THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLICING? Understanding Current Trends in Policing Systems

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1 BRIT. J. CRIMINOL. (2002) 42, THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLICING? Understanding Current Trends in Policing Systems TREVOR JONES* and TIM NEWBURN** This paper considers David Bayley and Clifford Shearing s (1996) argument that policing systems in developed economies are currently undergoing radical change. It is clear that a number of significant shifts have occurred including major reforms in public policing, and a substantial expansion of the private security industry. However, we question the degree to which current developments in policing should be interpreted as a sharp qualitative break with the past. By focusing primarily upon change the risk is that we overlook the significant consistencies and continuities that are equally important in understanding historical trends. We also question the extent to which the developments highlighted within this transformation thesis can be seen as global. We argue that the transformation thesis fails to take sufficient account of important differences between the nature and form of policing in North America, and of that in other countries such as Britain. We conclude by arguing that it is helpful to locate the set of changes within the framework of policing in a wider context. Thus, rather than view current developments as a fragmentation of policing, we see them as part of a long-term process of formalizaton of social control. The key development that appears to have taken place concerns shifts between what we term primary and secondary social control activities. Modern democratic countries like the United States, Britain and Canada have reached a watershed in the evolution of their systems of crime control and law enforcement. Future generations will look back on our era as a time when one system of policing ended and another took its place. (Bayley and Shearing 1996: 585) In recent years, there has been growing consensus that the policing systems of Western industrial societies are experiencing profound changes. Authors have highlighted a range of developments, including the expansion of private security (Shearing and Stenning 1987; Johnston 1992; Jones and Newburn 1998; Loader 1999), the growing importance of transnational policing organizations and practices (Anderson et al. 1995; Sheptycki 1997), changes in the organization and management of public police forces (Chatterton et al. 1996; Johnston 1996), the impact of new technologies upon policing and crime control (Marx 1988), and the emergence of new risk-based policing strategies (Feeley and Simon 1992; Ericson and Haggerty 1997). Such changes are clearly crucially important to a deeper understanding of policing systems in Western industrial countries as we move into the twenty-first century. However, it has further been suggested that we are currently seeing a transformation in policing of a magnitude at least as great as occurred with the introduction of the New Police in the early nineteenth century. This transformation has been variously described as post-keynesian policing (O Malley and * School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. ** Director, Public Policy Research Unit, Goldsmiths College, UK. 129 the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD) 2002

2 JONES AND NEWBURN Palmer 1996), pick n mix policing for a postmodern age (Reiner 1997) and, even, the End of Public Policing, (McLaughlin and Murji 1995). In this paper, we aim to address some of the broader issues relating to the interpretation of current trends, by focusing upon one particular example within this transformation literature in policing. In 1996, two of the most distinguished academic criminologists, David Bayley and Clifford Shearing, published an article entitled The Future of Policing in the journal Law and Society Review (Bayley and Shearing 1996). In the article they made a series of sweeping claims about the significant changes they perceived to be taking place in developed democratic societies. Whilst we must begin by saying that we concur with many of their observations, there are also some key points at which our respective views of both the history of policing and, consequently, the future of policing, diverge. In particular, we question the degree to which current developments in policing should be interpreted as a qualitative break with the past. Here, we begin by setting out the central elements advanced by Bayley and Shearing in their article and then move on to discuss these key points of divergence. We argue that the article, and some of the other writing in the field, whilst identifying some important developments in modern policing, tends to overstate the novelty and the epochal nature of current trends. Furthermore, we feel in general that what we will refer to as the transformation thesis fails to take sufficient account of important differences between the nature and form of policing in North America, and that in other countries such as Britain. 1 Finally, we suggest that rather than seeing current changes as a fragmentation of policing, they are better viewed as an ongoing process of formalization of social control. The Transformation Thesis Bayley and Shearing open by making clear the radical nature of the focus of their paper. Their concern is with the watershed in the evolution of the systems of crime control and law enforcement in the United States, Britain and Canada. They forcefully argue that that [f]uture generations will look back on our era as a time when one system of policing ended and another took its place (1996: 585). This epochal change is characterized by two developments: The pluralizing of policing or as they put it the end of a monopoly by the public police; and The search for identity by the public police. Before exploring each of these in greater detail they make the important point that the focus of their concerns is with policing, not just the police. They are interested in all explicit efforts to create visible agents of crime control, whether by government or by non-governmental institutions (1996: 586). The reason for emphasizing explicit efforts is to distinguish the elephant of social control from the breadbox of policing. 1 We have noted a similar problem of ethnocentrism in the literature on developments in private security (see Jones and Newburn 1999). 130

