Bob Hoogenboom

The Governance of Policing and Security

How does this chapter fit into the ‘grand scheme of things’ of the book? First, I am again moving outside the framework of the first two chapters. Factual policing and security nowadays involve a multitude of actors. The traditional perspective on all of this in police studies and criminology no longer suffices. It is a recurrent theme in my endeavour beginning on page 1. Second, my subtitle — ‘ironies, myths and paradoxes’ — comes into play beginning with this chapter. Policing is about power and power in my view is in dire need of checks and balances. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Therefore, in this chapter, I explore again changes in policing but draw attention to the fact that, increasingly ‘policing’ is being exercised by nonpolice actors. My ironies, myths and paradoxes arguments enter the stage here and will be addressed even more in forthcoming chapters.

Epilogue: Conversations with Clifford Shearing (II)

When I first started researching private policing in 1986/1987, hardly any literature was available. Much of the early writings on private security were completed by Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning. As true pioneers, they ventured outside the criminal justice system, and I read and used much of their work compiled in the 1980s. They were a constant inspiration. Jan van Dijk, then director of the scientific research department of the Ministry of Justice I worked for at the time, once made a cynical remark about the number of Shearing and Stenning references I made. But it was the same Jan van Dijk who made it possible for me to cross the Atlantic to deliver my first-ever speech: a presentation to be held in 1987 at an academic conference in Montreal. After my speech, someone came up to me and introduced himself: Philip Stenning. I met Clifford Shearing briefly in 2006 at a Mannheim seminar organised by the London School of Economics.

The Sopranos: Narrative Knowledge to Disrupt Academic Language

This chapter is somewhat strange, somewhat out of place and somewhat nonsciencelike. Of course all of this is somewhat ‘not true’. For almost a quarter of a century, I moved in and out of social sciences to understand a little of policing and security. Throughout the years from time to time, my dissatisfaction with theory, concepts, methodology and other scientific rules and regulations popped up. As Goffman states, ‘Life is too complicated for theories’. Along the line I developed an interest in ‘narrative knowledge’. Telling stories goes right back to the dawn of civilisation. Ancient myths are still today strong and powerful ways for us to understand life and death. I trained as a historian in the 1980s and remember the often-heated academic debates on whether or not history is an academic discipline or merely an art of telling (convincing) stories. Narrative need not involve language only; ‘it often gains impact through enactment or the emotional focusing that music offers in dance, theater, opera or film, or the visual focus in stage lighting, comics or film’.

Within Public Policing: Fictional and Factual Policing

In this chapter, public policing is again the main topic, but this time I will put the historical dynamics aside and look more closely into what is actually happening on the ground. That is, the police system is not the object of research, but policing itself. In doing this, I will discuss undertows in policing related to the gradual strengthening of the traditional law and order tasks of the police and the fact that police research (and criminology) increasingly studies parts of public policing that are actually diminishing in terms of manpower, priorities, budgets and political relevance. For this I use the concepts of fictional and factual policing. My argument here is that fictional policing accounts and academic studies neglect factual realities of policing. The factual realities of policing, I argue, fit the function and historical dynamics discussed in Chapter 1, and a distinction is made between five levels of policing. My argument here is that the first level of policing (community policing and other visible policing) — the main object of social sciences — actually is becoming less prominent vis-a-vis policing on other levels (riot squads, infiltration, criminal and political intelligence, forensic investigation, international cooperation and so on).

Unsafe and Unsound Practices

In this chapter, I change perspective again.51 Like the ancient Trojans, we hail the strange horses with names like privatisation, technology, increasing cooperation between public policing with regulators and the intelligence community. We say praise to cooperation in security networks and want to combine ‘nodes’ and govern security to safeguard society from the evil of crime, fraud and terrorism. But the new security architecture — designed for public order, crime control and national security — could very well foster unsafe and unsound practices. In essence, what I am saying here is that policing and security are, in some ways, at the individual or collective levels, a hazardous, unpredictable and risky enterprise and that this needs to be recognised. At the institutional and operational levels, organisations have to anticipate and institutionalise responses to critical incidents. This is because policing and ‘trouble’ go hand in hand in the sense of controversy, adversarial disputes, legal actions and medialed affairs (Newburn, 1999). The organisation’s response to dealing with ‘trouble’ and its repercussions are often crucial to determining the legitimacy and credibility of the executives in the eyes of the public.

