Transnational Crime and Policing: Selected Essays 2011925642, 9780754629252, 9781315084596

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Transnational Crime and Policing

Pioneers in Contemporary Criminology Series Editor: David Nelken The titles in this series bring together the best published and unpublished work by the leading authorities in contemporary criminological theory. By drawing together articles from a wide range of journals, conference proceedings and books, each title makes readily available the authors’ most important writings on specific themes. Each volume in this series includes a lengthy introduction, written by the editor and a significant piece of scholarship in its own right, which outlines the context of the work and comments on its significance and potential. The collected essays complement each other to give a retrospective view of the authors’ achievements and a picture of the development of criminology as a whole. Titles in the series A Criminological Imagination Pat Carlen Working Out of Crime David Downes Building Modern Criminology: Forays and Skirmishes David F. Greenberg Crime, Institutional Knowledge and Power Kevin D. Haggerty, Aaron Doyle and Janet Chan Policing, Popular Culture and Political Economy Robert Reiner Victims, Policy-making and Criminological Theory Paul Rock Transnational Crime and Policing James Sheptycki Thinking about Punishment Michael Tonry

Transnational Crime and Policing Selected Essays

James Sheptycki York University, Canada

Pioneers in Contemporary Criminology Series

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © James Sheptycki 2011 James Sheptycki has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice.. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sheptycki, J. W. E., 1960– Transnational crime and policing : selected essays. – (Pioneers in contemporary criminology) 1. Law enforcement–International cooperation. 2. Police– International cooperation. 3. Crime prevention– International cooperation. I. Title II. Series 363.2'3–dc22 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011925642 ISBN 9780754629252 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgements 

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Foreword and Author’s Acknowledgements 

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Introduction by Karine Côté-Boucher 

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Part I Theoretical Beginnings 1 Police Encyclopedia of Law and Society, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Reference, 2007, pp. 1121–26.  2 Transnational Policing and the Makings of a Postmodern State British Journal of Criminology, 35, 1995, pp. 613–35.  3 Law Enforcement, Justice and Democracy in the Transnational Arena: Reflections on the War on Drugs International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 24, 1996, pp. 61–75.  4 Policing, Postmodernism and Transnationalization British Journal of Criminology, 38, 1998, pp. 485–503.  5 The Global Cops Cometh: Reflections on Transnationalization, Knowledge Work and Policing Subculture British Journal of Sociology, 49, 1998, pp. 57–74. 

3 9 29 39 55

Part II Field Studies in Transnational Policing 6 Reflections on the Transnationalization of Policing: The Case of the RCMP and Serial Killers International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 26, 1998, pp. 17–34.  7 European Policing Routes: An Essay on Transnationalization, Policing and the Information Revolution Public Safety in Europe, H. Bruisma and J.G.A. van der Vijver (eds), Twente: Twente Police Institute, 1999, pp. 221–42.  8 Police Co-operation in the English Channel Region 1968–1996 European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 6, 1998, pp. 216–35.  9 Patrolling the New European (In)security Field: Organizational Dilemmas and Operational Solutions for Policing the Internal Borders of Europe European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 10, 2001, pp. 144–60. 

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Part III Accountability for Transnational Policing 10 Accountability across the Policing Field: Towards a General Cartography of Accountability for Postmodern Policing Policing and Society: Special Issue on Police Accountability in Europe Monica den Boer (ed.), 12, 2002, pp. 323–38.  11 The Accountability of Transnational Policing Institutions: The Strange Case of Interpol Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 19, 2004, pp. 107–34.  12 Global Law Enforcement as a Protection Racket: Some Sceptical Notes on Transnational Organized Crime as an Object of Global Governance Transnational Organised Crime: Perspectives on Global Security, A. Edwards and P. Gill (eds), London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 42–59.  13 Transnational Crime and Transnational Policing Sociology Compass, 1, (2007), pp. 485–98.  14 Criminology and the Transnational Condition: A Contribution to Political Sociology International Political Sociology, 1, 2007, pp. 391–406. 

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Part IV Future Trajectories From Detection to Disruption: Intelligence and the Changing Logic 15 of Police Crime Control in the United Kingdom (with Martin Innes), International Criminal Justice Review, 14, 2004, pp. 1–24.  16 The Governance of Organized Crime in Canada Canadian Journal of Sociology, 28, 2003, pp. 489–516.  17 Organizational Pathologies in Police Intelligence Systems: Some Contributions to the Lexicon of Intelligence-led Policing European Journal of Criminology, 1, 2004, pp. 307–32.  18 High Policing in the Security Control Society Policing, 1, 2007, pp. 70–79.  19 Policing, Intelligence Theory and the New Human Security Paradigm: Some Lessons from the Field Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates, P. Gill, S. Marrin and M. Phythian (eds), London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 166–85. 

215 235 255 273

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Afterword 

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Bibliography 

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Index 

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Acknowledgements The chapters in this volume are taken from the sources listed below. The author and publisher wish to thank the original publishers or other copyright holders for permission to use their material: Introduction: by Karine Côté-Boucher. Chapter 1: ‘Police’ in the Encyclopedia of Law and Society, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2007, pp. 1121–26. Copyright © 2007 Sage Publications, Inc. Chapter 2: ‘Transnational Policing and the Makings of a Postmodern State’, British Journal of Criminology, 35, 1995, pp. 613–35. Copyright © 1995 Oxford University Press. Chapter 3: ‘Law Enforcement, Justice and Democracy in the Transnational Arena: Reflections on the War on Drugs’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 24, 1996, pp. 61–75. Copyright ©1996 Academic Press Limited. Chapter 4: ‘Policing, Postmodernism and Transnationalization’ British Journal of Criminology, 38, 1998, pp. 485–503. Copyright © 1998 Oxford University Press. Chapter 5: ‘The Global Cops Cometh: Reflections on Transnationalization, Knowledge Work and Policing Subculture’, British Journal of Sociology, 49, 1998, pp. 57–74. Copyright © 1998 London School of Economics. Chapter 6: ‘Reflections on the Transnationalization of Policing: The Case of the RCMP and Serial Killers’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 26, 1998, pp. 17–34. Copyright ©1998 Academic Press Limited. Chapter 7: ‘European Policing Routes: An Essay on Transnationalization, Policing and the Information Revolution’, in H. Bruisma and J.G.A. van der Vijver (eds), Public Safety in Europe, Twente: Twente Police Institute, 1999, pp. 221–42. Copyright ©1999 H. Bruisma and J. G .A. van der Vijver. Chapter 8: ‘Police Co-operation in the English Channel Region 1968–1996’, European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 6, 1998, pp. 216–35. Copyright © 1998 Kluwer Law International. Chapter 9: ‘Patrolling the New European (In)security Field: Organisational Dilemmas and Operational Solutions for Policing the Internal Borders of Europe’, European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 10, 2001, pp. 144–60. Copyright © 2001 Kluwer Law International.

