From ‘pluralisation’ to ‘the police extended family’: discourses on the governance of community policing in Britain

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International Journal of the Sociology of Law www.elsevier.com/locate/ijsl

From ‘pluralisation’ to ‘the police extended family’: discourses on the governance of community policing in Britain Les Johnston Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

Abstract With increased pluralisation of security there has been a growing dispute about the governance (or ‘ownership’) of community policing: whether community policing is something that the police do on behalf of communities; that communities do on their own behalf, either through municipal, commercial or citizen-based provision; or that communities and police do in partnership with one another. This paper examines recent developments with regard to the governance of community policing in Britain. First, it considers municipal-led modes of community policing. By the provision of central government funding, municipalities have been able to employ neighbourhood (or community) wardens to undertake a variety of tasks including crime prevention and environmental improvement. The paper draws upon research from one community warden scheme—involving a partnership between local authority and a private security company. Amongst the issues considered are the potentially complex relations obtaining between wardens and the local police. While varied, the police response to pluralisation, in general, and to municipalisation, in particular reflects aspects of Stenning’s (1989) analysis of the stages of police reaction to the growth of private security in Canada. Though there has been no single police ‘position’ on the governance of plural policing in Britain, an influential model (‘the police extended family’) has begun to emerge. In part, this model has arisen because of concern in some places—including London—that municipal governments might opt to set up their own police forces, thereby posing a threat of ‘Balkanization’ (Blair, 2002). The second part of the paper examines key aspects of this model particularly as it applies to the employment of ‘community support officers’ by constabularies in England and Wales. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Re´sume´ Avec la pluralisation accrue de la s!ecurit!e, le diff!erend portant sur la gouvernance (ou la ‘‘propri!et!e’’ de la police communautaire a pris de l’ampleur. La question est celle de savoir si la E-mail address: [email protected] (L. Johnston). 0194-6595/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijsl.2003.09.003

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police communautaire constitue quelque chose que la police effectue au nom des collectivit!es, que les collectivite! s font en leur propre nom, gr#ace a" des mesures municipales, commerciales ou effectu!ees par les citoyens, ou que les collectivit!es et la police r!ealisent en partenariat. Le pr!esent document se penche sur les r!ecents d!eveloppements concernant la gouvernance de la police communautaire en Grande-Bretagne. Il examine tout d’abord les types de police communautaire dirig!es par les municipalit!es. Gr#ace a" l’octroi de fonds par le gouvernement central, les municipalit!es ont e! t!e en mesure d’employer des agents de quartier (ou communautaires) pour entreprendre un certain nombre de t#aches, y compris la pr!evention du crime et l’ame! lioration du milieu. Le document se fonde sur des recherches portant sur un syst"eme d’agents communautaires comportant un partenariat entre les pouvoirs locaux et une soci!et!e de s!ecurit!e priv!ee. Les relations pouvant e# tre complexes entre les agents communautaires et la police locale font partie des questions examine! es. Bien que varie! es, les r!eponses de la police face a" la diversification en g!en!eral et a" la municipalisation en particulier refl"etent les aspects de l’analyse des e! tapes de la r!eaction de la police face a" la croissance du secteur prive! de la se! curite! au Canada effectue! e par Stenning en 1989. Bien que la police n’ait pas adopt!e de ‘‘position’’ unique quant a" la gouvernance du maintien de l’ordre au pluriel en Grande-Bretagne, un mod"ele ayant de l’influence (la ‘‘famille e! tendue de la police’’) a commenc!e a" faire son apparition. C’est en partie l’inqui!etude apparue dans certains lieux, y compris Londres, face a" la possibilit!e que les gouvernements municipaux choisissent de mettre en place leurs propres services de police, repr!esentant ainsi une menace de ‘‘balkanisation’’ (Blair, 2002), qui a suscit!e la cr!eation de ce mod"ele. La seconde partie du document examine les principaux aspects de ce mode" le, particulie" rement en ce qui concerne a" l’emploi d’ ‘‘agents de soutien communautaires’’ par les services de police en Angleterre et au pays de Galles. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Pluralisation and community policing When writing about community policing we are immediately faced by a conundrum. On the one hand, it is widely accepted throughout North America and in large parts of Europe that the future lies in community policing. On the other hand, it is widely acknowledged that the concept of community policing lacks any coherent definition (Bennett, 1994). Why is it, then, that substantial economic and political investment is pledged by state police on a project that is so ill-defined? In order to make sense of this conundrum we need, first, to deconstruct the concept of community policing. In an earlier article (Johnston, 1997b) the present author distinguishes between two discourses of community policing. In the first (‘policing communities of collective sentiment’) community is defined as the embodiment or potential embodiment of collective attitudes and feelings. This model is well described in Mastrofski’s (1991) discussion of community policing in the USA where the appeal to community lies in powerful metaphors aimed to evoke an imagined past in which society was less prone to crime, conflict and division. Here, community policing aims to offer ‘a government that acts to advance the ‘‘natural’’ mechanisms of social control peculiar to a locale’ (Mastrofski, 1991, pp. 515–516). As Mastrofski points