3 THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLICING? The end of a monopoly The core of Bayley and Shearing s thesis is that in the past 30 years the state s monopoly on policing has been broken by the creation of a host of private and community-based agencies that prevent crime, deter criminality, catch law-breakers, investigate offences, and stop conflict (1996: 586). As a result, they argue, the police and policing have become increasingly distinct. Their conceptualization of the pluralization of policing can be broken down into the following main points: There used to be a state monopoly on policing, but this has been fractured during the past 30 years (i.e. since the mid-1960s); Evidence for this is to be found in the fact that there are now three times as many private as public police in the United States and twice as many private security agents than public police officers in the UK; in addition, the private security sector is growing faster than public policing; Citizen policing in the form of car and foot patrols, neighbourhood watches, crime prevention associations, protective escort services, and monitors around schools, malls, and public parks have been transformed in less than a generation (1996: 587) from something that would have previously been viewed as vigilantism but is now so common that the police are no longer the primary crime-deterrent presence in society. Searching for identity Alongside the increasing pluralization of policing, the other major element in the restructuring that is taking place in developed democracies is the increasing questioning of the role of the police particularly by the service itself. This is attributable, Bayley and Shearing (1996: 588) argue, to growing doubts about the effectiveness of their traditional strategies in safeguarding the public from crime. There are numerous components to this: The visible deterrent of patrol has declined as the police have been gradually swamped by the need to respond to emergency calls; Clear-up rates remain extremely low; There is therefore a search for new approaches these have included: community policing and order maintenance policing (a hybrid of community-oriented and crime-oriented policing ); The increasing sale by the police of the protective services they used provide without charge; The hiring of police officers as private security guards; The increasing civilianization of public policing including the use of Special Constables or other auxiliaries; and The increasingly rigorous supervision of the police by governmental and non-governmental agencies. Although Bayley and Shearing focus on the search for a new identity, other authors have, in a similar way, highlighted qualitative shifts in the nature of police activity. In particular, although Bayley and Shearing do not mention this specifically, one might 131

4 JONES AND NEWBURN include under this point the shifts towards new policing functions identified by writers such as Feeley and Simon (1996) and Ericson (1994). Feeley and Simon argue that the police (and the criminal justice system in general) are increasingly adopting actuarial rather than disciplinary approaches. These techniques are characterized by a pragmatic emphasis on the management of risky populations, rather than aiming to reform, punish or deter individuals. A related point is made by Ericson and Haggerty s (1997) analysis of the transformation of policing functions in developed societies. They argue that the public police role is no longer primarily concerned with law enforcement and peacekeeping, but has moved towards information brokering within a wider patchwork of organizations and individuals concerned with the promotion of security. Taken together, it is this raft of changes which has been interpreted by some authors as constituting a transformation to a fundamentally new kind of policing system. For example, Bayley and Shearing s (1996: 591) conclusion runs as follows: the pluralizing of policing and the search by the public police for a new role and methodology mean that not only has government s monopoly on policing been broken in the late 20th century, but the police monopoly on expertise within its own sphere of activity has ended. Policing now belongs to everybody in activity, in responsibility, and in oversight. As we have already indicated, there is much in these arguments with which we would not argue, particularly in relation to some of the changes taking place in the police organization (see Jones and Newburn 1997). However, particularly in relation to what we have elsewhere referred to as the policing division of labour (Jones and Newburn 1998), it is our view that Bayley and Shearing both overstate the degree of novelty attributable to the changes taking place and posit an over-globalized view of the world. They lose sight of the important continuities in policing systems and, further, fail to make sufficient allowance for the important differences between, for example, North America and the UK. It is to this we turn next. How Strong is the Evidence? For the purposes of empirical examination, we will consider three distinct elements of what we have termed the transformation thesis : the end of monopoly ; the pluralization of policing provision, and the changing character of, and the search for a new identity for, the public police. The end of monopoly? How policing or the police are best characterized has been the subject of considerable academic debate. Most attempts to define or distinguish the police from other policing organizations have focused either on functions or on legal capacities. Neither approach is entirely adequate (see the criticisms contained in Johnston 1992 and Jones and Newburn 1998). A functional focus tends to elide the police with policing assuming, implicitly or otherwise, that the two are effectively the same. In response to this, several authors have argued that what distinguishes policing from other activities is the capacity to apply the legitimate use of force. Indeed, the best known of these, Egon Bittner, went further and argued that this was in fact the distinguishing characteristic of the police 132

