Governing Security

Explorations of Policing and Justice

Clifford D. Shearing, Les Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415149624
• eBook ISBN: 9781135106034
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Government has been radically transformed over the past few decades. These transformations have been mirrored in, and often prefigured by, changes in the governance of security - mentalities, institutions, technologies and practices used to promote secure environments. This book traces the nature of these governmental changes by looking at security. It examines a variety of related questions, including: * What significant changes have occurred in the governance of security? * What implications do these changes have for collective life? * What new imaginings may be needed to reshape security? * What ethical factors need to be considered in formulating such new imaginings? The authors conclude bringing together descriptive, explanatory and normative considerations to access how justice can be conceived within the governance of security.

1
Introduction

Thinking about security

Introducing security

'Am I going to be safe?' 'Are those around me going to be safe?' 'Are the things I value going to be safe?' These are questions that we ask ourselves, implicitly or explicitly, hundreds of times a day. When we can answer them affirmatively we feel at peace and may move forward with a sense of security. This feeling of peace underlies the term ‘security’ whose derivation may be traced to Latin words meaning ‘without care’ or, in modern colloquial parlance, ‘carefree’. Sometimes that feeling of peace arises because we or others have taken particular initiatives to enhance our safety: women may carry rape alarms when travelling at night; anxious parents may choose to have their offspring vaccinated against certain childhood diseases, or equip them with cell phones when they are out at night; car owners may have sophisticated anti-theft devices fitted to their new vehicles. Yet, none of these initiatives necessarily guarantees a feeling of safety on the part of the person undertaking it, since each may itself give rise to other risks. For example, the anxious parents may have had to balance the benefits of vaccination (safety from measles and mumps) with its potential costs (the slim chance that the child might be damaged by it).

Nowadays, the term ‘security’ is applied to many different facets of our existence. It is used to refer to our personal, physical safety, as well as to the safety of our belongings from damage or depredation, but it is also used with respect to our emotional, psychological and financial well-being. We refer to collective programmes designed to ensure such well-being as ‘social security’ or the ‘social safety net’, and measures to protect the integrity of the state and its institutions as ‘national security’. Conflicts that break out in various parts of the world are often referred to as threats to ‘international peace and security’.

Important as security is to us, however, our desire to achieve it has to be balanced against other things that we value, such as liberty, privacy and justice. For example, people often say that they will accept a degree of insecurity rather than turn their homes into ‘armed fortresses’ in order to ensure their safety. While they might believe that having someone watch over them all the time would enhance their security, most people would regard the resulting loss of privacy as too high a price to pay for achieving that end. Similarly, the various ‘due process’ requirements that have been built into our criminal justice systems over the centuries reflect the view that the values of justice and liberty are considered to be just as important to us as the value of security. Of course, it is by no means easy to reconcile these different values. Recent controversy surrounding attempts to prosecute General Pinochet for ‘crimes against humanity’ in Chile, together with the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-Apartheid South Africa, indicate the difficulties which may be encountered in trying to balance demands for justice and security. That is not to say that the two are irreconcilable. Later in this book we consider the relationship between security and justice in more detail. We argue that while tensions may exist between the two, they are also mutually interdependent. This means that if authorities want to govern security more effectively they are obliged to pursue justice more diligently.

People rarely have complete control over their own security and, although most of us strive to achieve as much control as possible, not everyone has the same capacity or opportunity to do so. To complicate matters further, security is also affected by external contingencies. Thus, we may feel safe (or unsafe) not because we have implemented (or failed to implement) an action to enhance our security, but because things happen over which we have relatively little control. People may feel more secure after interest rate cuts, landslide election victories, royal weddings or great national sporting victories; and less secure after bouts of galloping inflation, ‘hung parliaments', royal scandals or national sporting disasters. Other factors, may be more closely linked to their local and immediate experience. Thus, people’s security may be affected by their integration or lack of integration into local neighbourhood groups or by their wider involvement in local civil institutions. Though our primary concern in this book is with deliberate (intended) actions undertaken by people in pursuit of security, it is also important to be aware of the wide range of contingencies that may affect their sense of security.