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out, however, the over-homogenous image of community propounded in this model is both a poor representation of how things have been in the past and a poor predictor of what they might become in the future. The result is that, rather like the discourses of tourism and heritage, this version of community policing becomes ‘preoccupied with the reconstruction of nostalgia’ (Johnston, 1997, p. 195). This first version also contains a paradox since, despite its communitarian rhetoric, it remains, to use Reiner’s (2000) term ‘police property’. In other words, community policing is considered, above all else, to be a police-led and state-centred initiative against crime and disorder. However, an alternative model (‘policing communities of risk’) neither assumes community policing to be underpinned by the collective sentiments of homogeneous communities nor to be predicated upon the state police’s continued monopoly of security governance. As a result of the involvement of non-state partners in policing, community policing becomes less exclusively focused on the problem of crime and increasingly oriented to problemsolving. A good account of what this might imply may be found in Brogden and Shearing’s model of dual policing in South Africa and Northern Ireland (Brogden and Shearing, 1993; Brogden, 1995). Here, it is argued, policing within local communities should be defined as the product of institutional networks operating at different levels and with different knowledges and resources. At the centre of this argument is the proposition that local self-policing be coordinated with local state policing to constitute a dual system. The dual model is based upon a genuine partnership between state and civil policing in the locality. State police would bear primary responsibility for enforcement while problem-oriented (community) policing would be provided by state police in conjunction with commercial, municipal and voluntary elements. Overall responsibility for coordination and integration of policing networks would lie with local government, though authoritative force would remain with the state police and national criteria would be established to determine the legitimate limits of local civil autonomy. Having deconstructed community policing in order to show that it can take widely differing discursive forms, let us now consider that deconstruction in the context of the changing nature of security governance. Neo-liberal regimes of security governance have coincided with the growth of security networks composed of dispersed, plural agencies. A good illustration of this development may be seen in Britain where recent legislation has done two things. First, for certain purposes it has defined community policing in terms of the more generic functions of community safety. Second, it has identified network coordination as the key problem of security governance. The following statement from the Government’s 10-year crime plan make this clear: There has always been a wide range of people contributing to community safety in various forms. These include park keepers (some with constabulary powers), security guards in shopping centres, car park attendants, neighbourhood wardens, night club bouncers, and the private security industry. The issue for policing is how these various activities can be coordinated to make the most effective contribution to making safer communities (Home Office, 2001).

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In the light of these developments we can begin to see why state police have invested such time and effort in the ill-defined project of community policing. As Clifford Shearing and I have argued, community policing is an umbrella term describing a broad family of initiatives through which police have sought to re-invent themselves and, by so doing, to keep control of the ‘steering’ of security governance while broadening the range of capacities, agents and knowledges engaged in its rowing (Johnston and Shearing, 2003). Though sharing broad family characteristics community policing initiatives vary significantly from one another. At the least challenging end of the community policing continuum one finds programmes whose aim is to mobilise communities—defined largely in homogeneous terms—in order better to aid ‘bandit-catching’. While such programmes may adopt neo-liberal ideas about the devolution of some policing functions to communities, their aim, first and foremost, is to ensure that community policing remains ‘police property’: in other words, that the police’s devolution of ‘rowing’ is combined with its consolidation of ‘steering’. This model of community policing—corresponding, roughly, to the first discursive form described earlier—has, understandably, been the dominant version within state police circles: the ill-defined model that has attracted such substantial police investment. At the other end of the continuum, one can find programmes that share the characteristics described in our second version of community policing: problem-solving programmes oriented towards the provision of safety (rather than mere crime reduction) within diverse and heterogeneous communities, the responsibility for which is spread across networks of plural partners. Inevitably, the emergence of these ‘networked’ versions of security governance poses a challenge to those wishing to ensure that the governance of community policing remains ‘police property’. Community policing is, then, the site of a discursive dispute about security governance the resolution of which will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In this paper we shall reflect upon how this dispute, now significantly reconfigured through the language of community safety, is developing in Britain. In the next section we consider the development of municipal security organisations in Britain during the last 20 years, paying particular attention to the growth of neighbourhood and community warden schemes. In Section 3 we investigate the police’s response to the pluralisation of security by examining the concept of ‘the police extended family’, a concept which embodies the latest attempt to secure police sovereignty over the governance of community policing/safety. In Section 4 we reflect upon the trajectory of the British police’s response to pluralised security networks.

2. Local security initiatives 2.1. Context Experiments in municipal policing and security are by no means peculiar to Britain. In 1983 the French Government passed legislation allowing for the formation of municipal police forces to supplement the activities of the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie Nationale (Kania, 1989). Municipal initiatives in the

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Netherlands arose as part of a comprehensive plan for social crime prevention developed in the mid-1980s (Ministerie van Justitie, 1985). This plan was based upon a mixed model of security in which formal and informal, public and private and local and national agencies were encouraged to combine in an integrated preventive framework. Though several of these initiatives, including the deployment of social caretakers on housing estates were to be replicated in Britain, it was the experiments in street patrol that were to be particularly influential in the development of British community safety policy. The Dutch experiments took two forms. First, the appointment of a new rank of ‘police surveillant’ provided for a ‘second tier’ of policing. Officers employed in this capacity carry out a limited range of tasks and are used in a way that limits the chances of them having to exercise their powers of arrest. Second, continued public demand for a uniformed presence on the streets led a number of municipal authorities to employ City Guards, effectively providing for a ‘third tier’ of policing. Possessing only citizen powers their basic function is to offer visible daytime patrol, to respond to public enquiries, to assist in the prevention of crime and nuisance and to provide public reassurance. Though municipalities have responsibility for City Guard schemes, some are completely autonomous of police while others are integrated with them to varying degrees. Early evaluations suggested that Guards enjoyed good relations with the public (Hesselling, 1995) and that schemes contributed towards an increase in citizens’ feelings of safety (Hauber et al., 1996). It is also worth noting—not least because the issue is relevant to developments in Britain to be discussed later—that one aim of the City Guards scheme was to use agents without police powers to remind citizens of their social responsibilities and obligations without recourse to formal law enforcement. This led the authorities to deliberate on whether the granting of minimal legal powers to Guards might enhance their effectiveness or, conversely, undermine their good relations with the public, thereby compromising the principles of informal social control (Hauber et al., 1996). Though the Dutch experience influenced the development of schemes in British local authorities, Britain already had a long history of municipal security provision. In some cases, municipal personnel would be in possession of constabulary powers.1 A ‘Parks Constabulary’ was established in the London borough of Brent in 1979 while similar organisations existed at Greenwich, Barking and Dagenham, Holland Park and Wandsworth. In other cases security personnel possessed no special powers. As in Holland, some of these schemes have recruited officers from the ranks of the out-of-work drawing their funding from state employment initiatives. In the late 1970s such schemes were set up in major metropolitan areas such as Merseyside and the West Midlands and by the early 1990s some of them were sizeable operations. On Merseyside, Wirral Borough Councils ‘Metro Security Service’ employed 88 people to deliver a variety of security services including cash-in-transit, 1

