Plural Policing and Democratic Governance
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900301 |
| Date | 01 September 2000 |
| Published date | 01 September 2000 |
| Author | Ian Loader |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
PLURAL POLICING AND
DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE
IAN LOADER
Department of Criminology, Keele University, UK
ABSTRACT
This article asks how we might best come to terms with – and seek to govern – the
multiplicity of institutional forms that are now involved in the delivery of policing
and security services and technologies. I begin by documenting briefly the network
of providers that constitute the policing field locally, nationally and transnationally,
before specifying how the fragmentation and pluralization of policing has called radi-
cally into doubt a number of received (liberal) suppositions about the relationship
between police and government. I then attempt – drawing constructively yet critically
on recent theorizations of governance and ‘governmentality’ – to make sense of some
contemporary reconfigurations of policing within and beyond the state, and tease out
their implications for questions of democratic legitimacy. Finally, I outline the con-
tours of an institutional politics for the regulation of policing that is both normatively
adequate to the task of connecting policing to processes of public will-formation and
sociologically plausible under the altered conditions of plural, networked policing.
INTRODUCTION
The question of the state is quickly disappearing behind us, the question of
democratic regulation of actually existing processes of social control is what
this new fin de siècle seems to be placing squarely in front of us. (Melossi, 1997:
73)
WE ARE LIVINGin the midst of a potentially far-reaching trans-
formation in the means by which order and security are maintained
in liberal democratic societies, one that is giving rise to the frag-
mentation and diversification of policing provision, and ushering in a
plethora of agencies and agents, each with particular kinds of responsibility
for the delivery of policing and security services and technologies. What we
might call a shift from police to policing has seen the sovereign state – hitherto
considered focal to both provision and accountability in this field – recon-
figured as but one node of a broader, more diverse ‘network of power’
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200009) 9:3 Copyright © 2000
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 9(3), 323–345; 013775
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 9(3)
(Castells, 1997: 304). Sure enough, this network continues to encompass the
direct provision and supervision of policing by institutions of national and
local government. But it now also extends – as we shall see – to private polic-
ing forms secured through government; to transnational police arrangements
taking place above government; to markets in policing and security services
unfolding beyond government; and to policing activities engaged in by citi-
zens below government. We inhabit a world of plural, networked policing.
These developments call radically into doubt a number of received ways
of thinking about policing and its governance. In terms of provision, they
suggest that we can no longer adequately make sense of policing (if, indeed,
we ever could) as the attempt of a sovereign body (the state) to exercise
control over a bounded territory by means of a single institution (the police)
in which is vested a monopoly over the use of legitimate violence – signifi-
cant though that body and that institution are likely to remain. They call
attention instead to the appearance of a multiplicity of agencies, relationships,
programmes and techniques by which the ordering of social life is carried out.
In terms of regulation, these transformations indicate that we can no longer
solely concern ourselves with how the public police can be made accountable
to government, whether by legal, democratic or – as has been prominent of
late – managerialist means. The pluralization of policing has generated a situ-
ation in which established intra-organizational modes of accountability (and
their supporting structures of thought) are rendered limited and inadequate,
and where novel policing forms are fast outstripping the capacity of existing
institutional arrangements to monitor and control them. The world of plural
policing remains, at best, weakly or obscurely accountable.
Fragmented, diverse, networked policing is to all intents and purposes here
to stay (indeed, current developments serve in many respects merely to
accentuate and extend what has in fact long been a world of multiple pro-
vision; Johnston, 1992), such that it has become sociologically implausible to
seek to defend or resurrect a field constituted by one sole state provider. Yet
far from being robbed of their import by current developments, the ques-
tions – pertaining to legitimacy, effectiveness, equity, human rights and so
forth – that have long vexed discussions of police policy and (mal)practice in
liberal democratic societies press themselves with renewed force under the
altered conditions of plural policing. The precise value and purchase of this
received democratic lexicon under such conditions remains, however, both
unclear and underelaborated. How – if at all – can public interest consider-
ations be made to count in shaping the diverse network of policing providers
that is presently emerging? On what basis might citizens be able to seek a
‘fair’ share of, or voice their concerns about, the multiple policing forms that
increasingly impact upon the quality of their lives? How might the plurality
of agencies and agents that now constitute the policing field locally, nation-
ally and transnationally adequately be rendered responsive to democratic
audiences?
My aim in this article is to address these questions, to which end I proceed
as follows: I begin by documenting the network of providers that constitute
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LOADER: POLICING AND GOVERNANCE
325
the emerging policing field, before specifying how the diversification of
policing calls radically into question certain received (liberal) ways of think-
ing that have tended to limit thought and action in this domain to the task of
rendering the police accountable to government. I then attempt – drawing
constructively yet critically on recent theorizations of governance and ‘gov-
ernmentality’ – to make sense of some contemporary reconfigurations of
policing within and beyond the state, and tease out their implications for
questions of democratic legitimacy. I conclude by sketching the contours of
an institutional politics for the regulation of policing that is both normatively
adequate to the task of connecting policing to processes of public will-
formation and sociologically plausible under the altered conditions of plural
policing.
POLICE, GOVERNMENT AND BEYOND: PLURAL POLICING AND
THE EXHAUSTION OF SOME RECEIVED IDEAS
In political theory we have yet to cut off the king’s head. (Foucault, 1980: 121)
A network, by definition, has nodes, not a center. (Castells, 1998: 332)
Our ways of thinking about policing have for the better part of two centuries
been closely associated with particular state-centred modes of theorizing
government. They have rested on the presumption – derived most immedi-
ately from the sociology of Max Weber (1972: 78) but with antecedents dating
back to the political theory of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin (Walker, 1999)
– that the defining feature of the modern sovereign state is its monopoly of
legitimate force within given spatial boundaries, a monopoly that is princi-
pally vested – with regard to internal threats to security at least – in the dedi-
cated, uniformed body we have come to know as the police. While it has long
been recognized that policing – or social control – is constituted by a complex
of formal and informal practices and sanctions, the most socially significant
part of that activity has overwhelmingly come to be thought of as a special-
ist enterprise located in an institution ‘through which the state asserts its
exclusive or pre-eminent title to the use or threat of coercion against dangers
from within its territory’ (Walker, 1999: 75). This institution has, moreover,
come to be closely if paradoxically tied to the production of security within
liberal democratic societies – the police representing both a guarantor of the
security upon which the exercise of liberty depends, and a potent, ever-
present threat to those very same liberties (Berki, 1986).
Thus it is that we have received a set of liberal (and lately neoliberal) dis-
courses and associated institutional arrangements that have as their central
preoccupation the precise task of limiting and seeking to control the activi-
ties of the police by finding means of rendering them accountable through
and/or to the mechanisms and institutions of government. These means have
generally assumed one or other (or some combination) of the following
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 9(3)
forms: (1) mechanisms of legal restraint and redress aimed at protecting the
sphere of civil society (and the active rights of its members) from illegitimate
police incursion; (2) a framework of democratic institutions (in England and
Wales, the Home Secretary, local police authorities and police–community
consultative groups) that the police can be required to consult and cooperate
with, or account or defer to; (3) various internal organizational devices (force
orders, codes of practice, disciplinary offences) that seek to guide the exer-
cise of police discretion and ensure that force...
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