Police Engagement with Muslim Communities : Breaking Out, Breaking In, and Breaking Through


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Breaking In, and Breaking Through.

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Article:

Bullock, Karen and Johnson, Paul James orcid.org/0000-0001-6391-7906 (2018) Police 
Engagement with Muslim Communities : Breaking Out, Breaking In, and Breaking 
Through. Policing and Society. pp. 879-897. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2017.1339706

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POLICE ENGAGEMENT WITH MUSLIM COMMUNITIES: 

BREAKING OUT, BREAKING IN, AND BREAKING THROUGH 

 

 

Karen Bullock 

Professor of Criminology 

Department of Sociology, University of Surrey 

 

Paul Johnson 

Professor of Sociology 

Department of Sociology, University of York 

 

 

ABSTRACT 

 

This article considers the character of engagement between UK police forces and Muslim 

communities and citizens. It examines, from the perspective of police personnel, a range of 

factors that prevent police organisations from ‘breaking out’ of constraints that currently 

hinder their engagement with Muslim communities, limit police officers from ‘breaking in’ to 

Muslim communities in ways that would improve engagement, and facilitate police officers 

in ‘breaking through’ barriers between them and Muslim communities. The aim of the article 

is to offer a critical insight into engagement between police officers and Muslim communities 

and citizens that may aid and enhance such engagement in the future. Enhancing positive 

engagement between the police service and Muslim citizens is vital in the context of 

contemporary concerns about Muslim communities being the focus of a multiplicity of 

counter-terrorism and counter-extremism strategies and, as a result, Muslims citizens 

retreating from participation in public life. 

 

 

KEY WORDS 

 

Faith and Religion, Islam, Muslim communities, Neighbourhood policing  



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INTRODUCTION 

 

Over the last three decades there have been concerted efforts in the UK to promote the 

participation of Muslim citizens and communities in state institutions and public life. This has 

been especially notable in respect of policy arenas relating to community cohesion, equality 

and discrimination, and security. However, establishing and maintaining the participation of 

Muslim communities and citizens has not been straightforward in a social context 

characterised by controversies about the rationale for engagement, the appropriateness of the 

mechanisms designed to facilitate engagement, and the benefits claimed to be created by 

increased engagement. Such controversies have intensified as Muslim communities and 

citizens have, following the ‘7/7’ terrorist bombings in London in 2005, become the focus of 

a multiplicity of counter-terrorism and counter-extremism strategies (Spalek et al, 2009). It 

has been suggested that, as a consequence of this, Muslim citizens are now retreating from 

participation in state institutions and public life (Citizens UK, 2016). 

 

In this article we focus on one area of engagement between the state and Muslim 

communities and citizens in the UK: that which takes place in the context of public policing. 

Understanding such engagement is important because it is arguably one of the most critical 

ways in which religious faith and the state intermix. Public policing forms the ‘coal face’ at 

which many contemporary questions about and practical solutions to issues relating to 

religious freedom and human rights are negotiated. Moreover, successfully facilitating the 

participation of Muslim citizens (and those of other religious faiths) in policing is now seen 

as a vital means by which community cohesion is achieved and maintained (McFadyen and 

Prideaux, 2011). The aim of this article is to offer a critical insight into engagement between 

policing and Muslim communities and citizens that may aid and enhance such engagement in 

the future.  

 

MUSLIM PARTICIPATION IN STATE INSTITUTIONS AND PUBLIC LIFE: A 

SHORT HISTORY 

 

The 1980s saw the start of major changes in respect of the engagement of Muslim 

communities and citizens with state institutions and public life (Vertovec, 2002; Gilliat-Ray, 

2010; O’Toole et al, 2013). Up until the 1980s the engagement of Muslims, as people of 

faith, with state institutions and public life had been marginal and reticent. Muslim 



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engagement with the state was comprehended and structured as a form of engagement based 

on ethnicity rather than religion (Vertovec, 2002). Moreover, dominant Islamic legal opinions 

discouraged the participation of Muslims in non-Islamic political systems and, although such 

opinions were keenly debated, this resulted in some Muslims choosing on principle not to 

engage with state institutions and public life (Hussain, 2004: 378). Since the late 1980s, 

however, there has been a growing consensus in the UK and elsewhere in Europe that 

Muslims should be viewed as full citizens of plural, democratic states (Hussain, 2004). 

Indeed, the participation of Muslim citizens in state institutions and public life has become 

seen as vital to secure the successful future of European states (Hussain, 2004). As a 

consequence, by the end of the 1980s many Muslim citizens had integrated into state 

institutions and public life and discussion of matters relating to Islam were treated like those 

of any other minority, ‘special interest’ group (Vertovec, 2002). Significant shifts in debates 

in the UK Parliament can be seen as indicative of this social change: whereas Islam and 

Muslims were infrequently mentioned in Parliament in the three decades prior to the end of 

the 1970s, during the 1980s there was a dramatic increase in discussions about the Islamic 

faith and Muslims in Britain that has continued to the present day. Although the increase in 

attention paid by parliamentarians to British Muslims during the 1980s was inexorably tied to 

concerns about ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, it became increasingly common to hear senior 

politicians express the view that ‘Britain has the fullest respect for Islam and for Moslem 

communities here’ (John Wakeham MP, Leader of the House of Commons, HC Debate, 2 

March 1989, vol. 148, col. 404).  

 

Since the 1980s religious faith, as distinct from race or ethnicity, has increasingly been 

recognised as a facet of individual identity around which political engagement activities 

should be oriented. Moreover, from the late 1990s UK governments have increasingly sought 

to engage with Muslim communities and groups (O’Toole et al, 2013). Such engagement has 

been viewed as necessary in the context of a range of disparate national and international 

occurrences such as the controversy surrounding the 1988 publication of ‘The Satanic 

Verses’ by Salman Rushdie, the campaigns for law prohibiting discrimination based on 

religion or belief, the debates regarding state funding of Islamic faith-based schools, and the 

participation of the UK in international conflicts such as those in Bosnia (1992–95), the Gulf 

(1990-1991), Iraq (2003-2009), and Afghanistan (2001-2014) (Smith, 2002; Vertovec, 2002; 

Hussain, 2004; O’Toole et al, 2013). Engagement between the state and Muslim communities 

and citizens has also been propelled by wider debates about the extent to which Muslims 



	 4	

have been and should be assimilated into ‘mainstream’ British society (for a discussion, see: 

Lewis, 2007). These debates have themselves been recently intensified by concerns about 

Islamic radicalisation and the involvement of Muslim citizens in political extremism and 

terror (O’Toole et al, 2013). Moreover, the evolving political landscape of the UK has 

motivated and mobilised Muslim citizens and communities to become more vocal in 

articulating their views on and demands for change of the activities of state institutions 

(Hussain 2004).  

