This volume examines how and to what extent security officers make use of`legal tools. The work identifies these tools and draws on two case-study sites to illustrate how security officers make use of them as well as how they fit in broader security systems to secure compliance. The study also examines the occupational culture of security officers and links them into the broader systems of security that operate to police nodes of governance. The book provides insights for researchers and policy-makers seeking to develop policy for the expanding private security industry.
This volume addresses critical questions about how to achieve the best outcomes from police and security providers by reviewing and critiquing the scientific literature and identifying best practice guidelines. Chapters cover a range of topical issues, including legitimacy, organised crime, public protests and intelligence and investigations.
Ports are the vital hubs of the maritime transport industry, and crucial to the flow of global trade. The protection of this global supply chain from crime and terrorism is a fundamental objective of port security, and is a landscape beset by new challenges and changes post 9/11. Building on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in two major European ports, Yarin Eski discusses how operational policing and security realities and identities are established, and examines how industrial commercialization has aggravated security issues. Policing, Port Security and Crime Control offers a compelling empirically balanced account of the attitudes and practices of port police officers and security officers, exploring the everyday realities and ambitions of these street-level professionals as they seek to (re)establish a meaningful occupational identity. In doing so, this book presents a criminological understanding of the way that security questions and procedures are integrated into the daily lives of those that protect the industrial port sites, where they themselves must interrupt the global supply chain in order to defend it. Exploring topics such as port security management, multi-agency policing, port theft, drug trafficking, human smuggling and terrorism, this book offers a major contribution to the growing literature on transnational crime and security and is one of the first to offer an ethnographic approach to port security. This book is interdisciplinary and will appeal to criminologists, sociologists, ethnographers and those engaged with policing and security studies, as well as professionals in the field of multi-agency policing, border control, security and governance of the port and wider maritime industry.
Policing in a Democracy is an overview of innovations and orientations both in policing missions, functions, and approaches that reflect democratic principles. It is intended to serve as resource material for law enforcement officers in training and those in the field, as well as for their administrators/managers. The public also needs to participate in ensuring their own safety and security through community policing. They want to know the legitimacy of law enforcement existence and operations, the basics about their training, their equipment and uses, the odds they face, and the sacrifices they make in ensuring community safety. Policing everywhere has a record of its merits and demerits. This book is also an appeal to law enforcement policy makers and all officers (the police, corrections, and security officers) irrespective of political ideologies or systems where they serve to embrace and apply innovative operational approaches in policing, by employing new equipment and logistics to provide satisfactory services commensurate with their professional standards, ethics, and morality while eschewing bias in all its forms.
Unique in focus, Homeland Security for Policing presents a framework for understanding the role police play in today's era of Homeland Security. The only book of its kind, it examines the events that led up to this new policing era, the relationship between national, state and local agencies, and specific strategies, operations and tactics that can be used to prevent and protect against future threats. Special emphasis is placed on understanding 9-11, the entire framework of Homeland Security in the U.S. and the unique issues faced by local law enforcement. Provides a strategic focus that addresses state and local level responses to Homeland Security as well as responses at the federal level. Discusses the specific issues facing police with respect to Homeland Security and connects the Homeland Security and criminal justice fields. Discusses how and why policing has changed in the last decade. Presents a fuller understanding of how the concept of Homeland Security developed, what it means for the police, and where within the scope of a national Homeland Security framework the police fit. Discusses the activities of local police within the context of both state and national Homeland Security policies. Emphasizes the integral web of dependency and connected nature of these agencies. Discusses techniques for information gathering, risk and threat assessments, intelligence analysis, preparation for mass disasters (including Weapons of Mass Destruction), risk management, information sharing (both laterally and vertically), preemption of terrorism, and employment of an Incident Command System under the National Incident Management System. Helps identify the new roles, new responsibilities, and new tasks of the police in today's post 9-11 environment. Law enforcement professionals.
Private Policing examines the origins of private policing, the growing literature that has sought to explain its growth, and ways in which it has been defined and classified.
In Policing China, Suzanne E. Scoggins delves into the paradox of China's self-projection of a strong security state while having a weak police bureaucracy. Assessing the problems of resources, enforcement, and oversight that beset the police, outside of cracking down on political protests, Scoggins finds that the central government and the Ministry of Public Security have prioritized "stability maintenance" (weiwen) to the detriment of nearly every aspect of policing. The result, she argues, is a hollowed out and ineffective police force that struggles to deal with everyday crime. Using interviews with police officers up and down the hierarchy, as well as station data, news reports, and social media postings, Scoggins probes the challenges faced by ground-level officers and their superiors at the Ministry of Public Security as they attempt to do their jobs in the face of funding limitations, reform challenges, and structural issues. Policing China concludes that despite the social control exerted by China's powerful bureaucracies, security failures at the street level have undermined Chinese citizens' trust in the legitimacy of the police and the capabilities of the state.
South Africa boasts the largest private security sector in the entire world, reflecting deep anxieties about violence, security, and governance. Twilight Policing is an ethnographic study of the daily policing practices of armed response officersÑa specific type of private security officerÑand their interactions with citizens and the state police in Durban, South Africa. This book shows how their policing practices simultaneously undermine and support the state, resulting in actions that are neither public nor private, but something in between, something Òtwilight.Ó Their performances of security are also punitive, disciplinary, and exclusionary, and they work to reinforce post-apartheid racial and economic inequalities. Ultimately, Twilight Policing helps to illuminate how citizens survive volatile conditions and to whom they assign the authority to guide them in the process.
Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic governance, and security. Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy. Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions.
