Some Theoretical Background
Police Studies, that is the academic and scholarly study of the police, began only in the 1950s. Prior to that time, professional Police Administrative Science was considered to provide an objective view of the subject. Starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in a context of growing public and political awareness of the excesses of police practice on the streets, a number of sociologists pioneered the study of police by direct observation and historical consideration. Egon Bittner’s book The Functions of Police in Modern Society (1970) consolidated thinking in the field. The first edition of Robert Reiner’s book The Politics of the Police (1985) generalized the paradigm beyond the United States to the Anglo-American sphere. What characterized this field was that the object of study – the police – were made subject to social scientific and historical analysis so, rather than producing a the kind of account that police administrators and policy makers might come up with, academics and scholars could provide an alternative account of police institutional thinking and, on that basis, provide a nuanced account of the police and society.
The central theoretical plank of the Bittnerean sociology of police that emerged in the English-speaking world is that ‘the police’ can be defined by their monopoly of the use of force in the maintenance of social order. The sociology of policing developed rapidly for a while, often under the banner of Police Studies. The field encompassed historical-sociological accounts of police institutions, cross-national comparative studies of police practices, observational case studies of police subculture, and more.
Success does not always last. In the 1990s, sociology in this domain began to lose ground to other ways of thinking. Notably interest in police and policing lost ground to more general theorising, inspired by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Ulrich Beck. Second, observing the presence of private police agents active in the reproduction of social order, scholars began to develop competing theories concerning the pluralization of security. Thirdly, as CCTV cameras popped up like mushrooms, a new field called Surveillance Studies seemed to capture a lot of what was interesting about contemporary social control. Fourthly, once police were recognized to be operating in transnational conditions, Anglo-American Police Studies seemed increasingly parochial. Outside of the jurisdictions where it first emerged, Bittnerian-inspired Police Studies did not initially seem directly relevant and, in a context where transnational practices were obviously growing in importance, other disciplines, notably political science and criminology, provided competing explanations. Lastly, the sociological and historical approach to Police Studies was always weak in comparison to Police Administrative Studies new varieties of which propagated, promising realistic and relevant knowledge. Police Science, Crime Science, and Police Management emerged as attractive alternatives to academic Police Studies, with the added lustre of professionalism.
By the early 2000s Police Studies was looking increasingly threadbare and the discipline of Sociology itself had lost the importance it had when the pioneers first began work studying police agents in the field first hand. In 2010 Jean-Paul Brodeur published a magisterial treatise that at once overthrew the Bittnerian paradigm and reconsolidated thinking in the field by absorbing surveillance theory, theories concerning the pluralization of security, human rights, into an historical account of the contemporary police into a comprehensive theory of The Policing Web (2010). Brodeur who passed away on April 26, 2010, was a philosopher and Director of the International Centre for Comparative Criminology at the University of Montreal in Canada. His final contribution was to provide a new theoretical language for understanding the practices of police agents and agencies that encompassed historical and contemporary concerns in a global context.
The publication of the fifth edition of The Politics of the Police in 2019 brought together the bulk of collective knowledge in Police Studies. In it occupational subcultural and other insider perspectives on police organization were located within the broad historical currents of modern state-making, and the politics of the police in the media were understood in the context of an increasingly pluralized, multi-cultural and transnational social order. Operationally defined, the police use surveillance underpinned by the authority and capacity to deploy coercive force to overpower resistance to an attempted solution to conflict in the native habitat of the problem (p. xiii). In practical terms, the police are agents linked through a complex division-of-labour by a common métier. The police métier has evolved as a set of institutional practices of tracking, surveillance, keeping watch, and unending vigilance, and it is able to apply force, up to and including fatal force, in pursuit of police organizational goals of reproducing social order, making crime, managing risk and governing insecurity (p. 37). Importantly, the concept of the police métier points to practices that can be empirically studied. Moreover, the enactment of the police métier under democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes can thereby be compared and contrasted.
