Policing and security provision are subjects central to criminology. Yet there are newer and neglected forms that are currently unscrutinised. By examining the work of community safety officers, ambassador patrols, conservation officers, and private police foundations, who operate on and are animated by a frontier, this book reveals why criminological inquiry must reach beyond traditional conceptual and methodological boundaries in the 21st century. Including novel case studies, this multi-disciplinary and international book assembles a rich collection of policing and security frontiers both geographical (e.g. the margins of cities) and conceptual (dispersion and credentialism) not seen or acknowledged previously.
Policing Cities brings together international scholars from numerous disciplines to examine urban policing, securitization, and regulation in nine countries and the conceptual issues these practices raise. Chapters cover many of the world’s major cities, including New York, Beijing, Paris, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Boston, Melbourne, and Toronto, as well as other urban areas in Britain, United States, South Africa, Germany, Australia and Georgia. The collection examines the activities and reforms of the traditional public police, but also those of emerging public and private policing agents and spaces that fall outside the public police’s purview and which previously have received little attention. It explores dramatic changes in public policing arrangements and strategies, exclusion of urban homeless people, new forms of urban surveillance and legal regulation, and securitization and militarization of urban spaces. The core argument in the volume is that cities are more than mere background for policing, securitization and regulation. Policing and the city are intimately intertwined. This collection also reveals commonalities in the empirical interests, methodological preferences, and theoretical concerns of scholars working in these various disciplines and breaks down barriers among them. This is the first collection on urban policing, regulation, and securitization with such a multi-disciplinary and international character. This collection will have a wide readership among upper level undergraduate and graduate level students in several disciplines and countries and can be used in geography/urban studies, legal and socio-legal studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and criminology courses.
Including novel case studies, this multi-disciplinary book assembles a rich collection of policing and security frontiers both geographical (e.g. the margins of cities) and conceptual (dispersion and credentialism) not seen or acknowledged previously, pushing criminology to the edge of its current understanding.
This edited text draws together the insights of numerous worldwide eminent academics to evaluate the condition of predictive policing and artificial intelligence (AI) as interlocked policy areas. Predictive and AI technologies are growing in prominence and at an unprecedented rate. Powerful digital crime mapping tools are being used to identify crime hotspots in real-time, as pattern-matching and search algorithms are sorting through huge police databases populated by growing volumes of data in an eff ort to identify people liable to experience (or commit) crime, places likely to host it, and variables associated with its solvability. Facial and vehicle recognition cameras are locating criminals as they move, while police services develop strategies informed by machine learning and other kinds of predictive analytics. Many of these innovations are features of modern policing in the UK, the US and Australia, among other jurisdictions. AI promises to reduce unnecessary labour, speed up various forms of police work, encourage police forces to more efficiently apportion their resources, and enable police officers to prevent crime and protect people from a variety of future harms. However, the promises of predictive and AI technologies and innovations do not always match reality. They often have significant weaknesses, come at a considerable cost and require challenging trade- off s to be made. Focusing on the UK, the US and Australia, this book explores themes of choice architecture, decision- making, human rights, accountability and the rule of law, as well as future uses of AI and predictive technologies in various policing contexts. The text contributes to ongoing debates on the benefits and biases of predictive algorithms, big data sets, machine learning systems, and broader policing strategies and challenges. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of policing, criminology, crime science, sociology, computer science, cognitive psychology and all those interested in the emergence of AI as a feature of contemporary policing.
What are the potential contributions of anthropology to the study of police? Even beyond the methodological particularities and geographic breadth of cultural anthropology, there are a set of conceptual and analytical traditions that have much to bring to broader scholarship in police studies. Including original and international contributions from both senior and emerging scholars, this pioneering book represents a foundational document for a burgeoning field of study: the anthropology of police. The chapters in this volume open up the question of police in new ways: mining the disciplinary legacies of anthropology in order to discover new conceptual tools, methods, and pedagogies; reworking relationships between "police," "public," and "researcher" in ways that open up new avenues for exploration at the same time as they articulate new demands; and retracing a hauntology that, through interactions with individuals and collectives, constitutes a body politic through the figure of police. Illustrating the various ways that anthropology enables a reassessment of the police/violence relationship with a broad consideration of the human stakes at the center, this book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the broad interdisciplinary field invested in the study of policing, order-making, and governance.
With contributions from leading experts in the field, this timely Research Handbook reconsiders the theories, assumptions, values and methods of comparative criminal justice in light of the challenges and opportunities posed by globalisation, deglobalisation and transnationalisation.
Nightlife is a place of both real and imagined risk, a ‘frontier’ (Melbin 1978) where apparent freedom and transgression are closely linked, and where regulation of leisure and collective intoxication has been diffused throughout an expanding network of state and private actors. This book explores Sydney’s contemporary night-time economy as the product of an intersection of both local and global transformations, as policing comes to incorporate more and more ‘private’ personnel empowered to regulate ‘public’ drinking and nightlife. Policing Nightlife focuses on the historical and social conditions, cultural meanings and regulatory controls that have shaped both public and private forms of policing and security in contemporary urban nightlife. In so doing, it reflects more broadly on global changes in the nature of contemporary policing and how aspects of neoliberalism and the ideal of the ‘24-hour city’ have shaped policing, security and night-time leisure. Based on a decade of research and interviews with both police and doorstaff working in nightlife settings, it explores the effectiveness of policies governing policing and private security in the night-time economy in the context of media, political and public debates about regulation, and the gendered and highly masculine aspects of much of this work. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, policing, sociology and those interested in understanding the debates surrounding security, policing and contemporary urban nightlife.
From Family to Police Force illuminates the production and contestation of social, familial, and national order on a South Asian borderland. In the borderland that divides Kutch, a district in the western Indian state of Gujarat, from Sindh, a southern province in Pakistan, there are many forces at work: civil and border police, the air wing of the armed forces, paramilitary forces, and various intelligence agencies that depute officers to the region. These groups are the major actors in the field of security and policing. Farhana Ibrahim offers a bird's-eye view of these groups, drawing on long-standing anthropological engagement with the region. She observes policing on multiple levels, showing in detail that the nation-state is only one of the scales at which policing is enacted at a borderland. Ibrahim draws on multiple sources and forms of policing structure to illuminate everyday interaction on the personal scale, bringing families and individuals into the broader picture. From Family to Police Force looks beyond the obvious sites, sources, and modes of policing to show the distinctions between the act of policing and the institution of the police.
This multidisciplinary volume demonstrates how Freedom of Information (FOI) law and processes can contribute to social science research design across sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, journalism and education. Comparing the use of FOI in research design across the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada and South Africa, it provides readers with resources to carry out FOI requests and considers the influence such requests can have on debates within multiple disciplines. In addition to exploring how scholars can use FOI disclosures in conjunction with interview data, archival data and other datasets, this collection explains how researchers can systematically analyse FOI disclosures. Considering the challenges and dilemmas in using FOI processes in research, it examines the reasons why many scholars continue to rely on more easily accessible data, when much of the real work of governance, the more clandestine but consequential decisions and policy moves made by government officials, can only be accessed using FOI requests.
