Community Policing and “John Schools”*

De nos jours, la police a déjà subi et continue de subir des changements dans sa philosophie et sa pratique fondamentales. Des zones de contrôle social auparavant laissées dans L'ombre par la police sont maintenant regroupées sous L'expression « police communautaire «. Le contrôle de la prostitution, bien qu'il soit traditionnellement axé sur les travailleuses du sexe, a récemment été ramené sous le parapluie de la police communautaire par le biais de méthodes parti‐culières. Cet article examine la police de quartier et son rôle élargi en prenant pour exemple les « John schools » ou programmes de traitement pour les clients de prostituées. Ces programmes, en tant que police communautaire en pratique, mettent en relief les difficultés de cette approche en général et, plus particulièrement, celles de la prostitution. Policing today has gone through and continues to undergo changes in its basic philosophy and practice. Areas of social control previously ignored by police are now included under the rhetoric of “community policing.” Control of prostitution activity, although an historical mainstay of policing directed primarily at female sex workers, has recently been subsumed under the umbrella of community policing through particular methods aimed at its control. This paper examines community policing and the expanded police role through the example of “John schools” or prostitution offender programs. As community policing in practice, such prostitution offender programs highlight the difficulties of the community policing approach generally, and the policing perspective on prostitution more specifically.     

“Police,Public Safety,and Race‐Neutral Discourse”

In the final decades of the 20th century policing in America was refashioned in the public image of community policing. Race‐neutral discourses dominate public and professional support for community‐oriented policing philosophies. In the contemporary era of hyper‐incarceration a focus on ethnoracial divisions grounded in the sociology of peculiar institutions is essential for documenting transformations in how the municipal police services are legitimized. Here I analyze how the public discourses of law‐and‐order center on distortions of social fact and public safety. Today the criminalization of immigrants is the latest turn in public discourses shaping patterns of ethnoracial visions and divisions. The carceral breadth of the neoliberal penal state extends beyond social structure, repackaged as race‐neutral ideology across the public sphere.     

Normalizing covert surveillance: the subterranean world of policing

In this article, I draw on data derived from an ethnographic field study of covert policing in the United Kingdom to demonstrate that the deployment of covert surveillance has become normalized, both in policing thought and operational practice. In a break with earlier patterns, the methods of covert surveillance are used extensively and are no longer regarded as a tactic of last resort. Covert policing is well anchored within organizational arrangements, empowered by a series of internal rationales mobilized to justify the expansion of covert tactics over and above more traditional, overt forms. The building of intrusive and exceptional policing practices within mundane contexts, I argue, is one of the ways the police have adapted to a broader policing environment characterized by public scepticism and distrust. Policing relies on the invisibility and low profile that comes with covert work, in order to govern contemporary concerns of crime and insecurity without the conflicts which can accompany – and trouble – overt policing practices. As mainstream policing becomes an increasingly extroverted enterprise, introverted forms of policing have come to the fore.     

Pacification of Rio's Favelas and the “Pacification of the Pacification Police”: The Role of Coordinating Brokerage in Police Reform

Rio de Janeiro's drug dealer–dominated favelas are territories where the state lacks the monopoly of violence. They have historically been sites of sporadic and violent police operations. Rio's favela “pacification” program aimed to consolidate state control via the establishment of a Pacification Police Unit (UPP). This proximity policing program initially experienced mixed results in different “pacified” favelas. I take advantage of this state intervention at the urban margins to ask, what explains the positive reception of this policing initiative in some communities but not others? I concentrate my fieldwork in two communities sharing a UPP that represented extreme cases of success in terms of the program's reception by residents. I find that the coordinating brokerage of respected local organizations helps acculturate police to the community and minimize offensive police behavior, thereby “pacifying the Pacification Police.” Residents are receptive to these resocialized police who comply with local norms of respect. This police‐reforming brokerage is possible due to the high level of closure in the local network and due to a vibrant local community with a strong history of organizing. My findings emphasize the importance of considering the role of local civil society in police reform at the urban margins.     

The Sliding Scale of Snitching: A Qualitative Examination of Snitching in Three Philadelphia Communities

We conducted an in‐depth interview study with 77 young men in three moderate to high‐crime neighborhoods in Philadelphia to hear their stories about community violence and relations with police. In this article, we have analyzed how Latino, African‐American, and white young men experience policing and how they discuss the guidelines around cooperation with the police and what they view as snitching. Contrary to popular perception, talking to the police is not always banned in poor or high‐crime neighborhoods. Instead, the respondents present a variety of personal rules that they use to assess when cooperation is called for. We argue that the policing they experience within disadvantaged neighborhoods shapes their frame of legal cynicism, which in turn makes decisions not to cooperate with the police more likely.     