In countries like Canada and the United States, status and prestige within the occupational subculture pertains to location within the police division-of-labour and proximity to the core practices of the métier. The subcultural language of the police occupation crystalizes around surveillance and coercion. That is why police ‘drug units’ are so interesting. They are in a position to mobilize operational intelligence which is linked into a transnational strategic intelligence system co-ordinating the so-called world-wide war on drugs and can mount self-justifying tactical operations at the local level.
Police working on operational files to do with drugs and bikers, are thought of as highly specialized officers who are ‘close to the action’ in terms of both surveillance and coercive means. In contrast, most police agencies that are large enough will also have a media relations unit. Public relations is a vital function necessary to the work of the institution, but personnel in these units are far removed from practical the day-to-day routines of the police métier. Police patrol units engaging directly with the population bye for prestige with officers in, for example, the Homicide Squad precisely because of their perceived proximity to the essence of the professional métier that they both share in common.
Much of the Police Studies can be read as providing accounts from various perspectives inside the police division-of-labour. This is useful. It is very difficult for outsiders to understand how the police division-of-labour within their local area is put together, never mind that is part of a global policing web. Police organization is a complicated linking up of many different kinds of unit more or less far removed from the core competences of the police métier that people can see on the street and in media reports. Police organizations often have a central unit, perhaps called the Intelligence Division, for managing their information. Sometime these units are described as the main ‘hub’ for strategic, tactical and operational intelligence. These units can sometimes have a large number of personnel because there is so much information to handle and exchange with other similar units in other jurisdictions. Police intelligence units make low-visibility decisions regarding the deployment of police resources. Absent an understanding of the internal police division-of-labour, it is very difficult to configure a system of police accountability.
The picture is complicated by the role of private actors in shaping the organizational form of the police métier. For example Police Foundations provide alternative sources of finance to municipal police forces in Los Angles, New York and elsewhere by channeling private donations from wealthy benefactors and corporations to public municipal police agencies. Private money has been used to supply police with a diversity of operational tools including surveillance and information processing technology. The organization of the Big City police in the United States has thereby transformed as a result.
The privatization of public space and the subsequent privatization of guarding has been paralleled by the growth of private investigation and security consultancies. Public police agencies have attracted criticism for their role in perpetuating structural disadvantage while private actors in the policing sector are often more influential in maintaining obvious injustices. Increasingly the research on police and security governance has exposed the risks privatization and police pluralization poses to social justice.
Not only large-scale population surveillance and extensive strategic power, but also the ability to tactically marshal coercive capacities in intensive ways gives organizational coherence to a transnational and extended policing web that practically escapes the institutional boundaries of states and even ‘the police’ themselves. The police métier has been noticeably militarized since the pioneering research of the 1950s and 1960s. The prime impetus then was perceptions regarding out-break of civil disorder and crime and the hope was that academic research might offer solutions. The socio-historical roots of the police in the international state system always made that unlikely.
The increasingly intense conflict between police and society in jurisdictions around the world is an index not of police legitimacy per se, but rather of growing social dissensus. Writing in the Anglo-American context, Alex Vitale argued that the growth and militarization of the police institutional sector since the 1960s has brought about intolerable conditions and therefore has called for the end of policing (Vitale, 2017).
The subject of Police Studies has never been more contested and the politics of the police never more volatile. Inevitably, in a context of rapid historical transformation and conflict, the practices of police agents and agencies are at the cutting edge of social change. The difficulty is developing a language for talking about the subject that is not itself part of the problem.
References
Bittner, E. (1970) The Functions of Police in Modern Society, Chevy Chase, MC: National Institute of Mental Health
Bowling, B., Reiner, R. and Sheptycki, J. (2019) The Politics of the Police 5th edition, Oxford University Press.
Brodeur, J-P. (2010) The Policing Web, Oxford University Press
Reiner, R. (1985) The Politics of the Police, Harvester Wheatsheaf
Vitale, A.S. (2017) The End of Policing, London: Verso
The Reluctant Criminologist 