5 THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLICING? (Bittner 1974, 1980). It is this capacity that is often being referred to when the idea of a public monopoly of policing is used. The term monopoly is defined by economists as the condition that exists when a firm or individual produces and sells the entire output of a commodity or service. The monopolist has total power in the market place to set prices and prevent the entry of new competitors. If all that is meant by monopoly is that the public police were the sole repositories of state-backed coercive power, then the public police monopoly continues today. In Britain at least, it is the public police who retain the legal power to arrest, detain and charge on behalf of the state (backed, if necessary, by the use of legitimate force), and there is strong resistance to providing such special legal powers to other bodies, and especially to private security guards. In relation to policing, however, the term monopoly tends to be used in a broader sense to describe a perceived functional, spatial and above all, symbolic dominance over policing by the public police. In this sense, it is clear that the symbolic monopoly that equated policing with the activities of the public police has fractured in the past 20 years or so. The period most associated with a public police monopoly, especially in Britain, is the two decades immediately following the Second World War. However, although the 1950s still tend to be presented as the golden age of public policing, Reiner (1992b) has persuasively argued that this was as much a matter of image as of substance. Relatively low rates of crime and disorder overall, and high police popularity ratings of the post-war years might be better explained with reference to wider social and economic conditions, than by anything the police were actually doing at the time. Even during the height of the golden era, police relationships with certain elements of the population remained difficult and conflictual, and there is no evidence that police malpractice was less common during this period (in fact, there are good reasons to suppose that levels of police deviance may well have been substantially higher than the present day, see Reiner 1992b). The main point here is that the height of the symbolic monopoly of public policing was an era in which low crime rates and relative social harmony were produced by a wide variety of structural influences which underpinned a more effective network of informal social controls. It is the breakdown of these more effective informal controls that have been a primary contributor to the growing demands upon public policing services, and the increasing soul-searching of state police forces. In an important sense, then, the public monopoly over policing was always a fiction, the idea that sovereign states could guarantee crime control to their subjects always a myth, albeit a powerful one (Garland 1996). The crucial change in the current era is that the myth is increasingly explicitly recognized as such, even by those state agencies tasked with dealing with crime. The pluralization of policing We deal with two major elements under this heading: first, the growth of private security and second, the emergence of other policing bodies (not part of constabularies or the private security sector). Bayley and Shearing argue that private security growth far outstrips public police in both the United States and the UK, is growing faster than the public sector, and that this change dates from the 1960s. They further argue that there has been a growth of citizen policing (we return to this below) automobile and foot patrols, neighbourhood watches, crime prevention associations and so on have been transformed in less than a generation from something that would have previously been viewed as 133

6 JONES AND NEWBURN vigilantism into a primary crime-deterrent presence. Other authors (see for example Johnston 1992, 1996) have highlighted the activities of a range of other policing bodies including the regulatory and investigatory bodies attached to national and local government as part of a growing fragmentation of policing provision The growth of private security In pure numerical terms, and reinforcing our argument above, it is clear that a monopoly in the field of security provision has never really existed. Data from both the US and the UK suggest that, whilst significant changes have certainly taken place in the policing division of labour, the idea of the end of a monopoly is difficult to support. According to Bayley and Shearing, the rebirth of private security occurred sometime around the 1960s. However, the Rand report (Kakalik and Wildhorn 1972), which provides the best historical picture of private security in the United States, found that in 1950 there were approximately half as many private security guards as public police staff. This is approximately a decade and a half before the rebirth of private security is alleged to have taken place. Similarly, in Britain, the 1951 census of population estimates about 66,000 private security employees compared with approximately 85,000 police officers. 2 At the very least, therefore, the argument that a public monopoly has been broken in the past 30 years is impossible to sustain. Was there ever a public monopoly? This is also doubtful. In Britain, commercial provision (and other private forms) of policing continued throughout the nineteenth century, despite the introduction and expansion of the New Police, and the early twentieth century contains many examples of private provision, including the development of the guarding industry in the inter-war period (Johnston 1992). What is clearly true is that the private security industry has become more important since the 1950s, both in absolute terms and relative to public policing. However, we feel that it is important to emphasize that, although the empirical evidence is limited, what there is suggests that the private security industry was relatively well established even during the height of the monopoly era for the public police. In our view, current developments are perhaps therefore better presented as the continuation of a long-term trend extending back several decades rather than a seismic shift occurring in the dying years of the twentieth century. Put another way, there is considerable continuity as well as change. Of course, employment estimates alone cannot adequately measure the expanding influence of commercial forms of policing provision. A number of other factors have contributed to the growing visibility of commercial policing. First, there has been a longterm trend within business organizations towards the contracting-out of non-core tasks, such as security. Thus, whereas many of the people working in security and related occupations in the 1950s and 1960s would have been employed in-house, increasingly companies contract in security services from specialist providers (Jones and Newburn 1998). Second, the functional remit of commercial policing has expanded in recent years, with the private sector undertaking tasks previously viewed as the preserve of state bodies, such as prisoner escort, court guarding, and the patrol of public places. Finally, the spatial remit of commercial policing has arguably grown, with the emergence of 2 Due to changes in occupational classifications and census estimates, these figures are approximations and should be taken as general indicators rather than exact measurements. However, the estimates for numbers of police officers compare reasonably well with official figures, and it is fair to say that these are currently the best available figures to examine change over time. 134