Our subjective ‘sense of security’ (our feeling of safety) is just as important to most of us as any objective measure of our ‘actual security’ (i.e. the risks that we actually face). However, if the discrepancy between the two grows too wide, we are liable to be warned either that we have a ‘false sense of security’ or that we are ‘paranoid’. Thus, to be effective, security measures must address our subjective perceptions as well as more objectively identifiable threats to our safety. For most of us, when we feel safe it is because we have confidence in the steps we, or others, have taken to promote security. Or, to put it another way, we feel safe because things have been done to govern security. This governance might be quite informal and fleeting as, for example, when we take precautions while engaged in some routine activity. At the other extreme the governance of security might be the result of a complex programme of action that is sustained through space and time and which may involve large numbers of people, sophisticated bureaucratic procedures, complicated budgetary calculations and the deployment of costly resources as, for example, in arrangements established by law enforcement agencies to ‘keep the peace’.

By way of illustration consider two rather different examples. The first of these shows how security may be the product of mundane, everyday practices. One of us was recently involved in a piece of research which looked at the transitions experienced by a group of young people (aged 16–25) living on ‘Willowdene’, a housing estate in the North East of England. Willowdene is a surprisingly complex locality. On the one hand, it experiences all of the objective indicators of an excluded place, including exceptionally high levels of unemployment, sickness, and school truancy, as well as high rates of crime and disorder. On the other hand, the impact of economic deprivation and exclusion on young people was far from simple since the transitions which they made from teenage years to adulthood were, with the exception of those engaged in criminal careers, surprisingly ‘complex, multiple, non-linear, often disorderly and sometimes unpredictable’ (Johnston et al., 2000: 31). Young people living in this multiply-deprived locality managed to ‘get by’, sometimes through participation in further education, sometimes through gainful (often spasmodic) employment, sometimes through engagement with the ‘informal economy’, and, as often as not, through a shifting combination of different means. This diverse process of ‘getting by’ was linked to young people’s participation in local networks. Such networks were one of the means by which they managed their daily lives, using them to obtain work, to participate in leisure and to manage personal and family safety. For example, in an area where burglary is commonplace, access to appropriate networks – and, more particularly, to the knowledge contained within them – is crucial. If residents want to avoid becoming victims of burglary, it helps to be acquainted with, or at least to know others who are acquainted with, potential burglars. That way it may be possible to persuade them not to victimise you or, if you are victimised, to improve your chances of recovering your stolen goods. Having access to local knowledge was, therefore, crucial for the negotiation of day-to-day problems relating to security in Willowdene. Access to these networks and to the knowledge contained within them was vital for identifying whom it was safe to associate with, where it was safe to go, and when it was safe to go there. It was also important for defining young people as locals and for differentiating them from outsiders. These local networks bore a complex relationship to the problem of exclusion. On the one hand, their very reason for existence indicated the estate’s exclusion vis-à-vis the wider area. On the other hand, their utility in helping people ‘get by’ provided a critical means for residents’ inclusion within the Willowdene locality. In the case of Willowdene, then, the governance of young people’s security was built into the routine, day-to-day, workings of local networks, rather than the product of an explicit security programme.

Our second example illustrates a different point and concerns the recent experience of one of us who had two friends visiting him in South Africa, one from Canada, the other from Germany. Both commented on how secure they felt when in the company of people in whom they had confidence as guarantors of their safety. When guided by such persons they went about their business feeling as safe as they would at home. This feeling covered a variety of different circumstances, from visiting the up-market parts of Cape Town, to driving in rural areas, or visiting informal settlements. Being at peace, they were able to concentrate on what they were doing, socialise, enjoy the scenery and so on. By contrast, when they had to negotiate things themselves, even when the places they were in and the people they were meeting were ‘objectively’ no more dangerous, their sense of safety was different. They had little confidence in the state’s capacity to guarantee their security and even less confidence in their own ability to organise their lives in ways that would ensure their safety. When confident of security guarantees, they were relaxed, paid little attention to reports of crime in newspapers and discounted the concerns of people they talked to at ‘home’ about their safety. When lacking such confidence, they felt unprotected and their sense of South Africa as a place changed dramatically. The newspaper reports of danger became much more salient as did the concerns of their friends and family. Of course, in both circumstances they were unharmed and ‘objectively’ secure. Yet peace for them was not simply the absence of objective risk. It required an assurance that the safety they were experiencing was something they could rely upon as they moved from situation to situation over time.