 

However, the increased participation of Muslim citizens in state institutions and public life 

should not be understood merely as the outcome of periodic crises, grievances, and security 

concerns (O’Toole et al, 2013). Rather, it should be seen in the context of the mainstream 

political agenda of encouraging engagement between state institutions and Muslim 

communities and citizens in order to strengthen local governance and foster democratic 

renewal (Dinham and Lowndes, 2008; O’Toole et al, 2013; see also Putnam, 1995; 2000; 

Giddens, 1998). In this sense, the participation of Muslim citizens in state institutions and 

public life can be seen as one outcome of the broad commitment of UK policymakers to 

encourage people of faith to play a greater role in key aspects of civil society (Dinham and 

Lowndes, 2008; O’Toole et al, 2013). Faith-based organizations, in particular, have been 

viewed as having an important role to play in the realisation of policies aimed at promoting 

social inclusion, improving community cohesion across ethnic lines, facilitating partnership 

working, accessing hard-to-reach minority communities, and renewing democratic structures 

at the local level (Dinham and Lowndes, 2008). Indeed, engaging faith-based organizations in 

the delivery of government policy has been a vital part of the broader ‘third-way’ government 

strategy of mobilizing the resources of civil society in pursuit of citizen well-being and better 

governance (Dinham and Lowndes, 2008: 818).  

 

MUSLIM PARTICIPATION IN POLICING 

 

Within the broader context of debates about the participation of Muslim citizens in state 

institutions and public life, there have been calls for the greater participation of Muslim 

citizens in the organization, implementation, and governance of public policing. These calls 

are closely linked to criticisms about constabularies being unresponsive to and detached from 

the communities they serve, as well as to concerns about racism in policing (for example, 

Scarman, 1981; Macpherson, 1999). Consequently, constabularies have increasingly been 



	 5	

expected to consult, promote interaction, and engage with Muslim citizens and communities 

in order to improve the quality of the services they provide and (re)establish their legitimacy 

in providing those services (Scarman, 1981; Macpherson, 1999; Jones and Newburn, 2001; 

Bullock, 2014). This has resulted in a proliferation of formal police-community meetings, 

informal networking, social research, and, more recently, the use of social media to 

communicate and interact with Muslim citizens. The primary aim of such engagement is to 

elicit views about current priorities for crime control, generate information and intelligence 

about crime and criminal activities, and promote police-community collaboration in 

responding to and resolving crime and social problems (Jones and Newburn, 2001; Bullock, 

2014). Because of the predominance of the concern to address racism in policing, a focus on 

questions relating to race and ethnicity in police-community engagement with Muslim 

communities has sometimes obscured the relevance of religious faith to policing 

(Chakraborti, 2007) but religious faith is formally established as a dimension of communities 

that constabularies are expected to engage with (NPIA, n.d.).  

 

Police engagement with Muslim communities and citizens needs to be understood within the 

context of the growth in police-community consultation that has characterised the 

development of community policing since the late 1970s. Community policing has become a 

dominant policing paradigm, rhetorically and organizationally, in the UK (as well as in other 

European states and the USA) and is designed to bring citizens, communities, and 

constabularies together by prioritising foot patrols, police-community partnerships, and 

collaborative problem solving (Alderson, 1979; Manning, 1984; Kelling and Moore, 1988; 

Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux, 1990; Fielding, 2005). Community policing has, more 

recently, become a major component of anti-terrorism policy in the UK. Whereas counter-

terrorism policies have traditionally emphasised ‘hard’ policing tactics (such as covert 

surveillance and the use of informants) to generate intelligence, ‘soft’ community policing 

models (which stress interaction, engagement, and partnership) are now dominant (Briggs et 

al 2006; Innes, 2006; Lowe and Innes, 2008; Innes and Roberts, 2008; Bettison, 2009; Spalek 

and Lambert, 2010; Spalek, 2010; McFadyen and Prideaux, 2014). It has been argued that 

grounding anti-terrorism work in soft community policing models may be more effective than 

utilizing hard policing tactics because the former builds up trust through the establishment of 

long-term community ties, breaks down suspicion of the police, and is responsive to 

community defined problems (Innes, 2006). Community policing, which attempts to facilitate 

greater police-community interaction, is said to promote information exchange and generate 



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intelligence that is vital to policing terrorism (Innes et al, 2006; see also Newman and Clarke, 

2008; Lyons, 2002). 

 

Police engagement with Muslim communities and citizens comprises both ‘general’ and 

specialist anti-terrorism policing strategies. However, such engagement has not been without 

problems. Previous research has drawn attention to the practical problems which have arisen 

in the implementation of community policing initiatives because of, for example, the lack of 

representativeness in the Muslim groups consulted, the absence of clarity in the breadth and 

scope of engagement activities, and the inability of some communities to meaningfully 

engage (e.g. Briggs et al 2006; Innes, 2006; Spalek et al 2008). Other problems have been 

more ideological in nature. For example, a perceived or actual conflation of general 

community engagement with anti-terrorism policing has made some Muslim citizens 

suspicious of the police – with the so-called ‘war on terror’ being viewed as a proxy for a 

‘war on Islam’ – and soft community policing interventions have therefore been undermined 

by their association with hard anti-terror interventions (Spalek and Imtoual, 2007; Spalek, 

2010; Choudhury and Fenwick, 2011). Consequently, whether as the result of a deficit in 

police legitimacy, or practical problems, it has proved challenging for the police to engage 

with Muslim citizens and communities.   

 

METHODOLOGY AND OVERVIEW OF OUR ANALYSIS 

  

In the remainder of this article we consider, from the perspective of police personnel, a 

number of factors that influence, enable, and inhibit the engagement of Muslim citizens and 

communities with the police service. In so doing, we draw on qualitative data derived from 

research on the role of religious faith in policing. The research was carried out in three 

randomly selected constabularies in England between 2015 and 2016. All three 

constabularies granted and facilitated access to their personnel and premises. To maintain 

confidentiality and anonymity we do not name the constabularies. The constabularies are 

regionally diverse (all three are county forces in England, with one in the south, one in the 

midlands and one in the north) and comprise a mixture of urban, suburban and rural policing 

contexts. All three constabularies have relatively low crime rates compared to the average for 

England and Wales.  

 



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The research comprised 21 qualitative interviews with a mix of officers and police staff. To 

ensure confidentiality and anonymity the roles of the participants are not revealed in the 

analysis that follows. The participants were drawn from neighbourhood policing teams, 

counter-terrorism units, and diversity directorates and all have extensive experience of 

engaging with faith communities. As ‘key informants’ or organizational ‘proxies’ (Parsons, 

2008) these research participants were selected because of their unique insight into the role of 

religious faith in the work of their constabularies. Participants were asked to discuss the 

nature of their role and how it brought them into contact with Muslim communities and 

citizens, to reflect on the nature of their interaction with Muslim communities, and to 

comment on the organizational benefits of such interaction. They were asked to identify any 

problems or difficulties they faced when attempting to encourage engagement between 

Muslim citizens and the police service. Furthermore, participants were asked to discuss what 

mechanisms existed to facilitate interaction between police and faith groups, to what extent 

the constabulary was engaged with issues relating to faith and how other officers perceive 

engagement work. The participants were not asked explicitly about their own faith and the 

role that this may play in operational policing, although a minority of them did discuss this. 

Since personal religiosity has been shown to influence day-to-day police practice (see 

Prideaux and McFadyen, 2013) we consider this issue, where relevant, when discussing our 

findings (see also: Bullock and Johnson, 2016). Moreover, whilst the issue of counter-

terrorism was not a specific focus of the interviews – because the primary aim of the research 

was to consider the relevance of religious faith to policing more broadly – participants did 

identify counter-terrorism policing as an influence on their engagement with some, 

predominantly Muslim, faith-based organizations and, accordingly, we consider this in our 

analysis.  

