Ben Bowling

Policing: Past, Present and Future

The question of what is to be done about law and order set in motion an important transformation in criminology in an earlier era (Lea and Young 1984). Questions about how policing should be conducted and how the police service can be improved confront the discipline again as the second decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close. But what a difference an era makes! When critical criminologists asked what was to be done in the 1980s, some lamented that the problems of crime and victimisation in poor communities were not taken seriously enough and that the police were ‘losing the fight against crime’ (Kinsey et al. 1986). Others were critical of the drift towards law, order and the authoritarian state and rejected the contention that the police were the solution to the crime problem (Scraton 1987). We do not intend to rehearse these older debates here, but it would do to acknowledge them, to forestall the problem of chronocentrism in our understanding of criminology (Rock 2005) and to tackle head-on new theories of policing which suggest that ‘the police’ have been superseded as objects of enquiry by a more diffuse notion of ‘policing’ (Reiner 2010).

Theorising Global Policing

Our first task is to contextualise our subject with regard to theories of policing, globalisation, social order and governance. We examine the role of the police within the classic nation-state system and how this has become problematic. We explore the idea of the ‘social contract’ and how this has been re-shaped by an emerging transnational-state-system. The chapter also sets out two typologies of policing that mark the conceptual boundaries of the field. The first explores the distinctions between policing that aims to secure territory and that which aims to maintain surveillance over suspect populations. It distinguishes between high policing (seeking to maintain particular interests of state and social elites) and low policing (seeking to maintain the interests of the social order more generally) and between public and private forms. A second typology suggests four geographical spheres of policing – glocal, national, regional and global. These typologies create the conceptual space within which the various forms of transnational policing explored in later chapters are theorised and understood. The groundwork covered here provides the basis for making global policing visible as a theoretical object.