What this example illustrates, in addition to the importance of the mobilisation of local knowledge and capacity in the governance of security, is the future-focused character of programmes for guaranteeing security. Such programmes not only seek to provide guarantees of safety at the present moment, but also to project them into the future. Peace is more than the mere absence of present threat; it embodies the sense that one will be safe in the future. For that reason peace requires a guarantee in which one has confidence and upon which one can rely. Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century thinker who provided much of the framework for conceiving contemporary governance, articulated this sense of future safety when he argued that peace was like the weather. The statement ‘the weather is fine’ is not merely a description of the present (‘it is not raining now in New York’) but also a confident prediction of the future (‘it will not rain in New York for the rest of the day’). Thus, it may be said, security comprises the confident belief that peace in our environment is assured both now and for some reasonably foreseeable future.

So far we have said that our interest in security lies in intentional actions whose purpose is to provide guarantees of safety to subjects, both in the present and in the future. Two further points may be added. First, the realisation of security is subject to empirical contingencies and cannot be taken for granted. It is one thing to offer guarantees of security to subjects. It is another to assume that they will be realised in practice. Thus, it is always possible that security initiatives and programmes will fall short of giving people an effective assurance of peace. Whether security is achieved in particular circumstances is, therefore, a matter of empirical (experiential) judgement. Second, because security is subject to the nuances of experience, it should not be regarded as an ‘either–or’ phenomenon – something dependent upon the mere presence or absence of given material conditions. We feel at secure and at peace when we perceive the risk of threat to be below our comfort threshold. Our comfort thresholds are not only determined by the threats we perceive, but also by the confidence we have in the mechanisms that seek to guarantee our peace. If we have confidence in these mechanisms we are inclined to see incidents of disorder as just that: as incidents. When we lack confidence we view them as emblematic of an underlying disorder and of the absence of any effective mechanisms for addressing that disorder. It is this feature of security that is recognised when people talk of the importance of responding to the fear of crime in addition to simply responding to the presence of crime.

The experiential character of security raises two further issues that are crucial to its governance. First, since individual comfort thresholds are not identical, what might be a peaceful situation for one person may not be so for another. Yet, we should not conclude from this that comfort thresholds may not be correlated. Often, one of the features of the collectivities we describe as ‘communities’ is a shared comfort threshold that underpins a common experience of peace. Second, people’s individual and collective feelings about security have to be considered alongside their feelings about other human values and priorities such as effectiveness, value for money, propriety, accountability, liberty, privacy, equality and justice. Recognition of this fact poses major dilemmas for the governance of security. One such dilemma concerns the appropriate balance that might be struck between the pursuit of security and the pursuit of other values such as liberty. Another concerns the compatibility of security with these other values. For example, is it possible to achieve the democratic governance of security while, simultaneously, ensuring its just distribution?

Security programmes

By now, the reader may have noticed that in discussing security we have made only a tangential reference to crime and no reference at all to criminology, policing or the police. This might seem strange in view of our professional backgrounds, each of us being employed for much of our professional lives within university criminology institutions and having written extensively on policing matters. We shall say more about our decision to conceive security initiatives in terms of ‘governance’ (rather than in the more conventional terms of ‘policing’) in a moment. For now, let it merely be said that this decision arises, in part, from a disenchantment with approaches which limit our understanding of the governance of security to a narrow range of actions undertaken by a limited number of specialist (state) agencies. The limits of that view are apparent as soon as one considers some of the rudimentary properties of security programmes.

Programmes that seek to guarantee peace involve six critical elements. First, they require a view of what security entails – a definition of order. Order, in this sense, connotes a prescription of the ‘way things need to be’ (e.g. which activities and behaviours should be permitted, and which proscribed) in order to ensure a secure environment. This prescription may be formally laid down in a set of statements, for example, as legislation, or it may be no more than an implicitly shared sense of order that is used to determine what we feel mechanisms for governing security should seek to accomplish. The criminal law is perhaps the most easily identified of such prescriptions, although local customs may be just as influential as prescriptions of order. What is common to all such prescriptions, however, is that they are products of some kind of political negotiation, that they almost always reflect some interests more than others and that they are commonly sites of contestation of some kind.