Two pieces of legislation, the Public Health (Amendment) Act of 1907 and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government Provisional Order Confirmation (Greater London Parks and Open Spaces) of 1967, empower local authorities to swear in employees as constables for the purpose of securing local byelaws. It is also possible for municipal officers to be sworn in as constables under the Local Government Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1982, s 40. Some local authorities also use specific local acts to establish constabularies to police parks and open spaces.

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risk management, alarm response, and security patrols in and around council premises. Probably the best known scheme was that established in Sedgefield, County Durham in 1994. The Sedgefield Community Force was the first municipally run body to be given the task of patrolling the streets in a local authority area. The Force was headed by an ex-Chief Inspector from the Durham Constabulary and its officers received four week’s training including an input from the police on evidence-gathering, scene of crime reporting and procedures for bomb threats (I’Anson and Wiles, 1995). Two things are worthy of note in regard to these initiatives, each of which has relevance to our later discussion. First, the range of ‘policing’ activities undertaken by municipal organisations is wide. This is true both of organisations comprising ‘sworn’ officers, such as the Wandsworth Parks Constabulary (Jones and Newburn, 1998), and those whose personnel have no special powers. The Sedgefield Community Force, while having a primary responsibility to act merely as ‘the eyes and ears of the regular police’, took on a wider brief. Early on, local journalists reported that the police control room, faced with excessive demand, had passed on jobs to the Community Force (Northern Eye, 1995). A statement from the Council’s Customer Relations officer was, however, especially pertinent: The police have to focus on priorities that move away from minor criminal activity and nuisance. We believe that we are filling the gap’ (cited in I’Anson and Wiles, 1995, p. 4). This was a particularly interesting comment since it suggested that the Community Force would focus on those same ‘incivilities’ that regular police were claiming to address—but apparently failing to do—as part of a ‘zero-tolerance policing’ strategy. Secondly, these municipal initiatives challenged the police’s claim to hold a monopoly over policing. This issue was particularly apparent in London where, in the light of the Wandsworth scheme, the Metropolitan Police sought legal opinion in an attempt to differentiate between police officers and ‘bodies of constables which are not police forces’. While this attempt to distinguish between ‘real’ police officers and those merely possessing specific and limited legal powers remained unresolved (see Johnston, 1993, 2000 for further discussion) it nonetheless indicated the depth of concern police felt about the expansion of municipal security.2 The growth of municipal security was given a new lease of life during the late 1990s under the aegis of New Labour policies aimed at addressing the problem of social exclusion. Currently the Neighbourhood Wardens Team3 manages pro2

In some cases police and public concern about the legitimacy and accountability of municipal schemes was undoubtedly justified. By the early 1980s the Liverpool City Security Force consisted of some 200 officers organised into three territorial divisions. However, during the late 1980s allegations were made that the Force had evolved into the ‘private army’ of the Deputy Council Leader and prominent Militant (Trotskyite) supporter, Derek Hatton. 3 The Neighbourhood Wardens Team is part of the Government’s Neighbourhood Renewal Unit and is funded jointly by the Home Office and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Initially, its role was to manage, in collaboration with Government Offices, the d18.5 m grants programme for Neighbourhood Wardens. Now it also has responsibility for managing the d25 m grants programme for Street Wardens and the d22.5 m grants programme for Street Crime Wardens.

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grammes in three areas: Neighbourhood Wardens (whose role is to provide a uniformed presence in residential areas with the aim of improving quality of life); Street Wardens (who provide highly visible uniformed patrols in town and village centres, public areas and neighbourhoods); and Street Crime Wardens (whose role is to conentrate on the reduction of street crime in ten targeted high crime areas and to contribute to area regeneration). The following section draws upon research carried out on a single Neighbourhood Warden scheme in a council district in the North West of England (Johnston and Donaldson, forthcoming). After describing the scheme—whose officers were, in this instance, called Community Wardens—we focus on some issues of particular relevance to the question of governance of community policing. Some of these questions are considered further in Section 3. 2.2. Community Wardens in N.W. England The scheme in question began operating in April 2001 and was interesting for several reasons. It was the result of a public-private partnership between the local authority (a district council), a private security company (which provided the personnel) and the police (who, along with the other partners, were involved in their training). It was also the first scheme involving a private security company to be granted public funding. Also, unlike some other warden schemes, this one undertook preventive patrols. The district-wide scheme (organised into 15 patrol areas) consisted of six community wardens and two supervisors covering shifts from 10.00 a.m. until midnight. The district itself was socially and geographically varied, ranging from opulent villages at one extreme to ‘problem’ housing estates at the other. Wardens were assigned four principal tasks: to assist in crime prevention and fear reduction by carrying out ‘overt uniformed patrol’; to aid environmental improvement by reporting indiscriminate fly tipping, property damage and graffiti; to provide an input into community development by attending local community meetings; and to liaise with estate housing managers in respect of council run properties. Warden patrol schedules reflected these varying functions and demands. Typically, morning patrols would focus on checking void (empty) council houses; afternoon patrols would be deployed in rural locations; and evening patrols would be directed at the urban high crime estates. Our observations showed wardens to be fully engaged in all four areas of activity: from visiting sheltered homes to identifying abandoned vehicles for removal; and from making themselves visible at traffic ‘hotspots’ to talking with local estate youths on the street. In respect of crime prevention, a weekly meeting was held with the local police intelligence officer. Wardens might be asked to look out for named persons, suspected of or wanted for crime, or to report the location of certain vehicles. They would also be given information on local crime ‘hot spots’ and played an active role in tackling anti-social behaviour. A major problem on the urban estates was the riding of unlicensed motorcycles by under-age youths at high speed along alleyways, over grassed areas and through under-passes. Wardens would identify offenders by capturing their details on digital camera. They would also take note of vehicles without a current excise licence and pass the

