The First Draft

Abstract

A variety of policing scandals at all ranks within the police (discussed in Chapter 4) and the gradual realization that investigative practices, particularly by the Criminal Investigations Department, had developed in ways which showed disrespect for individual rights and caused doubts as to the reliability of police evidence with regard to ‘confessions’, made reconsideration of the Judges’ Rules unavoidable. This chapter describes the initial phase in which the judges themselves sought to draw up new Rules against the background of the changing climate of police–citizen relations that the post-war period had inaugurated and the fate that their proposals met. After deliberating for sixteen months, and amid rising public concern over police practices, in 1962 the judges produced a set of proposals designed to meet ‘the public interest’ in regulating the police. These far-sighted proposals were in key respects a mirror of the regime established twenty-five years later by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE). This chapter shows how the executive summarily killed off these proposals, prioritizing instead what it saw as ‘the interests of the police’.