The Policing of Flows

Challenging Contemporary Criminology

Anthony Amicelle, Karine Cote-Boucher, Benoît Dupont, Massimiliano Mulone, Clifford Shearing, Samuel Tanner, Anthony Amicelle, Karine Cote-Boucher, Benoît Dupont, Massimiliano Mulone, Clifford Shearing, Samuel Tanner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367280093
• eBook ISBN: 9781000468267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Social Sciences

Rectifying the fact that little criminological attention has been paid to the notion that the security of flows increasingly embodies concerns at the heart of contemporary policing practices, this book makes a significant contribution to knowledge about the policing and security governance of flows.

The book focuses on how the growing centrality of flows affects both contemporary 'risks' and the policing organisations in charge of managing them. The contributors analyse flows such as event security; border controls and migration; the movement of animal parts; security-related intelligence; and organisational flows. The emerging criminology of these, as well as flows of money, information and numerous commodities, from pharmaceuticals to minerals or malicious software, is leading to critical advances in the understanding of the changing harm landscapes and the practices that have developed to manage them.

Taken as a whole, the book opens up the conversation, and encourages the invention of new conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools to help criminology tackle and better understand the mobile world in which we live. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Crime.

Managing flows during mega-events: taking account of internal and external flows in public order policing operations

Chad Whelan and Adam Molnar

ABSTRACT

The article examines the configurations and organisational dynamics of policing mega-events through the metaphor of ‘flows’. Using the Brisbane 2014 Group of 20 Summit (G20) as an explorative case study, we suggest that the metaphor of flows may not only hold value with regard to understanding how objects of policing are rendered visible and manageable, but also how it might enable us to take stock of internal flows of data, information and intelligence within public order policing operations. We examine how police pursued their goal of containing and controlling protest flows as well as managing rapid intra- and inter-organisational flows. In particular, we examine how police and security actors designed what we call ‘flow-based’ architectures and the underlying organisational and situational contingencies shaping how these structures and systems form and function. The article concludes by calling for greater attention on internal dynamics of policing operations which, we argue, can potentially be advanced by drawing on the metaphor of flows.

Introduction

Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France on Security, Territory, Population focus on the relationship between security and circulation as an emerging expression of the liberal art of government. A new era of ‘security’ emerged within eighteenth-century liberalism that broke from a rights-based conception of security, which extends to sovereign territorial limits, and instead ushered in a model of security premised on the control and regulation of people, objects and events.¹ Foucault’s insights invite nuance into conceptualisations of security and policing, particularly as security relates to how governments imagine, intervene upon and modulate risk in urban and digital environments.² Others have noted how practices of surveillance are situated within the onset of increasingly ‘fluid’ features of globalised modernity.³ This research has considered how accelerations and mobility of information, capital and people have led to the deterritorialisation of traditional social institutions and boundaries in ways that shape practices of security.⁴ While reflecting broader shifts in the field of security governance, these perspectives particularly call attention to, on the one hand, the traceability of flows and their regulatory management and control and, on the other, the ways in which social institutions are reorienting through rapid spatio-temporal fluxes in information, technologies, capital, political and symbolic life.⁵

Compared with the Foucauldian approaches of critical security studies that consider the regulation of ‘risky’ flows by security and policing institutions,⁶ and surveillance studies that consider the fluidity and proliferation of data and informational flows,⁷ one particular area where the institutional qualities of flows has seen less attention is in the internal dynamics of policing operations, particularly in the context of mega-events and public order policing.⁸ Police agencies routinely adopt technologies and adapt strategies and tactics in ways that bring about new or altered institutional configurations,⁹ especially in the context of mega-events.¹⁰ Research on public order policing has noted how ‘uncontainable’ and ‘transgressive’ protest flows during events such as the G20 protests in London and Toronto ‘have each stimulated tactical innovation, diffusion, and shifts in [police] practice’.¹¹ This research suggests that these developments in public order policing emerge through a form of interactive social learning between unpredictable protest tactics and subsequent police adaptation to neutralise those tactics, and how these policy developments diffuse as ‘best practices’, often on a transnational scale.¹² These shifts in police strategies and tactics are particularly evident in the context of mega-events such as international political summits and Olympic Games.¹³ Much of the literature on mega-events concentrates on transformations in the physical environment as police and security actors pursue ‘total’ security. This involves configuring public and private space into controlled ‘secure’, even ‘militarised’ zones¹⁴ and ‘pre-crime’ surveillance and intelligence efforts against potential threats in ways that blur the boundaries between criminal and security intelligence.¹⁵