7 THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLICING? private patrols in public spaces (see McManus 1995; Noaks 2000), and also the growth of mass private property in the form of large shopping centres, private theme parks etc. However, the available evidence suggests that such changes have been considerably less extensive in Britain than is the case in the USA ( Jones and Newburn 1999a). The growth of other forms of policing Another important aspect of the pluralization of policing (although not an element upon which Bayley and Shearing focus a great deal in their article) concerns the activities of what Johnston (1992) has termed hybrid policing bodies, such as Environmental Health Officers and Health and Safety Inspectors. However, as we have pointed out elsewhere (Jones and Newburn 1998) it is rather misleading to consider these bodies as though they are part of a relatively recent fragmentation of policing organizations. In the United States, and certainly in Britain, regulatory and investigatory bodies attached to national and local government have been undertaking policing activities for over a century. The fact that criminologists have only recently taken an interest in these perhaps reflects the general assumption, widely held until comparatively recently, that policing can be equated with what public constabularies do. During the mid to late 1800s in England and Wales, it was local constabularies that delivered services such as inspecting weights and measures, inspections under the Diseases of Animals Act, and inspections of dairies and shops (Critchley 1967). It was not until the late nineteenth century, beginning with the Local Government Acts of 1888, and the early twentieth century that local government began to undertake these policing functions itself. The post-war expansion of the welfare state introduced new policing functions which were undertaken by public bodies outside of the police (for example, benefit fraud investigation). As Bayley and Shearing correctly point out, many police forces in Britain and North America are currently seeking to divest themselves of what have increasingly been seen as ancillary functions, part of which has involved withdrawal from regulatory activity such as licensing bars, parking regulations and so on. However, in the light of the longer history of the policing of such activities, this is far from a novel development. Rather, it is the latest of a series of functional shifts between different policing bodies. For the large part of the twentieth century, policing functions have been undertaken by this mix of bodies, with the balance shifting between the different elements from time to time. For example, Taylor s (1999) fascinating analysis of policing in England and Wales in the early part of the twentieth century explains a dramatic fall in prosecutions for non-indictable offences such as vandalism and begging by reference to such a functional shift: [The Home Office s] argument that society had suddenly civilized to the extent that wife-beating, assaults, truancy, drunkenness, immorality, begging, child cruelty, vandalism and other similar minor offences had really fallen by two-thirds between the first world war and 1931 was unbelievable. Instead, many of these offences must have continued to be committed but were probably dealt with by agencies or departments of government other than the police... Notwithstanding these functional shifts, over the longer period from the mid-1800s to the mid-1950s it seems that the public police gradually obtained pre-eminence within the complex of policing bodies, in terms of staffing numbers, functions and spatial operation, but particularly in symbolic terms. However, it is clear that they never achieved anything even approaching a total monopoly over the provision of policing 135

8 JONES AND NEWBURN services (except possibly and very briefly at a symbolic level). This, however, is not to deny the fact that, since this time, the balance has shifted significantly again, and the dominance of the public police has declined. What is less clear is that the current era, rather than any other (for example, the 1890s or the inter-war years) represents a dramatic move into a completely new system of policing. In fact, taking a longer historical perspective suggests that on one level, policing provision has become less rather than more fragmented. In particular, repeated reorganization over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has seen a massive decline in the total number of constabularies and bodies of constables. Thus, out of the mixture of formal, semi-formal and informal policing bodies that existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there emerged the New Police. Beginning with the Metropolitan Police in 1829 these public policing bodies expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century, to the point where, by 1870, there were over 220 constabularies in England and Wales. From this point until, arguably, the 1960s, a process of centralization and formalization existed albeit alongside other changes taking place. The number of constabularies was reduced by the Police Act 1946 to 131. Further amalgamations reduced the number of provincial forces to 117 by the early 1960s. In 1966 they were further reduced to 49 and, most recently, the Local Government Act 1972 reduced the number of provincial forces to 41. The Police and Magistrates Courts Act 1994 gave increased powers to the Home Secretary to amalgamate forces without the need to consult publicly, and such amalgamations may well occur in the future. 3 The changing character of the public police This relates to the view that public policing organizations have somehow fundamentally changed in character as a result of the various pressures under which they have been placed. Bayley and Shearing concentrate on the police drive for improved effectiveness and the application of performance monitoring. As we have suggested, other authors have argued that the basic functions of public policing have now shifted to new actuarial and information-brokering roles. The question for us here is how far such changes represent a transformation towards a qualitatively different form of policing? We shall focus on three particular elements that have been linked with the changing character of public policing; the growth of managerialism and quasi-markets, civilianization, and the emergence of citizen-led forms of policing and crime control. Managerialism and quasi-markets The growth of managerialism has undoubtedly been one of the most significant changes in policing of the past 20 years or so. These changes have been widely documented elsewhere, and there is not the space here to analyse these developments in detail. Nevertheless, whilst not doubting their significance, we would argue that these changes, in Britain at least, have not yet been of such a degree as to constitute the transformation to a new policing system. Once again, the work of Howard Taylor (1999) highlights the danger of assuming the novelty of current trends. He has demonstrated how concerns about expenditure on policing, and the promotion of effective use of police resources was a central feature of British policing during the years 3 See, for example, what has happened recently to the probation service in England and Wales. 136

