Managing Risk and Preempting Immorality in Private Employment of Public Police
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918810375 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Author | Mathew Zaia,Kevin Walby,Randy K Lippert |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2019, Vol. 28(6) 794–816
Managing Risk and
ª The Author(s) 2018
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Preempting Immorality
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663918810375
in Private Employment
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of Public Police
Randy K Lippert
University of Windsor, Canada
Kevin Walby
University of Winnipeg, Canada
Mathew Zaia
University of Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
This article examines risk management and moral regulation of private employment of
public police (or PEPP). Drawing on a study of 104 North American police departments
and analysis of interviews with police and private employers, police policies and pro-
cedures, and police assignment logs, we first identify PEPP contexts. We then argue that
risk management is as much of as by public police officers. This risk management is
sometimes preempted by moral regulation of police officers focused on objects, spaces,
and suspect employers and which partially aims to preserve police legitimacy. We then
discern four means of managing risk: department-coordinated assignments, officer
reporting for superior assessment, private user liability insurance for temporarily hired
officers, and opportunistic third-party commercial brokers. The article makes an
empirical contribution by exploring risk management and moral regulation of PEPP and a
conceptual contribution by lending more understanding to risk management and moral
regulation in sociolegal studies.
Corresponding author:
Randy K Lippert, Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Windsor, 401 Sunset Ave, Windsor,
ON N9B 3P4, Canada.
Email: lippert@uwindsor.ca
Lippert et al.
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Keywords
Immorality, legitimacy, moral regulation, paid detail, private employment, public police,
risk management, security
Introduction
In North America, most public police departments permit hiring of officers by external –
often private – organizations to provide security detail (Giles, 2017). Similar arrange-
ments are in place in the United Kingdom1 (McLelland, 2016), Australia (Ayling and
Shearing, 2008; Robertson, 2013), and Ireland (Garda Inspectorate, 2015) for major
private concerts, festivals, as well as sporting and similar events. Police departments
typically assess each event or location before making officers available. For example, in
the United Kingdom, ‘[e]very event has a different category of policing demand, based
on . . . the level of risk involved’ (Garda Inspectorate, 2015: 352), although how that level
is assessed remains opaque. This private employment of public police (PEPP) and the
issues it raises are emerging internationally. Drawing on an empirical study of PEPP in
104 North American police departments, this article examines police officers as subjects
of risk management and moral regulation in these private settings, a realm relevant to
broader sociolegal and policing literatures. In an era of growing exchange between
private and public police sectors (Button and Wakefield, 2018; White, 2012), our interest
is in how department superiors conceive of police officers in private employment sites,
the related risk management and moral regulation efforts (to avoid risk and moral
spoilage), and their implications.
Based on the analysis of police policies and interviews, this article argues these public
police officers are privately hired for risk management purposes, but the risk stemming
from PEPP from the police department’s perspective becomes tied to risk management
of officers themselves. In PEPP, risk management is as much of as by public police
officers. This management is sometimes preempted by a department’s moral regulation
of police officers in relation to PEPP, which entails linkages of moralized elements such
as objects, spaces, and suspect employers. This moral regulation is evinced in police
organizations’ preemptive imaginings of what might happen, not the public’s actual
reaction to seeing a police officer working in, with, or for morally spoiling elements.
We suggest that sometimes when officers manage risk for private employers via their
presence, the risk posed to officers and to the department creates a tension that must be
addressed. The resulting preemptive decisions can erode police legitimacy (Coˆte´-Lus-
sier, 2013; Tyler, 2004) and a sense of the public good too. We contend this is because
police officers are sometimes halted from entering the spaces where their police depart-
ments identify a greater likelihood of violent and other crime and thus known to require a
police presence. We then identify four overlapping means of managing risk related to
officers employed at these private sites: department-coordinated paid detail assignment,
officer reporting for superior assessment, private user liability insurance for temporarily
hired public police officers, and third-party commercial brokers. This article makes an
empirical contribution by revealing details of risk management and moral regulation of
PEPP across many police departments and a conceptual contribution by refining
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Social & Legal Studies 28(6)
understanding of risk management and moral regulation especially as they relate to
public police legitimacy.