Within Public Policing: Gradual Centralisation

In this and the following chapters, I trace historic dynamics and patterns in the (political) function of the police, the gradual centralisation stemming from the political function, and I stress the differentiated character of policing on the ground.

On Old Folks and Things That Pass Away: Criminology in 2018

In previous chapters, I sometimes referred to this chapter. It was written on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Dutch crimino-logical association. I was working at the Dutch Antilles at the time, ‘temporarily selling my soul.’ But after two years of selling out, I returned to academia and wrote this piece. It was published in the anniversary book and has hardly ever been referred to since. Looking back, it was one of the moments when I wrote about things taking place ‘outside’ the ‘mental prison’ of police research and criminology and one of the occasions when I charged into ‘normal science’. In retrospect, I can see that it is also one of the works in which I tried to break away from the common sense of policing and security. Factual policing and security no longer fit 30-year-old routines and one-sided social science. Therefore, I imagined myself at a criminological conference in 2018. This experiment also — at least to me — was one of the earlier ventures into narrative knowledge. As mentioned in the introduction to this book, I love working at the intersections between social science and literature or, more broadly, popular culture. I recommend Vincenzo Ruggiero’s (2003) Crime. Literature. Sociology of Deviance and Fiction as a fine example of this type of work. In literary writing, we are not restricted by the rules and regulations of normal science.

Myths in Policing and Security

In many ways, policing and security arguments, debates and public discussions are mixed with myths, rhetoric, operational codes and other ‘necessity language’ actually masking institutional ineffectiveness. The introduction to this book mentioned my interests in two valuable concepts that were to be addressed in the final parts of the book: varieties of the ‘myth system’ and the ‘operational code’. ‘Myth systems’ refer to the formal front that governments and corporations present to the outside world and the ‘operational code’ indicates the actual informal — and sometimes covert — rules of the game: what really happens on the shop floor, in operations and in implementation? Somehow, the interface between the two ‘systems’ has to be managed, and only when this has been exposed, can we obtain a glimpse of the true lie of the land.

Blinded by the Light: The Interweaving of (Organised) Crime, White Collar Crime, State Crime and Terrorism

From the ‘Technopoly’, I now return to more mundane matters: rule breaking, crime and other assorted forms of deviance. The governance of policing and security is all about national security, public order and the prevention and repression of crime. My argument in this chapter is my criticism of the ‘one-sided’ analyses of crime by the multitude of different actors — both operational actors and certainly those in criminology. Only by combining crime analyses from the public police, regulators, intelligence and security services and private security can the hundreds of crime pieces from the big jigsaw puzzle make some sense.

‘Grey Intelligence’: The Private and Informal Future

At first glance this is an awkward chapter. I will be entering a foglike world of intelligence, espionage and (private) spooks. Intelligence (and espionage) — according to some the second profession after prostitution, and often in conjunction with it — largely falls outside of the realm of police research (and criminology). But again, referring to the political function of policing in Chapters 1 and 2, national security and intelligence have always been, and will always be, closely connected with policing. This world of spooks by nature is underresearched, but what also is neglected is the fact that spooks always intelligence always has, and has even more today, a private equivalent of CIA, MI5 and AIVD. Factual intelligence, as is discussed for factual policing in the first two chapters, is somewhat more complex and diversified than quid pro quo obligatory discussions (let alone scientific work) on what this is all about. This chapter is on the privatisation of what is supposedly a state monopoly, which is a fiction. I need the chapter for two reasons. First, I wish to break away once again from normal science and to break away from commonsense ideas about policing and security. Outside the state apparatus there are private actors performing the same intelligence functions as the state. Second, for my ‘ironies, myths and paradoxes’ perspective, I need this chapter to draw attention here (and in following chapters) to the drawbacks of interweaving. Also, in this domain of secrecy.