Chief Constables in England and Wales: A Social Portrait of a Criminal Justice Elite

Abstract

The leadership of the police forces In this country has never been considered in analyses of elites or of the structure of power. Policing generally has largely been ignored in political sociology, figuring only in some Marxist analyses as a taken­ for­granted aspect of the state, its first­line repressive apparatus whose inner functioning scarcely called for serious research or analysis. 'The term " elite " originally meant, and in many contexts still means, the best, the excellent, the noble, or the creme de la creme' (Dunleavy and O'Leary, 1987, p. 136)