm of the state that has a near-monopoly on the use of coercive force against citizens, legitimacy has not been a concept that has pervaded political and academic debate about policing. Rather, it has emerged, become submerged and re-emerged as reputational threats to the police have come and gone. In Britain, systematic police corruption in the 1970s and the urban riots of the 1980s threw issues of police legitimacy into sharp focus. Throughout the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the legitimacy of the nowdisbanded Royal Ulster Constabulary was a perennial source of concern there.

However, for much of the last 30 years, mainstream politicians in mainland Britain have largely ignored issues of legitimacy, and focused on tough, no-nonsense solutions to crime. The start of this period of ‘penal populism’ can be dated to 1992/93, when Tony Blair, as Labour shadow Home Secretary, announced that he would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, which earned the response from the Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard that ‘prison works’.