Social media and policing: A review of recent research

Studies of social media's impact on policing have emerged in several disciplines, including criminology, sociology, and communications. Despite their insight, there is no unified body of knowledge regarding this relationship. In an attempt to synthesize extant work, bring coherence to the field, and orient future scholarship, this article summarizes research on social media's implications for practices and perceptions of order maintenance. It does so by identifying how social media's technical affordances empower and constrain police services. By offering new opportunities for surveillance, risk communication, and impression management, emergent technologies augment the police's control of their public visibility and that of the social world. However, they also provide unprecedented capacities to monitor the police and expose, circulate, and mobilize around perceived injustice, whether brutality, racial profiling, or other forms of indiscretion. Considering these issues promises to enhance knowledge on contemporary directions in social control, organizational communication, inequality, and collective action. Suggestions for future research are also explored.     

It's a long way to Auchterarder! 'Negotiated management' and mismanagement in the policing of G8 protests

Recent analyses of protest policing in Western democracies argue that there has been a marked shift away from oppressive or coercive approaches to an emphasis on consensus based negotiation. King and Waddington (2005) amongst others, however, suggest that the policing of international summits may be an exception to this rule. This paper examines protest policing in relation to the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. We argue that 'negotiated management' cannot be imported wholesale as a policing strategy. Rather it is mediated by local history, forms of police knowledge and modes of engagement. Drawing on interviews and participant observation we show that 'negotiated management' works best when both sides are committed to negotiation and that police stereotyping or protestor intransigence can lead to the escalation of any given event. In closing we note the new challenges posed by forms of 'global' protest and consider the implications for future policing of protest.     

THIS PROTEST WILL BE TWEETED

This article examines the use of Twitter at protests surrounding the G20 meetings held in Pittsburgh, PA in September 2009. Based on work on information communication technologies and protest, and on more recent work on Twitter usage at protests, we develop several hypotheses about the content of tweets during protests. Most significantly, we argue that Twitter is a widely available mobile social networking tool that can be used to reduce information asymmetries between protesters and police. Examining the content of 30,296 tweets over a nine-day period, we find that protesters frequently used Twitter to share information, including information about protest locations, as well as the location and actions of police, which is information that was formerly monopolized by the police. Twitter use may be creating a new dynamic in protester and police interaction toward information symmetries. We conclude by identifying implications for policing practices and for protesters.     

Making Sense of Neoliberal Securitization in Urban Policing and Surveillance

Grâce à une analyse historique des fonctions de surveillance de police civile, cet article examine comment la titrisation civile se déroule en traitant disciplinaire‐surveillance et de sécurité‐surveillance des pratiques distinctes et des appareils qui fonctionnent respectivement à des moyens “centripètes” et “centrifuge” et en reconfigurant triangulation de Foucault de la gouvernance d'une matrice à deux par deux: la souveraineté‐gouvernement et de la discipline‐sécurité. Cet article montre comment la titrisation de police civile s'aligne avec la transformation actuelle du gouvernement à partir d'un centripète (Keynésienne) d'une centrifuge (néolibéral) la rationalité politique. Cela revêt une importance plus large de recherche: où la rationalité politique favorise l’équilibre n'avons‐nous pas trouver une prépondérance de la discipline‐surveillance? Où déséquilibre est promu n'avons‐nous pas trouver une prépondérance de la sécurité‐surveillance? Through a historic analysis of the surveillance functions of civil policing, this article considers how securitization is taking place by treating disciplinary surveillance and security surveillance as distinct practices and apparatuses that, respectively, function in “centripetal” and “centrifugal” ways and by reconfiguring Foucault's triangulation of governance to a two‐by‐two matrix: sovereignty government and discipline security. This article shows how the securitization of civil policing aligns with the current governmental transformation from a centripetal (Keynesian) to a centrifugal (neoliberal) governmentality. This has broader research significance: where governmentality promotes equilibrium do we not find a preponderance of disciplinary surveillance? Where disequilibrium is promoted do we not find a preponderance of security surveillance?     

Policing immigrants or policing immigration? Understanding local law enforcement participation in immigration control

As the United States has expanded its immigration control strategies, police participation in immigration enforcement has increased in scope and intensity. Local law enforcement agencies contribute to immigration enforcement in three key ways: through the direct enforcement of immigration law, through cooperation with federal immigration authorities, and through the everyday policing of immigrant communities. These enforcement approaches have consequences for unauthorized immigrants, and for the agencies and officers tasked with providing them police services. This article reviews local law enforcement practices and argues that future research should move away from an exclusive examination of police policies towards immigrants, to consider how the policing of immigrants actually occurs on the ground. Moreover, we argue that as long as discretionary arrests funnel removable immigrants into the deportation system, some immigrant communities will perceive policing as fundamentally unfair and discriminatory.     