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Chapter 10: ‘Accountability across the Policing Field: Towards a General Cartography of Accountability for Post-Modern Policing’, Policing and Society: Special Issue on Police Accountability in Europe, Monica den Boer (ed.), 12, 2002, pp. 323–38. Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis Limited. Chapter 11: ‘The Accountability of Transnational Policing Institutions: The Strange Case of Interpol’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 19, 2004, pp. 107–134. Copyright © 2004 Canadian Journal of Law and Society. Chapter 12: ‘Global Law Enforcement as a Protection Racket: Some Sceptical Notes on Transnational Organised Crime as an Object of Global Governance’, in A. Edwards and P. Gill (eds), Transnational Organised Crime: Perspectives on Global Security, London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 42–59. Copyright © 2003 James Sheptycki. Chapter 13: ‘Transnational Crime and Transnational Policing’, Sociology Compass, 1, 2007, pp. 485–98. Copyright © 2007 James Sheptycki. Chapter 14: ‘Criminology and the Transnational Condition: A Contribution to Political Sociology’, in International Political Sociology, 1, 2007, pp. 391–406. Copyright © 2007 International Studies Association. Chapter 15: ‘From Detection to Disruption: Intelligence and the Changing Logic of Police Crime Control in the United Kingdom’, (with Martin Innes, University of Surrey) in International Criminal Justice Review, 14, 2004, pp. 1–24. Copyright © 2004 College of Health and Human Sciences. Chapter 16: ‘The Governance of Organised Crime in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 28, 2003, pp. 489–516. Copyright © 2003 Canadian Journal of Sociology. Chapter 17: ‘Organizational Pathologies in Police Intelligence Systems: Some Contributions to the Lexicon of Intelligence-led Policing’, European Journal of Criminology, 1, 2004, pp. 307–32. Copyright © 2004 Sage Publications. Chapter 18: ‘High Policing in the Security Control Society’, Policing, 1, 2007, pp. 70–79. Copyright © 2007 James Sheptycki. Chapter 19: ‘Policing, Intelligence Theory and the New Human Security Paradigm: Some Lessons from the Field’, in P. Gill, S. Marrin and M. Phythian (eds), Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 166–85. Copyright © 2009 James Sheptycki. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Foreword and Acknowledgements People occasionally ask questions connecting my biography to my intellectual interests. The choices about what to research reflect the personality of the scholar, which itself may affect the outcome of the research and so it is important to put things into perspective by saying something about personal interests in pursuit of public knowledge. Possibly because I grew up following my father on transnational trails as an ‘oil patch brat’, I have had a lifelong curiosity about world affairs. Then too, because of her veneration of the university my mother raised early in me the desire to be part of the ancient tradition of scholarship. With wide-ranging tastes and interests I was thus launched out into the world by being ‘sent home’ to university in Western Canada in 1978. In the five years spent in Saskatoon as an undergraduate student at the University of Saskatchewan I changed my major five times, eventually cobbling together the requisite credits to be able to obtain a degree in something called International Studies. At that time I was greatly attracted to philosophical questions, which led me to complete a Masters degree in the History and Philosophy of Social and Political Science at Essex University in 1985, but was subsequently advised that a more secure future for an aspiring graduate student such as myself lay in applied areas such as gerontology, demography or criminology! As a young man, the latter, with its faint whiff of danger and excitement, appealed to me most and I found myself undertaking a study of the policing of domestic violence under the supervision of Paul Rock and David Downes at the London School of Economics. That study, completed in 1991, looked at the importation to the UK of criminological ideas from North America about the social response to violence against women in the home and then described how these ideas impacted on policing in London through an observational study of several innovative schemes in different police divisions. It was as a lecturer at Portsmouth University in 1992, looking out at the English Channel, that I initially thought to fully connect my academic interest in international relations with my expertise in criminology. Subsequently obtaining a four-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for Criminology and the Social and Philosophical Study of Law at Edinburgh University was a stroke of good fortune. In those days there was considerable speculation about how the diminution of European borders would facilitate criminal enterprise and, as it turned out, Malcolm Anderson had made Edinburgh the most important centre of research on international police co-operation in Europe. There the spark of my initial idea caught hold and grew into a research interest that has sustained me ever since. This book documents my transnational journeys in researching transnational crime and policing, but it does not fully do so. For one thing, even if only at the unconscious level, there are always in the back of my mind scenes from my childhood and teenage years. In my teens I remember seeing the gendarmes ‘patrolling in force’ on voting day in Jakarta and Tehran and of being surprised to see police officers with what looked like machine-pistols at Schiphol airport and in Athens. Back in the 1970s my mother would use the excuse of upcoming ‘Singapore stopovers’ as a pretext to enforce a haircut upon me – on the grounds

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that the authorities there could be expected to do an even more thorough job! After a feral childhood spent playing unfettered in the wide-open spaces of the Canadian prairies, one of the immediately obvious things about world travel was the constant and heavy presence of armed people in uniform. I also observed early on that enforcement of conformity, although ubiquitous, took many different forms. In other words, in trying to understand how the world system fits together, I have long thought it interesting to look at how the four corners of the earth are policed. My discovered interests in transnational policing have been global in scope from the outset, even if the essays in this book are limited to Western Europe and North America. The practical limitations of close empirical research are largely those of time and resources. I have had some limited opportunities outside of the ‘Western-centric’ sphere – in Latin America and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Far East – but that work is not represented here. Instead, what is presented is a selection of essays, written over a period of more than a decade, that look at transnational policing from a variety of angles. They reflect my eclectic tastes in scholarship, combining international relations and criminology, but also ethnographic sociology, political philosophy, socio-legal theory and other interests. In that way, I am still like the undergraduate student who changed his major every year. The work contained here is that of a bookish and thoughtful person who likes the intellectual challenges of academic research and who, during the feckless wanderings of misspent youth and young adulthood (about which nothing will be said here), discovered an interest in a set of phenomena which was then named ‘transnational policing’. What I find really interesting is the thought that the transnational practices of policing are a synecdoche of the emerging world system. Transnational policing shapes the global system in crucial ways. Transnational policing is both an opening into the global system and a microcosm of it. Transnational policing denotes an institutional part of the general world system and is, at the same time, that system’s most general characteristic. It is therefore my hope that young scholars will read the essays in this book and take up the challenge of researching in this field to continue adding to our stock of knowledge about the difficult and important issues that surround transnational policing. Author’s Acknowledgements Some scholars are more proficient at writing articles than they are at writing books. For some it is, perhaps, the other way round and a gifted few can do both. As an essayist, I have been acutely aware for some years that, although refereed journal articles are a good way of ensuring academic promotion for oneself, they are not necessarily the most effective way to ensure the promotion of a big idea. My work has been scattered across a wide number of journals in different disciplines and so it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. I had long harboured the idea of gathering my work into a single compendium, but it was not until a chance conversation with David Nelken at the European Society of Criminology meetings in Edinburgh in 2008 that I found a sympathetic ear. I am most grateful to David for agreeing to help me bring together this collection and for his subsequent stroke of genius in creating the Pioneers in Contemporary Criminology series of which this volume is a part. However, having

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struck a publishing deal in 2008, and being thus faced with the bureaucratic task of bringing the book together, things rather ground to a halt. I was maybe still a bit too busy writing articles! As luck would have it, Karine Côté-Boucher came to me asking for supervision and advice on the conduct of her PhD research about cross-border policing. In her I found not only an extremely smart and resourceful graduate student, but a hard-working one as well. I owe her a debt of gratitude for the enthusiasm she brought to this project – she worked well beyond the call of duty. It is particularly wonderful that she wrote the Introduction, a task I found difficult to face up to. As she notes, transnational policing provides a significant field of enquiry which continually invites new questions for research and scholarship. It is gratifying to see that she and many other young scholars are so keen to take up the invitation. A huge number of debts were built up during the years that the research represented here was undertaken. Most of the scholars, researchers and academics who helped along the winding road are cited in the references so there is no need to name names here. Obviously, the police practitioners and policy people who helped me along the way cannot really be named for reasons of confidentiality. In any case, there is only one among them who I must thank outright by name and he is Frank Gallagher. Frank was the first transnational police officer I ever met and, after him, everything seemed possible. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends, family, students and work colleagues who have, in their various ways, helped to make life interesting.

