Thinking Normatively About Private Security
| Published date | 01 September 1997 |
| Author | Ian Loader |
| Date | 01 September 1997 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.1997.tb00003.x |
JOURNAL
OF
LAW
AND
SOCIETY
VOLUME
24,
NUMBER
3,
SEPTEMBER
1997
ISSN:
0263-323X,
pp.
377-94
Thinking Normatively About Private Security
IAN
LOADER*
The policing of modern states can never
be
something which is merely a ‘technical’
question
of
administration. Within this are buried a whole range of complex issues
of
normative political theory.1
INTRODUCTION
In a recent paper on the future of policing, Bayley and Shearing make the
following claim:
Modern democratic countries like the United States, Britain, and Canada have reached
a watershed in the evolution
of
their systems of crime control and law enforcement.
Future generations will look back
on
our era as a time when one system of policing
ended and another took its p1ace.l
This is heady stuff and only time (and hindsight) will tell
if
it is borne out.
There can be little doubting, however, that as we approach the century’s end
the provision of security in Britain and other liberal democratic societies is
becoming ever more fragmented and commodified. The protection of person
and property is less and less the exclusive province of the public police, but
is now increasingly being delivered by a plethora of public, commercial, and
voluntary agencies. Significant developments have included: (i) resort by
business and government organizations to private modes of security, either
by ‘contracting-in’ commercial firms or putting in place ‘in-house’
arrangements; (ii) an intensification of local authority involvement in security
provision, through funding and operating CCTV systems, ‘contracting-in’
private firms to patrol council estates,
or
-
as in the case of Sedgefield District
Council in north-east England and Wirral Borough Council in Merseyside
-
setting up and running local ‘community patrols’; (iii) the sporadic
development of citizen patrols; (iv) an increasing deployment of crime
*
Lecturer, Department
of
Criminology, Keele University, Keele,
Staffordshire
STS
5BG,
Englund
I
would like to thank Tim
Hope,
Richard Sparks, and two anonymous
Journul
referees for
their constructive comments and suggestions.
377
0
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Oxford
OX4
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and
350
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prevention technology (alarms, bars, gates, and
so
on); and (v)the hiring of
commercial security firms to patrol residential areas. We are at the very least
witnessing the emergence of an uneven patchwork
of
security provision,
increasingly determined by people’s willingness and ability to pay.3
These developments have in recent years generated a welter of analysis
and critical commentary. In respect of the former, explanatory attention has
variously focused on ‘the fiscal crisis of the ~tate’,~ the spread
of
‘mass private
property’,5 the unmet (and seemingly insatiable) demand for (police) protec-
tion,6 and broader transformations in the character of g~vernance.~ With
regard to the latter, prominent
-
professional, academic, and even popular
-
concerns have included working conditions in the private security industry,
the weakness (or in the British case, lack)
of
specific regulatory regimes,
threats to civil liberties, the dangers of ‘two-tier’ policing, and the role of
private security in cementing and exacerbating social divisions.8
Much of this discourse is clearly animated by a profound sense of disquiet
about the pace and direction of current developments (South for instance
speaks of ‘the disturbing image of society’ conjured up by the idea of ‘house-
holds kept at bay within fortified
home^'^)
and frequent
-
if passing
-
refer-
ence is made to questions of equity, citizenship, human rights, and the like.
Yet, while this appears to suggest that what is at stake in the ongoing commod-
ification of security is some potentially profound alteration in what Unger calls
‘the basic terms of social life’,Io seldom are matters of justice or democratic
legitimacy made analytically central. To this extent, and notwithstanding its
explanatory purchase, much current critical discourse on private security
remains normatively impoverished and lacking in institutional imagination.”
My aim in this paper is to address some of the normative considerations
raised by private security; reflecting, in particular, on the meanings that secu-
rity has as a social good within liberal democratic societies, and considering
the criteria that ought to be employed to decide how that good is distributed
and regulated. I begin by developing a principled critique of the case put
forward by economic liberals and libertarians for allowing the market an
extended role in the allocation
of
security provision. I then assess the merits
and shortcomings of the dominant alternative discourse (in Britain at least)
that seeks to subject the security market to specific kinds of legal regulation;
before reflecting on how the provision
of
security might be reconfigured in
ways that accord greater priority to questions of equity and democratic
deliberation. In
so
arguing, my aim is to enlarge the ‘political and legal
imagination’ that we employ to think and act in this realm, for as Unger
reminds
us:
by
such an act of enlargement
. .
.
we
can struggle more
resolutely
against fate and drift
and weaken the
power
of circumstances over
our
minds. We can
see
more
clearly the
choices concealed by
our
present commitments and join the tactical
to
the visionary.’2
378
e
Blackwell
Publishers
Ltd
1997
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