Why policing the risk society became a footnote in American police studies: A missed opportunity to move police theorizing forward
| Author | Christopher D O’Connor,Phillip C Shon |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X20928093 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Why policing the risk
society became a footnote
in American police studies:
A missed opportunity to
move police theorizing
forward
Phillip C Shon and Christopher D O’Connor
Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute
of Technology, Canada
Abstract
Written in 1997, Ericson and Haggerty’s book Policing the Risk Society (PRS) should have
had profound effects on police theorizing and research in the United States. In this
article, we attempt to explain why this book failed to gain traction within the American
policing literature. We argue that PRS was ignored for three reasons: (1) incommen-
surable theoretical frameworks, (2) timing and aim of the book’s publication, and (3) the
intrusiveness of deductive surveillance technologies in the policing of identities. We
conclude by discussing how Ericson and Haggerty’s theorizing should be revisited in the
light of recent developments in policing.
Keywords
Risk society, history of policing, risk-based policing, big data policing, community policing
Introduction
As of 2019, Policing the Risk Society (hereafter, PRS) has been cited over 2,000 times
according to Google Scholar. PRS is cited, usually, whenever the phrase ‘risk manage-
ment’ and ‘policing’ appear together, almost as a perfunctory acknowledgment of its
Corresponding author:
Phillip C Shon, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, 2000
Simcoe Street, Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4, Canada.
Email: phillip.shon@uoit.ca
The Police Journal:
Theory, Practice and Principles
2021, Vol. 94(2) 222–238
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0032258X20928093
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place in police scholarship. Despite its pivotal role in the shift in theoretical framework
from a post-crime era to a pre-crime one where uncertainty, security, and risk manage-
ment precede the reactive character of criminological enquiries in general (Zedner,
2007) and police studies in particular, the potential influence of PRS has been absent
in American literature on policing (see Bayley and Shearing, 1996). The trend is almost
opposite in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom where crimin-
ological enquires and police studies have moved toward the incorporation of risk, gov-
ernmentality, and security into their research questions and analyses (e.g. Mazerolle and
Ransley, 2005; Shearing, 2016; Young, 2007, 2011). Moreover, the significance and
impact of PRS—its potential to inform the theory, function, and role of the police for the
future—rarely appear in the mainstream, positivistic accounts of police studies in crim-
inal justice scholarship (O’Malley, 2015). Despite being an integral part of police the-
orizing, the idea of risk has at best been only a tangential focus of academic research on
the police—particularly in the United States (for exceptions, see Brayne, 2017). Written
by two scholars who have been trained and/or taught in criminology and criminal justice
departments in US institutions of higher learning, we provide a theoretical speculation as
to why this omission may have occurred in late 20th century American police
scholarship.
With the exception of Ericson and Haggerty’s (1997) book, Policing the Risk Society,
which focused on Canadian police, few researchers have attempted to fully incorporate
the idea of risk into a more robust understanding and theory of contemporary police
work. Ericson and Haggerty’s book should have provided such an impetus for a risk
focused research agenda and theoretical framework. However, as O’Malley (2015: 430)
argues, it instead ‘became just a convenient anchorage point for mooring many a minor
study that found evidence of risk in police work ...[it] was a landmark provocation
wasted on an uncritical audience’. In this article, we provide a speculation of why PRS
may have found such uncritical reception by policing scholars in America.
According to established canons that attempt to account for broad shifts in the the-
oretical activities of a discipline, paradigm shifts occur due to outliers that cannot be
explained by the existing frameworks. The accretion of significant anomalies wends in
uncertainty, followed by trenchant debates before a new paradigm emerges (Kuhn,
1996). The last 20 years since the publication of PRS may reflect the period of dueling
paradigms in police studies, although some have argued that we are in the midst of
another era (Hooper, 2014; Kim and de Guzman, 2012; Oliver, 2006). This account,
however, is implausible as community policing has been a political and rhetorical suc-
cess. That is to say, the ascendancy and perdurability of a theory depends on factors that
are extraneous to its internal coherence or external recognition. For example, the pre-
dominance of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) self-control theory throughout the 1990s
and 2000s in criminology is attributable to the ease of its testability, the discipline’s
preferred methodology (self-report surveys) using readily available adolescent popula-
tions, and the theory’s ability to generate disprovable propositions (Cullen, 2011).
Using Kuhn’s model of change, the emergence of community policing as the logical
step after the reform/professional era is anticipatable. The professionalization of major
police departments ought to have ameliorated the problems of the patronage system and
corruption of the preceding era. Yet, the reforms that were introduced to improve police
Shon and O’Connor 223
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