James Sheptycki

York University, Canada

James Sheptycki (Photograph: Nadia Claire Sheptycki)

Introduction … a consideration of the police institution encounters nothing essential at all. Its power is formless, like its nowhere-tangible, all pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states. Walter Benjamin 1996[1921]: 243

Currently scholars from various disciplinary perspectives are striving to make sense of the rapid and continuous transformations characterizing the ways in which policing and security are undertaken across borders since the end of the twentieth century. Sociologists working in surveillance studies and socio-legal studies, criminologists interested in policing, international relations and critical security studies researchers, international political sociologists, political geographers and border studies aficionados are among those who are crafting a language to comprehend what is at stake in the development and formalization of transnational forms of security provision. James Sheptycki’s contribution has been influential in shaping the understanding of transnational policing. Years of empirical research and theoretical engagement with this rapidly changing field point to the continuing challenges that transnational policing poses for students, scholars, policy-makers and the general public. His research has done much to shed light on the structural organization of transnational policing and its everyday routines, and also on the lack of proper oversight mechanisms for the ‘global cops’. This inquiry into the fragmented and opaque character of the transnational policing field points at the spreading and deepening of what Walter Benjamin regarded as the ‘ghostly presence’ of policing – a form of policing mainly situated beyond the purview of the rule of law, little concerned with accountability frameworks and seriously lacking transparency mechanisms. The work collected here represents a crucial intervention in studies of contemporary forms of control, surveillance and coercion. This collection brings together a selection of essays on the topic of transnational policing. It encompasses research started in the early 1990s, when European police co-operation entered a new phase following the signature of the Maastricht Treaty, and work undertaken after the turn of the millennium. These studies particularly investigate the effect of the adoption of information technologies and intelligence-based thinking on transnational policing and its subculture. While the ethnographic and empirical value of these works cannot be emphasized enough, Sheptycki’s efforts at conceptualizing the meaning of the transformations he witnessed is a testimony to the variety and complexity of the theoretical and practical issues raised in his research: from the social construction of ‘transnational organized crime’ to the iconographic use of the ‘serial killer’ folk-devil in advancing the technocratic interests of policing transnationally, as well as naming a variety of organizational pathologies characteristic of ‘intelligence-led policing’. Perusing the chapters in this book provides an excellent opportunity to take a step back and reflect on these transformations in transnational policing and also to place this work in

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something of a broader context. In doing so, one avoids the common teleological explanation which rationalizes the growing importance of transnational policing institutions by reference to an increase in transnational organized crime or terrorism. That functional logic holds simply that there is more transnational policing because of a concurrent growth of crime problems that transcend borders. Such explanations may provide legitimacy rhetoric for what is happening, but it says little about other important questions raised through empirical research on transnational policing. Can we historically trace contemporary forms of transnational policing? How do we differentiate between international and transnational policing? What are the theoretical, moral and political implications of the current extension of policing powers to the transnational stage? Can things be done differently? These are some of the questions raised in the essays collected here and which this Introduction looks over. Historical Signposts in International Policing Borrowing from C. Wright Mills, the essay ‘Transnational Policing and the Makings of a Postmodern State’ (Chapter 2) characterizes our contemporary period as permeated by a profound feeling of disorientation and a ‘sense of deep fissure in the fabric of history’ (p. 9). Thus characterized, our epoch is one in which categories of thought that emerged during the modern period appear ill-fitting and poorly suited to explain our present reality. This may be true of the notion of ‘policing’ which remains, both in scholarly literature and common parlance, closely associated with national law enforcement and is often even further limited to the municipal level. Who doesn’t think of these uniformed, public-paid enforcers who walk the pavement or cruise by in technologically burdened ‘cop cars’ when picturing ‘the police’? However, current research in policing is increasingly interested in illuminating its less well understood transnational dimension. As Sassen argues, current forms of globalization are doing away with the traditional notion of the ‘national’. Globalization, rather, ‘consists of an enormous variety of micro-processes that begin to denationalize what had been constructed as national … Sometimes these processes of denationalization allow, enable, or push the construction of new types of global scaling of dynamics and institutions; other times they continue to inhabit the realm of what is still largely national (Sassen 2008: 1). Many processes contribute to making transnational policing an emerging global institution. Cross-border policing collaborations in criminal and terror cases allow for the exchange of information about various categories of persons, ranging from criminals and suspects of terrorism to air travellers and refugees. Furthermore, many issues are now considered to be somehow located beyond the sole jurisdiction of national police forces: for example, money laundering or illicit drug traffic. In order to grasp how far current forms of transnational policing depart from an (inter)national logic, it is important to understand policing and its historical relation to the modern nation-state. Orthodox reviews of the historical foundations of police forces often focus on European developments occurring between the seventeenth century and the end of the nineteenth century – usually limiting themselves to the paradigmatic cases of Britain and France, but sometimes accompanying their studies with a quick detour through Italy and Germany (see, for instance,

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Bayley 1975). These reviews generally hold in high esteem the British decentralized policing system created in the nineteenth century, accountable to political officials with unarmed officers committed to prevention as well as to minimally coercive and liberal forms of social regulation. Against this normative backdrop is an engagement with the centralized French police in activities of political spying and general surveillance, founded under the reign of Louis XIV in 1667 and under a very different political rationality: namely, la raison d’État (reason of state). This signals haute police (high policing), the accumulation of intelligence through various means – use of criminals and mouchards (informants) or mapping out the urban space into grids for efficient surveillance – with the aim of protecting the state’s powers. Long before the end of the twentieth century, the information capacities of new electronic technologies were seen by Brodeur as inferring the scope of high policing capabilities and ‘leading police forces to operate under this model’ (Brodeur 1983: 512), a prescient statement which Sheptycki’s work has verified time and again for transnational policing. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after the revolutionary attempts of 1848, the French political policing model was adopted by Prussia, Russia and Belgium in matters related to émigrés and their revolutionary activities. These police authorities used various extrajudicial methods to gather intelligence, conduct the surveillance of émigrés (for instance, by opening their mail) and disrupt political activities through the use of agitators and agents provocateurs all over Europe. European national police often collaborated by exchanging information about these émigrés even sometimes via less official channels, through personal contacts (Andreas and Nadelmann 2006). These cross-border connections, exchanges in investigative methods and the circulation of policing philosophies point to early forms of international police co-operation. During the same period, European states also negotiated extradition treaties for the repatriation of fugitives. Since the nineteenth century, the ‘international policing of aliens’ and one of its most extreme instruments, deportation, has been the means to police national territories, secure public order and ensure the government of populations (Walters 2010).1 Deportation was, and remains, a tool in the hands of sovereign state authorities to assign individuals to designated territorial jurisdictions and expel those designated as political enemies – those seen as socially undesirable or else endangering the economy, welfare system or what is imagined as racial or ethnic purity. In fact, the development of policing means for imposing border and travel restrictions on populations in Europe started in the seventeenth century, especially through the creation of identity and travel documents such as passports and visas. In his influential work on the history of the passport Torpey (2000) argues that identity documents distinguishing citizens from non-citizens have been central to the constitution of the modern conception of citizenship and nationality. Establishing membership in a territoriallyfixed polity, these documents contributed to producing the ‘national’, both as a territorially sovereign space and as a community of belonging reserved to its citizens. However, what Walters designates as ‘police’ differs from the common use of the term. In fact, scholars often reflect on the changes in the meaning of the term over time and place. What sociologists of ‘the police’ define as their object is a specialized, hierarchical organization engaged in the maintenance of the social order and generally believed to be entrusted with a 1

Interestingly, Walters (2010: 89) quotes a 1909 French text about deportation authored by A. Martini, to wit: ‘Expulsion is not a punishment; it is a police measure.’

