Policing Cities

Urban Securitization and Regulation in a 21st Century World

Randy Lippert, Kevin Walby, Randy Lippert, Kevin Walby, Randy K Lippert, Randy K Lippert, Kevin Walby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415540339
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136261626
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Policing Cities brings together international scholars from numerous disciplines to examine urban policing, securitization, and regulation in nine countries and the conceptual issues these practices raise. Chapters cover many of the world's major cities, including New York, Beijing, Paris, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Boston, Melbourne, and Toronto, as well as other urban areas in Britain, United States, South Africa, Germany, Australia and Georgia.

The collection examines the activities and reforms of the traditional public police, but also those of emerging public and private policing agents and spaces that fall outside the public police's purview and which previously have received little attention. It explores dramatic changes in public policing arrangements and strategies, exclusion of urban homeless people, new forms of urban surveillance and legal regulation, and securitization and militarization of urban spaces. The core argument in the volume is that cities are more than mere background for policing, securitization and regulation. Policing and the city are intimately intertwined. This collection also reveals commonalities in the empirical interests, methodological preferences, and theoretical concerns of scholars working in these various disciplines and breaks down barriers among them. This is the first collection on urban policing, regulation, and securitization with such a multi-disciplinary and international character.

This collection will have a wide readership among upper level undergraduate and graduate level students in several disciplines and countries and can be used in geography/urban studies, legal and socio-legal studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and criminology courses.

Part I

Public police reform and community policing in twenty-first century cities

1 Policing urban insecurities through visible patrols

Managing public expectations in times of fiscal restraint

Anna Barker and Adam Crawford

Introduction

On 10 May 2012, some 30,000 police officers took to London's streets to protest against the government's 20 per cent reductions in police funding, changes to the service and cuts to police pay.¹ This extraordinary reaction to contemporary events indicates that public policing is undergoing rapid and fundamental change. This is especially so in the British cities that gave birth to modern professional policing, a quintessential dimension of which always has been visible patrol officers. They represent what Thomas (1945) sardonically described as the ‘“scarecrow” function of the police’. The evolution of professional policing has long been tied to shifts in the nature of insecurities fuelled by the changing face of risks and the manner in which these are perceived by powerful elites (Reiner 2010). Contemporary insecurities, moreover, coalesce and take on acute meaning within the city as both host to, and generator of, diverse forms of crime and anti-social behaviour. Consequently, concerns about disorder and urban safety directly inform debates about the urban condition and the nature of city governance.

This chapter reflects upon public policing through visible patrols in a changing climate of fiscal restraint,² a flurry of government reforms, and volatile public expectations. We chart policy and economic shifts and consider their implications for policing insecurities in cities across England and Wales.³ In particular, we assess the rise of the ‘reassurance policing’ agenda under the New Labour Government (Povey 2001); unfolding relations between public and private provision of security; and, for the first time, the election of a Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for each force area outside of London introduced by the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011. We question the extent to which these changes signal the eclipse of reassurance policing and foreshadow a recasting of public police ambitions. We conclude with speculation on future trends in light of projected police budgetary cuts, opportunities for further private sector involvement in policing, and plans for democratic oversight.

The future shape and ambitions of public policing are uncertain. Nevertheless, policing is now on a radically altered course, largely defined by several interconnected influences. These include abandonment by the Coalition Government of the previous political shibboleth of increasing police officer numbers, described by Ian Blair (2012a) as constituting a ‘straightjacket’ on police budgets; political and ideological commitment to greater private sector involvement in the delivery of public services as the only rational response to conditions of austerity, thus increasing the pluralized provision of ‘policing beyond the police’ (Crawford 2008); and a radical reform to police governance through publicly elected PCCs, deepening efforts to make policing ‘citizen-focused’ and enmeshing its operational delivery more significantly in public expectations and popular demands. In an interesting example of policy transfer, this unique model of police governance borrows from, but modifies, US models of police ‘demo-cratic’ accountability. In the reconfiguration, 41 new PCCs will become primary fund holders and be responsible for planning and accounting for policing strategy and services to be delivered by the Chief Constable or other providers in their police area.⁴ PCCs will preside over the central government police grant, local council tax precept and various other funding streams, including current Community Safety Partnership funding and Home Office special grants, as well as new forms of income generation such as the levy on night-time economy service users. These will be streamlined into a single PCC funding pot by 2014/15 (Home Office 2012). Significant here is the level of discretion elected figures will have over these resources.