 

Interview data were thematically analysed in light of the aims of the study and extant 

literature in the field. This involved a process of data familiarisation, generating codes, 

forming initial themes, and reviewing and refining those themes (Braun and Clarke, 2006). 

Given the sample of participants from which the data were generated – police personnel – the 

thematic analysis must be understood as an interrogation of police perceptions of and 

attitudes toward the relationship between Muslim communities and the police service. The 

thematic analysis does not, therefore, definitively determine whether such perceptions and 

attitudes accurately represent the beliefs or experiences of Muslim citizens. Rather, it 

provides an insight into how police personnel, informed by their operational experiences, 



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construct a certain ‘reality’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) in respect of Muslim communities 

and how this, in turn, forms a basis for their professional decision-making.  

 

The thematic analysis of the qualitative interview data is presented below in three sections 

which each explore different aspects of engagement between constabularies and Muslim 

communities and citizens. In the first section, ‘breaking out’, we explore factors that are 

perceived to emanate from constabularies which make engagement with Muslim 

communities and citizens problematic. In the second section, ‘breaking in’, we consider 

certain problems and concerns relevant to Muslim communities that officers must be able to 

deal with in order to gain access to them. In the third section, ‘breaking through’, we examine 

factors that might facilitate and enhance engagement between the police service and Muslim 

communities and citizens.  

 

BREAKING OUT 

 

In this section we explore a number of factors that emanate from within constabularies that 

are understood by the police personnel that we interviewed to make engagement with Muslim 

communities and citizens problematic. We consider how the current organization and 

delivery of particular police services can generate suspicion and mistrust amongst Muslim 

communities, and go on to explore how this can encourage a culture of non-engagement 

between Muslim communities and constabularies which, in turn, may result in Muslim 

citizens choosing to adopt forms of self-policing.  

 

Police work breeds suspicion and mistrust 

 

Suspicion and mistrust of the police was a major concern of the police personnel we 

interviewed. As we explore below, our participants identified a number of policing policies, 

organizational behaviours, and officer attitudes, that they regarded as undermining trust in 

constabularies and stifling engagement with Muslim communities.  

 

Counter-terrorism and ‘Prevent’ 

 

Our participants expressed the concern – reflected in previous research (Briggs et al 2006, 

Spalek and Imtoual, 2007; McFadyen and Prideaux, 2014) – that British counter-terrorism 



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policing has raised suspicion, undermined trust, and depressed engagement between the 

police and Muslim communities and citizens. Participants tended to agree that this is because 

those in Muslim communities may feel that counter-terrorism officers are ‘spying’ on them or 

asking them to report on the activities of their peers or families. As an example of this, one of 

our participants described how persuading those in Muslim communities to give officers 

information about religious radicalisation was made difficult by suspicions that such 

information would be used to target specific individuals:  

 

So, it’s about building up a trust. Trust within the community. To say, ‘Listen, if you 

give us some information, it’s not going to lead to an arrest, it’s going to lead to other 

work which is more around the safeguarding world.’ So that’s what we do. But it’s 

been a real challenge with community, getting community referrals. (INT9)  

 

In light of such problems, and in order to alleviate community anxieties, the bulk of police 

engagement work with Muslim communities is conducted under the remit of neighbourhood 

policing rather than being linked explicitly to counter-terrorism policing (McFadyen and 

Prideaux 2011). However, in spite of this, participants drew attention to how the problem 

remains that many Muslim citizens are suspicious of what they regard as the ‘real agenda’ 

behind police engagement work. As one participant described it, many Muslim citizens 

respond to the engagement work carried out by neighbourhood police officers by saying: 

‘You’re doing [something] tactically to us under the pretext of something else and we […] 

don’t trust you’ (INT6).  

 

Suspicion of the police among Muslim citizens may stem, in part, from the introduction and 

allocation of specific government funding designed to promote cooperation between the 

police and Muslim communities. The allocation of such funding to particular projects in 

Muslim communities – which has been organized on the basis of direct applications by 

Muslim faith-based organizations (usually Mosques) to constabularies – has been dependent 

on those who have received the funding engaging with ‘Prevent’ activities. Prevent is one 

aspect of the UK Government’s counter-terrorism strategy, ‘Contest’, and, although it is not 

uniquely a police programme, ‘understanding and cooperation between police and 

communities’ is at the heart of the Prevent strategy (HM Government, 2011, para 3.43). 

Participants regarded tying the allocation of resources designed to promote engagement with 

Muslim communities to Prevent to be an approach that risked alienating the very people the 



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funding is designed to win over (see also: Kundnani, 2009). For one, such an approach has 

‘reinforced some of those beliefs, that actually it’s a bit smoke and mirrors here’ (INT6). 

Similarly, other government funding programmes related to preventing terrorism was seen to 

raise suspicion in Muslim communities. For example, in respect of a policy initiative 

announced by the former prime minister David Cameron (BBC News, 2016), which linked 

funding for English language classes for Muslim women to terrorism, one officer stated: ‘He 

[Cameron] made in his speeches the connection between that and terrorism, so straight away 

a certain community said why is terrorism and English and being Muslim all in the same 

sentence?’ (INT16). 

 

It has been recognized from the outset that a potent criticism of Prevent is that its anti-

extremism agenda has been formulated by government rather than communities and that this, 

in turn, leads Muslim citizens to be suspicious that the Prevent agenda serves only the 

interests of state actors, such as the police, rather than themselves (Briggs et al 2006; Spalek 

and Imtoual, 2007; Innes et al, 2011). A focus upon policing potential extremism and 

terrorism in Muslim communities fails to acknowledge that these communities are often 

socially and economically deprived, that citizens are concerned about a wider range of 

problems other than terrorism, and that communities often require the police to help resolve 

these problems (Choudhury and Fenwick, 2011; Spalek and Imtoual, 2007; Spalek and 

MacDonald, 2010; Innes et al, 2011; O’Toole et al, 2013). Indeed, although the state has 

increasingly sought to engage with Muslim communities on the basis of an anti-terrorism 

agenda, many Muslim citizens view the priorities for state action at the local level in very 

different ways (Spalek and Imtoual, 2007; Choudhury and Fenwick, 2011; Innes et al, 2011). 

