Ian Loader

Plural Policing and Democratic Governance

This article asks how we might best come to terms with - and seek to govern - the multiplicity of institutional forms that are now involved in the delivery of policing and security services and technologies. I begin by documenting briefly the network of providers that constitute the policing field locally, nationally and transnationally, before specifying how the fragmentation and pluralization of policing has called radically into doubt a number of received (liberal) suppositions about the relationship between police and government. I then attempt - drawing constructively yet critically on recent theorizations of governance and ‘governmentality’ - to make sense of some contemporary reconfigurations of policing within and beyond the state, and tease out their implications for questions of democratic legitimacy. Finally, I outline the contours of an institutional politics for the regulation of policing that is both normatively adequate to the task of connecting policing to processes of public will-formation and sociologically plausible under the altered conditions of plural, networked policing.

Policing and the Social: Questions of Symbolic Power

Taking as its point of departure the tension that currently exists in Britain between official crime control discourse and popular sentiment towards policing, this paper has two aims. Drawing upon P. Bourdieus concept of symbolic power the author argues, first, that sociological enquiry needs to devote more attention to understanding the social meanings of policing, and outline a framework within which the role and significance of policing as a cultural category might be investigated. He then illustrates the symbolic power of the police by means of a discussion of the contemporary cultural salience of policing in the 1950s. His argument is that the continuing mobilization and appeal of policing in this period says much about the relationship between the police and dominant forms of English national identity

Youth, policing and democracy

Preface - Introduction - Policing and the Youth Question: Against Managerialism - Communicative Action, Democracy and Social Research - The Uses and Meanings of Public Space: Belonging, Identity and Safety - Policing Public Space: The Over-Control and Under-Protection of Youth - Transitions in Trouble: Fragmentation, Inclusion and Marginalisation - Talking Blues: Youth, the Police and Prospects for Communication - Towards Discursive Policing - Bibliography - Index

Policing, Recognition, and Belonging

In this article, the author reflects on the question of how policing institutions can help to foster and sustain the values and practices of democracy. The author’s overarching concern is to outline and defend a conception of democratic policing that highlights the role of policing agencies in recognizing the legitimate claims of all individuals and groups affected by police actions and affirming their sense of belonging to a political community. From this perspective, the author offers a critique of certain prominent forms of what he calls “ambient policing” and aims to cast some new light on the issue of how policing contributes to—or undermines—citizen security in democratic societies.

Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations

Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations Criminology and the Question of Feminism The Universal Victim and the Body in Crisis The Scene of the Crime Reading the Justice of Detective Fiction The Bulger Case and the Trauma of the Visible Criminological Concordats On the Single Mother and the Criminal Child Fatal Frames HIV/AIDS as Spectacle in Criminal Justice Afterthoughts The Imagination of Crime

Democracy, Society and the Governance of Security: Necessary virtues: the legitimate place of the state in the production of security

Thus far … we have no reason to suppose that there is any better general solution to the problem of security, and little, if any, reason to regard any other possible countervailing value as a serious rival to security as the dominant continuing human need. (Dunn 2000: 212) In their recent book Governing Security , Johnston and Shearing pinpoint what they see as a significant shift in criminological writing about ‘the problem of the state’ ( 2003 : 33–4). Three decades ago, they contend, ‘cutting-edge criminological theory’ posited the state as the ‘problem’ – structurally tied to class interests, systemically and unjustly directed towards coercing the poor and weak, incapable of defending public interests against narrowly drawn private ones. It was, as such, a force to be struggled against and, ultimately, transcended. Today, by contrast, such theory has come to invest in the state as ‘solution’ – a means of articulating and defending the ‘public interest’ in a market society whose neo-liberal champions triumphantly proclaim that no such thing exists. Johnston and Shearing describe this situation as a ‘strange paradox’ ( 2003 : 34). But perhaps this is not so very paradoxical. In an age of ‘solid modernity’ (Bauman 2000 ) it could indeed be claimed that the task of defending dispossessed individuals and groups from the overweening and intrusive reach of the coercive, bureaucratic state pressed itself with particular urgency upon the forces of progressive politics, whether liberal or socialist. But we no longer inhabit such a world.

