Randy K. Lippert

Signs of the Surveillant Assemblage: Privacy Regulation, Urban CCTV, and Governmentality

Signage in urban ‘open-street’ CCTV arrangements is explored in relation to the strategies and forms of law brought to bear upon it. In the context of privacy regulation, CCTV signage’s content reflects deterrence strategies and political subjectification consistent with liberal governmentality. CCTV signage is evinced to be both an agent and target of privacy and other forms of law and is therefore shaped and brought into being by complex webs of legal governance. Rather than befitting panoptic arrangements or merely amplifying CCTV’s deterrent effects, CCTV signage signals and serves as a vital element of the surveillant assemblage. Possessing varied functions, including features attributed to surveillance cameras, CCTV signage is a material means by which the surveillance assemblage interfaces with the legal complex and by which urban time-spaces are constituted. This analysis moves beyond previous accounts of regulatory signage and has broad implications for governmentality and surveillance studies.

Advancing governmentality studies Lessons from social constructionism

Criminology has been significantly influenced by governmentality studies and the social constructionist perspective on social problems. Despite emerging in distinctive academic networks, this article elaborates how both programmes similarly focus on the simultaneous governance and constitution of problematized—often moralized or criminalized—conduct; imagine plurality, temporality and continuous failure of their subject matters; and presume language is constitutive. These similarities are discussed in order to show how the governmentality project in relation to criminology can learn from the social constructionist perspective on social problems. Using empirical illustrations, it is shown how governmentality studies can benefit from adopting constructionism’s concept of claims-making activities; attention to context; and earlier acceptance of the futility of cutting the cord with ‘the real’.

Security Intelligence Networks and the Transformation of Contract Private Security

This article explores the transformation of contract private security and security intelligence networks by drawing on results of a 2003 survey of contract security firms in Ontario, Canada. Comparing these results with a 1976 survey by Shearing et al. reveals a dramatic increase in the intelligence gathering and sharing capacities of contract security firms. This increased capacity can be put to various uses. The results of the 2003 survey permit the identification of three security intelligence networks that are constituted by this intelligence capacity: disciplinary networks, private justice networks, and multi-lateralized networks. These are differentiated by the type of intelligence provided and by the asymmetrical processes of intelligence provision to select security intelligence consumers. Security firms that share intelligence with their clients are less likely to share intelligence with police. Contract security consumers therefore largely determine the intelligence sharing practices of contract security firms.

Urban Revitalization, Security, and Knowledge Transfer: The Case of Broken Windows and Kiddie Bars

This article investigates a downtown revitalization project in a Canadian city and the problem it encountered to shed light on neglected aspects of urban revitalization, security provision, and knowledge transfer. With a gradual shift to “market friendly” downtown land-use, Windsor’s core underwent expansion of a night-time, youth-oriented, retail alcohol economy. A security problem with moral dimensions emerged and was deemed to detrimentally affect police patrol resources, residential development and living, and retail business. Using governmentality and Latourian-influenced analytical tools, attention is paid to three interrelated facets: (1) the role of Windsor’s downtown business improvement association (BIA); (2) the influential movement of a consultant’s report through urban institutions rendered responsible for revitalization; and (3) resulting measures, including an interim control bylaw and then a zoning bylaw targeting and redefining a particular type of licensed liquor establishment called a “kiddie bar.” The implications of this analysis for understanding the role of BIAs, governance “from below,” and knowledge transfer are discussed.

Capturing crime, criminals and the public’s imagination: Assembling Crime Stoppers and CCTV surveillance

This article explores Crime Stoppers’ use of CCTV images as a node of a surveillant assemblage via analysis of a sample of Crime Stoppers advertisements deploying CCTV images supplemented by interviews and other qualitative procedures. Advertisements using images are becoming more prevalent and rely on complex textual narratives and the CCTV image format to construct crime for public consumption to generate ‘tips’. The advertisements capture a narrow range of ‘street crime’ to the benefit of private business and to the neglect of pervasive and serious conduct affecting the less powerful. The convergence of Crime Stoppers and CCTV surveillance is found to have unanticipated and ironic consequences regarding deterrence and identification, to befit a form of ‘counter-law’, and to demonstrate potential to harm individuals and visible minorities. Theoretical implications of this analysis for understanding assumptions about the relation between image and the Truth of crime, governance, and surveillance are discussed.

