Bridge Over the River Crime: Mobility and the Policing of Organised Crime

Abstract

This paper examines the significant disparity between the mobility of organised crime and the mobility of law enforcement through the use of Kaufmann’s (2002 Kaufmann, V. 2002. Re-thinking mobility. Contemporary sociology. Aldershot: Ashgate. Google Scholar]) three categories of motility: access, skills and appropriation. It argues that the differential mobility of organised crime and law enforcement can be accounted for by the differential insertion of these groups of actors into ‘the practice and politics of market liberalisation and the practice and politics of market criminalisation’, and suggests that it is possible to view each of these as inhabiting ‘different modernities’. It concludes that whilst mobility systems are critical to understanding the movement of these groups of actors, these systems are themselves embedded within different institutional structures that shape the opportunities to be mobile, in particular economic and political structures.