Policing The Police In Asia

This brief offers an overview of the prevailing debates in police oversight and accountability through an analysis of policing in Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan. It places emphasis on three major controversies of oversight: professionalism, representation, and empowerment. Arguing that traditional models do not accurately depict variations in police systems in Asia, the volume aims to bring attention to the implementation of these three concepts and clearly articulate the power relationship within these Asian police oversight mechanisms. This brief will be a useful resource for researchers in policing as well as criminologists, political scientists, and sociologists, particularly those specializing in East Asia.

Community policing has often been promoted, particularly in liberal democratic societies, as the best approach to align police services with the principles of good security sector governance (SSG). The stated goal of the community policing approach is to reduce fear of crime within communities, and to overcome mutual distrust between the police and the communities they serve by promoting police-citizen partnerships. This SSR Paper traces the historical origins of the concept of community policing in Victorian Great Britain and analyses the processes of transfer, implementation, and adaptation of approaches to community policing in Imperialand post-war Japan, Singapore, and Timor-Leste. The study identifies the factors that were conducive or constraining to the establishment of community policing in each case. It concludes that basic elements of police professionalism and local ownership are necessary preconditions for successfully implementing community policing according to the principles of good SSG. Moreover, external initiatives for community policing must be more closely aligned to the realities of the local context.

Policing is legitimized in different ways in authoritarian and democratic states. In East and Southeast Asia, different regime types to a greater or lesser extent determine the power of the police and their complex relationship with the rule of law. This volume examines the evolution of the police as a key political institution from a historical perspective and offers comparative insights into the potential of democratic policing and conversely the resilience of authoritarian policing in Asia. The case studies focus on eight jurisdictions: Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. The theoretical chapters analyse and explain the links between policing and society, the politics of policing and recent police reforms. This volume fills a gap in the literature by exploring the nature of authoritarian policing and how it has transformed and developed the rule of law throughout East and Southeast Asia.

"Evaluates the police bureaucracy in modern day China using interview and archival sources. Argues that despite projecting the appearance of a strong security state, the police bureaucracy in China is weak and plagued by problems of resources, enforcement, and oversight in virtually every area of policing except protest response"--

Based on interviews with black, Asian and white resigners from the police, this book analyses the ways in which mundane features of employment within constabularies racialize the work of officers and leads to a decision to resign. It is argued that the occupational culture of policing remains a key context for the racialization of relationships between officers from majority and minority ethnic groups. This book adds to sociological and criminological research by grounding racialized relations within the reality of day-to-day work.

This book examines the politics of policing in Greater China, including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. As the author shows, police ideological indoctrination is strongest in mainland China, followed by Hong Kong, and Taiwan, where the police is under increasing political stress, in the aftermath of rising public protests and socio-political movements. Macao's police, on the other hand, is far less politicized and indoctrinated than their mainland Chinese counterpart. This book demonstrates that policing in China is a distinctive and extensive topic, as it involves not only crime control, but also crisis management and protest control, governance and corruption (or anti-corruption), the management of customs and immigration, the control over legal and illegal migrants, the transfer of criminals and extradition, and intergovernmental police cooperation and coordination. As economic integration is increasing rapidly in Greater China, this region's policing deserves special attention.

This innovative volume explores issues of law enforcement cooperation across borders from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. In doing so it adopts a comparative framework hitherto unexplored; namely the EU and the Australsian/Asia-Pacific region whose relative geopolitical remoteness from each other decreases with every incremental increase in globalisation. The borders under examination include both macro-level cooperation between nation-states, as well as micro-level cooperation between different Executive agencies within a nation-state. In terms of disciplinary borders the contributions demonstrate the breadth of academic insight that can be brought to bear on this topic. The volume contributes to the wider context for evidence-based policy-making and knowledge-based policing by bringing together leading academics, public policy-makers, legal practitioners and law enforcement officials from Europe, Australia and the Asian-Pacific region, to shed new light on the pressing problems impeding cross-border policing and law enforcement globally and regionally. Problems common to all jurisdictions are discussed and innovative ‘best practice’ solutions and models are considered. The book is structured in four parts: Police cooperation in the EU; in Australia; in the Asia-Pacific Region; and finally it considers issues of jurisdiction and due process/human rights issues, with a focus on regional cooperation strategies for countering human trafficking, organised crime and terrorism. The book will be of interest to both academic and practitioner communities in policing, criminology, international relations, and comparative Asia-Pacific and EU legal studies.