Policing And Contemporary Governance

What is it that police and policing actually do? What are the effects? How are these effects mediated and experienced by different people at different times and in different contexts? This volume draws attention to the centrality of police and policing to the project of governance and the experience of being human in the contemporary world.

Policing and Public Management takes a new perspective on the challenges and problems facing the governance of police forces across the UK and the developed world. Complementing existing texts in criminology and police studies, Morrell and Bradford draw on ideas from the neighbouring fields of public management and virtue ethics to open the field up to a broader audience. This forms the basis for an imaginative reframing of policing as something that either enhances or diminishes "the public good" in society. The text focuses on two cross-cutting aspects of the relationship between the police and the public: public confidence and public order. Extending award-winning work in public management, and drawing on extensive and varied data sources, Policing and Public Management offers new ways of seeing the police and of understanding police governance. This text will be valuable supplementary reading for students of public management, policing and criminology, as well as others who want to be better informed about contemporary policing.

Accountability of Policing provides a contemporary and wide-ranging examination of the accountability and governance of ‘police’ and ‘policing’. Debates about ‘who guards the guards’ are among the oldest and most protracted in the history of democracy, but over the last decade we have witnessed important changes in how policing and security agencies are governed, regulated and held to account. Against a backdrop of increasing complexity in the local, national and transnational landscapes of ‘policing’, political, legal, administrative and technological developments have served to alter regimes of accountability. The extent and pace of these changes raises a pressing need for ongoing academic research, analysis and debate. Bringing together contributions from a range of leading scholars, this book offers an authoritative and comprehensive analysis of the shifting themes of accountability within policing. The contributions explore questions of accountability across a range of dimensions, including those ‘individuals’ and ‘institutions’ responsible for its delivery, within and between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ sectors, and at ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘transnational’ scales of jurisdiction. They also engage with the concept of ‘accountability’ in a broad sense, bringing to the surface the various meanings that have become associated with it and demonstrating how it is invoked and interpreted in different contexts. Accountability of Policing is essential reading for academics and students involved in the study of policing, criminal justice and criminology and will also be of great interest to practitioners and policymakers.

This interdisciplinary and international volume provides a critical analysis of the power to police as a basic technology of modern government found in a vast array of sites of governance, including not only the state, but also the household, the factory, the military, and—most recently—the global realm of war, police actions, and peace keeping.

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.

The security governance of South Africa has faced immense challenges amid post-apartheid constitutional and political transformations. In many cases, policing and governmental organizations have failed to provide security and other services to the poorest inhabitants. Security Governance, Policing, and Local Capacity explores an experiment that too

The promotion of security is no longer a state monopoly. It is dispersed and takes place through the practices of states, corporations, non-governmental actors and community-based organizations. But what do we know about the ways in which 'security' is thought about and promoted in this pluralized field of delivery? Are democratic values being advanced and protected, or threatened and compromised? Wood and Dupont bring together a team of renowned scholars to shed light on our understanding of the arrangements for contemporary security governance. Offering a 'friendly dialogue' between those who argue that democratic transformation rests in the development of strong state institutions and those who propose a more de-centered agenda, the scholars in this volume bring cutting-edge theoretical analyses to bear on empirical examples. This volume will appeal to researchers in the fields of criminology, political science, sociology and security studies.