This chapter's first objective is to consider the implications of these developments for policing urban insecurities. The dark shadow cast by spending cuts and the volte face on police numbers loom large over the earlier policy preoccupations with reassurance policing and allied goals of managing subjective insecurities and impressions of order. Nonetheless, in explicitly tying the fortunes of PCCs to the policing of public demands, including the insatiable desire for a visible police presence, their arrival heralds potentially contradictory implications for continuation of the reassurance agenda. This is a timely juncture at which to reflect upon the recent fortunes and future prospects of reassurance policing and the extent to which government reforms signal its eclipse or its reinvigoration. Our second objective is to consider the unfolding relations between public policing and private security, notably in relation to visible patrols in cities.

This chapter analyses contemporary public policy shifts from a criminological perspective. It highlights the key dynamics of governmental intentions and speculates on future implications. Evidently, it has less to say about the manner in which these logics and ambitions are played out, interpreted and contested on the streets of cities across England and Wales. These are empirical questions for another day.

The rise of ‘reassurance policing’

The past two decades have seen several significant twists and turns in the direction and priorities of policing in British cities. Whereas the 1990s saw a narrowing of the police mission to a preoccupation with ‘crime-fighting’ and ‘priority crimes’, the 2000s witnessed a more expansive vision of policing tied to efforts to manage public insecurities. Managerialist concerns about the efficient target-ing of police resources to crime-related performance indicators (often concerned with detection) emerged as the dominant logic in the late 1980s – exemplified in the 1993 White Paper's mantra that ‘the main job of the police is to catch criminals’ (Home Office 1993: para. 2.2). This relegated to the margins less measurable dimensions of policing, including public engagement through locally tied community patrols (FitzGerald et al. 2002). Crime reduction displaced order maintenance and visible street patrols due in part to the acknowledgement that the latter had little direct impact on crime rates (Clarke and Hough 1984).

Things changed dramatically soon after 2000, against a background of declining crime rates. There was a growing recognition of a ‘reassurance gap’ (ACPO 2001) between public perceptions of crime and the declining risk of victimization and deteriorating public confidence in the police, particularly marked in urban areas. This was combined with fears that the private sector may encroach onto, and stimulate, a market for policing services, including patrols. The then deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Ian Blair (2002) somewhat apocalyptically warned of the possible ‘Balkanization of policing’, whereby ‘we may see hundreds of different law-enforcement agencies springing up across Britain’, returning policing to the dark ages before the rise of the professional police.

Subsequently, the police mission was recast, in the words of the 2004 White Paper, to include ‘both preventing and detecting crime and reassuring the public’ (Home Office 2004: 18, emphasis in original). This vision of policing signalled both a more capacious ambition of governmental intervention and, simultaneously, a narrower focus on the regulation of individual behaviour and local social order as the crucibles in which the fortunes of governments are to be forged. As the capacity of political institutions to control large-scale economic and social problems has become increasingly circumscribed under pressures of globalization, so we have witnessed a tapering of governmental capabilities. Uncertain of their values and purposes, governments have re-sighted their energies on managing public displays of behaviour. Under New Labour, this expressed itself in a zeal to deliver local public sector reform and tangible changes to quality of life, in ways that would be visible and recognizable to the electorate. A key philosophy behind the shift was that ‘numbers are important but not enough: citizens have to see and feel the difference’ (Barber 2007: 370). Hence, delivering irreversible change that citizens might notice became a major policy driver. The then Prime Minister Tony Blair (2006) reflected on the importance of public perceptions:

you can argue about statistics until the cows come home and there is usually a very great credibility gap between whatever statistics are put out and whatever people actually think is happening, but the real point is not about statistics, it is about how people feel, and if they feel safer and more confident, because the fear of crime is as important in some respects as crime itself. (Emphasis added.)