9 THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLICING? following the First World War. At this time, centrally-driven management targets were applied to a number of aspects of police work. This is not to deny that the police service in Britain in recent years has again been significantly effected by another, perhaps more vigorous, form of managerialism. As part of the general trend towards new public management, the police have been required publish objectives, measure performance against these objectives, charge fees for some services, introduce devolved management structures and link resources to performance (Jones and Newburn 1997). Clearly, this is a significant development, and one that could fundamentally subvert the nature of policing as a collectively purchased public service, should it be taken to the extreme. However, we would argue that at the present at least, public policing in Britain remains a public service in several crucial ways, and clearly distinguishable from commercial private security. The police remain overwhelmingly (and increasingly) funded by a combination of national and local taxation. The vast majority of their workforce is made up of full-time publicly employed officials. Recent developments have clearly tried to heighten the privatization mentality. For example, section 24 of the Police and Magistrates Courts Act allows local authorities and health authorities to contract with police authorities and pay for extra constables for their areas. To date, however, few developments have been noted. Police forces are increasingly encouraged to charge for services where possible, for example for providing security at rock concerts or at football matches. Although this has grown significantly in recent years, legal provision for this was first made in England and Wales in the 1964 Police Act. One further difficulty in applying Bayley and Shearing s thesis to, say, the UK, concerns its very particular North American focus (despite their claims to be talking about broader global changes). Thus, they additionally refer to two aspects of the privatization mentality which apply in North America and Canada which do not apply to Britain. The first involves moonlighting by sworn police officers who may take employment as private security guards. Such activities are forbidden by police regulations in Britain. Second, they refer to the internal market of policing services in Canada, where local authorities may choose between a range of competing public sector providers in a quasi-market. These developments go substantially further than the current situation in Britain. Though the transformation thesis rightly identifies many changes taking place in British policing, it also tends to exaggerate them. It will require the emergence of a significantly more competitive internal market in British policing, for example, before Bayley and Shearing s picture appears an accurate one. Civilianization Another key feature of the fracturing of the public police identity crisis has involved the increasing involvement of civilians within the public police service, both in ancillary roles within the police organization, and in undertaking voluntary duties as special constables or police auxiliaries. We do not currently have data for the US or Canada on these trends. However, the data that are available in Britain do not tend to support the notion of dramatic growth in the involvement of police auxiliaries over the past decade or so. In fact, the available data suggest the opposite, with substantially fewer special constables operating in Britain than was the case in the early and mid-twentieth century. The civilianization of key posts within the police service was an important element of policy encouraged by successive Conservative administrations during the 1980s. Forces were encouraged, by various funding incentives, to replace with civilian employees 137