Seeing private security like a state

Based on a systematic and detailed statutory analysis of 58 jurisdictions in Canada and the United States, this article constructs a modal typology of state regulation of contract private security. State regulation of private security has been neglected despite the fact it has grown across North American jurisdictions in the past two decades. Moving beyond rudimentary regulatory models and focusing on the contract security sector exclusively, five key dimensions of state regulation of private security are identified: governing-at-a-distance, character, identity, training, and information. Whether and how these dimensions relate to management protocols at the security agency level are then examined by combining these results with an analysis of an international survey of contract security managers within these jurisdictions. In turn, each dimension is found to relate to security agency management protocols. Implications for understanding state regulation and future research on private security governance are elaborated.

‘Clean and safe’ passage: Business Improvement Districts, urban security modes, and knowledge brokers

This paper interrogates the complex role of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in securing and shaping conduct in public retail and ‘entertainment’ spaces in Canadian cities. Adopting a Foucault-inspired sociology of governance perspective, this paper uncovers key features of the role of BIDs therein and casts doubt upon assumptions evident in previous research, including in relation to urban neo-liberalism. BIDs seek to exclude obstacles, which include ‘panhandlers’ and the homeless, from public spaces. Yet, other barriers are placed into relief by a proliferating ‘clean and safe’ rationality and are deemed to interfere with consumption conduct and pedestrian flow. These include BID members engaged in moralized enterprises. Some BIDs are deploying CCTV surveillance arrangements and interactive ‘ambassadors’ consistent with ‘clean and safe’, whereas others avoid these modes and rely upon and lobby for public sources. The role of BID coordinators in brokering specialized knowledge is pivotal in these varied security arrangements. Theoretical implications of this analysis are discussed.

Downtown ambassadors, police relations and ‘clean and safe’ security

This article investigates uniformed patrols called ‘ambassadors’ that are increasingly providing security in the cores of western cities. An analysis of texts and interviews with key institutional actors in three cities reveals ambassador operations and practices are shaped and made possible by relations with police that entail exchanging knowledge for limited training and tacit tolerance. Ambassadors are imagined remaining distant from police and private security self-designations, operations and appearances to the benefit of police and downtown business-oriented associations, but not so remote as to lose vital benefits of these links. Ambassador practices include acting as police ‘eyes and ears’ and governing ‘nuisance’ using indirect and unauthorised strategies. In these arrangements ambassadors are not so much ‘steered’ by police as they are ‘anchored’, suggesting notions of ‘networked governance’ and government ‘at a distance’ while otherwise valuable approaches are inappropriate here. Making sense of ambassador practices and relations with police is better accomplished through reference to a lower level ‘clean and safe’ rationality that constitutes ambassadors as both its agents and targets.

Policing Property and Moral Risk Through Promotions, Anonymization and Rewards: Crime Stoppers Revisited

This article explores promotions, anonymity and rewards as techniques of governance in Canadian Crime Stoppers (CS) programmes by analysing texts and personal interviews. The function of CS Crime of the Week advertisements is found to be more a practical effort to reduce loss along property lines through offering rewards and anonymity and less a tactical effort to solve mostly violent crimes or a symbolic endeavour consistent with the promotion of ‘law and order’ ideology. Through new partnerships with CS, various partners including private insurance gain symbolic but also practical risk management benefits. Anonymization promises to reduce risk to ‘tipsters’ and moral risk to police and partners. A graduated system of rewards seeks to manage risk while encouraging risk among ‘tipsters’ and is linked to moral imaginings of the tipster as ‘good citizen’ and ‘criminal’. Risk and morality are therefore linked in this context. These techniques of governance are deployed together to render the policing of property and moral risks possible as these techniques are themselves governed. CS does not simply aid law enforcement. Rather, in CS law is at once a way in which these techniques are governed and a barrier to their deployment. These findings have implications for the sociology of governance and law and move beyond previous research on CS.

After the “quiet revolution”: the self‐regulation of Ontario contract security agencies1

This article explores private security self‐regulation and client‐centredness by comparing the results of two surveys of contract security agencies in Ontario, Canada—one by Shearing et al. in 1980 and one by the authors in 2003. Comparative analysis reveals that the perceived adequacy of existing state regulation has increased while the adequacy of enforcement has decreased despite unchanged state regulation. There have been changes in the type of guard‐training agencies provide. Educational requirements for guards and the educational levels of private security managers have increased substantially over time. Changes in the training and increases in educational requirements are found to be positively associated with the provision of customized services to clients. Since 1980, agencies have diversified their client base across public and private sectors, and consumption sites have become more important among client types. Client‐centredness has become a key factor in agency self‐regulation since the “Quiet Revolution”.