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monopoly in the use of legitimate force (Reiner 2000). One of the points found in Sheptycki’s encyclopedia entry for the term ‘Police’, reproduced as Chapter 1 in this volume, is that consensus regarding a particular social order may well be absent, therefore making consent to its preservation through policing a matter of contest and debate; hence an historical fluidity in the meaning of the term. During the mercantilist era, as Foucault’s work (2001[1978]) reminds us, the term ‘police’ pointed to the means through which the powers of the state could be enhanced through various interventions permitting the preservation of a well-ordered social body. Regulated areas were as diverse as sanitation, public morality, food distribution, trades and the circulation of people and commodities (see also Pasquino 1991). Interestingly, Foucault associates the maintenance of social order through ‘police’ as a means of protecting and increasing each state’s strengths in the competition ranging between them following the signing of the Westphalia Treaty in 1648. Consequently ‘policing’ – the concern for social order, the disciplining of communities and the regulation of commerce – is a participatory act in inter-state games of power from as early as the seventeenth century. These histories of the genesis of modern policing are quite useful, but they suffer from a common amnesia. In fact, in the heyday of colonialism, many European states were busy enforcing claims overseas in distant lands. The trade generated by colonial expansion brought about the policing of the open seas by navies, with varying degrees of success and with varying ends in mind. In the sixteenth century the Spanish Crown could not prevent what it deemed to be illicit trade. Commerce between Peru, Acapulco and Asia made Manila ‘the hub of a trade network that drew the Chinese into the Philippine orbit and that created a commercial circuit in which Chinese textiles were exchanged for New World silver’ much to the chagrin of the Spanish (Wolf 1997[1982]: 153). A century later, pirates – once employed as ‘privateers’ by the English monarchy to pillage Spanish colonies and ships – swarmed the Caribbean, threatening cross-Atlantic commerce. Pirates were overcome in the region only by concerted European efforts at the end of the seventeenth century. These are reminders that, depending on the period, state authorities have adopted various attitudes, ranging from prohibition to laissezfaire or even implicit support of economic actors engaged in the production, transportation and exchange across borders of commodities sometimes considered illegal – precisely the type of activities labelled ‘transnational organized crime’ in contemporary parlance. Once the exclusive affair of customs and trade officials, the status of certain commodities changed to ‘illicit’ and passed under the responsibility of law enforcement authorities later on. Understanding this historical development is necessary in order to comprehend why the British pursued two ‘Opium Wars’ in China in the nineteenth century in order to preserve the right to bring that commodity to market and in the twenty-first century have come to participate in opium poppy eradication policies in Afghanistan in order to prevent it. Some have chastised police historians for not making colonialism more central to historical studies of the British police in the nineteenth century. Among other things, these critiques point out the many social control techniques developed in the colonies and later exported back to the metropolis (Brogden 1987).2 Other students of imperial policing also note that ‘the empire was a system in which ideas flowed not only outward from the metropole and back again 2 An argument that may also be made in the case of France. In the 1920s the Service des affaires indigènes nord-africaines, attached to the city’s police headquarters and charged with the surveillance of North Africans living in the metropolis, was created in Paris. Contemporary urban policing echoes

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but between the various colonies themselves’ (Anderson and Killingray 1991: 13). British police differed across colonies, but often combined military and civilian–administrative roles, blending metropolitan and local law into hybrid legal discourses. Recruitment focused on the ‘policing of strangers by strangers’ – that is, by officers originating from other parts of the Empire and put in place to protect colonial interests. For instance, during the first half of the twentieth century, the policing of crime in Delhi was found to be concentrated in privileged areas of the city, with public safety planning primarily focused on the protection of Europeans and their dependants. Crimes in other areas were seldom investigated (Legg 2007). British colonial police forces made overt use of coercive force in non-settler colonies against nationalist protests in Africa and Asia as well as in opposition to Native populations in the settler colonies of the South Pacific and North America (Anderson and Killingray 1991). At home, British services organized, in 1910, an intelligence network responsible for the surveillance of Indian nationalist activities in Europe, an initiative replicated in British Columbia in collaboration with Canadian authorities (Popplewell 1987). Arendt (1976[1951]) argued that European imperialist administrations created a new form of government characterized by an extensive recourse to police and armed forces as well as by informality, arbitrariness and widespread secrecy – again, Benjamin’s ‘ghostly presence’. Searching for the origins of totalitarianism – Nazism and Stalinism – Arendt saw a ‘traditional intimate connection’ between imperialism and the ‘rule by “invisible government” and secret agents’ (1976[1951]: xx). Her work emphasized many of the same characteristics associated in police historiography with the concept of ‘high policing’ and ‘colonial policing’. The historical implications of these elective affinities between policing practices transcending and transgressing the national ambit, or those concerning ‘foreigners’ on ‘national soil’ and the opacity, as well as the lack of proper accountability and democratic safeguards that surround these practices, constitute central aspects discovered in contemporary transnational policing. ‘The Ghostly Presence’: Transnational Policing or Control without Controllers The forms of policing reviewed in the scholarly literature mainly involve a perception of national police forces engaged in intermittent international collaborations during the modern period. During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, these initiatives increased in number and were ostensibly undertaken in order to circumvent crossborder activities identified as illicit. The post-World War II era saw the emergence of more formalized transnational collaborations between policing agencies of different countries. Truly global policing institutions, such as Interpol, were constituted as hubs for the sharing of information about ‘ordinary law crime’ and (decades later) about terrorism suspects, asylum seekers, air travelers and so on. The acceleration of networking and liaison between policing agencies at the beginning of the twenty-first century was facilitated by the introduction of information technologies which radically transformed the capacities of transnational policing. Documenting and observing this period of profound change and growth has been the special concern of Sheptycki’s work. the past as individuals associated with former colonies are often the object of police surveillance in the French banlieues (Geisser and Zemouri 2007).

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Explaining this growth is no small feat. As mentioned above, critical criminologists are suspicious about functional explanations which argue that growth in transnational policing capacities is simply due to alleged expansions in ‘transnational organized crime’, ‘extremism’ and the like. Without denying the reality of cross-border activities that are harmful to social life, sociologists rightly insist on a fuller account of what constitutes ‘transnational organized crime’ and other such concepts. In his ethnographic account of ‘The Case of the RCMP and Serial Killers’ (Chapter 6), Sheptycki observes that police capitalize on ‘the functionality of the mythology of the serial killer’ (p. 71), that they are ‘not cultural dupes, but knowing manipulators of the myth’ (p. 73). What is more, the big folk-devil of ‘organized crime’ hardly corresponds to the romanticized Hollywood-inspired image. There is a wealth of scholarly literature that shows transnational crime and policing to be, in a sense, disorganized and much more complicated (and interesting) than stereotypical images imply (see, for example, Woodiwiss and Hobbs 2009; Scherrer 2009: ch. 2). Furthermore, proper theoretical explanation of transnational policing also needs to take into consideration empirical evidence concerning the broader socio-cultural, political and economic context, because these elements are also important for understanding the role played by transnational policing organizations in the (re)definition of their mandate. Various authors have studied the shift in discourse about global threats following the end of the Cold War at the start of the 1990s. This was a period of fierce struggles between security professionals over declining budgets and resources, accompanied by the first consistent attempts to portray an array of objects – irregular migration, terrorism and organized crime – as new security threats worthy of transnational policing interventions (Bigo 2002). The redefinition of the environment of threat has also been underlined by others. For example, Beare (2003: xviii) argues that the discursive correlation ‘transnational crime growth/ transnational police needs’ serves the particular interests of a crime control industry which is dependent on the public’s perception of a mounting threat of transnational crime and corruption. Anti-money laundering, of which the principal tactic rests upon the seizing of the proceedings of crime, further illustrates this point. Borrowing from Charles Tilly, in his essay ‘Global Law Enforcement as a Protection Racket’ (Chapter 12), Sheptycki observes that asset forfeiture and sharing arrangements could offer a welcome additional revenue source for law enforcement. At the same time, counter-money laundering often fails to bring to prosecution those responsible for the worst economic crimes (Levi 2008[1981]). The ‘followthe-money’ method was mainly developed during the 1990s in prosecution of the drug war and was subsequently adapted as an anti-terrorism tactic in the decade that followed. Policing and security agencies began targeting remittances, informal money transfer systems and charity donations sent across borders by diasporic communities from Muslim, African and Asian backgrounds. Such targeting raised allegations of racial profiling and lack of cultural sensitivity (Bahdi 2003; Cheran and Aiken 2005). The policing of money offers fascinating insights into the global system. Finally, what constitutes the object of control in so much of the literature on transnational policing seems so narrow. In some of the chapters in the present collection the reader is invited to think more broadly by examining activities that could be regarded as problems for policing, but are not considered matters of law enforcement. In our private conversations on the subject of transnational policing, Sheptycki has encouraged me to think about the