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information on to the police. While the research was being carried out the first Anti-Social Behaviour Order was imposed in the area, Wardens being instrumental in providing some of the evidence in its enforcement.4 A number of issues arising from this research are worthy of note. Consider, first, the issue of police reaction to warden schemes. At the outset there was some evidence of police rank and file resistance to this scheme, but as one of the Warden Supervisors pointed out, the officers concerned were ‘taken away and spoken to about their attitudes’ and the situation was soon resolved. However, a degree of police organisational resistance undoubtedly remained. As the local authority officer responsible for oversight of the scheme put it to us they [police] say the right political things and they nod and support the scheme but often y it does not translate down the organisation y There are certain officers who—ideologically or for whatever reason—are not supportive of this scheme y There are certain other officers who see it as a platform to develop themselves y [by gaining] the benefits that we deliver to them. It is worth bearing this first point in mind when considering a second issue, the extent to which the warden role can be differentiated from that of the police officer. One of the police’s main concerns about warden schemes is the possibility of ‘mission creep’: the fear that wardens might take on duties considered to be part of the police’s traditional patrol mandate. In this scheme wardens were adamant that they were not police officers, as the following two comments indicate y[my role is] to look at and tackle juvenile nuisance, anti-social behaviour, to act as an intermediary between the complainant and the council regarding problems such as fly tipping y[but] y I am not a policeman ywe aren’t around to catch the guy breaking into cars. That’s somebody else’s job. We’re there to stop people leaving their cars to be broken intoy However, wardens also understood that, in practice, exact delimitation of their role—one which like the police’s role is demand-led—could prove difficult. As one of them put it, ‘If someone asks me to do something, I can’t say ‘‘that isn’t my job’’. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing’. Thus, by the mere fact of carrying out regular street patrols—something which police rarely did—wardens were likely to have demands placed on them that might generate ‘mission creep’. This outcome could, no doubt, have been predicted from one’s prior knowledge of demand-led policing. However, a second aspect of ‘mission creep’ was more interesting for, despite residual resistance to the scheme from within the police organisation, the main pressure towards mission creep came from police themselves. 4 The Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) was introduced under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Anti-social behaviour is defined as ‘a matter that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm, or distress to one or more persons not of the same household’. Applications for an ASBO can be made by the police or the local authority, the orders requiring a civil burden of proof. However, non-compliance with the prohibitions deemed necessary under the Order to protect people from further anti-social behaviour, is a criminal matter. For further discussion of the implications of the ASBO see Newburn (2002) and Von Hirsch and Shearing (2000).

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As the Police Training Officer who had been involved in delivering the warden induction programme, put it: ‘Mission creep is inevitable since the [over-stretched] police will place demands on wardens’. The same view was expressed by the Operations Director of the private security company involved in the scheme when he expressed concern that the police were ‘upping demand’ on the number of targets wardens were being asked to look out for. The Council’s Chief Executive also noted the police’s tendency to assume wardens would simply pick up the jobs that they were unable to deal with themselves. In his view, this was highly problematic: y dealing with maybe twenty or thirty youths y who have been drinking or may be on drugs y that’s not the role of Community Wardens. What I’ve said is that when you have likely criminal proceedings which will result from attendance at a scene that should either be in partnership with the police or it should be the police on their own. And if they’re not prepared to go, it’s not our job y we don’t have the powers. A third issue concerned wardens’ lack of legal powers to arrest or detain people. Such absence of powers could, as we shall see in a moment, be construed as a strength or a weakness. For one warden it was, undoubtedly, a weakness: You don’t have any authority at all. The only way you can make people y listen to you y is by your personality. This works y but there are some people [who need to be arrested]. The same warden went on to describe an instance in which she and her colleague had apprehended a youth engaged in trespass and criminal damage. The police had been called, but when the youth realised that the two wardens had no authority to detain him he ran away. As the warden put it: ‘He did a runner. It was just patheticy’. The issue of legal powers is, however, double-edged, something which may be illustrated in our fourth point, concerning the wardens’ role in intelligence-gathering. One of the most striking findings of the research was the extent to which people on the urban estates were willing to pass on information to wardens which they did not give to the police. Part of the reason for this was that police engaged in little face-toface patrol on the estates anyway and thus had limited opportunities to pick up information from the public. Yet, an equally important reason was that police-public relations on the estates were strained, people either mistrusting or being hostile to police officers. Consequently, little information was given and those who contemplated giving it had to consider the implications of doing so. As one warden put it Seen talking to police, they’ll definitely get their windows done [broken]. Seen talking to a warden, they could be talking about anything. This led to an odd situation. People who would not pass on information directly to police officers willingly gave it to wardens who, in turn, transmitted it to the police. As one of the Warden Supervisors said: ‘People must know what we’ll do with the information, but they [still] won’t tell the police’. To sum up: Wardens, it seems, were