Our participants drew attention to this tension and stated that problems important to Muslim 

communities must be acknowledged and addressed if people in those communities are to be 

encouraged to turn their attention to matters of interest to the state:  

 

[I]n order to deal with one issue you need to deal with other issues […] [W]hat I mean 

by that is in order to deal with preventing violent extremism, actually the public want 

you to deal first of all with dog fouling and social behaviour, and the car which was 

damaged outside the mosque, and when you’ve done that, they actually might talk to 

you about something else. But you’re going to deal with these issues first. (INT14) 

 



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Such a view concurs with previous studies that have shown that many Muslim citizens feel 

that they are viewed by the police as members of a ‘suspect group’ which is itself the primary 

object of anti-terrorism policy and surveillance activities (Awan, 2012; Briggs et al, 2006; 

Chakraborti, 2007; Pantazis and Pemberton, 2009; Spalek, 2010; Choudhury and Fenwick, 

2011; Spalek and McDonald 2010; O’Toole et al 2013). Therefore, as our participants 

explained, it is important for police officers to demonstrate that they are interested in helping 

to solve the wide range of problems experienced by many of those in Muslim communities: 

‘it is difficult to engage with communities who have been tarnished or feel they are being 

victimised’ (INT16). The strong and enduring feeling of victimisation was seen by our 

participants to create a number of problems in respect of police engagement work. First, 

participants stated that many Muslim citizens and community organizations put up ‘barriers’ 

when officers seek to engage in respect of any subject:   

 

There’s definitely barriers as a police officer, because people are suspicious. So there 

might be barriers in relation to the media, there’s so much going on, there’s so much 

stuff in the media about terrorism, Islamophobia.  So if you go to a mosque they’re so 

suspicious. (INT15) 

 

Second, participants agreed that the existence of barriers between the police and Muslim 

communities could lead to Muslim citizens being less likely to call on the police when they 

are victims of crime: ‘Because of everything that’s on the media, you know, we get the 

backlash, because we get basically painted with the same brush, “all the Muslims are 

terrorists, all the Muslims are this”, and they go, “well what can the police do?”’ (INT17). 

Third, participants stressed that, given the social context in which policing operates, most 

officers are anxious not to make problems worse: ‘Although the engagement is great, and any 

intelligence is great for the wider picture, we don’t want them to make their community feel 

even more in the spotlight’ (INT9).  

 

Illegitimacy and racism 

 

Barriers between the police and Muslim communities and citizens need to be understood 

within the context of the long-term legacy of accusations of police racism (Scarman, 1981; 

Macpherson, 1999). Our research participants, although critical of claims about the continued 

existence of racism in policing, believed that much police work is interpreted by Muslim 



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citizens through the lens of racism and that this can influence their willingness to engage with 

officers. Therefore, as Chakraborti (2007) notes, irrespective of the legitimacy of claims 

about Islamophobia in policing, the perception of many Muslim citizens that policing is 

inherently discriminatory has implications for their relations with the police (see also Tyler et 

al, 2010). In this respect, participants drew attention to how the characterisation of 

constabularies as bastions of ‘institutional racism’ (Macpherson, 1999) continues to cast a 

long shadow: ‘once you’re branded with that kind of name, “institutionally racist”, then 

everybody thinks, “Oh my god, the police are racist, I can’t possibly go to them for help, 

because they’re racist”’ (INT17). One officer described ‘battling, day in, day out’ with the 

idea that constabularies are institutionally racist but, despite this constant ‘battle’, expressed 

the view that perceptions of racism continue to taint the service and make engagement work 

difficult (INT8). As this officer elaborated: ‘[…] all the police force, all police service, is 

tainted. We’re racist and we’re useless. No we’re not, that’s ridiculous […] And that’s what 

we’re facing’ (INT8).   

 

The belief that the police service is racist can lead to problematic perceptions of the 

legitimacy of police actions. In turn, perceptions of whether police actions are legitimate have 

been shown to influence whether citizens cooperate with the police (Tyler et al, 2010). In this 

respect, participants drew attention to how some Muslim citizens, especially younger citizens, 

view the actions of police officers as illegitimate and that this influences their willingness to 

engage and, moreover, may influence the willingness of others in their social networks to 

engage. As one officer explained: ‘if I give somebody a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt, lo 

and behold they aren’t going to be too chuffed […] they go into the mosque or place of 

worship and they are talking [and] it has a ripple effect.’ (INT16) Similarly, another officer 

describes how ‘one thing happens to one person, and it’s amazing how quickly that 

information, or misinformation, is then passed to the rest of the community members’ 

(INT7). These are examples of how routine police actions, such as the issuing of a fixed 

penalty notice for a driving related offence, can produce a ‘ripple effect’ in Muslim 

communities and cause the spread of ‘misinformation’ about the police. The key concern of 

our participants is that the essence of the ‘information’ that ‘ripples’ out is that the police 

service is racist.  

   

 

 



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Under policing and being let down 

 

Although concerns about the impact of over policing – especially by way of counter-

terrorism activities – were a strong characteristic of our participants’ accounts of police 

engagement with Muslim communities, some participants also expressed concerns about the 

problematic impact on engagement work created by the under policing of Muslim 

communities. These concerns are perhaps unsurprising given that Muslims communities 

often suffer from high levels of victimisation – especially in respect of religiously motivated 

hate crime – high levels of fear of crime, and low confidence in the police (Chakraborti, 

2007). Such problems have been exacerbated by the events of ‘9/11’ and ‘7/7’ which have 

had the effect of increasing fear of victimisation, strengthening perceptions of vulnerability, 

and reducing well-being in Muslim communities (Chakraborti, 2007). Our participants drew 

particular attention to the police response to religiously motivated hate crimes committed 

against Muslim citizens – which they recognized had not always been satisfactory – and how 

this has influenced the attitudes of Muslim citizens towards the police and created a lack of 

willingness to engage with officers. For example, when talking about the sudden disbandment 

of a specialist hate crime unit in one constabulary – which reportedly happened without 

consultation and no explanation from senior officers – participants drew attention to how ‘a 

lot of the community were quite angry about it, and we got the brunt of that’ (INT11). This 

officer stated that the consequence of the closure of this ‘specialised unit who could oversee 

officers and advise officers’ was that ‘all that skill and knowledge is gone’ which, in turn, 

means that 

 

if you’ve got an officer who goes to a person who’s a victim of hate crime, they, 

they’re limited to what support they can offer them, and they perhaps don’t have the 

full knowledge of the impact of that crime on that individual. Because it’s a very 

personal crime, if someone calls you names because you’re white or black or because 

of religion, people don’t comprehend why they’re being targeted. (INT11) 

 

This officer, like other participants, pointed out how under policing, illustrated here by the 

withdrawal of specialist services, can make communities ‘quite angry’ and that this can result 

in individuals being less willing to engage with the police.  

 

 



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Foreign nationals 

 

The problem of suspicion and mistrust of the police in Muslim communities was seen by our 

participants to be particularly acute among non-British nationals. This is because, as many 

participants explained, foreign nationals may have negative perceptions of policing which 

originate from their experiences of law enforcement in jurisdictions beyond the UK. To 

illustrate this, noting that perceptions of the police ‘depends [on] what area they’ve come 

from’ and ‘what kind of experiences they’ve had’, one officer stated: ‘It’s not a problem with 

us, but what their ideas are and what they think’ (INT7). Or, as another officer put it when 

describing ‘distrust of the police’: ‘people migrated to Britain from Pakistan, and there’s very 

little trust in the Pakistan police force, and they bring those prejudice over, and transfer them 

to the British police force’ (INT9). These negative perceptions of British police officers, born 

from cultures of policing in other jurisdictions, were seen to potentially make engagement 

work with non-British nationals in Muslim communities extremely difficult. 