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magnitude of the social, economic and environmental harm of man-made disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer of 2010. Not forgetting the death of 11 employees in the explosion that caused the spill – which happened despite early warnings by many about safety problems and equipment failures – there was the toxic legacy. The risks and threat were known prior to the disaster, but nothing was done: ‘Is this not woeful underpolicing?’ he asked me. Or consider white-collar crime and the financial schemes which precipitated the 2008 financial bail-out of banks around the world (which led to massive job losses and economic wreckage in many countries); here, the policing of the money system has been totally inadequate. In a nutshell, enforcement and security agencies are the primary definers of a limited range of contemporary threats while other harmful activities remain unpoliced. Therefore, close observers of the scene rightly call for a dose of healthy scepticism about the rhetorical role – both as a political platform and as an argument in favour of more policing resources – played by alarmist discourses regarding this or that folk-devil. If contemporary transnational policing cannot be taken as a simple functional response to a rise in transnational criminality, then the particulars of its expansion remain to be explained. Some do so by using a grid of analysis blending national politics and inter-state relations: ‘the internationalization of crime control is substantially a function of domestic politics producing new criminal statutes’ (Andreas and Nadelmann 2006: 105). Following this type of argument, contemporary forms of policing across borders remain an instance of international forms of policing and may be understood as fundamentally similar in configuration to international police collaborations attempted since the nineteenth century. Others have argued that, since this time, police institutions became gradually autonomous from the immediate concerns of national governing powers and developed into powerful and specialized bureaucracies. Deflem (2002) observes that this autonomization process requires the sharing of knowledge about and definitions of what constitutes the objects of police work – as well as an agreement about control and enforcement methods – in order for national police institutions to collaborate on the international stage. Expanding on this knowledge-sharing thesis, Andreas and Nadelmann (2006) skilfully describe the growth of the United States’ influence on policing world-wide during the post-war period, especially through its ‘war on drugs’, and, more recently, via its ‘war on terror’. This contemporary hegemony in the field of policing, they argue, contributes to an enforced homogenization in authoritative definitions of crime, in the enforcement methods and in the criminal justice systems of various countries. But, despite being a valuable instrument for measuring the ‘Americanization’of transnational policing, this state-centric approach has its limits. The sociology of globalization has shown that diverse scales, subjects and institutions, which do not always nicely coincide with the state, have emerged in the last decades. We are nowadays confronted with making sense of the multiplicity of actors on the global scene who are more transnational than international. A variety of actors, some in state employ and some not, transgress the boundaries that comprise the transnational state system. Thinking about the transnational security business, police agents obviously fall into both camps (O’Reilly and Ellison 2006). Global economic elites and technocrats, global civil society groups and NGOs, as well as novel political subjects such as migrants, are all also partly disembedded from national settings, while experiencing various levels of privilege and exclusion in relation to wealth redistribution and citizenship

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regimes. Therefore, while sociologists of globalization – Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells come to mind – do not deny that ‘the national’ constitutes an important scale of analysis, they also provide an examination of the ways in which processes and institutions located below (for example, the decision to send a member of a local town or city police force abroad to work with, support or train officers in other countries) and beyond the national state (for example. the building of transnational policing institutions and agencies such as the Schengen Information System, Interpol or Europol) are reshaping the territorial ambit of social relations. There are obvious parallels here with other developing transnational bureaucracies (together with their adoption of methods, laws, expertise and rhetoric) and the degree to which the United States’ domestic politics, legal practices and legal traditions are overarching. For instance, evidence of an ‘Americanization’ of legal frameworks in transnational settings has been found in studies of networks of legal experts in private commercial arbitration who operate within transnational institutions regulating markets – for instance, NAFTA or the WTO (Garth and Dezalay 1996) while at the same time the Europeanization of transnational commercial law is also palpable (Gessner and Nelken 2008). Similar parallels can be seen in discussions concerning the coming together of the International Criminal Court (Ralph, 2007). Observing these parallels tells us why the study of transnational policing should be of interest to socio-legal scholars generally. Of specific interest is the participation of transnational policing bureaucracies in global processes. Transnational policing is characterized, and may be sociologically studied, as a complex set of institutions, techniques, routines, subcultures and informal networks operating in the middle range of transnational governance, which somehow lack anchorage (whether legal or institutional) in a specific state apparatus. Sheptycki’s preferred methodological strategy, ethnographic fieldwork, brings rich empirical depth to the study of transnational policing and problematizes certain assumptions about the security field. For instance, in the essays ‘Police Co-operation in the English Channel Region 1968–1996’ (Chapter 8) and ‘Patrolling the new European (In)security Field: Organizational Dilemmas and Operational Solutions for Policing the Internal Borders of Europe’ (Chapter 9), routine police work in transnational settings is revealed as having frequently to do with small-time crime and routine public safety and less to do with transnational organized crime. This grounded approach, which emphasizes subculture and everyday routine, has important consequences for theorizing policing across borders. Take the essay ‘Law Enforcement, Justice and Democracy in the Transnational Arena: Reflections on the War on Drugs’ (Chapter 3) which looks at the consequences of the variety of legal frameworks and jurisdictions that affect everyday transnational policing work. Here is uncovered the practice of jurisdiction shopping, where transnational police officials choose to make arrests in countries where the penalties are more severe or evidentiary restrictions less difficult. In such cases, national legal frameworks do not delimit police action but are a legal bundle from which police officials may strategically choose their options. These officials thus de facto obtain the power of extrajudicial legal decision. Despite the widespread representations of policing as a domain mainly characterized by law enforcement and coercive power, Sheptycki’s ethnographic work reveals that the everyday routines of transnational policing primarily involve knowledge work. In the essay ‘The Global Cops Cometh’ (Chapter 5) the transnational rise of intelligence-led policing is laid bare in its

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subcultural detail. Knowledge production (gathering, storage and analysis of information) and knowledge exchange (data, expertise and investigative methods) between these agencies are significantly fostered by the introduction of information technologies. In the essay ‘European Policing Routes’ (Chapter 7) are added various ‘smart surveillance’ technologies. These currently include novel types of imaging (for example, gait-based identification, automated number plate recognition, iris scans, face scans) new types of sensors (for example, full body scanners or mobile phone sensors) and data integration technologies (for example, data mining, counterterrorism databases, RFID tracking) which provide heterogeneous information that is gathered, triangulated, correlated and interpreted by policing agencies in areas as diverse as border security, anti-terrorism, critical infrastructure protection and enforcement in organized crime cases (Wright et al. 2010). This ethnographic work sheds considerable light on the organizational changes that ensued after the introduction of these knowledge-based technologies into policing transnationally. It points to the novel challenges that information exchange and surveillance technologies create for policing subcultures. For instance, some of this work has documented the many ‘organizational pathologies of intelligence-led policing’, some of the better known being ‘linkage blindness’, ‘information overload’, ‘noise’ and ‘false positive’. Sheptycki emphasizes more than most (who usually assume a ‘top-down’ international perspective on global forms of policing) the mid-range horizontal relations between multiple agencies, agents, routines and subcultures. Intelligence sharing and co-ordination does happen in different ways. Police officials may refer to their informal networks of police contacts when in need of intelligence or advice. In a more official way, transnational police agencies have developed a network of liaison agents whose mandate is to act as a relay between agencies (Bigo 2000). Methods, technologies, expertise and representations about the licit and the illicit circulate through these official and informal relations. Police subcultures within transnational organizations are constituted through these networks of officers who often relate more to the sense of mission they create with each other than to any responsibility to protect and serve the populations they police. This emphasis on the transnational character of policing practices across borders is not merely an intervention in the debate between global-sceptics and those who analyse power formations as they emerge below and beyond the state. More accurately theorizing ‘transnational’ rather than ‘international’ policing has important implications. Transnational policing happens in a political and juridical grey zone inhabited by technocrats and policing experts largely outside of public scrutiny. This implies important costs in terms of accountability, transparency and public oversight while evading democratic decision making regarding the priorities, conduct and actions of transnational police agents. Preoccupation with policing in this legally, ethically and politically liminal space distinguishes Sheptycki’s work. This is clearly seen in his unease with arguments regarding the consequences of the autonomization of transnational police work from political interference. Examining this process from the perspective of a nineteenth-century genesis of cross-border political policing efforts directed at political refugees and dissenters, Deflem (2002) is more enthusiastic concerning this independence. However, contemporary forms of high policing, especially transnational ones, reveal a disregard for the public spirit of law because the practices of secrecy can be easily justified by the rhetoric of security; that is why documenting the social world of policing in the transnational grey zone is of much more than theoretical interest.

