Autonomy, Regulation and the Police Beat
| Date | 01 March 2000 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900104 |
| Published date | 01 March 2000 |
| Author | Willem De Lint |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
AUTONOMY, REGULATION AND
THE POLICE BEAT
WILLEM DELINT
University of Windsor, Canada
ABSTRACT
In this article, the historical development of the police beat in the context of liberal
governance is explored. As a mechanism of surveillance, the beat was a continuation
of rules of the nightly watch, characterized by a tight control over watchmen by fixing
person, post and time. As a site of police autonomy, the patrol beat facilitated the fur-
therance of the enterprise of the amateur constabulary and cultivated police officer
dominion by matching police authority to territorial imperatives. In this way, disci-
pline and autonomy have been carved into the mobilization of police in an economy
or surveillance and discretion. The legacy of night and day patrol offered an initial
temporal organization to this economy, with prohibitions and permissions by time
and place. Rather than compromising liberal distinctions, this patrol bifurcation
allowed their perseverance by structuring police capacity to intervene into the lives
of citizens. But while the legacy of liberal autonomy in the police beat has served to
maintain police discretion in the short run, technological innovations offering
enhanced time and space compression may in the long run threaten that autonomy
and, with it, an important grounding of liberal consent policing.
LIBERAL CONSENT policing can be seen as a delicate balancing of
respectful protection and intrusive penetration. The agency and
agents of public policing have been invested with dual obligations
consisting of a liberal respect for autonomy and self-governance, and an
administrative claim to knowledge in the collective interest in the security
of the polity. Every category of liberal consent policing is subject to intense
scrutiny in its scripting and delivery of authority and restraint, penetration
and protection.
By and large, it is assumed that the maintenance of this balance is ensured
from without, as part of the checks and balances of a liberal governance.
External political and judicial oversight counterbalances the breeding of a
will-to-power of police institutions. Saving such oversight, there is no natural
limit to the expansionist appetite pushing the knowledge and penetration
capacities of police. Police agencies and agents in their very nature have not,
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200003) 9:1 Copyright © 2000
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 9(1), 55–83; 011673
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this assumption goes, taken liberalism seriously: they will regularly forge new
accesses and cultivate new information territories to maximize the ‘policing’
aspect of the terms ‘liberal consent policing’. A lineage of police authority
conditions the patrol officer to the tactics, permissions, and exigencies of
bureaucratic surveillance.
However, external and administrative oversight cannot be aimed singularly
at the complete knowledge of police agents in their every action. Neither can
the agents on the ground be seen as capacitated and identified in the singular
aim of expanded penetrative capacities for a knowledge juggernaut. Know-
ledge and capacity must be administered selectively. A lineage of constabu-
lary authority and enterprise serves to ground patrol activity in the protection
and respect of commerce, citizenry independence and self-regulation, pro-
viding an institutional basis for instrumental knowledge limitations.
This article will decipher the scripting of dual obligations in the mobiliz-
ation of police in one specific site: the patrol beat. The distribution of regu-
lation and autonomy will be analyzed to present the alternative view that in
this site liberal consent penetrates policing to the core, at the point of appli-
cation. It will be argued that the distribution of police agents in the patrol
beat has been achieved through a political economy of time and place.
Security and respect, and authority and penetration are apportioned in patrol
and detective work according to out-of-place, out-of-time schedules of per-
mission. This maintenance of protections to legitimate commerce on one
hand, and the penetration, accessing and disposal of ‘contrapreneurs’ and
‘sumptuary outsiders’ (or problem populations)1on the other, represents
ordering and detecting versus protecting and peacekeeping functions.
Finding a balance of restraint and penetration is at the heart of the craft of
patrol; the bureaucratic surveillance of the police officer makes out-of-place,
out-of-time activity police deviance but can also leave it as ‘good police
work’, or work which shows initiative and takes calculated risks.
If a traditional distribution matches police visibility and penetration to
time-and-place expectations of respectable and disreputable commercial
activity, presently the tight interweaving of day-and-night activity in work
and leisure, and legitimate and illegitimate commerce makes the distribution
of respectful protection and penetrative authority more coterminous and ‘re-
embedded’ (cf. Giddens, 1991). The consequence this may have to liberal
consent policing is only just beginning to be seen and has yet to be adequately
addressed.
THEORIZING THE ORIGIN OF LIBERAL CONSENT POLICING
WHIGS, REVISIONISTS, AND GOVERNMENTALITY
Liberal consent policing may be understood as an institution for the preven-
tion and detection of crime which is staffed by public officials, publicly
accountable, and subject to the rule of law. The emergence of the modern
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