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perceived by the public as different from police in certain critical respects, something which would almost certainly have been undermined had they been in possession of authoritative legal powers. They were given information because they provided a visible, uniformed, neutral and sympathetic presence on the street. As one warden expressed it People don’t [necessarily] want to give a statement. Ninety-nine per cent of the time they just want to give a bit of information y Sometimes the information is not about crime y they want to offload something ‘cos there’s nobody else in uniform to listen to them. Our fifth point also concerns intelligence. As the research was being completed, the local authority, the police and the various partner agencies involved in community safety programmes throughout the district were developing a multi-agency problem solving (MAPS) model. This model reflected the increased emphasis that has been placed on the policing of risk society (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997). Police and other partner agencies, it is said, are increasingly preoccupied with the collection, collation, and dissemination of information for risk management purposes. In effect, police organisation become part of a network of information-based expert systems seeking to produce knowledge for—and to collect reciprocal knowledge from—other agencies concerned with the provision of safety (Johnston, 2000). Though there is much to be said for this argument, one should not deny the organisational obstacles that might subvert the project. Police organisations do not have a good record when it comes to sharing information with partners. As the council official responsible for oversight of the scheme put it: The Fire Brigade are OK about sharing information. But there still seems to be a one-way sharing of information with the police. We give it to them but we don’t get much back. We give 100% and get 20% back y there are a lot of council resources being put into [such] activity y and if it’s not really generating any feedback y we should be saying ‘let’s look at it’. Clearly, if police are preoccupied with ‘owning’ rather than ‘sharing’ information, certain things are likely to follow. Specifically, warden schemes are unlikely to continue passing on information to police when nothing is fed back to the local authority. More generally, ‘ownership’ of information is not conducive to the ‘partnership’ principles upon which multi-agency, risk-oriented policing is predicated. Our final point identifies some of the tensions surrounding the future governance of community wardens, in particular, and of community policing/community safety, in general. We shall refer briefly to four aspects of this problem: ownership; coordination, legitimacy and finance. The first aspect is, in fact, an extension of our last point. The council official whom we referred to previously expressed concern that the police’s attitude to all new initiatives tended to follow a particular pattern. Typically, he said, they would begin by being indifferent, then, if the initiative worked, they would try to take it over. His fear was that the same pattern would be replicated in respect of wardens, something the Council would find unacceptable

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ythere is a tendency for some police officers to think in that way y we need to work hard with the police to educate them [that] this is a Council scheme, not an extra resource for the police The second aspect, concerning the coordination of community safety, was raised by the Council’s Chief Executive. He had been the key figure in setting up the Community Wardens as a public-private partnership and as such, was understandably, supportive of the scheme’s effectiveness and of the professionalism of its staff. It was somewhat surprising, therefore, that he regarded it as a ‘second best solution’. His first reason for saying this was to do with community safety coordination. Small local authorities, like his own, he suggested, found it difficult to deliver ‘joined up’ services because of the complex of county, district and parish divisions that existed. His long term view was that the drive towards regional government would produce large, regional police authorities (in this case a North West Police Authority having responsibility for a North West Constabulary) capable of coordinating the various components that delivered community safety. This, he suggested, would make possible the development of a ‘second tier’ of policing comparable to the Police Municipale in Spain—something he regarded as preferable to wardens. His other reason for favouring a police solution was related to the issue of warden legitimacy. The very fact that wardens were not police officers, he suggested, posed certain insuperable problems. I think that with 360 local authorities in England and Wales doing this [i.e. establishing warden schemes], somebody is going to make a mistake y [my nightmare is that] one of the guys or girls y to use that lovely Scouse [Liverpool] expression y ‘‘goes on the rob’’, burgles a house, gets caught y it leaves the scheme’s reputation in tatters. Police can, to some degree, explain their corrupt acts by the ‘‘bad apple theory’’. Wardens—who are easily labeled ‘‘cowboys’’ can’t and the reputation of the scheme would be destroyed. The final aspect concerns finance. Like the Chief Executive, the local police commander had his own personal nightmare A concern I’ve got is that if, at some future time, the District Council experiences budget cuts y and they cut the warden scheme or some part of it y what am I going to do y? Who’s going to fill that gap? There might be some expectation that police officers will have to do what people have got accustomed to wardens doing. Those are unknown areas. We haven’t got a clue what might happen y which is why in some parts of [the county] we are piloting alternative warden schemes y Northern Division are going to start a pilot in which we use [six] traffic wardens as community wardens on a specific housing estate. That’s different. They are our employees and nobody can cut them except us. One of the dodgy thing about all of this partnership working is that any partner can pull funds. This final comment was important since the solution proposed—for the police to find a way of delivering patrol services ‘in-house’, thereby, retaining sovereignty over

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community policing—was the direction in which one strand of official thinking was shifting. We consider this issue amongst other police responses to pluralisation further in the following section.

3. Police and security governance In recent years a number of British chief constables have commented on the challenges posed to front-line policing by security pluralisation. In this section we look at four such analyses, each of them containing an explicit or implicit model of security governance. After reviewing these models we conclude by focusing on three issues. First, we consider the concept of the ‘extended family’ as applied to security governance. Second, we explore the extent to which the ‘extended family’ analogy deals with some of the issues raised previously in this paper. Finally we compare the trajectory of the British police response to pluralisation with that found in Stenning’s (1989) analysis of the Canadian experience. Let us begin, however, by reviewing our four models. 3.1. Police as coordinators of local security Blair (1998) was the first senior police officer in Britain to address, systematically, the challenges posed for the police by security pluralisation. His paper questioned the dominant view—subscribed to by both the Police Federation and the Association of Chief Police Officers—that the police should retrain a monopoly over security and that, even in the event of regulation, there should be no role for the private security industry in policing.5 Countering this, Blair argued that various policy initiatives had already eroded the police’s monopoly. Not only were local authorities required to pursue ‘Best Value’ policies, thereby exposing police and other public service providers to market and other forms of competition, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, by formalizing the concept of ‘partnership’, had removed from chief constables their exclusive right to set local strategies for community safety. As a result, Blair maintained, the police had to abandon their claim to a monopoly of the patrol function, something which they had, in any case, lost years before. Having rejected the monopoly model of patrol, Blair proposed a pluralistic one. The model proposed was significant in several respects. First, it emphasised multiagency delivery, the patrol function being undertaken by police, Special Constables, municipal security forces, privates security guards, volunteer groups and the like. Second, it emphasised multi-functionality, its focus being on the delivery of generic community safety functions rather than on narrower crime-oriented goals. Third, it 5