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The essays that comprise Part III of this collection reflect these issues. Here, the policing field is conceptualized as a ‘fragmented terrain’ wherein transnational policing counts myriad actors (both ‘public’ and ‘private’) whose security practices encompass an array of activities. These activities include enforcement, exchange of methods and information, gathering and collation of data, strategic and tactical analysis of intelligence, lobbying for resources, developing security expertise, policing issues and priority setting. The governability of this terrain is an important issue of transnational democracy. How can we ensure democratic input, independent oversight and at least a modicum of transparency in transnational policing decisions? This terrain does not respond well to traditional review mechanisms available nationally – such as parliamentary oversight, annual reports, public reporting, independent review bodies or special review committees dedicated to the activities of one agency. Accordingly, in ‘Accountability across the Policing Field: Towards a General Cartography of Accountability for Postmodern Policing’(Chapter 10) it is argued that ‘conventional accountability frameworks for policing … fall short of an adequate conception of governance for postmodern policing’(p. 139). When and where they exist, traditional accountability mechanisms can help to ensure the legitimacy of territorially-based institutions of social control. They might also constitute important tools in the protection of privacy rights and civil liberties in some jurisdictions. But seen from the transnational point of view there is a problem. Organizations such as Interpol wonderfully illustrate the difficulties of policing accountability transnationally, as is documented in the essay ‘The Strange Case of Interpol’ (Chapter 11). Lacking a formal treaty, Interpol exchanges quantities of information, but its operations are not submitted to any formal external accountability mechanism. Sheptycki is concerned by this opaque character of transnational policing and by what others, such as Born, Johnson and Leigh (2005), designate as the ‘accountability gap’ in intelligence cooperation. This gap is generated by policing and security agencies increasingly co-operating with one another without governing standards, without regard to issues of privacy and outside any oversight from review bodies and from the general public. But this gap is also one of legitimacy. The extent of the powers of mass surveillance granted to transnational police agencies should warrant proportional scope in independent oversight, as well as external and internal formal review procedures. The importance of these points cannot be understated. The structural organization of these agencies, combined with their heavy reliance on information technologies, carries with them significant effects of social distanciation. Their work generally focuses on ‘data analysis’; transnational police officials’ relationships with actual persons is mediated through technology and shrouded in secrecy. Consequently, the social organization of their work process may inhibit ethical practice, thus making imperative at minimum some solid safeguards for privacy and civil liberties in transnational policing. Of course, practical difficulties remain. Elsewhere, in ‘Accountability across the Policing Field’ (Chapter 10), the centrality of internal police accountability mechanisms are observed: ‘external oversight works in harmony with internal accountability mechanisms’ and ‘policing subculture(s) depends, at least partly, on the commensurability of formal and informal accountability ties’ (p. 156). Various interveners into policing have put many solutions on the table, and so the essays collected here are helpful because they not only describe organizational processes in transnational policing, but also directly point to their impact on social cohesion and the global body politic. This work is representative of what Honnett (2010) designates

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as a ‘tradition of a normatively oriented sociology’ – that is, intellectual inquiry which, like that of Durkheim or Marx, if not Weber, finds the basis of theories and concepts in political and moral philosophy. This is sociology that assesses the production of the social order and its modes of production (for example, coercive power, discipline, territorial enforcement or moral regulation) as well as its forms of legitimation. Such approaches also pay attention to the consequences of the deepening of social inequalities on the social fabric as well as to the ethical and political significance of research findings. The work compiled in this volume thus presents a rich blend of empirical ethnographic research, sociological theorization and ethicopolitical concern. New Avenues for Research The above-mentioned investigations into the consequences of the introduction of information technologies on the practice of policing raise important questions that invite further research and careful thought. In work originally undertaken for the UK Home Office concerning the intelligence-led policing paradigm that now operates transnationally in policing organizations around the world, Sheptycki added to the ‘lexicon of organizational pathologies’ in security and intelligence systems. In the essay ‘From Detection to Disruption: Intelligence and the Changing Logic of Police Crime Control in the United Kingdom’ (co-written with Martin Innes and reproduced here as Chapter 15) he helped to demonstrate that the use of intelligence data by police organizations has created a quiet revolution in the objectives pursued by policing. The traditional, primarily reactive, mode of police investigation was directed towards the identification of offenders and the prosecution of past criminal activities. This model now shares the ground with a logic of crime control emphasizing ‘disruption’. Police officials are increasingly opting for disruptive practices in organized crime cases, with the stated aim of preventing the commission of crime or reducing its impact. Disruption follows an ‘Al Capone’ model, favouring methods that disturb criminal networks by eliminating key persons considered important to a given network, often through the use of legal measures other than criminal law enforcement. The cost and time requirements of building legal cases with solid evidence, based on often secret intelligence retrieved from a super abundance of information supplied by intelligence systems, far exceed the budgetary resources and time constraints of police organizations. This forms a central problematic in intelligence-led policing, which helps to promote disruption as a pragmatic choice. This tendency to choose disruption over prosecution was, as mentioned above, also illuminated in transnational settings in Sheptycki’s work on anti-money laundering – which often favours seizing the proceeds of crime rather than prosecuting the culprits. The circulation of this logic of disruption within and between different security and policing organizations warrants further attention from students of policing. In the world of intelligence investigations and anti-terrorism cases, disruption is known under another name: pre-emption. Both disruption and pre-emption participate in the same logic; that is, acting upon things that are seen as criminal, threatening or risky before they happen. Pre-emption and disruption thus transforms an increasingly significant part of police work from law enforcement after the fact of a criminal act to behavioural prediction. Working through databases, intelligence