Fingerprinting and Biopolitical Police Surveillance in Turkey

This paper problematises the 2007 amendments to Article 5 of the Police Powers and Duties Law (PPDL) in Turkey that categorises all citizens as ‘potential suspects’ through fingerprinting technology. The amended article requires everyone to submit fingerprint samples when applying for certain official documents such as driver's licences, passports, and ID cards. Consequently, the result has been dramatic: the police have so far proactively recorded more than 60 million people's fingerprints in the process of issuing these documents. Yet, there has been no research into this phenomenon. This paper suggests that this sort of biometric police surveillance is not a recent development, rather part of a long tradition within policing ‘Turkish’ national interests. Following Foucault's genealogical methodology, the paper argues that the governability of a large heterogeneous population across a vast territory has always demanded biometric policing technologies, addressing biopolitical proximity between the capacity building of modern security apparatus and identifying the unknown masses. Studying the historical data comparatively reveals that fingerprinting first started with recording exceptional groups such as criminals and convicts in Europe, while from the late Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey, large sections of the population have always persistently been targeted by police regulations.     

Neighborhood Organizations and Resident Assistance to Police1

Police and scholars note that successful crime fighting requires police and residents to “co‐produce” public safety. However, residents are often reluctant to get involved in policing initiatives or even report crimes they witness. One possible means of stimulating resident involvement in crime‐control activities is through neighborhood organizations. This research, conducted on 1,313 residents of 42 neighborhoods in western South Carolina, investigates whether neighborhood organization participation increases the likelihood of assisting police in crime‐control efforts. Results indicate that organization participants are more likely to assist police than are nonparticipants, even after controlling for social cohesion, perceptions of police legitimacy, various policing strategies, fear of crime, and demographic factors.     

Rescaling the Sanctuary City: Police and Non‐Status Migrants in Ontario,Canada

Canadian cities pledge to provide access to municipal services to non‐status migrants and withhold information identifying non‐status migrants from federal immigration authorities. Despite these promises, local police continue to cooperate with the Canada Border Services Agency, which raises questions about the capacity of cities to honour their promises. An empirical study involved interviews with high‐ranking police officers in eight local jurisdictions in Ontario about police perceptions regarding their role in the enforcement of federal immigration law and their obligations to honour sanctuary‐city policies. The results show that many police officers believe they possess legal authority to report non‐status migrants to federal authorities. We suggest that this belief rests on misconceptions about the relationship between criminal law and immigration law, claims of jurisdictional immunity from municipal government, and distortions of the principles of policing in Canada. Rescaling of sanctuary policies to the provincial level may offer solutions.     

Sensing the Leviathan

The premise of this article is that the expansion of closed‐circuit television (CCTV) across the contemporary landscape and its utilization by control systems fundamentally alters the process of policing and the social landscape of the cultures involved. The physical extension and procedural contraction of the process of control is a fundamental component of the establishment of the society of control and the adjustments this necessitates in our approaches to the notion of “police” and “surveillance” necessitate investigation.     

Research on Women in Policing: A Look at the Past,Present and Future

There are more women employed by police agencies today than ever before. Their role and workplace experiences have changed significantly from the time that they were first employed as police matrons in the late 1800s‐early 1900s. This article covers the history of women in policing. It provides an overview of past and contemporary research focused on female police officers. A trend found in the contemporary research reveals that there are many similarities among male and female police officers. This trend is interesting as policing has traditionally been a male dominated profession in the United States.     

Security a la Mexicana: on the particularities of security governance in México’s War on Crime

Social scientists from different fields have identified security as a future-oriented mode of governance designed to preserve the social order from diverse types of global risk through international cooperation, militarization and privatization of the state security apparatus, surveillance technologies, community policing, and stigmatization of identities and behaviors deemed dangerous. This literature has largely been limited to English-speaking countries in the Global North, however, that are relatively “secure.”. To understand how security operates in a different context, this article focuses on the current War on Crime in México using newspaper and magazine articles, government documents, and extant academic research. In México, it is argued, the basic elements of security governance (international cooperation, militarized police, surveillance technologies, law, etc.) are present, but in modified form. Rather than focusing on external risks that could develop into future threats, security in México is turned inward against traditional forms of national economic, political, and cultural life thought to produce harm in the present. This, in turn, underscores security’s unique purpose in the country, which is not to preserve the prevailing social order, but to transform an emergent social order that through globalization has come to threaten the state’s legitimacy. These observations suggest an international divide in the operation of security that leaves those most vulnerable in the Global South to bear the greatest costs.     