The second element is some authority, or more likely authorities, that seek to promote security, that is, a guarantor or guarantors. States have been and continue to be guarantors of security, and this responsibility is commonly expressed in their constitutions. The Canadian constitution, for instance, states that the Federal Parliament is responsible for making laws for the ‘peace, order and good government’ of the country. There are, however, many others. These others may be no more than people we know, and rely upon, to protect us, such as family members, friends, colleagues and neighbours. They are just as frequently other forms of government, such as the non-state, ‘private governments’ described by Mcauley (1986), which seek to promote secure places in which people can do business. Today these non-state governments are often corporate entities that assume responsibility for governing the spaces in which people live, work and play. The residential spaces we call ‘gated communities’ provide one example. Increasingly, the various authorities that govern security co-ordinate their activities to form networks of governance. An example is the networks that are established when residents accept responsibility for governing their own security through programmes such as Neighbourhood Watch. Typically, these programmes are organised in ways that co-ordinate police and community resources at the local level.

The remaining elements are closely related to one another. The third of these comprises the methods that programmes for governing security rely upon. We will call these methods technologies. These technologies are correlated with a fourth element: ways of thinking (or mentalities) that establish how issues of peace are constructed and addressed. Mentalities make order and disorder thinkable. As such, they provide the framework within which technologies are developed and practised. Since the exercise of technologies requires an infrastructure for applying resources, technologies are also correlated with a fifth element, institutions – structures which provide a means of organising and relating people and things. Finally, the result of the combination of these different elements is the production of a determinate security practice.

A very common technology is the threat or application of punishment to persuade people who might be tempted to undermine security to act in an orderly fashion. This technology, together with the mentality and institutional arrangements correlated with it, forms the basis of what we have come to think of as the ‘criminal justice system’. The criminal justice system is a set of institutions employed by the state to guarantee security – though, as we shall see, the state’s responsibility for guaranteeing other values, such as liberty, privacy and justice, places constraints on the design of state security mechanisms. While the criminal justice system is the institutional complex we tend to associate with the governance of security, it is not the only mechanism that is used to serve this end. However, because we have tended to conflate this mechanism with the governance of security we are inclined not to notice alternative mechanisms. This is true even though we rely on them constantly to provide guarantees of peace both in their own right and within networks that may include state mechanisms. Consequently, although we employ these other institutions and technologies of security regularly they tend to remain at the edges of our awareness – used but unnoticed.

To recognise the presence of these other mechanisms for guaranteeing security, however, we only need to reflect on the basis on which we answer questions about the existence or absence of peace. If, for instance, we respond to the advertising slogan not to ‘leave home without it’, and set off on our travels armed with an American Express Card, we are recognising and acting upon the effectiveness of the global guarantees of financial security which American Express offers its card holders, both alone and in conjunction with the many network partnerships that American Express can and does mobilise.

As we go about our daily lives a whole network of resources provides for our security. This typically includes a variety of corporate auspices, many of which, however, are only available to those who are already well off and ‘successful’. An interesting, contemporary illustration is provided by companies who plan and execute what has come to be called ‘incentive travel’. These companies arrange exotic trips for business people and their families who have won incentive awards. The awards enable them to enjoy wonderful meals and excursions in exotic places that are not accessible to others. These travellers (corporate denizens) are thus able to enjoy safe and peaceful holidays in countries where, outside the benefit of corporate guarantees of security, life is experienced as far from safe and peaceful. They travel in a world of safety that extends across national boundaries and that links secure enclaves. This concept of extending the developed world with its safety and luxury into the ‘undeveloped’ world has been pioneered by organisations like Club Med. When travellers take holidays with Club Med in some part of the world where the climate is good and the geography appealing, the world they live in belongs to a new corporately governed set of linked terrains that together comprise a new global space. A ‘third place’ that is neither entirely ‘public’ nor entirely ‘private’ as these terms have come to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: thinking about security
• 2 Dimensions of governance
• 3 The punishment mentality and coercive technologies
• 4 Historical shifts in security governance
• 5 Corporate initiatives: the risk paradigm
• 6 Zero-tolerance, community policing and partnership
• 7 Security governance in Britain
• 8 Nodal governance, security and justice
• Bibliography
• Index