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algorithms, risk profiles and field intelligence, disruption and pre-emption stress the correlation of the collected information and its organization into risk management schemes for tactical purposes, and its further analysis for strategic intelligence. This logic, according to which one prevents a course of action or hinders its consequences, responds to what François Ewald (2002) calls the ‘philosophy of precaution’. At the extreme, the precautionary logic refuses to countenance any level of threat. It holds doubt and anticipation in high esteem and does not require proof or evidence. This attitude is at the core of an increasingly dominant intelligence strategy in the security world which establishes, through algorithmic calculations, associations between people, objects, places, behaviours, events and organizations and translates probability into ‘actionable security decisions’ (Amoore 2009: 52). In the world of border security, precaution includes reading class and social status (for example, gender, ethnic background, occupation, citizenship status) as more or less threatening, contributing to the constitution of risk profiles circulated through intelligence reports (Côté-Boucher 2010; Pratt and Thompson 2008). The consequences of this type of shift to a precautionary attitude can be quite important and remains to be fully investigated. How do smart surveillance tools impact on people’s everyday life? What are the juridical outcomes of the precautionary logic on privacy and civil liberties regimes? How are social categorizations embedded in surveillance technologies? How do these categorizations participate in police discretionary power? To what extent is this police discretionary power capricious? Reviewing Sheptycki’s work provides an open invitation to other scholars to join in answering these difficult questions with empirically grounded detail and theoretically sophisticated imagery. As found across the policing and security field, the philosophy of precaution clearly demonstrates that there is more to information technologies than their mere technical aspect. Serious research on intelligence-led policing should take into account the socio-cultural context in which those practices take place and critically examine contemporary anxieties about what constitutes a threat and a crime. In ‘Criminology and the Transnational Condition: A Contribution to International Political Sociology’ (Chapter 14) Sheptycki critiques the contemporary ‘catalogue of anxieties’ found in research about policing and security. The call in this essay, to go beyond functionalist, positivistic and purportedly realistic theories about international policing, goes out to scholars in political science, security studies, international relations and political sociology. It brings full circle an insight found in the early essay ‘Transnational Policing and the Makings of a Postmodern State’ (Chapter 2), which observed that part of the historic shift towards the transnational were changes in policing as evidenced by shifts in discourses about folk-devils. As designated by sociologist Anthony Giddens, late-modernity is permeated by ‘ontological insecurity’. Criminologists have theorized that this sense of insecurity emerges from a contemporary conviction that state-based solutions for social ills such as crime are failing, thus threatening the very legitimacy of the state as provider of security (Garland 1996). While neo-liberal logics of responsibilization as well as the privatization of security provision have taken hold to complement, supplement (and perhaps even supplant), the state provision of security, policing has paradoxically also been a way for state agents to regain some lost ground. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the use of the organized crime/ undocumented migration/terrorism triad as a symbolic tool in political platforms stressing law

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and order, homeland security and public safety. Researchers may choose to operate within the standard terms this triad suggests, and thereby reproduce the tendency to scapegoat through xenophobia and moral panics, or else adopt a critical distance from these societal anxieties. There are, of course, policing alternatives to intelligence-led national security and crime control doctrines. The impact of these alternatives in reducing crime and insecurity is foregrounded in ‘Policing, Intelligence Theory and the New Human Security Paradigm’ (Chapter 19). This paradigm stresses the fundamental importance of ensuring freedom from want (material security) and freedom from fear (personal security) in efforts to foster local communities, improve quality of life and enhance individual well-being. Here Sheptycki records, with some qualified approval, some successful uses of crime control disruption and non-punitive policing techniques working in connection with broader programmes of community development, including various governmental, policing and local actors. Once again, the ethnographic method uncovers interesting and unexpected examples of policing endeavour, in this case practical and pragmatic community-based policing measures that offer some hint as to alternatives to top-down transnational intelligence-led law enforcement and its lack of democratic control. As a step away from mere law enforcement and strict social control, such alternative policing practices could fit well alongside and be part of a wider social justice agenda, such as the one proposed by Nancy Fraser (2009). This agenda acknowledges the material and redistributive needs of individuals and communities (social security), as well as their claim for social recognition, but it also holds democratic political representation as essential to any global social justice programme. Following such an agenda could mean presenting transnational policing practices for public deliberation, as well as submitting policing decisions to the review of those ultimately affected by policing actions. Already, transnational policing methods are the object of some public debate, while public calls for accountability and data privacy made by NGOs and civil liberties groups are multiplying.3 But, as the work contained here in this collection reveals, students of policing need to continually emphasize that policing legitimacy cannot be separated from social justice. While it is essential to point towards conflict resolution, the promotion of social cohesion amidst cultural diversity and the effort to minimize social harm, that should not deflect from the more difficult work of uncovering Benjamin’s ‘ghostly presence’ that now stalks the world in the guise of transnational policing and of showing how it so often compounds social ills such as ethnic tension, xenophobia and moral panic. Arguing for the improvement of people’s everyday lives – is this not what security should be about? Karine Côté-Boucher 3 See the work of civil liberties groups such as American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), advocating against the use of torture by US military and intelligence services, fighting in court dispositions of the Patriot Act, including the surveillance of activists, and denouncing extraordinary renditions: http://www. aclu.org/. Another example is the monitoring group Statewatch, a formidable source of information and analysis on European security, surveillance and intelligence: http://www.statewatch.org/. Examples of public calls on privacy include the 2009 Madrid Privacy Declaration on data and privacy protection, as well as a call for a moratorium on the ‘implementation of new systems of mass surveillance’, http:// thepublicvoice.org/madrid-declaration/ (consulted 15 September 2010).

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References Amoore, L. (2009), ‘Algorithmic War: Everyday Geographies of the War on Terror’, Antipode, 41(1), pp. 49–69. Anderson, D.M. and Killingray, D. (1991), ‘Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control: Policing the Empire, 1830–1940’, in D.M. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Andreas, P. and Nadelmann, E. (2006), Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations, New York: Oxford University Press. Arendt, H. (1976[1951]), ‘Imperialism’, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt. Bahdi, R. (2003), ‘No Exit: Racial Profiling and Canada’s War against Terrorism’, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 41(2–3), pp. 293–317. Bayley, D.H. (1975), ‘The Police and Political Development in Europe’, in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 328–75. Beare, M. (ed.) (2003), Critical Reflections on Transnational Organized Crime, Money Laundering, and Corruption, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Beare, M.E. and Schneider, S. (2007), Money Laundering in Canada: Chasing Dirty and Dangerous Dollars, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Benjamin, W. (1996[1921]), ‘Critique of Violence’, in M. Bullock and M.W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, pp. 236–52. Bigo, D. (2000), Liaison Officers in Europe: New Officers in the European Security Field’, in J.W.E. Sheptycki (ed.), Issues in Transnational Policing, London: Routledge, pp. 67–99. Bigo, D. (2002), ‘Security and Immigration: Towards a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease’, Alternatives, Special Issue, pp. 63–92. Born, H., Johnson, L. and Leigh, I. (eds) (2005), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Service Accountability, Washington DC: Potomac. Brodeur, J.-P. (1983), ‘High Policing and Low Policing: Remarks about the Policing of Political Activities’, Social Problems, 30(5), pp. 507–20. Brogden, M. (1987), ‘The Emergence of the Police – The Colonial Dimension’, British Journal of Criminology, 27(1), pp. 4–14. Cheran, R. and Aiken, S. 2005. The Impact of International Informal Banking on Canada: A Case Study of Tamil Transnational Money Transfer Networks (Undiyal), Canada/Sri Lanka (Working Paper), Toronto: Law Commission of Canada/Nathanson Centre for the Study of Organized Crime and Corruption. Côté-Boucher, K. (2010), ‘Risky Business? Border Preclearance and the Securing of Economic Life in North America’, in S. Braedley and M. Luxton (eds), Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 37–67. Deflem, M. (2002), Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ewald, F. (2002), ‘The Return of Descartes’ Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophy of Precaution’, in T. Baker and J. Simon (eds), Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–25. Foucault, M. (2004[1978]), Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978, Paris: Gallimard, Seuil.