Given the close association between the ‘crime–disorder–fear’ nexus and the city, as well as the importance of urban electorates for political fortunes, the salience of these issues was magnified across British cities. Moreover, the very notion of delivering reassurance through visible policing was tied to a certain image of urban social order. Implicit in this and paralleled in the concurrent ‘antisocial behaviour’ agenda was a prevailing attempt to re-imagine and re-designate cities as safe places to visit, live and invest in. This was linked directly to entrepreneurial ‘urban boosterism’ and ‘local growth coalitions’ (Logan and Molotch 1987), combining municipal authorities and business interests, that have played a crucial role in promoting safety as an essential dimension of regeneration agendas (Crawford and Flint 2009).

In the ensuing period, citizens of cities across England and Wales have become accustomed to policing reforms, backed by sustained funding increases, designed to manage public perceptions of local safety. Key to the delivery of this reassurance agenda have been expanded numbers of police officers and strategies to augment their ‘visibility, familiarity and accessibility’ (Povey 2001). Hence, the Police Reform Act 2002 introduced a second tier of police patrol officers, Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), without the full powers or training of sworn constables. The separation of the patrol function from reactive demands means that PCSOs are not subject to the ‘tyranny of the radio’ or other reactive burdens on police constables. Hence, they dedicate more time to public interactions on the streets. Their introduction and expansion became a linchpin in convincing the public they could ‘feel safer and more confident’.

Allied to this was the establishment of a ‘National Reassurance Policing Programme’ (NRPP) in eight police forces across England from 2003 to 2005. The programme was informed by the signal crimes perspective (Innes et al. 2004), suggesting that public reassurance can be engineered by visible policing interventions, such as foot patrols, attuned to key drivers of insecurity identified by communities. Visible policing is argued to influence public impressions about the degree of ‘guardianship’ and social controls present in an area (Innes and Fielding 2002: 14). The main evaluation of the NRPP found that, compared with their control sites, it ‘had a positive impact on crime, perceptions of crime and antisocial behaviour, feelings of safety and public confidence in the police’ (Tuffin et al. 2006: ix). The NRPP's success informed the introduction of neighbourhood policing teams across England. These locally tied teams aim to provide a response to community concerns. This has seen greater value and resources accorded to visible foot patrols, resulting in a substantial increase in the number of police officers and support staff dedicated to maximize front-line visibility. In contrast to the recent budget cuts, public spending on policing after the turn of the century rose by over 20 per cent (Home Office 2001: 14). By 2010, the size of the police workforce in England and Wales reached an all-time high, at just under 245,000. So too, the number of PCSOs peaked at approximately 17,000.

Figure 1.1 Public perception of the police 2006–11 (%).

Source: Crime Survey for England and Wales.

Consequently, the reassurance agenda has been a public policing project, associated with the direct activities of state-funded constables, PCSOs and other public sector policing auxiliaries (including neighbourhood wardens).

The broadening of the police mandate combined with additional resources has coincided with significant improvements in traditional measures of police performance. The crime rate continued to decline to its lowest level since 1981. There has been a steady upward trend in perceptions of police visibility with a greater percentage of people reporting sight of a police patrol officer on a weekly basis or more and a marked decline in those who have never seen an officer on foot patrol (see Figure 1.1). We have also witnessed a turnaround in public perceptions of local crime and confidence in the police, apparently deliv-ering on New Labour's reform pledge. The percentage of respondents perceiving a rising local crime rate declined from 54 per cent in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: how the world's cities are policed, regulated, and securitized
• Part I Public police reform and community policing in twenty-first century cities
• Part II New modes of urban policing and governance
• Part III Policing city spaces and regulating conduct
• Part IV Securitization of twenty-first century cities
• Index