Paradigms for Policing
by
Clifford Shearing
Clifford Shearing is a Professor in the Research School of Social Science at the Australian National University.
Introduction
In the 15 minutes I have today I will attempt to do two things.
- I will first explore two major developments in policing worldwide. These mirror, and contribute to, more general developments in governance. I will recognize this link between policing and governance more generally throughout my remarks by locating policing within this wider context.
- Second, I will identify what I consider to be some of the challenges that these developments present. In doing so I will consider in particular what these developments have meant for the poor and the weak.
- Third, I will argue that these challenges are particularly important to poor South Africans and that accordingly it is these challenges that should be at the forefront of our transformational agendas here.
This will set the stage for my colleagues John Cartwright and Madeleine Jenneker to explore one path that we have been experimenting with in responding to these challenges in very concrete and practical ways. What we have been doing over the past several years has been to build a model of governance that seeks to demonstrates that the challenges I will review can be responded to in significant and sustainable ways within very poor communities. Having built this model our current challenge is to explore how it should be modified so as to make it a sustainable.
My analysis of the trends I will review will inevitably be very partial as my intention is simply to highlight a few critical contours within a much larger terrain of governance.
Developments in the Governance of Security
Let me turn now to the first of these issues I plan to canvas – namely developments in policing and governance more generally. In my remarks I am going to be deliberately ignoring developments that have been taking place with respect to state police organization. I do so in order to bring into focus the nodal context within which policing, and governance more generally, now takes place.
I turn now to the first development I wish to highlight. States have over the past several decades sought to increase their access to resources that can be deployed in governance by mobilizing a variety of non-state knowledges and capacities. This has taken place, in particular, with reference to the private sector. Businesses are now being deployed by states as service providers to realize governmental objectives. In addition, states have sought to mobilize the knowledge and capacity of civil society, what Drucker calls the "third sector", by mobilizing the resources of volunteers.
At the moment perhaps the most dramatic example of this practice of contracting out governmental services has been the way in which America and its allies have (either directly or in directly) employed private security and paramilitary service providers from within the corporate sector.
These developments can be traced to a range of theoretical frameworks including those of Adam Smith and Frederic Hayek. The central policy idea here is that states can, and should, strengthen their ability to govern by mobilizing, and then integrating, both state and non-state resources.
A nautical metaphor that has been used to express this is that states should retain control of the steering of governance but do less of the rowing. One might think of this, to borrow a term from Ian Loader as "state anchored pluralism". Nicholas Rose has borrowed Bruno Latour's notion of "action at a distance" to talk about these developments as "rule at a distance" initiatives. Other useful terms are the "regulatory state" and "meta-regulation". What is envisaged by the policy driving these initiatives is not a "hollowing out of the state" but a strengthening of the capacity of states to govern.
While there are lots of debates about just how well these initiatives have worked they have, in my assessment, certainly operated to enhance the capacities of states to mobilize non-state resources. The initiatives that have deployed private sector resources have benefited those constituencies that states have used to get the rowing of governance done -- the corporate world and the communities they support have done very well out of these rule at a distance initiatives. The same is true of the volunteer based initiatives. It is now common wisdom to observe that these schemes have worked best where they are least needed, namely, in middle class communities.
The same cannot be said for poor communities. They certainly have not experienced an increase in wealth as a consequence of this form of pluralization in the same way as richer communities have. So, as is so often the case, the rich have done better, much better, than the poor. In saying this I am not ignoring the fact that, within the domain of policing for example, many jobs have been created within the private security industry that have been taken up by poor people.
A second development that has also led to the pluralisation of governance has taken place alongside state anchored pluralisms. While this development has been much more significant in its implications for democratic governance, it has drawn much less attention.
What I have in mind here is what we might think of, following Loader, as "corporate anchored pluralism". What has happened in this development is that private entities – in particular corporations – have taken advantage of legal spaces within state law to become what Stuart Macauley has termed "private governments". That is sites of governance outside of the state where both the steering and the rowing of governance has been shifted to non-state entities. What this shift has meant is that privatisation has introduced the opportunities for private entities to govern in ways that promote their conceptions of order.
Again the private security industry proves to be a good bell-wether for what has been happening. The vast majority of the growth that the private security industry has seen over the past several decades has not been the result of state driven rule at a distance initiatives. Rather they are a consequence of initiatives by private governments to govern in the interest of their objectives and concerns. These objectives and concerns, and the orders that are pursued to realize them, are often significantly different from those of states even though these governments may be operating legally within states. An example would be a private company that chooses not to reveal a theft to the police, for instance a credit card fraud, because it would be bad for the company's image.
This development has also brought with it a host of advantages. And once again these have been enjoyed far more by the rich rather than by the poor. As with state anchored pluralism the corporate sector, and the communities associated with it, have benefited. In addition, the governance of richer communities has generally seen significant improvements. There have been a variety of reasons for this but the most obvious is that they have been able to add an extra layer of private governance to the governance provided by states.
