The Global Making Of Policing

This edited volume analyses the global making of security institutions and practices in our postcolonial world. The volume will offer readers the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the global making of how security is thought of and practiced, from US urban policing, diaspora politics and transnational security professionals to policing encounters in Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia or Haiti. It critically examines and decentres conventional perspectives on security governance and policing. In doing so, the book offers a fresh analytical approach, moving beyond dominant, one-sided perspectives on the transnational character of security governance, which suggest a diffusion of models and practices from a ‘Western’ centre to the rest of the globe. Such perspectives omit much of the experimenting and learning going on in the (post)colony as well as the active agency and participation of seemingly subaltern actors in producing and co-constituting what is conventionally thought of as ‘Western’ policing practice, knowledge and institutions. This is the first book that studies the truly global making of security institutions and practices from a postcolonial perspective, by bringing together highly innovative, in-depth empirical cases studies from across the globe. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in International Relations and Global Studies, (critical) Security Studies, Criminology and Postcolonial Studies.

This anthology explores the political nature of making order through policing activities in densely populated spaces across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Based on ethnographic research, the chapters analyze this complex with respect to marginalized young men in Haiti, community policing members and national politicians in Swaziland as well as other individual and collective actors engaged in policing and politics in Indonesia, Swaziland, Ghana, South Africa, Mexico, Bolivia, Haiti and Sierra Leone. What these contexts have in common is a plurality of order-making practices. Not one institution monopolizes the means of violence or a de facto sovereign position to do so. A number of interests are played out simultaneously, entailing re-negotiations over the very definition of what ‘order’ is. How and by whom a particular order is enforced is contested, at times violently so, and is therefore inherently political. In the existing literature on weak states, legal pluralism and policing in the Global South it is seldom made explicit that making order is a route to power and positions of political decision-making. It is this gap in the literature that this anthology fills, as it analyses the politics at stake in processes of order-making.

Policing the Global South provides scholarship which further transnationalises and democratises ideas about policing practices and philosophies, highlighting renovations in approaches to policing studies, and injecting innovative perspectives into the study of policing from scholars positioned on the ‘periphery’. Criminological knowledge depolarisation underscores a conscious effort by scholars from the Global South to increase intellectual knowledge focused on developing context-specific responses to issues not aligned to Northern ideological positions and specific to the non-Northern context. Such shifts draw attention to the expanse of spaces beyond Northern centres rife with challenges unlike any specific to those experienced or conceptualised by scholars from the Global North with an applied Northern criminological lens. Applying a postcolonial lens to empirical knowledge from country-specific cases in former colonies in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Latin America, this book examines how policing issues not aligned to Northern ideological positions and specific to non-Northern contexts are addressed. The primary purpose is to share innovations in the field of policing – service provision, threats to security, crime responses, justice and international trends – developed in postcolonial developing-country contexts. Given the aim of the book and the contributors’ own research on issues of policing across the globe, it discusses themes including but not limited to the colonial legacies and their impact on policing; how plural regulatory systems and partnerships are navigated by the police; the linkages between access to justice, community perceptions, and police legitimacy; innovations and challenges in organisational reform, crime prevention, and community partnerships; and the expanding roles of police organisations in the Global South. While each chapter presents a policing issue in a country within a specific part of the Global South, the book highlights how important it is to frame responses based on contextual realities informed by an awareness of the past and present, with a goal of informing the future. Delivering a much-needed introduction to those specialising in policing in developing countries, this book is invaluable reading for academics and students of criminology, criminal justice, governance, policy, and IR, as well as professionals in policing organizations across the globe.

If police are the problem, what’s the solution? Tens of millions of people poured onto the streets for Black Lives Matter, bringing with them a wholly new idea of public safety, common security, and the delivery of justice, communicating that vision in the fiery vernacular of riot, rebellion, and protest. A World Without Police transcribes these new ideas—written in slogans and chants, over occupied bridges and hastily assembled barricades—into a compelling, must-read manifesto for police abolition. Compellingly argued and lyrically charged, A World Without Police offers concrete strategies for confronting and breaking police power, as a first step toward building community alternatives that make the police obsolete. Surveying the post-protest landscape in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Oakland, as well as the people who have experimented with policing alternatives at a mass scale in Latin America, Maher details the institutions we can count on to deliver security without the disorganizing interventions of cops: neighborhood response networks, community-based restorative justice practices, democratically organized self-defense projects, and well-resourced social services. A World Without Police argues that abolition is not a distant dream or an unreachable horizon but an attainable reality. In communities around the world, we are beginning to glimpse a real, lasting justice in which we keep us safe.

Making an Impact on Policing and Crime: Psychological Research, Policy and Practice applies a range of case studies and examples of psychological research by international, leading researchers to tackle real-world issues within the field of crime and policing. Making an Impact on Policing and Crime documents the application of cutting-edge research to real-world policing and explains how psychologists’ insights have been adapted and developed to offer effective solutions across the criminal justice system. The experts featured in this collection cover a range of psychological topics surrounding the field, including the prevention and reduction of sexual offending and reoffending, the use of CCTV and ‘super-recognisers’, forensic questioning of vulnerable witnesses, the accuracy of nonverbal and verbal lie detection interview techniques, psychological ‘drivers’ of political violence, theoretical models of police–community relations, and the social and political significance of urban ‘riots’. This collection is a vital resource for practitioners in policing fields and the court system and professionals working with offenders, as well as students and researchers in related disciplines.

"Decision making in the police environment must take advantage of the latest advances in business and military management, but at the same time remain aware of the challenges associated with maintaining and restoring order on a day-to-day basis. The framework proposed in this book has been elaborated form the diverse experiences of the authors as managers, police officers and crime analysts; and shows how to effectively use intelligence for making decisions, which rules to respect when deploying resources and how to assess and monitor the impact of measures taken."--Publisher.

In the transitional networked society, police power is no longer constrained by the borders of the nation state. It has globalised. Global Policing shows how security threats have been constructed by powerful actors to justify the creation of a new global policing architecture and how the subculture of policing shapes the world system. Demonstrating how a theory of global policing is central to understanding global governance, the text explores: - the ′new security agenda′ focused on serious organised crime and terrorism and how this is transforming policing - the creation of global organisations such as Interpol, regional entities such as Europol, and national policing agencies with a transnational reach - the subculture of the ′global cops′, blurring boundaries between police, private security, military and secret intelligence agencies - the reality of transnational policing on the ground, its effectiveness, legitimacy, accountability and future development. Written by two leading international experts who bring cutting-edge theoretical debates to life with case studies and examples, Global Policing will prove captivating reading for students and scholars in criminology, criminal justice, international relations, law and sociology.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates. Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities. A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.