When police patrols matter. The effect of police proximity on citizens’ crime risk perception

Crime risk perception is known to be an important determinant of individual well-being. It is therefore crucial that we understand the factors affecting this perception so that governments can identify the (public) policies that might reduce it. Among such policies, public resources devoted to policing emerge as a key instrument not only for tackling criminal activity but also for impacting on citizens’ crime risk perception. In this framework, the aim of this study is to analyze both the individual and neighbourhood determinants of citizens’ crime risk perception in the City of Barcelona (Spain) focusing on the effect of police proximity and taking into account the spatial aspects of neighbourhood characteristics. After controlling for the possible problems of the endogeneity of police forces and crime risk perception and the potential sorting of individuals across neighbourhoods, the results indicate that crime risk perception is reduced when non-victims exogenously interact with police forces. Moreover, neighbourhood variables, such as proxies of social capital and the level of incivilities, together with individual characteristics have an impact on citizens’ crime risk perception.     

Young People as Co‐producers in Policing across England. An Evaluation of the ‘Youth Commission’ on Police and Crime

This paper discusses a recent study on three ‘Youth Commission’ on police and crime projects. Professional viewpoints were interpreted to understand how they valued young people's participation and made sense of their experiences and capabilities. Framed within policing reforms, the ‘Youth Commission’ projects regard young people as co‐producers, who work in partnership with professionals to address police and crime issues. The focus is upon professionals and their relationships with young people for transformative participation and social outcomes. Working in partnerships showed interdependency but identifies further challenges if professionals do not truly value young people's participation.     

Policing “Domestic Disturbances” in Small Towns and Rural Communities: Implications for Officer and Victim Safety

Drawing on Canadian police data on homicide involving domestic dispute calls from 1960 to the present (n = 20), as well as on in‐depth interviews with police officers (n = 33) working in rural and remote communities, the authors reexamine the argument that police attendance at domestic disturbance calls can pose a special threat to officer safety. Although some scholarship suggests that purported risks have been overstated, the authors argue that location may be a critical factor in reducing or heightening not only risks to officers, but also to victims. Although intended as an exploratory work, situated within the context of cultural support for domestic violence in rural communities, the authors raise both interesting policy implications, as well as potential avenues for future research. En partant de données de la police canadienne sur les homicides impliquant des disputes familiales de 1960 à nos jours (n = 20), ainsi que sur des entrevues en profondeur avec des agents policiers (n = 33) travaillant dans des régions rurales et des communautés éloignées, les auteurs ré‐examinent l'argument voulant que les interventions policières lors d'appels liés à des problèmes domestiques posent un risque spécial pour les agents policiers. Même si certains spécialistes suggèrent que ces risques sont exagérés, les auteurs affirment que le lieu pourrait être un facteur important par rapport au niveau de risque pour les agents policiers, ainsi que les victimes. Même s'il s'agit d'une recherche exploratoire, se situant dans le contexte du soutient culturel de la violence domestique dans les communautés rurales, les auteurs s'intéressent à la fois aux implications en termes de gestion et aux directions possibles en termes de recherches futures.     

Risking safety and rights: online sex work,crimes and ‘blended safety repertoires’

It has been well established that those working in the sex industry are at various risks of violence and crime depending on where they sell sex and the environments in which they work. What sociological research has failed to address is how crime and safety have been affected by the dynamic changing nature of sex work given the dominance of the internet and digital technologies, including the development of new markets such as webcamming. This paper reports the most comprehensive findings on the internet‐based sex market in the UK demonstrating types of crimes experienced by internet‐based sex workers and the strategies of risk management that sex workers adopt, building on our article in the British Journal of Sociology in 2007. We present the concept of ‘blended safety repertoires’ to explain how sex workers, particularly independent escorts, are using a range of traditional techniques alongside digitally enabled strategies to keep themselves safe. We contribute a deeper understanding of why sex workers who work indoors rarely report crimes to the police, reflecting the dilemmas experienced. Our findings highlight how legal and policy changes which seek to ban online adult services advertising and sex work related content within online spaces would have direct impact on the safety strategies online sex workers employ and would further undermine their safety. These findings occur in a context where aspects of sex work are quasi‐criminalized through the brothel keeping legislation. We conclude that the legal and policy failure to recognize sex work as a form of employment, contributes to the stigmatization of sex work and prevents individuals working together. Current UK policy disallows a framework for employment laws and health and safety standards to regulate sex work, leaving sex workers in the shadow economy, their safety at risk in a quasi‐legal system. In light of the strong evidence that the internet makes sex work safer, we argue that decriminalisation as a rights based model of regulation is most appropriate.