Professor John Benyon
Criminologist who had a profound impact on public order and policing in Britain and the EU
PROFESSOR JOHN BENYON, who has died aged 65, founded the University of Leicester’s Criminology Department and played an important part in shaping public order policing in the United Kingdom and the European Union.
As treasurer of the Political Studies Association for more than two decades, he transformed the organisation into a well-resourced and influential body that raised the prestige of British political science.
On June 15 1974 John Benyon was nearing the end of his term as students union secretary at Warwick University when one of his members, 21-year old Kevin Gately, became the first person to die in a public demonstration in Britain for 55 years, as mounted police sought to control a counter-protest against a National Front march in Red Lion Square, London. Media reports pointed the finger of blame at the police and the incident became the subject of a public enquiry led by Lord Justice Scarman.
The industrial and civil unrest that swept Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 showed no signs of abating and in 1981 it was a Tory prime minister who called on Scarman to undertake the public enquiry for which he became best known, into the Brixton riots.
Benyon arrived in Leicester the same year and in 1982 he organised a conference to consider the riots and the lessons for public order legislation. This led to a series of publications – Scarman and After (1984); The Police: Powers, Procedures and Proprieties (with Colin Bourn, 1986), and The Roots of Urban Unrest (with John Solomos, 1987) – in which he analysed the role of state and police in public order.
One of the key issues highlighted was the corrosive impact on police effectiveness and authority of perceived racial bias, an issue that was addressed in the Public Order Act 1986, which clarified police powers and created the offence of acts intended to stir up racial hatred. The work also influenced police guidance and training over the next decade. By tackling negative perceptions with clear accountability, Benyon’s research strengthened policing by consent, which he saw as a prerequisite for social stability.
John Terence Benyon was born in Southampton on March 10 1951 and educated at Taunton’s School, Southampton. His parents were both teachers. Throughout his life he maintained close connections with the city and he was a lifelong supporter of Southampton Football Club.
As a teenager, Benyon took a job stripping out asbestos in power stations, as the result of which, years later, he developed the mesothelioma which would cost him his life. He attended Sir John Cass College in London, where he met his future wife Coleen Ramsey, but they both dropped out and retook their A-levels before resuming their studies at University – Coleen at Essex and John at Warwick.
Throughout his life, Benyon remained an advocate of giving people a second chance in education, pioneering the development of lifelong learning and distance learning programmes at Leicester.
Benyon’s first academic posting was at Warwick University. After transferring to Leicester, in 1987 he founded the university’s Centre for the Study of Public Order (now the Department of Criminology). Two years later he raised eyebrows by instituting the first master’s degree in public order. “Students could soon be studying a fourth ‘R’, for rioting,” protested the Leicester Mercury, but students on the course included magistrates and senior police officers who had been involved in the Brixton and Toxteth riots and the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
While much of Benyon’s energy was devoted to institutional organisation and leadership, he made an important contribution to police co-operation across the EU. In Police Cooperation in
Europe (1993), he examined such issues as international terrorism, drug trafficking, offender mobility, international fraud, environmental crime and extradition – research which fed directly into the 1995 Convention which set out Europol’s operational remit.
This was followed by his 1995 study Police Forces in the New European Union, which defined the structures and powers of the EU’s 121 separate police forces, helping to lay the groundwork for effective procedures for Europol based on the realities of the member states.
Benyon’s wider published research includes studies on race and policing in Leicestershire and gun control after Dunblane.
Benyon was a passionate teacher who inspired generations of students, many of whom went on to become academic leaders in their own right. “I’d waited for the moment when I would meet one of those maverick academics who would inspire you to learn,” Professor Adrian Beck, the current head of Leicester’s Criminology Department, has recalled. “John did that. We all looked forward to his sessions because you never knew what was going to happen. He’d sit there with a roll-up fag, looking every inch the drop-out, hippy-type, 1970s academic with his Starsky &
Hutch cardigan, prepared to really challenge the status quo and make you think differently about the subject.”
John Benyon served, variously, as a fellow and council member of the Academy of Social Sciences, chairman of its College of Learned Societies and editorial board member of Political
Insight. After he stepped down from the Criminology Department he became head of the University of Leicester’s Institute of Lifelong Learning.
John and Coleen Benyon had two children. Their son Joe tragically took his own life eight years ago, at the age of 27. John Benyon is survived by Coleen and their daughter, Danni.