 

Cultures of non-engagement and self-policing 

 

Whilst, as we noted above, there has been increasing participation of Muslim citizens in state 

institutions and public life in the UK, our research participants drew attention to what they 

regarded as an enduring culture of non-engagement between Muslim citizens and 

constabularies. In discussing this, participants frequently referred to what they regarded as the 

difficulties in engaging Muslim women: ‘You know, it’s far more complicated, you can’t just 

steam in like we do, you know, for the white British ladies, it’s just, it’s not as easy as that’ 

(INT18). One of the key reasons given by our participants for why ‘it’s not as easy’ to engage 

Muslim women was the difficulty of engaging with women through mosques. Participants 

described a wide range of obstacles that they had encountered when trying to engage with 

women who attend mosques in their constabularies. A female officer, for example, noted that 

whilst she had access to a small budget that could be used to organize crime prevention 

events for Muslim women, the process of getting access to these women via local mosques 

could be very frustrating (INT15). To illustrate this, she described how she might find it 

difficult to gain access to the contact details for those leading the women’s groups at the 

mosque and, even if she acquired such information, how she might then be asked to request 

permission from the mosque committee. The mosque committee, she said, might ask her to 

speak to the imam who, in turn, might request that the women’s husbands were consulted. 



	 15

The outcome of these negotiations, this officer told us, may be influenced by the gender of 

the officers engaging with the mosque. In this respect, she stated, male officers may be more 

likely to gain access to women’s groups in mosques because the mosque committee will say 

‘actually, you’re probably better getting [a male colleague] to speak to the imam, to ask 

permission for you to go to the women’s group’ (INT15). However, if a male officer manages 

to negotiate such access he can then subsequently encounter difficulties when attempting to 

communicate directly with women. For example, a male officer told us: ‘as soon as I walk in 

and there is ladies straightaway covering their faces, and they turn their backs to me and that 

kind of thing, that is a lot more difficult to break down, because that is a cultural difference’ 

(INT20). 

 

Officers, both male and female, regarded the restrictions they face at mosques to be 

frustrating but they told us that they put their personal views aside in order to achieve the 

desired outcome of gaining access: ‘you know, we get that, we get in there and I get that level 

of service, then I have to put my own frustrations aside’ (INT15). This officer noted that, 

even when access is gained, there are some crime-related matters, such as female genital 

mutilation (FGM) or domestic violence, which those in mosques may be especially resistant 

to discussing with the police:  

 

[I]t’s very hard to go into groups and say, ‘I’m here, I’m from the police, one of the 

things we are interested in talking about is FGM’ [….] and through a traditional 

cultural background, if the husbands know that that’s what the talk is about, that’s 

what the group is about, it won’t engage (INT15).  

 

The only way of dealing with the limitations imposed by ‘traditional culture’, as this officer 

told us, is to build up trust and confidence in policing over time: ‘For me, I think the most 

important [thing for] people is to have that, a little bit of confidence, and by having 

confidence is a bit about knowing you and seeing, actually seeing, somebody’ (INT15).  

 

Although building confidence in policing through engagement with mosques is regarded as 

vital, officers are aware of the need to be constantly ‘sensitive’ when dealing with particular 

crime-related problems. For example, one officer described how she would be very careful 

when giving a talk about domestic violence to a group of women in a mosque: 

 



	 16

You have to pretend it’s... I didn’t say it was domestic violence when I went to do the 

talk. ‘Healthy relationships’, I think, or I don’t even think I termed it quite as... I can’t 

remember what I termed it as, because if for a minute the men thought the women 

were going to that, that is family honour, we’re done, so. (INT18)  

 

‘Family honour’, as this officer notes, is a cultural matter that officers must be sensitive to if 

they are to engage with Muslim women in respect of crimes such as domestic violence. 

Participants were clear that officers must find ways of persuading Muslim women with 

‘traditional’ views that matters relating to ‘family life’ fall within the ambit of public 

policing. Participants acknowledged, however, that this is extremely difficult because for 

reasons such as honour, pride, embarrassment, and fear, ‘they will try to sort it out within 

their mosque’ (INT20). The response of Muslim citizens and their community organizations 

to attempt to ‘sort out’ crime-related problems themselves means that, according to our 

participants, Muslim citizens are engaging in forms of self-policing. One officer explained 

such self-policing in the following terms: ‘I think that’s born out of they think maybe the 

police won’t understand or sometimes it can almost be a little bit of embarrassment that this 

issue is happening in our community, we will deal with it ourselves’ (INT15). Our 

participants saw it as incumbent on the police, therefore, to ‘go out there in the community 

and speak to these people and try to build their confidence and their trust’ (INT17) in order to 

encourage Muslim citizens to engage with constabularies. This continued engagement is vital 

because, using the example of attempting to persuade Muslim women to report domestic 

violence, one officer explained:  

 

I’ve been to enough domestics in my time where I’ve seen they’ve been whipped with 

belts but they haven’t talked to me, they’ve kind of gone and they’ve shown me […] I 

just think that’s dreadful, I think it’s dreadful that domestic violence full stop is…, but 

I think the fact that they don’t feel they’ve got access, they don’t trust us necessarily. 

(INT18) 

 

However, building confidence and trust in the police service among Muslim citizens in this 

way was seen as far from straightforward. To illustrate, participants stated they felt a constant 

conflict of interest between building trust and facilitating engagement on the one hand and, 

on the other hand, following constabulary guidelines and enforcing the criminal law. For 

example, positive action policies in respect of domestic violence encourage officers to arrest 



	 17

a criminal suspect where such action can be justified (HMIC, 2014). However, our 

participants believed that following such a policy might make women less likely to engage 

with the police in the future. This leaves officers, as they told us, in a ‘Catch 22’ situation 

because their attempt to positively protect Muslim citizens can frustrate their attempts to 

build up trust. Such a situation can be compounded when Muslim citizens – women in 

particular – are made vulnerable as a consequence of social isolation, unclear immigration 

status, and poor English language skills.  

 

BREAKING IN 

 

In this section we explore a number of factors that our participants say must be negotiated in 

order for successful engagement between the police service and Muslim communities to take 

place. We consider the ‘risk’ that participants associated with working with Muslim 

communities, the importance they attached to officers’ understanding of religion, and the 

significance they placed on the personal commitment and longevity of officers working with 

Muslim communities.  

 

Officer conception of ‘risk’ 

 

Previous research has shown that matters relating to religion, as one aspect of the diversity 

agenda within British policing, are often understood by officers to give rise to ‘unpredictable’ 

or ‘unreasonable’ risks (McFadyen and Prideaux, 2014: 608). Our participants identified a 

range of risks that officers associated with religion, many of which relate to officers’ 

anxieties about engaging with Muslim citizens and communities in ways that might be 

deemed ‘wrong’ and liable to get them into trouble. Many participants drew attention to how 

officers were frightened of offending Muslim citizens. To illustrate, one officer noted: ‘We’re 

often scared because we don’t want to offend, or we don’t want to say the wrong thing’ 

(INT10). For another: ‘Well, I think officers are frightened when it comes to dealing with 

certain communities. I think there’s a culture of the fear of doing something wrong’ (INT9). 

As McFadyen and Prideaux (2014) argue, such fear appears to be, in part, motivated by 

diversity agendas in constabularies that stress that officers must avoid causing offence to and 

demonstrate sensitivity towards minority communities. In attempting to observe diversity 

agendas, officers fear that ‘doing something wrong’ may lead to disciplinary action and this, 

in turn, creates anxiety and a reluctance to engage.  



