Kevin D. Haggerty

Modern serial killers

The study of serial killing has been dominated by an individualized focus on the aetiology and biography of particular offenders. As such, it has tended to downplay the broader social, historical and cultural context of such acts. This article addresses this lacuna by arguing that serial killers are distinctively modern. It highlights six modern phenomena related to serial killing: (a) the mass media and the attendant rise of a celebrity culture; (b) a society of strangers; (c) a type of mean/ends rationality that is largely divorced from value considerations; (d) cultural frameworks of denigration which tend to implicitly single out some groups for greater predation; (e) particular opportunity structures for victimization; and finally (f) the notion that society can be engineered. Combined, these factors help to pattern serial killing in modernity’s own self-image, with modernity setting the parameters of what it means to be a serial killer, and establishing the preconditions for serial murder to emerge in its distinctive contemporary guise.

Displaced Expertise Three Constraints on the Policyrelevance of Criminological Thought

The long-standing relationship between criminal justice policy and the advice of criminologists has been ruptured in the past two decades. Three interrelated factors help to account for this displacement of criminological thought: (1) the rise of neo-liberal forms of governance which have made traditional forms of criminological knowledge and preferred sites of intervention increasingly superfluous to the practice of governance; (2) the ascendancy of a highly symbolic public discourse about crime; and (3) the transformation of the criminal justice system by new technologies of detection, capture and monitoring. While criminologists continue to influence the development of specific criminal justice policies, the combination of these three developments pose additional hurdles for our ability to shape criminal justice policies in a rational manner.

Civil Cities and Urban Governance: Regulating Disorder for the Vancouver Winter Olympics

The paper analyses Project Civil City (PCC), a major initiative launched by the City of Vancouver in 2006 that aimed for significant reductions in street disorder in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics. This initiative is considered in light of the links between urban regeneration/revitalisation efforts and security and surveillance practices. PCC stands as a telling moment in the on-going and highly politicised efforts to regulate urban disorder in this ‘world city’. The paper concentrates on three distinct initiatives aimed at ordering different components of urban disorder in Vancouver.

The Ambivalent Insider/Outsider Status of Academic ‘Homecomers’: Observations on Identity and Field Research in the Nigerian Delta

This research note draws attention to the play of a researcher’s identity during a summer’s worth of research conducted in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Focus is particularly directed at the position of ‘academic homecomers’, and the various ways in which different forms of their identity and ‘insiderness’ can structure research.

Theorizing Surveillance in Crime Control

Surveillance is conventionally perceived as a key component of the crime control apparatus. This editors’ introduction to a Special Issue of Theoretical Criminology on ‘Theorizing Surveillance in Crime Control’ outlines both the need for new theorizing on surveillance and some of the difficulties in doing so. It also introduces the seven pieces in the Special Issue.

Policing on camera

On any shift a police officer might be filmed by some combination of public or private surveillance cameras, including the cameras of individual citizens, activists, journalists, businesses, and a range of police-controlled cameras. This loosely coordinated camera infrastructure is part of the broader transformation of policing from a historically “low visibility” to an increasingly ‘high visibility’ occupation. This article reports on the findings of a participant-observation study of how police officers understand and respond to this transformation. We identify three distinct orientations, and highlight the multifaceted and contradictory relationship between police officers and cameras. The study raises questions about the extent to which camera technologies represent a straightforward way to “police the police”.

Technology and crime policy: Reply to Michael Jacobson

I was pleased that Professor Jacobson (2004), in his response to my ‘Displaced Expertise’ article, generally agreed with my analysis of how criminological knowledge has been dislocated from the development of crime policy in the United States (Haggerty, 2004). Given his previous position as Probation Commissioner of New York City, I take this as insider confirmation for some of the points I tried to articulate in that piece. Professor Jacobson did, however, disagree quite strongly with a position he believes I expressed in that article, and this requires a brief response. In particular, I was surprised by Professor Jacobson’s characterization of my views on the embrace of new technologies in the criminal justice system. He suggests that I am engaged in a ‘critique of technology’ (2004: 235) where I express ‘dismay at the use of tools and techniques adapted from the physical sciences in the day-to-day operation of criminal justice’ and ‘condemn the wholesale use’ of particular investigative technologies (2004: 234). Unfortunately, this misrepresents my argument, suggesting that I advance a normative position about technology as a whole, which I do not. Very briefly, the thesis advanced in the ‘Displaced Expertise’ article is that a series of interrelated developments in recent years pertaining to emergent models of governance, the expediencies of politics and changes to the routine operation of the criminal justice system have contributed to the comparative dislocation of criminologists from direct policy influence in the United States. In each of these spheres new forms of expertise have emerged, offering forms of knowledge that policy makers perceive to be more directly relevant to the development of crime policy than the

Negotiated Measures: The Institutional Micropolitics of Official Criminal Justice Statistics

Abstract This paper examines some of the background social and institutional practices involved in the production of official statistics about crime and criminal justice. It documents how a host of micropolitical considerations impinge on what studies are conducted, which agencies control official data, and how measures are standardized. The communication of statistical facts is also shown to be influenced by a concern to prospectively manage the political symbolism of popular accounts about crime and criminal justice statistics.

Iterations of Olympic security: Montreal and Vancouver

This article compares security dynamics at two Olympic Games hosted by Canada: Montreal (1976) and Vancouver (2010). It is the first study of security at the Montreal Olympics and was only made possible after four years of requests under the Access to Information Act that resulted in the release of thousands of classified security documents in French and English. A comparative study of the two largest peacetime security operations in Canadian history offers unique insights into the challenges of hosting a major international gathering in the aftermath of an international terrorist incident: the 1972 Munich massacre and the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. The comparison further offers an opportunity to chart the continuities and differences in Olympic security over time. We focus in part on how the historical context of each event informed ‘imaginaries of disaster’. We also examine continuities in the official security response, such as the emphasis on advance intelligence gathering, security ‘mock-ups’, manpower allocation, coalitions of security agencies and technological innovation. We conclude with some considerations on security legacies and the importance of major event security as a subject of comparative inquiry.

The Surveillance Legacies of 9/11: Recalling, Reflecting on, and Rethinking Surveillance in the Security Era

Do we need yet more analysis of the responses to the September 11, 2001 (hereafter 9/11), terrorist attacks? Those tragic events occurred more than a decade ago, and their 10-year memorial focused on bringing “closure” to the event. For many, those attacks have become an increasingly distant, if still poignant, memory. For still others—such as the new cohort of undergraduate students who were only nine years old on the day of the attacks—9/11 is social history. Our contention in putting together this volume is that there continues to be significant reason to scrutinize 9/11 in terms of its consequences for the dynamics of surveillance. The aftermath of that tragic event played a major role in policy changes and in international relations. Wars were fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, sparked by 9/11, and many thousands more people died as a result. “National security” was elevated to a top priority in the United States and elsewhere, and this approach has had wave and ripple effects throughout the world. This is the “War on Terror,” and, unlike other wars, this one has no visible end point. These developments certainly affected surveillance practices internationally and have been the cue for the United States to demand that other countries fall in line with its approach. On the other hand, for many countries, especially in the global south, 9/11 is not a top-of-mind matter, nor is “national security” a vital concern.