10 JONES AND NEWBURN relatively expensive police officers in posts not directly requiring police powers, training or experience (such as traffic depot managers, force finance officers, administrative functions). Undoubtedly, the main drive to civilianization came after 1980, with up to a third of total police strength in the UK now accounted for by civilian employees. However, as we showed in an earlier study ( Jones et al. 1994) the employment of civilians in the police service has a long history dating back to the early years of this century. Although there was a rapid expansion in civilian employment in the police during the 1980s, this expansion has now levelled off. Turning to the Special Constabulary in Britain there have been various government initiatives aimed at expanding the role (and number) of Special Constables in British police forces, particularly since Encouragement of the Special Constabulary has been an important priority for governments keen to promote wider public involvement in policing and crime prevention activity. However, taking a longer-term perspective, we can see that despite an expansion of the Special Constabulary over recent decades, total numbers of Specials remain substantially lower than has been the case for the majority of the post-war period. The figures below (which have been rounded to the nearest thousand) illustrate the general trend. The growth of citizen-led policing Bayley and Shearing (among numerous others) focus on the significant expansion of citizen involvement in policing activities in the form of neighbourhood watch, citizen patrols and other community-led crime prevention and policing initiatives. It is clear that these are very significant developments. The growth of neighbourhood watch, as an explicit public policy, is a relatively recent phenomenon both in North America and Britain, and is generally agreed to date from the early 1980s. Since the 1980s, governments in most industrial democracies have been engaged in what Garland (1996) calls responsibilization strategies whereby individuals and organizations outside of the state apparatus are encouraged to take responsibility for crime prevention and security. We agree that this is a key aspect of the changes that are currently occurring in policing. However, we are less sure that this can be accurately FIG. 1 Special Constabulary strength (England and Wales) Source: Derived from Leon (1991) and recent Home Office figures. 138

11 THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLICING? represented as a part of a shift from public monopoly to mixed economy of policing provision. It is clear that private citizens and organizations are now more involved in organized self-conscious activities aimed at order maintenance, crime prevention and control. However, although much of the current debate focuses upon the growth of private and self-policing mechanisms, purportedly at the expense of an increasingly beleaguered public police service, we offer here a slightly different interpretation. Part of the problem for the public police is that citizens in general have been increasingly, rather than decreasingly, taking matters to them for resolution. Calls to the police, reported crime and disorder incidents have grown exponentially across all Western countries (Smith 1996). Since the demand for formalized policing services has so far outstripped the ability of public police organizations to respond, commercial security and citizen-led approaches have unsurprisingly seen a major growth. But we would suggest that rather than see these developments as a fragmentation of policing, with non-state provision benefiting at the expense of public constabularies, what we are seeing is a general trend towards the formalization of social control. In particular, we would argue that the current growth in alternative forms of policing is related to a restructuring in forms of social control not directly connected to formal policing, private or public. We have so far considered some of the changes taking place within public policing together with those occurring in the broader policing division of labour. In thinking through current trends in policing systems this is only part of the picture however. We now want to move on to consider changes in the broader context of policing and social control, changes that we take to have been central to the developments taking place since the Second World War. The Formalization of Policing and Changes in Social Control A large body of literature has linked current trends in crime control and penal systems to wider structural developments in capitalist societies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (see for example, Johnston 1996; Bottoms 1983; Garland 2000). There is not the space here to provide a detailed examination of this large body of literature. However, we will highlight just some examples of changes in the nature of wider social control systems that we think may prove helpful to a deeper understanding of what is happening to policing. As Cohen noted, there is a danger that the term social control can be defined so broadly as to be meaningless, covering all social processes to induce conformity, from infant socialization to public execution (Cohen 1985: 2). Cohen thus defines social control in terms of organized and planned responses to deviance and socially problematic behaviour which are actually conceived of as such. We have found this to be a helpful definition in beginning the process of thinking about what kinds of activity should come under the rubric of policing (Jones and Newburn 1998). Returning to social control, we think it helpful to distinguish three different levels: primary, secondary and tertiary. In this context, primary social control we take to refer to crime prevention, peacekeeping, investigatory and related policing activities that are purposively carried out by organizations/individuals that see these activities as a primary 139

12 JONES AND NEWBURN defining part of their role. This would include the activities of public constabularies, other policing bodies such as inspectorates or regulatory bodies, and the commercial security sector. Thus, in our terms, primary social control covers those activities that we have previously described as policing (Jones and Newburn 1998). By contrast, secondary social controls may be said to be exerted by functionaries for whom social control activities are not a primary part of their role, but where nevertheless social control is an important secondary aspect of what they do. We would therefore include within this group: teachers, park-keepers, caretakers, railway guards, bus conductors and a range of other similar occupations. What such occupations have in common, in our view, is a very clear social control function, but one that is not a primary defining part of their role. This leaves the third category: tertiary social control. This corresponds to Cohen s wider concept of social control and includes the informal social controls exerted by intermediate groups within local communities, including workgroups, churches, trade unions, clubs and societies, and community groups. Our categorization of social control activities shares some characteristics with Hunter s (1995) work on developments in urban space. There Hunter categorizes three different kinds of order : the public, the parochial and the private, each with its particular institutional and spatial domain. The private order is based upon the family and informal primary groups including interpersonal friendship networks and the institutions of kinship. The parochial order arises from the interlocking of these networks and local institutions which service the sustenance needs of local residential community, such as local stores, schools, churches, and community associations. These correspond to the intermediate level institutions outlined above. Finally, the public social order is found mainly in the bureaucratic agencies of the state. The public order related to the state and its monopoly over the legitimate use of force. Hunter argues that growing crime and fear of crime has led to overwhelming demands on the police and criminal justice system. However, we should look to the private and parochial orders for the fundamental sources of this overload. Stronger parochial orders are a prerequisite for more effective social control activities along with the state and the private order. The limitations of the private order in terms of wider social control can be addressed by linking such networks through parochial institutions such as schools, churches and youth clubs. Several authors have highlighted this apparent decline in informal bases of social control in many Western societies, corresponding roughly to our tertiary level outlined above. For example, Giddens (1990) discussed what he termed disembedding, whereby social relations are removed from local contexts due to the increasing mobility of people, of capital and of information. Authors such as Etzioni (1993), Putnam (2000) and Sennett (2000) have highlighted the fact that increasingly, the decline of participation in intermediate level institutions such as community groups, secure employment, trade unions, churches and local societies and organizations, has meant that citizens are more likely to relate to the social world as individuals. In this connection, we would wish to argue that current trends in policing can be related to the decline of more indirect (and arguably more effective) sources of social control. This is not just in the general sense of a decline of social bonds and indirect (tertiary) controls connected with the parochial sphere, but also with the decline of secondary social control activities. There has been a marked decrease in employment in a range of occupations providing natural surveillance and other low level controls as a corollary to their primary functions. In part, this has been a consequence of the 140

