Monique Marks

Building the capacity of police change agents: The nexus policing project

This paper argues that police members from all ranks possess potential to challenge the beliefs and meanings that inform their daily practices, and are able to alter their routines when innovative practice and new ideas assist them in responding to new dilemmas. The paper suggests that both scholars and practitioners pay insufficient attention to nurturing rank-and-file police as change agents and to building their capacity as knowledge workers and ideas generators in forging change. In response to this gap, the paper discusses the Nexus Policing Project in Victoria, Australia, which is based on a police–university partnership aimed at realising new ways of seeing and doing in the field of policing. The participatory action research method is utilised as a way of overcoming the traditional gap between research and practice. The paper discusses some of the challenges associated with this kind of collaborative endeavour.

Who should the police be? Finding a new narrative for community policing in South Africa

In South Africa, police cling to the idea of a policing monopoly and prove reluctant to exhaust possibilities for sharing the load of creating safety. Nevertheless, they operate knowing that feelings of insecurity are rising and diverse ‘nodes’ for governing security have been established. Police and public authorities realize that a policing monopoly is more a dream than a reality, yet their policies and practices surrounding partnerships reveal an incoherent vision. We argue that this incoherence provides opportunities for designing innovative partnerships for the nodal governance of security that support the notion of a ‘core,’ and publicly symbolic police role.

South African policing at a crossroads: The case for a ‘minimal’ and ‘minimalist’ public police

This article explores the distinct but related notions of ‘minimal’ and ‘minimalist’ policing in the context of South Africa. We argue that these conceptions can shape a new vision for the future of policing in this country, one which is especially needed at a time when the political elites are seeking to re-militarize and centralize policing. This article searches for an answer to the question: Who should the public police be in emergent democracies where there is a plurality of policing providers, state and non-state? Drawing on research conducted in the city of Durban this article demonstrates that, to a large extent, policing is being carried out by agents other than the police. In this context, the article articulates a more circumscribed role for the police in a time (and place) of uncertainty, one that is anchored in local structures of strategic planning and regulation. Within such structures, non-state actors should be supported to play meaningful roles in ‘everyday policing’, but in ways that are moderate and bound by legal constraints within a human rights framework.

'Standing on the inside looking out’: the significance of police unions in networks of police governance

Abstract Scholars and practitioners now recognise the importance of ‘governing through networks’ if policing agendas are to be promoted effectively and democratically. Central to such an agenda of networked governance is the identification or creation of community-based structures and processes that can be harnessed by, and linked to, other forms of governance in furtherance of security outcomes. However, notions of community have generally been limited to the ‘communities’ outside of police organisations. This article explores the idea of a police union as ‘a community of interest’. We suggest that police unions are ‘communities’ that have the potential to impact significantly on the governance of security. As ‘insider groupings’ police unions are engaged in complex networks of police management, policy decision-makers and civil society groupings both at the national and international level. Given their organisational status, police unions have the potential to constitute themselves as active, forward-thinking social agencies within policing network arrangements. But, in order to do this they need to move beyond the demands of their conservative social base and their preoccupation with industrial issues and embrace the changing world of policing. In addition, they may need to network with a range of agencies beyond the security industry such as social justice groupings and the broad trade union movement.

As Unremarkable as the Air They Breathe? Reforming Police Management in South Africa

With the transition to democratic governance in South Africa in 1994, the public service was identified as the key sector requiring transformation. This involved refashioning the types of delivery offered to the public and a complete renovation of labour relations practices and institutions within public service organizations. The police were expected to dramatically change their labour relations framework and practices to allow for increased ‘worker’ participation in decision-making processes and enhanced performance management. This article examines attempts at transforming police labour relations in one unit of the South African Police Service. Existing legacies of authoritarianism and police disciplinary customs and a lack of directive leadership from management have seriously limited this attempt at transforming police labour relations. This, in turn, has hampered the unit’s transition towards operating in accordance with the community policing framework that is supposed to guide the practice of the ‘new’ South African Police Service.

The role of the rank and file in police reform

Police departments today are more attractive places than they used to be for experiments in participatory management and other forms of workforce empowerment, but experiments of this kind in law enforcement remain disappointingly rare. The articles in this special issue, drawn from an international, cross-disciplinary conference on ‘police reform from the bottom up,’ highlight the potential benefits of giving rank-and-file officers a larger collective voice in the shaping of their work, as well as some of the difficulties of doing so, and the conditions under which it is most likely to succeed.