Perhaps most importantly of all, however, these developments tended to significantly enhance the self-direction of rich communities. As a consequence they have been able, as a result of them, to exercise greater and more direct control over their lives. Once again, poor people have not shared these advantages equally. More seriously these private forms of governance often directly make the lives of poor people more difficult. One need only think about gated communities and their impacts to appreciate this.
Policy Stance
What this analysis indicates is that while many positive consequences have flown from the twin developments I have reviewed they have not been equitably distributed. The same is true of the negative consequences. This is true with respect to the governance of security but it is also true across many areas of governance -- for instance, the governance of health.
The problem then is not that these developments have not had very positive consequences but that neither these, nor the negative downsides often associated with them, have been equitably shared. Some people have gotten most of the good things while others have gotten most of the bad things. The people who have done best are the rich and those who have done worst are the poor. There is nothing particularly surprising about this. It has been and continues to be the way of the world.
These problems are particularly evident in poorer parts of the world and they are very evident within South Africa where, for many observers, they threaten the future of our democracy. The South African government has made clear that as part of its policy of transformation it is determined to respond to these inequities. The question they and many other governments face is what can be done about this given the fact that these are global and not simply national developments.
Much of the thinking that goes on about how this might be done has focused on the macroscopic factors that lie behind these consequences and how these factors might be turned around. While this is obviously a sensible place to focus it is not the only place to focus. One can, as the now somewhat discredited aphorism, "think globally act locally" suggests take a more microscopic view.
If one is to do this, as I have been doing with several colleagues, it is useful to move the discussion from the general question of governance and locate it firmly within specific domains of governance. We have done so within the domain of the governance of security that we think of as a "window" through which to approach more general issues. Our question has been: What should be done about the inequalities and deficits that pervade the governance of security?
There are obviously a whole series of possible answers to this question when one thinks at a local level just as there are when one things at a more macroscopic level. I have not the time to list and then review these possibilities here. Instead I want to go directly to an approach that we have been pursuing.
This approach has been inspired by a remark by Nicholas Rose that in responding to the developments, I have outlined, we should do more than engage in a "simple dismissal". In other words we should, in responding to these two sets of developments, be careful not to through the baby out with the bathwater. Rather, in responding to their deficits, we should ask: How can we best hold on to their advantages and generalize them at the same time as we seek to reduce the negatives? Put differently the question is: What can poor people do to take advantage of these developments, and avoid their negative consequences, within the sphere of the local?
Let me emphasize in case there is a misunderstanding that we are not saying that macroscopic action should not be taken or that local level initiatives are likely to be a cure all. What we are saying is that micro-action can have an effect and that it is worth working on.
Again there are many ways of answering this question that deserve to be debated. Again this is not the time or place to pursue this debate – although we certainly can debate this and other issues I have raised during our discussion period. And again I will once more simply state the conclusion that I, and several others, have come to.
The conclusion we have come to is that a crucial reason for the deficits, I have canvassed, is the lack of appropriate institutions that will enable poor communities to become better players within the domains of governance I have outlined. Our answer as to where to start follows directly from this -- we should start we argue by identifying, and then building, appropriate institutions.
To take this position, let me quickly add, is not to say that there are not lots of institutions at the local level both formal and informal within South African communities. This would, of course, be nonsense. Rather it is to say that we need specifically to build institutions that operate within a formal legal framework that will respond to the issues I have raised.
The kind of institutions we think it is important to build are ones that enable poor people to identify and then market their knowledge and capacities in ways that bring tax resources directly into their communities and keep them there.
Our methodological stance on this – and again I simply state a conclusion – is that the best way to do this is on an iterative basis through processes of experimentation that directly involves the people whose knowledge and capacity is to be identified, mobilized and marketed.
The argument underlying this policy stance is that one of the crucial differences between poor communities and richer ones is that they do not have institutional structures at their disposal that will enable them to contract with governments, to become private governments, to enter partnerships with state governments or to retain the benefits that flow from these within their communities. If this argument is correct then what we need to do in various terrains of governance – for example, security, health, education, shelter – is to work at local levels to build institutions that will enable these things to happen.
Specifically, we have argued that we need to build institutions that will do four principal things:
- First, allow for greater self-direction and control by poor people over their own governance. That is, institutions that will deepen democracy.
- Second, enable the knowledge and capacity of poor communities to be mobilized, not as volunteers, but in ways that bring resources directly into poor communities by creating small businesses – micro-enterprises -- that are run by and for poor people.
- Third, enhance the quality of governmental services.
- And finally, build partnerships with state agencies that will give them more bargaining power in determining what these institutions do.
These institution building objectives have, for the past 5 years been the orienting objectives of a small and modest local governance initiative at the School of Government at the University of the Western Cape.
I will now pass the speaker's baton to John Cartwright and Madeleine Jenneker who will talk about this initiative in more detail.
