BestThinking / Articles / Science / Social Sciences / Sociology / The Problem of Zombie Cops in Voodoo Criminology: A 27 Year Old Myth About Beat Patrol Policing is Busted (Article)

Picture commissioned by Sutton from the artist Marcus Jones. Marcus can be contacted via his online gallery website http://marcusjones.daportfolio.comUsed only with express written permission

Randomly Patrolling Zombie Cops

Braced Myth Definition

The 27 year old zombie cop myth was first bust in an encyclopedia entry I wrote on the UK Safer Cities programme. Following the presentation of a paper based on this BestThinking article at an academic conference, several papers are in preparation, or else undergoing peer review, that use swathes of text from it. Simply in order to comply with the rules of academic publishers that the books, chapters and scholarly papers they publish are not first reproduced elsewhere I have removed the text from this article.

As and when book chapters and papers are published, that are based in part on this article, I will publish a reference to them here. Furthermore, with permission of the publishers some of the text may then be reproduced.

I would like to thank the several thousand readers who have read this article and in particular those police officers who contacted me directly by email to let me know the negative impact of this policing myth on their work. This preliminary and revolutionary peer-to-peer publishing process on Best Thinking has been extremely beneficial and informative for policy oriented knowledge progression.

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Allan Brown

July 4, 2011 at 2:51 am

Thank you, at long last

Mike, I spent 31 years as a Police Officer, of which 20 years were as a patrolling resource. I have been repeatedly brow beaten by this "weak arguement" and had many Police Leaders use it for their own political ends. I always felt it had to be rubbish but never had the time or the access to resources to de-bunk it as well as you do; Instead my response was couched perhaps to firmly in the Anglo Saxon. But my reasoning I felt was sound, because I knew how many times in my career I had "happened upon a burglary in progress" and that not in the mean streets of London, but in a largely rural policing area. Crucial to this was that I made the distinction between "happening upon" and being sent to an "intruders on call"; It averaged out to about twice a year (not as often as I would have liked but pleasing when it happened) and I also knew that colleagues had similar strike records, so in my own rather uneducated manner I simply couldn't get the maths to work because even allowing for non patrolling officers (who all at some stage had patrolled however unsuccessfully) I couldn't reconcile the frequency rate let alone establish a relationship with area. Thanks for laying this to rest at last, and I will be telling all my colleagues to put a copy of your paper in a drawer somewhere, because like all urban myths it is bound to go full cycle and pop up again as the considered opinion of the next generation of Policy makers.

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Mike Sutton

July 12, 2011 at 10:42 am

Dear Allan

Very many thanks for this informed feedback. I'm glad the essay has been of some use.

I am currently writing a book (aimed at popular appeal) on the subject of policy oriented research frauds and other dysologies - some of this essay will be included within it

Apologies for the delay in replying - I have been overseas for the past few weeks.

Please do disseminate this mythbusting to your fellow officers. In all honesty I am not sure how effective beat policing can be. Ultimately it must be as bad as the worst officers. but how effective it is for officers who fully committed and capable of exploiting it to detect and reduce crime has never been subjected to research. My main point in the paper is that the current orthodoxy that has it that beat policing is ineffective is based on utter and ludicrous nonsense.

Best wishes

Mike