The South African policing ‘nexus’: Charting the policing landscape in Durban

Abstract Throughout the world, including in South Africa, there is a growing recognition that the state police are but one actor within a hybrid policing field involved in the production of security. How exactly this mix works at micro levels, and through what processes and with what outcomes requires a great deal of investigation. Based on an ethnographic study of two distinct local initiatives that illustrate the ‘nodal’ character of security governance, this paper explores the broader question of how the public police are, and should be, locating themselves within networks to ensure the delivery of ‘good’ public security outcomes. The authors advance a conception of ‘minimalist’ policing — one centred on re-affirming and bolstering the unique authority and capacities of the public police — as a possible normative guide to the design of optimally effective and democratic nodal arrangements.

The right to unionise, the right to bargain and the right to democratic policing

This (normative) article explores the importance of police unions in the quest for democratic policing. The authors argue that if we are to expect police to behave democratically, it is important for police themselves to experience democratic engagement within the organizations in which they work. That is, if police are expected to defend democracy, they should not be denied basic democratic rights such as the right to collective bargaining and the right to freedom of association. The authors contend that police unions, through networking with other social justice groupings and through encouraging democratic practice, constitute a real forum for the promotion of democratic policing. For this potential to be reached, however, police unions need to identify with broader labor movement trends toward community unionism.

Voices from below: unions and participatory arrangements in the police workplace

Taylor and Francis Ltd GPPR_A_308289.sgm 10.1080/15614260802081238 Police Practice & Research: An International Journal 561-4263 (pri t)/1477-271X (online) Original Arti le 2 08 & Francis 90 000May 2008 Mon queMarks ARKS@ukz .ac.za; monique.marks@a u.edu.au In October 2006, Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted an international, multidisciplinary roundtable on ‘Police Reform from the Bottom Up.’ This unprecedented gathering, co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice, the Center for the Study of Law & Society, and the Regulatory Institutions Network at Australian National University, provided an opportunity for policing scholars, police unionists, representatives of identity-based police organizations, and police executives to exchange ideas about the role of rank-and-file officers in the ongoing process of police reform.1 Some participants in the Berkeley roundtable have argued for years or even decades that rank-and-file police officers should be given a greater collective voice in shaping the nature of their work. Most often the argument has sounded in management theory: participation in departmental decision-making will make officers more engaged and more committed, will lessen their opposition to reform, and will infuse managerial judgments with localized, hands-on knowledge of the day-to-day realities of policing. But sometimes the argument has sounded in civics: police are citizens and should be awarded the same rights as other citizens; police are most likely to respect and protect citizen rights if they themselves are afforded those rights – not only rights to speech and free association, but also rights to bargain collectively, and to fair and impartial adjudication of disciplinary allegations and workplace grievances. Democratic policing, in short, has been linked to a measure of workplace democracy for police officers (Broderick, 1977, p. 206; Sklansky, 2005, pp. 1774–1778). That linkage has never achieved anything close to mainstream acceptance, either within policing or among scholars of policing. The dominant assumption in policing, and in policing scholarship, is and always has been that good policing, and effective police reform, requires strong, top-down management. The Berkeley roundtable was purposely comprised of academics and practitioners who shared at least some skepticism of that assumption, but not all participants were equally resolute about increasing the individual and collective rights of the police. Nor were all the participants equally convinced about the possibility for reform from below or even from within police organizations. There was skepticism voiced, too, about the capacity for police unions to be forces for reform, rather than obstacles. For their part, some of the police unionists at the roundtable criticized existing policing scholarship as uninformed and unnuanced. This special issue of Police Practice and Research contains a selection of five papers that were presented at the Berkeley roundtable. The theme of this special issue is police unionism, police labor rights, and participatory management. This issue, very much in the

The untold story: The regulation of police labour rights and the quest for police democratisation

This paper explores the struggles for labour and social rights on the part of police officers in democratising countries. The paper suggests that the rights of police officers and labour–management relations are important issues to be acknowledged if we are serious about deepening the democratic practices of police, particularly in democratising countries. These issues should be deliberated among policing scholars and police managers as well as important international regulatory organisations such as the ILO whose current regulatory frameworks inadvertently restrict police worker rights.