BSC Policing Network Annual Prize
Applications for 2023 are now closed.
Previous Winners
2024 – The winner of the Policing Network paper prize is Anna Souhami for her paper: ‘Weather, Light and Darkness in Remote Island Policing: Expanding the Horizons of the Criminological Imagination‘ published in the British Journal of Criminology.
2023 – not awarded
2022 – Winner
This year’s prize winner is Dr Jonah Miller, for his article ‘The Touch of the State: Stop and Search in England, c.1660-1750’ (History Workshop Journal 87 (2019)).
2020 – not awarded due to the COVID-19 outbreak
2017 Prize Winners
Sole authored paper
Wood, D. (2016) The importance of liberal values within policing: police and crime commissioners, police independence and the spectre of illiberal democracy, Policing and Society, 26(2), 148-164.
Review: Wood’s paper is an excellent piece of scholarship, bringing important insight into conceptual challenges relating to the democratic governance and accountability of police in 21st century. It draws upon a wide-range of police history, political theory and similar literature to explore the tensions between developing a liberal model of policing and one that is democratic.
Joint authored paper
Murray, K. and Harkin, D. (2017) ‘Policing in Cool and Hot Climates: Legitimacy, Power and the Rise and Fall of Mass Stop and Search in Scotland’, as published in the British Journal of Criminology, 57 (4), 885-905. (online in 2016)
Review: What is perhaps most impressive about this paper is the way the research interests of the two authors are combined to produce a highly valuable contribution to way we think about legitimacy in the context of policing; with particular reference to (a) how legitimacy is reproduced within particular political climates and (b) the extent to which it can provide a cloak to hide problematic police practice.
Previous Winners
2016 – Prof Tim Newburn, LSE.
‘Reflections on why riots do not happen’, Theoretical Criminology, 20(2): 125-144.
Previous winners
2015 – Genevieve Lennon for her article ‘Precautionary Tales: Suspicionless Counter-terrorism stop and search’ Criminology and Criminal Justice 15(1).
2015 – Ben Bradford and Paul Quinton for their article: ‘Self-legitimacy, Police Culture and Support for Democratic Policing in an English Constabulary’ British Journal of Criminology 54 (1023-1046).