The public and private police, or back to the future

Hamerton, Christopher and Hobbs, Suzanne (2022) The public and private police, or back to the future. In, Privatising Criminal Justice: History, Neoliberal Penality and the Commodification of Crime. 1st ed. Abingdon. Routledge, pp. 107-136. (doi:10.4324/9781315709819-7).

Abstract

Chapter 7 builds on the preceding chapter to explore public and private policing developments in England and Wales and the United Kingdom since the early 1990s, beginning at the end of the Thatcher administration. These last four decades have witnessed a period of precipitous social and technological change, with public policing increasingly forced to play catch up and second fiddle to the private security industry. In this chapter the authors examine the continuing privatisation ethos of the Major government, which saw policing increasingly placed under the political microscope, at turns viewed as saviour, service industry and Aunt Sally. Such close scrutiny continued with the rise of New Labour under Blair with its particular brand of driven neoliberalism, placing emphasis on tough-smart tech-smart crime policy, and an attempt at public-police responsibilisation through pluralism, civilianisation and legislation.

The strategic shrinking of the nation State during the 1990s and 2000s ensured that the arrival of the global credit crunch and ensuing austerity affecting Western countries from 2010 could be utilised to initiate further attacks by consecutive coalition and Conservative administrations on the public sector, including the cutting of police services to the bone. Within the volatile political environment of the last decade, a wider more operational role for the private security industry has been conceived and trialled, alongside increasing numbers of private watch and patrol services and a belief that dataveillance, technology and analytics can provide the panacea in policing precarity which drives traditional social control methodologies towards redundancy.

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Contributors

Author: Christopher Hamerton

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