	 18

Indeed, our participants drew attention to how this type of anxiety tinges many aspects of 

operational police work. For example, the following extract illustrates how officers may be 

concerned about whether or not to take off their boots when entering Muslim households: 

 

I’ve had examples of officers going on emergency work, and asking should they take 

their boots off when they go into someone’s house. Now if you’re on an emergency 

call, your safety is primary, and then the individuals you’re going to is secondary.  

Taking off your boots negates both of those, and it’s about officers feeling, having the 

confidence to say ‘no, this is what I need to do’. They are quite frightened with 

dealing with certain BME communities. (INT9)  

 

It is clear from this, and from other examples provided to us by our participants, that officers 

can be anxious about offending Muslim citizens and, as a consequence, this can sometimes 

lead them to behave inappropriately in certain crime-related situations. Our participants said 

that addressing the anxieties among officers about the risks associated with engaging with 

Muslim communities was therefore essential. 

 

Understanding Islam 

 

Many of our participants stated that most police officers have a limited understanding of 

Islam and that this can create problems when they attempt to engage with Muslim 

communities. Our participants agreed that this limited understanding of Islam relates not just 

to scriptural matters but also to broader cultural issues relevant to diverse Muslim 

populations. This was seen to be problematic and participants were unanimous that it is 

necessary for officers to have at least some understanding of 

 

the detail of the communities […] and it’s about, it includes things like where abouts 

they’re from in Pakistan, the regions they’re from in Pakistan and the differences that 

brings about culturally. The difference in their faith, different strands of Islam itself, 

so yeah, understand those complexities really. (INT10) 

 

As the following extract indicates, understanding geo-cultural differences among Muslim 

communities in the UK was viewed as important for understanding differences between 

Muslim citizens at the local level: ‘Just because they are Muslim doesn’t mean to say they are 



	 19

all going to get on. There is different sets within Muslims, and we have learnt that as well’ 

(INT20). Being aware of these differences within Islam and between Muslim communities 

was thought by participants to help officers identify tensions and to navigate them in order to 

facilitate engagement.  

 

Many of our participants stressed that being attentive to dimensions of ‘culture’ was 

paramount when trying to understand the dynamics of Muslim communities. To illustrate, 

when describing divisions among particular groups of people in Muslim communities one 

officer noted that: ‘I think faith has played its role in those divisions but I think underpinning 

it all is culture and tradition’ (INT16). Our participants were aware that many officers 

struggle to ‘unpick’ matters of culture and faith and that this  

 

is an area where we need to do more work in policing, […] to untangle and to make 

people feel more confident that sometimes it isn’t a religious issue, it’s a cultural issue 

dressed up as a religious issue, and therefore we are not being religiously insensitive 

or faith group insensitive by challenging something that is a cultural norm, that is also 

not acceptable. (INT2)  

 

To expand on this, in respect of domestic violence, one officer explained that it ‘is always an 

interesting issue, because in some faiths and communities domestic violence is seen as less of 

a taboo than in others, is sometimes seen as far more acceptable in some communities than 

others’ (INT1). The perception that domestic violence may be ‘far more acceptable’ in 

Muslim communities was understood by participants, as the following extract illustrates, to 

generate a certain amount of confusion in respect of how best to respond: 

 

[W]e had a case where a man had beaten his wife up and said, ‘well, it’s allowed in 

the Koran’, and the officer was then in a bit of a quandary, because she didn’t know 

whether what he was saying was correct, she didn’t really know if that was a proper 

reason why you could hit your wife, and then she was also worried about offending 

the chap. And so that issue came up, and obviously, I’m not an expert on the Koran, 

but my Muslim colleagues will say no, the Koran doesn’t allow that. (INT11)   

 

Our participants saw improving officers’ understanding of faith and its link to cultural 

relations to be vital to successful engagement with and policing of Muslim communities.  



	 20

Personal commitment, longevity, and trust 

 

Previous research has shown that police engagement with Muslim citizens is often reliant on 

relationships built up between police officers and gatekeepers in Muslim communities over 

time (Innes, 2006; Choudhury and Fenwick, 2011). Our participants similarly stressed that 

police engagement with Muslim citizens is reliant upon trusted relationships being 

established between a small numbers of police officers and gatekeepers in Muslim 

communities – with gatekeepers usually being located in mosques. Such relationships were 

seen as important by our participants because they can help overcome negative perceptions of 

the police in the wider community and encourage citizens to engage with police officers (see 

also Innes, 2006). To illustrate, one officer stated:  

 

I mean it’s not just the Muslim culture, I’m sure it’s all walks of life, but it’s the 

classic thing of, ‘oh the police are all a bunch of arseholes, but you’re alright 

[officer’s name], or you’re alright [officer’s name]’, or whatever the case may be; 

‘you’re not like the rest of them’. (INT12) 

 

Many of our participants made similar statements and the importance of maintaining 

‘personal’ relationships between key officers and Muslim communities was consistently 

stressed. Such relationships were said to establish the trust between officers and communities 

that is necessary to facilitate meaningful dialogue and the exchange of information.  

 

Strong trust relationships between police officers and Muslim communities are generally 

forged over long periods of time: ‘The key to my role is longevity, you can’t, you can’t knock 

up at a mosque, knock on the door and ask a question, because you’ll get an answer of, 

“there’s no problem here, the issue is somewhere else”’ (INT9). This extract serves to 

illustrate the point, repeatedly made by participants, that officers who are unknown to those 

in mosques will face difficulties when trying to engage, whereas an officer who has a long-

term relationship with a mosque will more easily gain access. For example, one officer 

explained: ‘It [access] only works usually with continued engagement. If you go once or 

twice then they get to know your face a little bit, but if you keep going and going and 

going…’ (INT20). This illustrates the point that repeated and consistent engagement with a 

community and its organizations is necessary to establish the relationships needed to facilitate 

information sharing. Consequently, as this officer explained to us, ‘for an officer who goes 



	 21

into neighbourhood policing and works six weeks and goes into another community, and then 

moves on, often it’s very difficult to create those links, those partnership working and getting 

the trust from certain people out there’ (INT19). However, several participants told us that the 

importance of maintaining long-term relationships was not well understood within 

constabularies. Participants explained that police service managers were often unable or 

unwilling (because of financial or other resourcing pressures) to maintain officers in 

particular engagement roles over long periods of time. As a consequence, participants 

described how some officers seek to maintain the relationships they have built up with 

communities ‘in their own time’, outside of their formal roles, because they regard these 

relationships to be of considerable importance.  

 

Although participants saw close relationships between key officers and Muslim communities 

as essential for facilitating police engagement, they also viewed such relationships as 

potentially problematic. One problematic aspect identified by participants related to how 

those in Muslim communities might become ‘over reliant’ upon particular trusted individuals 

and willing to deal only with them (see also Choudhury and Fenwick, 2011). This, our 

participants noted, can be particularly problematic in emergency situations. For example, one 

officer described the problems that arose from one incident: ‘There was a bomb threat made 

to the mosque, and that phone call came through to me. Thankfully I was working, because if 

I’m at home […] my phone is off. But they didn’t call the police because, to them, I was the 

police’ (INT12). Because to those in the mosque this officer represented ‘the police’ they, 

faced with a bomb threat, contacted him via his mobile phone rather than dial 999 to ask for 

emergency assistance. This problem of over reliance on individual officers is exacerbated 

when individuals leave their posts in communities. In such cases, contacts are severed and, in 

the absence of a personal link to the police service, Muslim citizens may choose not to 

contact constabularies when they face crime problems.  