After 30 years of campaigning for private security regulation in England and Wales, the Private Security Industry Act was finally passed in 2001. The Act establishes a Security Industry Authority responsible for the licensing of individuals working in those parts of the industry that are subject to regulation (see Button, 2002).

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envisaged the police officer as a problem-solver occupying a focal point in inter-agency cooperation. However, it was the fourth component of Blair’s model that was the most crucial. Not only would local police constables be responsible (as ‘beat managers’) for the day-to-day management and coordination of plural agencies, the police themselves would bear responsibility for governing the security network: Whether y patrol, beyond present police resources, is provided by local authority employees or by private security y the police service should provide the governance of this security, acting as guarantor to the public, that all of these employees, in terms of recruitment, training and service delivery, operate at an acceptable standard (Blair, 1998, p. 13). In order to demonstrate that agencies had met such acceptable standards, Blair proposed that local police organisations should award ‘kite marks’ to accredited security providers. These would be displayed as ‘police compliant’ logos on security uniforms and vehicles. In Blair’s (1998) view, the justification for police, rather than democratic, governance of plural security networks lay in two factors. First, that the police are relatively immune from the political factionalism that dominates local communities. Second, that the police service has a history of being more tolerant than local communities of disadvantaged minorities needing protection. 3.2. Maintaining the status quo O’Byrne’s (1998) analysis was written as a direct response to Blair’s argument. In his view the critical issue for the police is how to reduce the public’s fear of crime and perception of threat. One solution commonly proposed to achieve this end is increased patrol. However, in O’Byrne’s opinion patrol is a red-herring, politicians and the police having for years stoked the public’s demand to see ‘more police officers on the beat’, while knowing full-well that better outcomes would be served by alternative means. The provision of random patrol, he insists, is incapable of effecting fear reduction, evidence showing how difficult it is to achieve a sufficiently high level of visible patrol in today’s sprawling communities. Private security is unlikely to resolve this problem since, although it is not subject to all of the factors which affect the cost of police patrol, it remains subject to some, such as providing the large numbers of personnel necessary to cover geographically dispersed communities on a 16 or 24 h basis. In addition to that, O’Byrne (1998) challenges Blair’s analysis on three fronts: that the police function is indivisible and cannot be parceled out between plural agencies (i.e. that, in effect, it constitutes an inherent monopoly); that private security is inherently inequitable, irrespective of how it is governed; and that, in any case, people will not be willing to pay for private patrols. For that reason, he suggests, the key to success lies in using the community itself, with the police as catalyst, to deal with quality of life issues and, by so doing, to reduce public fear and perception of threat. This, he suggests can be achieved

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through effective performance management and by utilizing the structures contained within the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. 3.3. The ‘police extended family’ In a recent analysis Blair (2002) has revised his earlier position. In London, he argues, factors such as the ‘war on terrorism’, the growth of drugs markets and rising gun crime have coincided with a crisis in public confidence in the police. Crime and community safety have become the main priorities for Londoners. Yet, faced with rapidly escalating demands, the Metropolitan Police Service has been unable to fulfill public expectations in respect of visible police patrol. Whereas, previously, Blair (1998) saw the solution lying in police coordination of plural security networks, he now contends that, due to these changing conditions, the police must, themselves, employ a majority proportion of those engaged in patrol. Failure to meet people’s demands for visible policing will, he suggests, exacerbate public fears, causing individuals and their political representatives to ‘vote with their wallets’ by opting into private security. The most serious danger, he suggests, is one where the London boroughs choose to set up their own police forces—either municipally run or contracted out—which, coupled with the growth of private security patrols and warden schemes, would result in the ‘Balkanization’ of policing in London. This analysis is inextricably linked to Government policies influenced by the Dutch municipal security initiatives described earlier, the object of which is to develop the ‘police extended family’. The aim of this model is to ensure that the police organisation retains its role as the dominant supplier—arguably, as the monopoly supplier—of services and human resources within a locality. Central to this policy has been the initial provision of central government funding to support the appointment of Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), first within the Metropolitan Police, later more widely in police forces in England and Wales. PCSOs are uniformed civil staff with limited legal powers6 whose function is to provide visible patrol for purposes of public reassurance. Blair gives the following rationale for the employment of PCSOs within the Metropolitan Police: We believe that by giving such staff the Met badge of excellence, by ensuring they work under the direction and control of constables, by offering an auxiliary service with powers, we will be able to persuade local authorities and others to spend their money on this kind of service, rather than on schemes without Met backing, without Met intelligence, without Met standards and without Met-based powers (Blair, 2002, p. 31). Considered in the context of our previous discussion Blair’s analysis holds that the deployment of PCSOs will facilitate the reconsolidation of police sovereignty over community policing in London. 6

See Police Reform Act 2002 Schedule 4 (Powers Exercisable by Police Civilians) Part 1 (Community Support Officers).