We argue that in much of the mega-events literature such flows of people, objects and things are largely viewed as external threats subject to governance.¹⁶ The literature is yet to sufficiently address the organisational configurations and situational environments of those aiming to control such flows. Combining work that seeks to recover the broader empirical nuance of institutional reconfigurations during mega-events¹⁷ with research on the organisational complexities data, information and intelligence flows within policing organisations and networks,¹⁸ we examine the extent to which flows might also be analysed as an internal mediating feature in terms of informational exchanges within and between security actors. We examine the utility of ‘flows’ as a concept with which to understand how objects of policing are controlled through novel developments in spatial and population management¹⁹ as well as the internal workings of police operations through taking stock of intra- and inter-organisational flows. We aim to address how attempts to police territories and populations at mega-events shape, and are shaped by, an underlying ‘web’²⁰ of structures and systems to manage data, information and intelligence flows.

The article proceeds in five sections. The first section provides a very brief review of Foucault’s work as it has conditioned scholars to locate flows as objects of policing and security subject to risk-based classifications and sorting so that they can be regulated and controlled. Drawing on examinations of flow architectures in financial markets²¹ and ‘smart cities’,²² we then consider how flows might be considered as an internal characteristic of public order policing, reflective of developments in policing practices at mega-events that are customised to address the uncertainty of protest flows. The second section outlines the methodology for our case study, involving the analysis of internal police documentation and detailed interviews with key members of the Queensland Police Service (QPS), the organisation responsible for policing the 2014 G20. The following three sections draw on our empirical data as it relates to existing understandings of flows, as external to police organisations, and subsequently as it relates to the internal flows within police operations. We examine how police reconfigured the urban environment to regulate flows of people and manage populations during the event. We then focus on the often hidden relationships between technical architectures and organisational contexts that coordinate data, information and intelligence flows. In particular, we examine the underlying structures and systems designed to manage such flows and the organisational and situational contingencies shaping how these systems operate. The paper concludes by reflecting further on the properties of such internal flows in large scale policing operations.

Theorising the objects of security: existing perspectives on the policing of flows

Foucault’s objective for his lectures was to theorise the relationship between security, territory and population as an attempt to better grasp techniques of power specific to a liberal art of government. As a biopolitical configuration, apparatuses of security sought to make the subjects and objects of circulation increasingly transparent, visible and subject to normative classifications in such a way that a security dispositif intervenes within and reshapes flows of people, objects, activities and information in ways that ‘permit, guarantee, ensure circulations: of people, of goods, of air’.²³ Scholars have drawn on Foucault’s lectures to consider the governmental rationalities and techniques of power implicated in managing circulations and mobility as part of contemporary security practices.²⁴ Critical geographers of security, in particular, have drawn on Foucault to theorise and research expressions o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Criminology in the face of flows: reflections on contemporary policing and security
• 1. Managing flows during mega-events: taking account of internal and external flows in public order policing operations
• 2. Fluid interfaces between flows of rhino horn
• 3. Regulation of cross-border law enforcement: ‘locks’ and ‘dams’ to regional and international flows of policing
• 4. Crime analysis and cognitive effects: the practice of policing through flows of data
• 5. European border policing: EUROSUR, knowledge, calculation
• 6. Liquid modernity and the police métier; thinking about information flows in police organisation
• 7. International flows, political order and social change: (in)security, by-product of the will of order over change
• Index