 

BREAKING THROUGH 

 

In this section we consider a number of our participants’ ideas about how to enhance police 

service engagement with Muslim communities and address the complexities involved in 

doing so. We examine ideas relating to how better understanding of religion among officers 

might be generated, how to encourage officers to better interpersonally engage with Muslim 

citizens, and the role of Muslim officers in engagement work.  



	 22

Generating understanding 

 

Our participants agreed that if engagement between the police service and Muslim citizens is 

to be enhanced, police officers must be equipped with an awareness of the key issues that 

concern Muslim communities. Police officers are currently provided with training, briefings, 

and opportunities to interact with faith groups as part of their probation and on-going 

training. However, our participants told us that there are limits to gaining knowledge about 

Muslim communities through formal, structured forms of training and that understanding of 

faith groups is most likely to be gained experientially (see also McFadyen and Prideaux, 

2014). This is undoubtedly true since the issues facing Muslim communities are so broad and 

diverse that, as one officer put it, ‘if you try to cover everything [in training], it is impossible, 

when you look at all the different themes out there and all the different communities’ 

(INT20). Participants tended to see it as the responsibility of officers to educate themselves 

about Islam and Muslim communities: ‘it’s a bit like I imagine academia, you read for a 

university degree, you are not taught it’ (INT16). For this officer, then, what is important is 

that all police officers should have an ‘interest in picking up a national paper, watching the 

news, what’s on the Internet and so forth’ (INT16). Participants indicated, however, that 

many police officers are not generally motivated to ‘educate themselves’ about Muslim (and 

other) faith communities and that a continued lack of understanding amongst officers may 

undermine engagement between constabularies and faith groups.  

 

Treating people with respect and delivering a service 

 

As we explored above, treating people with respect, sensitivity, and empathy was seen as 

essential in driving engagement between constabularies and Muslim communities. However, 

our participants also told us that officers must be willing to show an active interest in aspects 

of Muslim communities and, as such, should enquire and ask questions about faith. One 

officer put it like this: ‘There’s no point pretending you’re going to understand and know 

everything there is to know, so you just go and […] be curious and ask questions’ (INT10). 

Or, as another stated:  

 

It’s just really getting out there in the community […] if you don’t go out and speak to 

people you’re never going to, you’re not going to understand what their issues are 



	 23

within that community. It’s alright you sitting here thinking or assuming what’s going 

on, but until you go out there… (INT17) 

 

In other words, engagement should be respectful but this should not be translated into a 

‘hands off’ approach. Respect, participants stated, must be balanced with active engagement: 

‘we go along, we are quite open, we explain what we do, and if we need to ask a question we 

will ask it. And a lot of officers are sometimes a little bit frightened of doing that’ (INT20). 

Our participants stressed that officers must be supported in overcoming being ‘a little bit 

frightened’ if engagement with Muslim communities is to succeed.  

 

Our participants also stressed that engagement is more likely to succeed when constabularies 

deliver a ‘good service’ to communities, including Muslim communities, rather than a 

‘specific service’. Whilst awareness of and attention to certain unique cultural or social needs 

was viewed as important, it was seen as more important to ensure that Muslim communities, 

like all other sections of society, receive a consistent, respectful and good quality service 

from the police. In discussing this, participants stressed that short-term or ‘gimmicky’ 

interventions are best avoided. For example, one officer described what he regarded as the 

problem of encouraging officers to learn multiple conversational greetings in minority 

languages as a way of facilitating engagement:  

 

I've seen senior officers, their solution was we should have a handbook and give it to 

every officer to greet somebody in Punjabi […] or whatever and I think, well hang on 

a second, what about, are you going to tell them to speak in German, in French and 

greetings in whatever language, you are not really going to get to that because that 

book will be too big and officers won't be able to cope. (INT16) 

 

As this quote suggests, such approaches were regarded as gimmicks, not long-term solutions, 

and, at best, merely a means of papering over problems and complexities.  

 

Role of Muslim officers 

 

For participants, ‘[putting] your own house in order’ (INT7) was one way of generating 

greater understanding of and engagement with Muslim communities. In this respect, 

improving the diversity of constabularies was seen to be of primary importance (see also 



	 24

Macpherson, 1999). As a senior officer stated: ‘I just think to myself if we’re not fair, 

transparent and inclusive of people, be it faith, be it anything, any protected characteristic, 

then how on earth are we expecting our people to operate that way with the people they’re 

coming to terms with’ (INT1). Recruiting, encouraging, and supporting officers of faith was 

therefore seen as vital (for a discussion of the challenges involved in increasing police 

recruitment of Muslim citizens, see: Awan, Blakemore and Simpson, 2013). Participants 

drew attention to the importance of support networks and organizations for officers of faith, 

the need to facilitate and encourage the practice of religious rituals (such as prayer) whilst on 

duty, and the need to support liaison officers in raising awareness of matters of faith: ‘this is 

about recognizing that actually police officers have faith and police officers are part of that 

community, so why would we not be inclusive of that’ (INT1).  

 

However, whilst increasing diversity and inclusivity in the police service is generally 

regarded as desirable, it is not necessarily seen to lead to more effective engagement with 

‘hard-to-reach’ communities. Previous research has shown, for example, that there are both 

positive and negative aspects of deploying officers to carry out work with citizens on the 

basis of shared faith (McFadyen and Prideaux, 2011). Whilst the personal faith of an officer 

can be a resource on which he or she can draw when seeking to engage, it can also create 

challenges and conflicts of interest. For example, officers with a particular faith may be 

expected to experts in that faith, or to be the medium for all contact with a wider faith 

community, and, as a result, may become inappropriately or excessively utilized by 

constabularies (McFadyen and Prideaux, 2011).  

 

Our participants were aware of the complexity surrounding the position of Muslim officers in 

their constabularies. They pointed out that some Muslim officers possess language skills, 

social experience, and cultural understanding that can facilitate engagement between the 

police service and Muslim communities. They also stated that Muslim officers might have an 

interest in working with Muslim communities. As one Muslim participant explained about 

her engagement work with Muslim communities: ‘I feel so passionate about it […] I wanted 

to join the police to help the community […] so I’ve kind of been lucky to fall into this role’ 

(INT17). However, this participant also noted that her faith did not guarantee her access to 

communities ‘because when you talk about Muslims or Hindus or Sikhs, when you start 

breaking it down, there’s different types of Muslims, different types of Sikhs and if you’re 

not part of that religion or that group you don’t really know’ (INT17) (for a discussion of 



	 25

how diversity in and between ‘minority’ religious groups creates challenges for policing, see: 

Sian, 2013). This participant, like others, also stressed that non-Muslim officers can engage 

with Muslim communities under the right conditions – notably, as we explored above, when 

officers proceed sensitively, are willing to learn, and persist in a role over time. Indeed, the 

dominant view among our participants was that the way that officers treated people is more 

important than their own personal faith. Matching Muslim officers to Muslim communities 

was not seen as the panacea to breaking down barriers to engagement.  