13 THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLICING? development and spread of new labour-saving technologies such as self-purchasing ticket machines and automatic barriers, CCTV, and automated access control. The spread and impact of such technologies was underpinned and encouraged by neo-liberal public policies which sought to maximize profit, often through reductions in labour costs via downsizing. Much criminological literature has assumed that the rise of private security has been on the back of reductions in (or, at least, restrictions on the growth of) public policing. Whilst there may be a small element of truth in this, in our view it is the decline of secondary social control occupations which is much more significant. In our own local case study of the policing of a London borough, we found that commercial security carrying out activities that were previously undertaken not by public police officers, but by caretakers, receptionists, teachers, prefects and parkkeepers. Thus, the decline in such occupations as bus conductors, railway station masters, train guards, ticket inspectors, park-keepers etc. has removed an important source of secondary social control ( Jones and Newburn 1998; see also Smith and Clarke 2000: 177 8). To what extent is it possible to show that this has been a long-term national trend? The table below is derived from Census figures for 1951, 1971 and The figures should be taken as approximate indicators only, given that in all cases (bar 1951) occupational estimates for the GB are based on a 10 per cent sample only. Furthermore, changes in occupational classifications over the years make comparison over time more difficult. Nonetheless, the figures are reasonably robust and, given the absence of any other reliable longitudinal data, provide the most accurate picture to date of this particular area of occupational change. As the table indicates there has been a sharp increase in the security and related occupations (i.e. what is often talked of as private security ) over the past 40 years. In addition to noting that this covers a longer time period than that outlined by Bayley and Shearing, the Census data show that as far back as 1951 the size of this sector was substantial. Indeed, in the first decade after the Second World War the numbers of people employed in the sector represented the equivalent of four fifths of those employed in public constabularies. As we have shown elsewhere, by the early 1960s the sector employed greater numbers than did the public police (Jones and Newburn 1998). Over the past 50 years there has also been a large increase in the numbers of public police officers, though the extent of the increase has not been as great. The conclusion to draw from this, it seems to us, is not that the well-documented increase in private security reflects a process of transfer of functions and responsibilities from the public to the TABLE 1 Primary and secondary social control occupations in Britain Police officers Security guards and related Roundsmen/roundswomen Bus (& tram) conductors Rail ticket inspectors/guards ,585 66,950 98,143 96,558 35, , ,670 48,360 57,550 46, , ,704 49,182 2,471 15,642 Source: Occupational estimates from the 1951, 1971, 1991 Census of Population (GB)

