John Edward Deukmedjian

Community into Intelligence: Resolving Information uptake in the RCMP

Police now and then undergo radical mission adaptation. Yet, how events shape organizational police history, including the adoption of radically different missions, has largely evaded scholarship. Through a review of executive-level interviews and strategic leadership documents, we trace how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turned from a community-policing mission to one which now highlights intelligence. We argue that while various programs and strategies to garner rank-and-file and public buy-in to the community-policing mission largely failed, problem-oriented policing nevertheless readied the ground for the next mission iteration: intelligence-led policing. The core problem underpinning the transition was not community service, but information uptake.

The Simulation of Crime Control A Shift in Policing

The authors argue that policing by consent is being displaced by policing by information control. This discomfiting adaptation in liberal democracies is possible in the shadow of asymmetrical, border-collapsing exceptionalism. It has also benefited from synoptic effects in which reference to the liberal democratic legacy substitutes for liberal democratic practices. Current technologies, as demonstrated in watch-listing, public relations operations, and fourth-generation training, exemplify ironic homage to a consent and democracy. These take for granted the loss of innocence: There is no “real” (democracy, order, control) but rather impressions, which require effective simulations. The article concludes with the contention that today it is control, not justice, that must be “seen to be done.”

RESHAPING ORGANIZATIONAL SUBJECTIVITIES IN CANADA'S NATIONAL POLICE FORCE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF RCMP ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION

This article examines how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police developed alternative dispute resolution mechanisms to reshape the organizational subjectivities of its members and managers in ways consistent with community policing principles. The governance of organizational conflicts is a significant aspect of police management. Moreover, since public conflict management is an important aspect of public policing, this article argues that public policing mentalities such as “legalistic-professional law-enforcement” and “community policing” directly influence how the police conceptualize and manage organizational conflicts.

From Community to Intelligence: Executive Realignment of RCMP Mission

L’analyse, par l’administration de la GRC, de certaines incohérences au niveau des services de police communautaires au cours des années 1990 constitue en quelque sorte le point de départ pour l’adoption, vers la fin de l’an 2000, d’une démarche visant une application de la loi axée sur le renseignement. En effet, les dirigeants de la GRC ont identifié trois secteurs qui risquaient de poser des problèmes particulièrement délicats : les services de première ligne, la formation et la gestion intermédiaire. Or, on prévoit que ces « zones-problèmes » referont surface dans le cadre de la démarche axée sur le renseignement. L’auteur propose donc que l’adoption de nouveaux modèles et les initiatives de restructuration organisationnelle s’inscrivent dans des processus plus vastes d’alignement cyclique. Il présente également certaines conclusions à portée plus globale, dont la réaffectation et le déplacement éventuels de ressources (élaboration d’expertises et de savoirs) au sein du réseau des agences policières.

Securitization, Infopolitics and the Suppression of Liberty

Starting 6 June 2013, The Washington Post began to publish a steady stream of revelations about the National Security Agency, including the special-source operations code named Upstream and PRISM (see Gellman, 2013). According to the June 6 article, the US and British governments have been mining vast amounts of global signals data from fibre cables as well as directly from the servers of nine major American Internet service providers and telecommunications companies. These programs perhaps represent the most robust strategic surveillance of American and global populations thus far revealed historically. Broadly speaking, the programs function in at least two ways. The first is a reactive and tactical function: to mine and query the ‘big data’ to build target packages against specific targets. This tactical surveillance, to cite Donald Rumsfeld (2003: 2) from a Department of Defence news briefing in 2002, tries to get at the ‘known unknowns’ — that is to say, the things that are known to be unknown. The second is a proactive and strategic function: applying complex mathematical processing of data flows to conduct human social linkage analysis (Barria, 2013). In other words, the purpose is to potentially get at Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’, the things we don’t know that we don’t know.

The Simulation of Crime Control

The authors argue that policing by consent is being displaced by policing by information control. This discomfiting adaptation in liberal democracies is possible in the shadow of asymmetrical, border-collapsing exceptionalism. It has also benefited from synoptic effects in which reference to the liberal democratic legacy substitutes for liberal democratic practices. Current technologies, as demonstrated in watch-listing, public relations operations, and fourth-generation training, exemplify ironic homage to a consent and democracy. These take for granted the loss of innocence: There is no “real” (democracy, order, control) but rather impressions, which require effective simulations. The article concludes with the contention that today it is control, not justice, that must be “seen to be done.”

Simulating Control: A Shift in Policing?

The authors argue that policing by consent is being displaced by policing by information control. This discomfiting adaptation in liberal democracies is possible in the shadow of asymmetrical, border-collapsing exceptionalism. It has also benefited from synoptic effects in which reference to the liberal democratic legacy substitutes for liberal democratic practices. Current technologies, as demonstrated in watch-listing, public relations operations, and fourth-generation training, exemplify ironic homage to a consent and democracy. These take for granted the loss of innocence: There is no “real” (democracy, order, control) but rather impressions, which require effective simulations. The article concludes with the contention that today it is control, not justice, that must be “seen to be done.”