 

CONCLUSION 

 

This article has provided a critical insight, from the perspective of police personnel, into the 

considerable challenges that constabularies face in creating and sustaining productive 

engagement with Muslim communities and citizens. Such engagement, as we have shown, is 

fraught with difficulties and characterised by complexities. Indeed, although such 

engagement is now a dominant aspect of counter-terrorism policing in the UK, it has the 

potential to erect and sustain, rather than remove, barriers between constabularies and 

Muslim communities and citizens. Whilst it is clear that the importance of sustained 

engagement between constabularies and Muslim communities is acknowledged, too little has 

been done to support and integrate engagement activities into mainstream policing.   

 

The difficulties and complexities identified by police personnel – which are multi-faceted and 

arise from both within and beyond the police service – must be comprehended and resolved if 

the laudable aim of improving police engagement with Muslim communities and citizens is 

to succeed. The perceptions of police personnel discussed in this article may, we suggest, 

provide the basis for a wider research and practice agenda in policing designed to improve 

engagement with Muslim communities. Although the findings presented in this article are 

based on research undertaken with a relatively small sample, which means they may not be 

representative of the entire spectrum of views and opinions of all UK police personnel, the 

police personnel who comprised the samples can be seen as ‘key informants’ or 

‘organisational proxies’ who can be expected to have a good understanding of the issues 

discussed. Furthermore, as we noted above, whilst the perceptions and attitudes of police 

personnel may not reflect the beliefs or experiences of Muslim citizens, they nevertheless 

provide an important insight into how police personnel comprehend and approach 

engagement work. Understanding the challenges of police engagement with Muslim 



	 26

communities and citizens from the standpoint of police personnel provides the basis for a 

number of recommendations, which we summarize and consider below.  

	

First, to ‘break out’ of the constraints that emanate from within constabularies and make 

engagement with Muslim communities and citizens problematic the police service will need 

to find more effective ways of addressing suspicion and mistrust among those in Muslim 

communities. Indeed, there is a clear need to better understand what engagement strategies 

are effective in generating cooperation between police and Muslim communities. Similarly, 

there is a need to better understand how certain strategies might actively hinder engagement 

with certain citizens such as, for example, Muslim women, who have frequently been side-

lined by existing strategies (Spalek et al, 2008). Crucially, then, the police service needs to 

focus on finding better ways of building the trust of all Muslim citizens in policing and, 

specifically, in counter-terrorism policing. There is a need to invest more resources in 

strategies that seek to reach out to and work in tandem with Muslim communities to develop 

and implement anti-terrorism policies and to understand how these operate. For example, the 

anti-terrorism agenda has been criticised for failing to understand the nature of Muslim 

identities in the UK and, as a consequence, perpetuating a problematic link between faith, 

extremism and radicalisation (Spalek and Imtoual, 2007; Spalek and MacDonald, 2010). An 

exploration of how it may be possible to engender a more socially inclusive approach among 

police officers that acknowledges multiple Muslim identities and facilitates a wider 

appreciation of diversity among Muslim populations would be welcome. However, it is clear 

that promoting trust in policing among Muslim citizens will only be achieved when 

constabularies are able to demonstrate the elimination of ‘institutional racism’ in the delivery 

of services more broadly. One key way this can be achieved is by ensuring the effective and 

consistent delivery of police services to Muslim communities. Building trust in policing 

through the ‘fair’ delivery of services to Muslim communities is necessary to combat cultures 

of non-engagement with constabularies. Officers therefore need to be encouraged and feel 

empowered to proactively engage with Muslim communities in order to enhance the belief 

among Muslim citizens that the police service can and will positively respond when crime or 

other issues arise. In addition, it must be understood that police engagement practices do not 

occur within a vacuum and issues arising from international socio-political events, as well as 

national changes in social and economic policy, influence whether Muslim citizens are 

willing to engage with the police. Although engagement is clearly influenced by a wide range 



	 27

of social and political factors, little is known about, for example, how exogenous factors, 

such as war or foreign policy, influence street-level engagement between police and Muslim 

communities. Improving understanding of how such factors can undermine the generation of 

effective engagement would be welcome.  

 

Second, to ‘break in’ to Muslim communities it is necessary for constabularies to address a 

strong perception among officers that engaging with Muslim citizens poses certain significant 

‘risks’. Officers are clearly hesitant, given the potential for their actions to be perceived as 

racist, to engage in situations where they feel they may make interactional mistakes. 

Constabularies therefore need to acknowledge such anxieties and positively encourage 

officers to overcome any ‘risk aversion’ they feel. One reason such risk aversion exists is 

because of a lack of understanding of Islam among officers. This lack of understanding is not 

confined to ‘scriptural’ matters but encompasses social and cultural issues specific to Muslim 

communities and, moreover, the ways in which religion and culture inform each other. 

Constabularies should also ensure that long-term links are developed and maintained between 

Muslim communities by, for instance, resourcing engagement officers to remain in posts 

long-term. Moreover, they should champion those officers who have the personal 

commitment to maintaining long-term engagement activities as a means of building trust in 

the police service and regard such championing as a means to encourage a similar 

commitment in others. Because trust between the police and communities appears to be 

dependent on relationships built between particular individuals, and because the success of 

these relationships seems to depend on the ‘personality’ and commitment of individual 

officers (Choudhury and Fenwick, 2011; see also Innes 2006), consideration should be given 

to the ‘qualities’ that police officers need to have in order to sustain engagement. Harnessing 

and extending those qualities within police engagement strategies among a greater range of 

police personnel could avoid those in Muslim communities over-relying on particular police 

personnel and feeling ‘let down’ when such personnel are not available.  

 

Finally, to ‘break through’ barriers preventing engagement between constabularies and 

Muslim communities we think that there are a number of practical actions that constabularies 

can take. One key priority for constabularies should be to develop new strategies for 

encouraging opportunities for officers to gain greater understanding, through experiential 

rather than formal learning, of matters relating to Muslim (and other faith) communities. 



	 28

Another priority should be to encourage officers to engage with Muslim communities in ways 

that balance respectful, sensitive and empathic interaction with quizzical and active interest. 

Officers need to be encouraged not to feel ‘frightened’ of showing to those in Muslim 

communities that they may lack awareness of a wide range of community-specific issues but 

are open and willing to learn. In other words, officers should be encouraged not to paper over 

problems or complexities that arise from interaction with Muslim communities but seek to 

confront them in an open and frank manner. Clearly, this already takes place in constabularies 

in a number of formalized ways but officers need to be encouraged to engage in candid 

communication in day-to-day operational activities without fearing they will offend. 

Constabularies also need to think critically about the role of Muslim officers, how to support 

these officers, and whether deploying Muslim officers to work in Muslim communities 

enhances engagement between the police service and Muslim citizens. Further empirical 

examination of the position of Muslim officers within police organisations and exploration of 

how their social and cultural capital enables them to build partnerships with particular 

sections of the Muslim population (Spalek et al, 2008) would be welcome. However, for 

reasons discussed in this article, there is evidence to suggest that rather than relying on 

Muslim officers to achieve such engagement, the police service needs to develop strategies to 

enable any officer to possess the knowledge and interactional skills that makes effective 

engagement possible.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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