Private security and the demand for protection in contemporary britain

Against a backdrop of uncertainty created by an escalating and unmet public demand for police protection, and the reemergence of unregulated commercial security, this paper has three aims. First, it outlines the developments in security provision currently unfolding in Britain and reviews some of the responses that have been made. It then develops a critique of recent suggestions that private security is best countered by introducing novel ways of meeting the public demand for a visible police patrol presence. Finally, it proffers an alternative way of responding to the commodification of security, one suggesting that the concept of private security is in fact an oxymoron.

For penal moderation: Notes towards a public philosophy of punishment

The 2008 financial crash, and the lessons it teaches us about the costs of unregulated excess, offers an opportunity to think anew about, and seek to temper, the enthusiasm for excessive punishment that has swept across several western societies in recent years. Taking this as my point of departure, I make the case in this article for a public philosophy of punishment that can speak to the times we now inhabit—what I call penal moderation. I begin by describing the value and role of a public philosophy of punishment and setting out the constitutive elements of penal moderation as a candidate for such a philosophy. These elements are restraint, parsimony and dignity. I then indicate how penal moderation might be put to work as an intervention in contemporary cultures and practices of punishment— by naming excess, drawing lessons from ‘moderate’ times and places, emphasizing that punishment is a social and political choice, and reconfiguring the relation between penal practice and ‘public’ opinion. I conclude by assessing two contrasting—if not mutually exclusive— styles of penal moderation that I term moderation-by-stealth and moderation-as-politics. My claim is that while the former offers a route to short-term reform, the latter is ultimately more consistent with penal moderation’s aspiration to serve as a public philosophy.

A State of Denial?: Rethinking the Governance of Security

In this book, Johnston and Shearing develop an argument for ‘re-aligning’ security and justice under conditions of dispersed, multi-site governance. Under such conditions, wherein the state has been de-centred from the delivery and regulation of policing, and the trend is towards ‘community’ displacing ‘the social’ as the sign under which collective life is imagined and secured (Rose, 1996), the authors argue for re-deploying and re-configuring neo-liberal techniques of risk management as a means to address the ‘security deficits’ that afflict contemporary societies. This strategy is informed by two theoretical propositions. Johnston and Shearing argue, first, for a ‘problem-solving’ as opposed to an ‘interest-based’ view of policing, one that makes no ‘essentialist’ claims about the functions, ends, means or historical trajectories of the police, and proposes, more generally, to conceive of the provision of security as ‘the application of any means that will promote safe and secure spaces in which people live and work’ (p. 71). Second, and relatedly, in an argument which connects with broader debates within the study of social control, they contend that the relationship between the mentalities of security provision and its institutions, technologies and practices is ‘enabling’ and open-ended rather than either ‘determining’ or ‘functionally differentiated’ – one where the flow of influence between these different security modalities is reciprocal and a range of diverse rationalities vie for ascendancy in fluctuating political conditions. In so arguing, Johnston and Shearing subscribe neither to the view, postulated in some of the neo-Foucauldian writing on ‘governmentality’, that the diffusion of risk mentalities is the linear product of a singular governing rationality (neo-liberalism being the most obvious candidate) and that it leads ineluctably to the furtherance of coercion and control, nor to the dualist perspective, closely associated with the work of David Garland (2001), that the state retains something close to a monopoly over the business of punishment just as other functions of security or crime control in which alternative rationalities may be nurtured come increasingly to be relocated to sites beyond the state. It is from their more contingent

Ice cream and incarceration: On appetites for security and punishment

In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for investigating the relationship between contemporary consumer desires and practices and public demands for security and punishment. My organizing suggestion is that punishment-centred public responses to crime, social disorder and terrorist threats (what has been termed penal excess) are today bound up with other, widespread social practices of excess. The article outlines the questions that need to be posed, and the practices that can usefully be investigated, in a bid to advance empirical enquiry into this way of understanding contemporary penality. In so doing, it proceeds as follows: I begin with a discussion of how the concept of excess (and its close cousins) has been and might potentially be applied to the social analysis of crime and crime control. I then make a case for understanding demands for security and punishment as an appetite and consider how we might examine the coupling of such appetites with identity, the market and the State in ways that can shed new light on the emergence of excessive, insecurity-reproducing penal practices. I conclude with some brief reflections on corrosive, self-defeating effects of such practices and how one may seek to moderate or counteract them.