Samuel Tanner

Police work and new ‘security devices’: A tale from the beat

Mobile technologies have brought about major changes in police equipment and police work. If a utopian narrative remains strongly linked to the adoption of new technologies, often formulated as ‘magic bullets’ to real occupational problems, there are important tensions between their ‘imagined’ outcomes and the (unexpected) effects that accompany their daily ‘practical’ use by police officers. This article offers an analysis of police officers’ perceptions and interactions with security devices. In so doing, it develops a conceptual typology of strategies for coping with new technology inspired by Le Bourhis and Lascoumes: challenging, neutralizing and diverting. To that purpose, we adopt an ethnographic approach that focuses on the discourses, practices and actions of police officers in relation to three security devices: the mobile digital terminal, the mobile phone and the body camera. Based on a case study of a North American municipal police department, the article addresses how these technological devices are perceived and experienced by police officers on the beat.

Not always a happy ending: the organisational challenges of deploying and reintegrating civilian police peacekeepers (a Canadian perspective)

The deployment of civilian police in UN peacekeeping operations represents a significant commitment for many police organisations, especially in decentralised political systems such as Canada where municipal and provincial police services are involved. While these missions attract large numbers of highly motivated officers, their selection, deployment and return are fraught with organisational challenges that are underestimated or ignored by the contributing agencies. In this paper, we will examine these challenges as they are experienced and resolved by three large Canadian police organisations, through a number of qualitative interviews conducted with former police peacekeepers and their managers. We argue in this paper that the deployment and reintegration stages of a police peacekeeping mission should be included in the assessment of its success, and that unless contributing police organisations find ways to improve the experience of their returning officers, the sustainability of UN police peacekeeping deployments could become problematic.

Police work in international peace operation environments: a perspective from Canadian police officers in the MINUSTAH

Deployment of police officers on international United Nations peace operations is still a marginal topic addressed only by transnational police scholars. In this paper, based on interviews conducted with Canadian police officers who participated in the United Nation Mission for Stabilization in Haiti, we focus on how participants negotiate the transposition of a ‘home grown’ constabulary ethos in order to provide effective police work in such transnational operations. While the strict transfer of domestic police methods to the new environment is ineffective, we show that police officers elaborate innovative strategies and practices that reveal promising routes for the prevention and de-escalation of violence in the peace operation context. Such innovations may also serve as the basis for the development of more accurate paradigms that will advance police work in a transnational context.

Political Opportunities and Local Contingencies in Mass Crime Participation: Personal Experiences by Former Serbian Militiamen

Participation in mass crime is often approached from a top-down perspective that centralizes the actions of the masses under the order of elites and leaders. While there is some evidence to support this approach, a more complete assessment of participation in mass crime must also consider the grassroots contingencies that unite the collective motivation and capacity that induce such actions. Such a bottoms-up approach is developed in this article with a particular focus on the personal experiences of former Serbian militiamen who took part in scenes of mass violence in Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina. Interviews with former militiamen illustrate how political opportunities, diverging nationalistic attitudes, proximity to growing violence in increasingly localized killing fields, incentives to participate in parallel criminal activities, and an influence within community networks that were submerged in mass crimes united to legitimize and facilitate their personal commitment to the events that took place in this region during the 1990s.

Criminology in the face of flows: reflections on contemporary policing and security

ABSTRACT Much has been written about the governance of crime – indeed, this is the thread that has unified criminology. Yet, property crimes and attacks against individuals – traditionally at the core of the discipline – are plummeting in many societies. Meanwhile, harms and harm management emerge outside the narrowness of criminal justice definitions. Despite this, little criminological attention has been paid to the fact that the security of flows increasingly embodies concerns that are at the heart of contemporary policing practices. This introduction to this special issue takes stock of these changes and argues that to stay current and relevant, criminology must pay closer attention to these changing landscapes of harms and policing.

The mass crimes in the former Yugoslavia: participation, punishment and prevention?

This article discusses sanctions for and the prevention of mass violence. But rather than take a classic approach centred on statutory players such as soldiers, officers or political leaders, all of them acting within a legal chain of command, I focus on non-state perpetrators. My reflections are based on case studies of four former Serbian militiamen who took part in mass violence in the former Yugoslavia. I argue that it is of the utmost importance to consider the typical grass-roots relationship between these local players and their own community, so as to maximize the effect of sanctions and perhaps prevent further offences by potential future perpetrators.