14 JONES AND NEWBURN private police, though there may be some elements of this. Rather, and more fundamentally, it is better understood as a formalization of secondary social control activities. More particularly, we think it is more accurate to see the declining visibility of occupations with a secondary social control element as being a key contributor to the growth of primary forms of social control i.e. private and public policing. Only a limited number of such occupations are can be estimated from Census data, but four key examples are illustrated above. Taking what the Census generally classifies as roundsmen/women the house-to-house delivery of milk, bread and other goods there has been a significant decrease in these kinds of occupations since 1951, with numbers approximately halving. Census figures suggest that there has been a very sharp decrease in the number of bus and tram conductors. In 1951, the Census estimated over 96,000 people in such occupations. In stark contrast, the 1991 Census estimated only about 2,500 in Great Britain. There has also been a sharp decrease in Census estimates of the numbers employed as rail ticket inspectors or train guards. This declined from 35,715 in 1951 to 15,642 in Even though these figures are approximations, they do suggest a quite dramatic fall in some of these occupations with secondary social control effects in public space, whilst policing, both private and public, has expanded. The decline and in some cases the almost complete disappearance of each of these occupations is important in its own right, given the implications they have for both the perception and the reality of safety and security in local neighbourhoods, on buses and trains (and in bus and railway stations), and no doubt in other places too. It is the decline in such occupations that has been explicitly recognized and addressed by new forms of municipal policing such as the employment of uniformed patrollers by some local authorities in Britain (see Johnston 2000) and similar developments in the Netherlands (see Hauber et al. 1996). Collectively, however, the very rapid transformation in this key set of occupations has, we believe, had an impact wider than simply the formalization of social control important though that is. Though we have not the space to develop the argument here, it seems plausible to us that the marked decline of secondary social control occupations that has taken place in England and Wales since the war is linked not only to changes in the formal policing division of labour, but is also implicated in the rise levels of crime during the same period. In explaining the rapid rise in levels of reported crime over the past half century authors have focused on numerous changes in contemporary forms of (particularly urban) life: the unintended consequences of urban renewal (Jacobs 1992); the dispersal of routine activities (Felson 1998), the rise of market society (Currie 1997; Taylor 1999) and the exclusionary nature of late modernity (Young 1999), to list but a few. Each of these, in different ways, has something important to offer in our attempt to understand post-war social change. Yet each, in our view, would be enhanced if it also contained a focus on the important role played by the decline of secondary social control occupations in the period. Conclusion In short, our argument here has three major elements. First, in our view, much current criminology tends to exaggerate the degree of change, and underplay the extent of continuity, in seeking to explain the transformations taking place in contemporary policing systems. More particularly, we are unsure to what extent it is realistic to present current 142

15 THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLICING? developments as an epochal change in policing. 4 Some of the changes are undeniably far-reaching. Consequently, it is understandable that commentators should wish to focus on what is novel. It is clearly the case that new institutional forms of policing, outside of nation state boundaries, are developing quickly. Similarly, both the form and content of public policing is changing (though perhaps less radically than some would have us believe), as is the commercial sector. Our concern is that in focusing on such changes, important as they are, it is all too easy to exaggerate their extent, either by failing to recognize the consistencies and continuities that exist, or by misrepresenting what it is supposed used to exist but is now disappearing (e.g. the mythical public monopoly in policing). Secondly, we are concerned that many current theoretical analyses of policing transformation pay insufficient attention to variation between nation states. Thus, for example, there is a tendency to assume that the changes (believed to be) taking place within North America are, in large part, identical to those affecting other developed economies. Whilst we accept that there are indeed some important commonalities and continuities, nonetheless there are also some extremely important points of departure: the nature, timing and reasons for the growth of the commercial security sector to name but three. To date such differences have remained largely resistant to academic scrutiny. In part, this is due to the relative absence of comparative research. In this regard, it is particularly ironic that we should be critical in this article of one of the few scholars in the policing field to have undertaken comparative analyses of policing systems: David Bayley. In such work he has talked persuasively of some of the general lessons that can be learned from policing systems around the world (e.g. Bayley 1994). As we have suggested, we have no difficulty with Bayley and Shearing s proposition that there are some quite strong common elements to the changes taking place in policing systems in many developed economies. However, it is clearly also the case that not all countries exhibit the same degree of change in their policing systems. More importantly, in our view there is no inevitability about the future direction or degree of change that will affect policing systems in these countries. That is, we should not assume that the policing systems of different countries are all moving in the same direction for the same reasons. Finally, it is our view that the set of changes taking place within policing can profitably be set within a wider context. It is certainly the case that changes within one part of the policing division of labour can, and do, have effects on other parts and it is important for us to seek to develop an understanding of such changes. Nonetheless, there is we think a broader social transformation taking place (at least in the UK). It is our view that rather than seeing current changes simply as indicative of a process of fragmentation of policing, rather they are better viewed as part of a long-term process of formalization of social control. In particular, we highlighted in this article a shift that appears to have taken place between what we have termed primary and secondary social control activities. More particularly, there is clear evidence that during the last half century there has been a significant decline in certain key secondary social control occupations. It is this set of changes, we argue, at least as much as the changes affecting public policing bodies, that 4 David Wall (1997: 225) notes how the discourse of transformation and new age policing is far from new. It has emerged at various points during the history of policing in Britain, most notably during the early years of the twentieth century when police commentators envisaged the revolutionary impacts that new technologies would have upon the police role. 143