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3.4. Further extending the family? In contrast Childs (2001a, b) poses the question of whether, in the light of the Private Security Industry Act 2001, the police should adopt a more positive approach to the industry. In particular, he asks, ‘why should the police service retain its monopoly over policing’? Might there not be benefits to be gained from the police seeking to work in collaboration and partnership with a well-run private sector capable of picking up the costs of selecting, training, equipping and supervising staff employed in hitherto ‘traditional’ police roles? Rather than invoking the mantra of the ‘omnicompetent’ police officer, Childs suggests, the service might do better to ask itself certain ‘uncomfortable’ questions. For example, could not some private security personnel be granted limited legal powers, thus serving as a conduit to conventional police resources as and when necessary? Could the police not reorganise some of their services so that they are better coordinated with those delivered by the private sector? And, most controversially, might there be a case for rethinking the fiercely protected ‘operational independence’ of police in an era of partnership governance? Child’s position is particularly interesting since, having proposed that certain patrol functions could be devolved to the commercial sector, he accepts the financial implications of that proposition: that the police should, thereby, lose funding for work they no longer provide. The implication of Child’s argument is, therefore, clear. By opening up the policing market to autonomous commercial providers whose services would be coordinated with—but not subordinated to—those provided by police, the security ‘family’ is extended beyond the ambit of the police organisation. As a result of this shift (from the ‘police extended family’ to what might more properly be called ‘the extended family of security’) the police lose any automatic claim to enjoy sovereignty over community policing.

4. Conclusion What can the preceding discussion tell us about the current state of British security governance? Let us take, first, the concept of the (extended) family as an analogy of governance. This concept has been at the forefront of official thinking about how to address the issues arising from security pluralisation. In some respects this is understandable since, at the common-sense level, the concept of the ‘extended family’ has connotations similar to those described earlier in respect of consensual versions of community policing. The message of the analogy is clear: plurality may be governed—and conflict mollified—through the application of the principle of inclusivity. The reasoning seems to be as follows. The ‘nuclear’ family of sworn police officers should be extended through the incorporation of its (not-too-distant) cousins. Once that has happened, members of the extended police family will work cooperatively with one another because what unites them as family members is greater than whatever may divide them. What we have, in effect, is a ‘blood is thicker than water’ theory of governance.

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Yet, in many respects, the choice of this particular analogy is strikingly ill-suited for the purpose intended of it. After all, sociologists have been telling us for decades that we need to reassess our conventional (cosy) assumptions about the family. Thus, they insist, while the family may indeed provide emotional support for its members and contribute to societal stability, it may also be associated with pathological conditions such as domestic violence and child abuse. Far from being a site of exclusive consent and cooperation, therefore, the family may also be a source of conflict and division. Added to that, the conceptual apparatus of the family is itself contestable. Here, a particularly telling criticism noted by sociologists has been the inability of the ‘family’ concept to account for the plurality and diversity of different household forms. As a result, academic commentators have sought to expand the family concept in order to take into account ‘lone parent’, ‘step’, ‘empty-nest’, ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ forms. What is true for family sociology is equally true for security governance. As we saw in the previous section, it is possible to construct alternative, maybe even incompatible, family forms—such as the ‘police extended family’ versus ‘the extended family of security’—while remaining entirely consistent with the domestic analogy. Considered at the abstract level, then, the extended family concept may offer us no better solution to the problems of security governance than those offered by consensual models of community policing. This fact is well-demonstrated in the provisions for establishing community safety accreditation schemes contained in the Police Reform Act 2002.7 Accredited Community Safety Officers (ACSOs) who, like PCSOs, may be deployed within these schemes, are civilian personnel accredited by the police to undertake community safety duties. Thus, while PCSOs and ACSOs may work alongside one another, the former are directly employed by the police; the latter merely subject to arm’s length regulation by the police. The purpose of the accreditation process is to enable further development of the ‘police extended family’. By giving the police powers of accreditation, it is anticipated that their sovereignty over local security networks will be consolidated. Yet, the future of these arrangements is unpredictable. First, it is by no means clear that an already over-committed police will want to engage in a bureaucratic accreditation process. Second, it is uncertain that security providers will want to meet the substantial costs of gaining accreditation. Third, the fact that police will have responsibility for regulating security providers with whom they are competing directly for a share of the local security market is unlikely either to clarify or to resolve the problems of security governance (see Crawford and Lister, 2003 for a discussion of some of these points). Rather than foreclosing discussion, then, the extended family analogy leaves unresolved the future direction of security networks. It also leaves unresolved some of the issues we raised in Section 2 of this paper. Take the question of the police function. Here, repeated attempts have been made to demarcate the functions undertaken by sworn police officers from those undertaken by municipal and commercial security personnel. The extended family model attempts to resolve this 7

Such schemes may only be established after consultation between the chief constable, the local police authority and all local authorities whose boundaries fall within the police force’s territorial jurisdiction.