Conceptualizing Risk Management and Moral Regulation
In a thorough explication of risk in criminology (see also O’Malley, 2008, 2010, 2016),
Garland (2001: 51) asserts that ‘risks are estimates of the likelihood impact of dangers’
and that ‘[u]nlike dangers or hazards, risks never exist outside of our knowledge of
them . . . ’ (2001: 52). Further, he comments: ‘Risks are relationships of possible adver-
sity, calculated and assessed by someone’ (2001: 53). But morality is not so calculable
(Hier, 2011). We consider the PEPP realm as one where uniformed public police offi-
cers, who are thought to be visibly upholding the rule of law and through whom justice is
served, enter a private employment world where the aims of employers and perils present
are largely hidden from the public and oversight (also see Hobbs et al., 2000). This
causes concern within the police organization about risk, including moral and physical
risk, as well as about legitimacy.
Public police are entrusted to maintain the rule of law, rendering work for specific
private organizations risky. As one news media commentator noted, this includes repu-
tational risk: ‘These “duties” don’t involve any policing whatsoever, yet they are paid as
if they are doing police work . . . This denigrates the reputation of the police’ (Casey and
Loriggio, 2015). In PEPP, public officers are imagined arriving morally pure, but with a
potential to become morally tainted by what they encounter in private employment. We
know little about how increased risk and moral spoilage occurs.
Work on private security is also relevant to moral regulation, despite not necessarily
embracing this concept. Loader et al. (2014) invoke the notion of a moral economy in
relation to how contract private security, but not necessarily public police working as
private security, is morally tainted. Other work has revealed how private security work is
deemed ‘dirty work’ (Lofstrand et al., 2015), including Hobbs et al.’s (2002, 2003) work
on bar bouncers and how they both manage risk of violence and are themselves a source
of risk to be managed (also see Hadfield, 2008). Other private security arrangements are
revealed to be moralized, as Loader and White (2018) show in their account of industry
award celebrations of heroism of private security guards that works as a kind of self-
legitimization. Elsewhere Lofstrand et al. (2017) similarly write on private security ‘as a
moral drama’. For PEPP, moral tainting and an assumed need for regulation due to its
‘dirty’ nature may be less inherent to the personnel involved (police departments and
officers rather than contract firms and guards), and more to the spaces, practices, and
objects they regularly encounter in the provision of this private (rather than public)
security. PEPP also threatens to damage police legitimacy since there may be some
moral spillover that is not as easily avoided as in simple contract private security, a
point we return to in the conclusion.
Hier (2008: 180) notes ‘all forms of moralization involve one group of people acting
on the conduct of others’. Hunt (1999) provides a framework for the study of such
moralization. For Hunt (1997: 280, emphasis added), the ‘“moral” dimension is not a
distinctive characteristic of the regulatory target but rather is found in the linkage
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posited among subject, object, practices and their projected social consequences’. He
writes further
Moral discourse links a moralized subject with some moralized object or practice in such a
way as to impute some wider socially harmful consequences unless . . . subjected to appro-
priate regulation. Moral regulation . . . is relational. (Hunt, 1997: 280)
This means that there is nothing inherently immoral about objects, spaces, and practices.
We suggest below, however, that if police officers are ‘subjects’, then ‘object’ or ‘prac-
tice’ includes persons (as objects) and spatializing practices (or spaces) as well and that
these become factored into police administrators’ regulation of frontline police officers
in PEPP.
Douglas (1990) instructs that risk is a component of moral responsibility lan-
guage, and thus risk and morality are intimately linked (see also Ericson and Doyle,
2003: 6). Moral regulation often demands risk discourses, but the converse is not
necessarily true. Hunt (2003: 165) argues ‘risk analysis has...
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