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problem once and for all: first, by excluding certain (non-accredited) persons from the police family; then, having done so, by introducing ‘tiered’ or calibrated powers within that family. The PCSO initiative—currently made up of two-tiers though, by no means incompatible with the introduction of multiple ones—is a clear expression of this governing rationale. Under it, police officers have constabulary powers; PCSOs have limited powers; and others, subject to accreditation by the police, will probably possess only citizen powers. However, this legalistic solution is unlikely to resolve the issue of police-led ‘mission drift discussed earlier. For if that occurs—and it will, surely, continue to do as long as public demand for security continues to escalate—the supposed ‘irreducibility of the police function’ is rendered less and less tenable. Neither is the extended family model likely to resolve the thorny issue of the police’s involvement in partnership governance. For, as our discussion of the community wardens experience indicated, the police constantly veer between the need to engage on an equal footing with partner agencies (in order to progress the information and intelligence requirements of today’s risk-based forms of policing) and the need to ‘take over’ successful partner initiatives (in order to defend the traditional boundaries of police sovereignty over security). Yet, the extended family model is no guarantee of future police sovereignty, something which is no better illustrated than in the PCSO example. Here, a crucial issue concerns the future funding base of PCSOs. While central government finance is guaranteed in the short term, the long term expectation is that PCSOs will be financed directly by local authorities keen to ‘buy in’ to successful local schemes. Should this happen, of course, a situation will arise where local communities are paying directly for community policing. Under those circumstances community representatives are likely to demand an effective say in the governance of patrol. Once again, as in the conflict-ridden years of the 1980s, we may find local politicians challenging police commanders about their right to exercise operational independence over local policing policy. This time, however, should local politicians not get the answers they want, they may, indeed ‘vote with their wallets’, deciding to opt for modes of security provision—including commercial forms—that are more directly open to local political influence. In short, we may end up rekindling the same controversies about police accountability that dominated British local government throughout the 1980s: conflicts which, it was assumed, had been stilled by successful waves of governmentdriven centralisation. So, what can we say about the trajectory of the British police’s response to the pluralisation of security? Here, it is useful to reflect back upon Stenning’s (1989) analysis of the Canadian police’s reaction to commercial security growth. In Stenning’s view this reaction went through a number of distinguishable stages. First, police simply refused to accept that private policing was a legitimate topic for discussion. Next, faced with the security industry’s obvious expansion, a stage of ‘grudging recognition’—accompanied by ‘denigration’—was reached. During this stage police also began to contemplate the limits of their organisational capacity and came to recognise that, in the future, malls, public housing complexes and private condominiums would be policed privately. Such recognition was coupled, however,

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with an insistence that private security was engaged in mere property protection rather than ‘real policing’. This despite evidence that virtually no function performed by public police was not also performed by private ones. A third stage, involving competition and open hostility, was also characterised by confusion and ambivalence on the police’s part. On the one hand, the growth of private security threatened their claim to enjoy a legitimate monopoly over security. On the other hand, private security provided them with both a source of post-retirement employment and a potential solution to the problem of how to meet growing public demand for policing during times of fiscal crisis. The result was a mixture of reserve, aggression and hypocrisy, public police criticizing their private counterparts for being incompetent, unprofessional and corrupt, while simultaneously developing closer ties with them. The next stage involved increased demands being made for controls to be placed upon the activities of private security. Public police were often at the forefront of these demands and, ‘despite the obvious potential for conflict of interests involved’ (Stenning, 1989, p. 175) were often assigned the responsibility for administering controls. By the end of the 1970s, every Canadian province had introduced legislation regulating some sectors of the contract security industry. The basic rationale of regulation seemed to be that ‘private policing could at best be regarded as a necessary evil, which should be the subject of strict governmental control and public police supervision, and kept within as narrow bounds as possible’ (Stenning, 1989, p. 176). By the early 1980s, Stenning suggested, some enlightened police managers had reached the stage of active partnership, recognising that the expertise and experience of the private sector in certain areas of policing was greater than that of the public sector. Finally, speculating on the future, Stenning (1989) suggested that since public police have much to learn from their commercial counterparts, equal partnership should be the desired end. From what we have said in this paper, it would appear that the trajectory of the British police’s reaction to private security and to the wider issue of security pluralisation is more convoluted than was demonstrated in the Canadian case. While few police in Britain now deny the onset of pluralisation (Stenning’s Stage One), many rank and file officers, together with their senior colleagues, still exhibit ‘grudging recognition’ to plural policing, notwithstanding their increased awareness of the limits of police organisational capacity (Stage Two). Others either manifest open hostility to pluralisation or seek to compete with it in order better to defend the police’s claim to enjoy a monopoly over security provision (Stage Three). Yet others, recognising the incremental encroachment of pluralisation, call for it to be subjected to increased controls (Stage Four). A small minority of police contemplate the possibility of engaging in active partnership with commercial and other providers (Stage Five). In fact, this convoluted reaction to security governance on the part of police merely reflects similar convolutions on the part of the British state. Indeed, the most striking feature of the last decade has been the state’s attempt to consolidate its hold over security governance through policies of centralisation while, simultaneously, devolving elements of authority through policies of dispersal (Johnston, 2000, pp. 158–163). Rather than conceptualizing these processes in terms of state

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sponsored ‘steering’ and ‘rowing’ policies—a view which, whatever its descriptive appeal, over emphasises the state’s capacity to ensure its own sovereignty by endowing state institutions with unambiguous interests and an unlimited capacity for achieving them—Clifford Shearing and I (Johnston and Shearing, 2003) have adopted a nodal-network based approach to governance. The implication of this approach is that no single governmental node within a network is given analytical priority. Rather, the specific ways in which nodes relate to one another will vary empirically across time and space. This means that, within networks, the different nodes may engage in various forms of cooperation and conflict. In Britain, for example, there has been mutual hostility between the state and the commercial security sectors. Yet, there has also been both commercial sponsorship of state security and state sponsorship of commercial security, confirmation of the fact that resources may flow across nodes in various different ways (Grabosky, forthcoming). The nodal model implies that proposed ‘solutions’ to the problem of security governance will vary according to the specifics of local history, politics and culture. The convoluted nature of the police’s response to pluralisation in Britain is, therefore, a product of both generic factors concerning pluralisation and specific factors peculiar to Britain. This suggests that any attempt to invoke a simple (consensual) solution to the problem of security governance—either through the concept of the ‘police extended family’ or through the consensus-based model of community policing that preceded it—is unconvincing. The concept of the ‘police extended family’ is an expression of the problem of security governance rather than a solution to it.

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