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Fraser, N. (2009), Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, New York: Columbia University Press. Garland, D. (1996), ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society’, British Journal of Criminology, 36(4), pp. 445–71. Garth, B.G. and Dezalay, Y. (1996), Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geisser, V. and Zemouri, A. (2007), ‘Surveiller, contrôler et représenter: le fantôme colonial’, in Marianne et Allah : Les politiques français face à la question musulmane, Paris: La Découverte. Gessner, V. and Nelken, D. (2008), European Ways of Law: Towards a European Sociology of Law, Oxford: Hart. Honnett, A. (2010), ‘Dissolutions of the Social: On the Social Theory of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’, Constellations, 17(3), pp. 376–89. Legg, S. (2007), Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, Oxford: Blackwell. Levi, M. (2008[1981]) The Phantom Capitalists (rev. edn), Aldershot: Ashgate. O’Reilly, C. and Ellison, G. (2006), ‘Eye Spy Private High: Reconceptualizing High Policing’, British Journal of Criminology, 46(4), pp. 641–60. Pasquino, P. (1991), ‘Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital – Police and the State of Prosperity, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Popplewell, R. (1987), ‘The Surveillance of Indian “Seditionists” in North America, 1905–1915’, in C. Andrew and J. Noakes (eds), Intelligence and International Relations 1900–1945, Exeter: University of Exeter, pp. 49–76. Pratt, A. and Thompson, S. (2008), ‘Chivalry, “Race” and Discretion at the Canadian Border’, British Journal of Criminology, 48, pp. 620–40. Ralph, J. (2007) Defending the Society of States; why America opposes the International Criminal Court and its Vision of World Society, Oxford University Press. Reiner, R. (2000), The Politics of the Police (3rd edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sassen, S. (2008), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scherrer, A. (2009), G8 against Transnational Organized Crime, Farnham: Ashgate. Torpey, J. (2000), The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walters, W. (2010), ‘Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens’, in N. de Genova and N. Peutz (eds), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Durham: Duke University Press. Wolf, E.R. (1997[1982]), Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press. Woodiwiss, M. and Hobbs, R. (2009), ‘Organized Evil and the Atlantic Alliance: Moral Panics and the Rhetoric of Organized Crime Policing in America and Britain’, British Journal of Criminology, 49(1), pp. 106–28. Wright, D., Friedewald, M., Gutwirth, S., Langheinrich, M. and Mordini, E. (2010), ‘Sorting out Smart Surveillance’, Computer Law & Security Review, 26, pp. 343–54.

Part I Theoretical Beginnings

[1] Police1 The concept of police is a modern idea with its roots in the European Enlightenment. The term is rooted etymologically in the ancient Greek term polis, which refers to the city-state as a system of government. The modern notion of a polity, as a system of governance and social ordering, is similarly related. In addition, the concept of police connects to the terms policy and politics, as well as to their derivatives – political, politician, politicize, and so on. The activities that take place under the auspices of police inextricably link to political and policy processes concerned with the governance of populations and territory. Policing is that form of civil administration concerned with the regulation, disciplining, and ordering of a community, and is usually associated with that department of government concerned with the maintenance of public order, public safety, and the enforcement of laws. It implies a set of activities aimed at preserving the security of a particular social order, or social order in general, that may or may not derive from a consensus of common interest. Police activities are a specific aspect of social control processes that, for example, exclude punishment. The term also excludes other activities aimed at creating the conditions for social order in the first instance (such as the socialization processes that go on in family or religious institutions and that are aimed at the internalization of ethical controls). Policing is a subset of social control activities distinguished by access to systems of surveillance, coupled with the ability to invoke the threat or use of coercive force, all in the name of the polity, which is the social order writ large. Broadly speaking, policing is concerned with the maintenance of the health of the social body. In contemporary parlance, the police most often denote the regular uniform patrol of public space coupled with post hoc investigation of reported or discovered crime or disorder. Yet what meaning lies in the term cannot reduce to mere law enforcement. Many features of modern police organizations are currently under great challenge. Global changes in the way civil societies exist have led many commentators to suggest that fundamental changes in the nature and organization of police and policing arise due to what is a new stage of historical and social development; this is a matter considered later. The Classical Roots of the Police Idea The origins of the police idea are historically located in the early Enlightenment period. Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) argued that policing was an essential underpinning for the functioning of markets and public life generally, since it fosters the conditions of social peace necessary for the establishment of trust, the sine qua non of civil society. In its classical formulation, Originally published in Encyclopaedia of Law and Society, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 1121–26 (2007). 1

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the idea of police had two senses, as Pasquale Pasquino explained: it was concerned with the promotion of public safety and the public good (cura promovendi salutem; and it was concerned with averting future ills (cura advertendi mala futura). Adam Smith (1723–1790) referred to the police as ‘the second general division of jurisprudence’ and across eighteenthcentury Europe the term ‘police’ encompassed the whole art of government in the sense of regulation, management, and maintenance of populations and territory. In short, policing was the classical manifestation of modern state governance in the domestic sphere. King Louis XIV of France laid the foundations of the first modern police organization in 1666. Following the edict that created the post of lieutenant of police, Louis XIV commented austerely: ‘I shall submit myself to the rulings of this police, and I intend that all shall respect and obey them as I will’ (Stead 1983: 15). Thus, Louis XIV articulated the important principle that no one, including the sovereign, is above the law, even if he – the archetypal Sun King and absolute monarch, who also is supposed to have claimed ‘l’état, c’est moi’ (‘I am the state’) – often, in fact, set himself above the law. Nicholas-Gabriel de La Reynie, the first officer to hold the post, was a first-rate administrator, who effectively implemented the king’s domestic policy. There were in all 14 lieutenants-general of police between the establishment of the office of the Police of Paris in 1667 and the French Revolution in 1789, by which time the police idea had been put into practice not just across the territory of France, but had also taken root across virtually all of continental Europe. It is worth stressing how broad the police mandate was in its classical formulation. The office of police was responsible for diverse matters including firefighting, sanitation, street lighting, relief of the poor, care of the sick, inspection of weights and measures, securing and distributing the food supply, licensing of news publications and manufacturing enterprises, and many other functions crucial to the maintenance of a healthy population. It was the provision of these basic policing services, grouped under the notion of basse police (low policing) that profoundly touched most citizens’ lives. The new institution also carried out the functions of political policing (haute police, high policing), including the maintenance of a system of political spies (mouchards), but this surveillance system ultimately failed to forestall the French Revolution that toppled the ancien régime. Political policing continued unabated after the French Revolution and Joseph Fouche, Napoleon’s minister of police, sharpened and improved the practices associated with it. As Eric Arnold showed, the ‘man Napoleon feared’ lent some considerable notoriety to the practices of political policing, propagating the foundational myth of high policing, much loved by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in the mid-twentieth century, to wit: if three men meet to talk indiscreetly about public affairs, one of them is sure to be a police spy. Although the institution of the modern police was something of a double-edged sword, the improvements in the living conditions of fast-growing European cities were testimony to the social utility of the new institution. Observing that La Reynie left office in 1697 after 30 years of service, during which he had overseen the paving, cleaning, and lighting of Parisian streets (then lit by 6,500 lanterns placed twenty yards apart), François-Marie de Voltaire (1694– 1778) remarked that most of the great cities of Europe had followed his example, but none had equalled it. La Reynie’s lasting contribution was more than helping Paris to acquire the title Ville Lumière (City of Light): it was to show that the way police could successfully strike at the causes of crime and human misery was to aim at dirt and darkness.

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The Modern Police Idea The police concept entered the English language during the classical period, but it was originally a suspect term strongly associated with French practices of haute police and therefore considered inimical to Anglo-Saxon notions of liberty. It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century that the word was established in the political lexicon of the Anglophone world. The Dublin Police Act (1786), under the stewardship of Robert Peel, then secretary for Ireland, established the first body of police in the English-speaking world. He built this police force along military organizational lines, similar to later manifestations of British colonial policing and, in its essential aspects, a gendarmerie. Police forces developed in Scotland during the early years of the nineteenth century, but it was the establishment of the first public police force for London, with the passage of the Metropolitan Police Act (1829), that set the conventional date of inception for the modern democratic police idea, the ‘citizen in uniform’. The centrepiece of this notion was policing by consent of the governed. Several ideals underpinned this doctrine, such as efficient and effective bureaucratic organization, due process and the rule of law, proportionality and the strategy of minimal force, political nonpartisanship, public accountability, and a primary focus on the prevention of crime and provision of a general social service. European social historians have shown that it was the threat posed by the disenfranchised and economically marginalized ‘dangerous classes’ at the beginning of the Industrial Age that galvanized the political elites into creating the police institution and giving it a mandate to secure public space through various legal instruments aimed at public disorder, indigence, theft, and violence. This history is dotted with violent episodes, not least of which are the many instances of rioting, but the general tendency was a diminution in the amount and intensity of violence from the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s. What nineteenth-century police history makes apparent is that the new institution evolved as the threat of capital punishment was pared back and the military role gradually confined itself to the frontiers of the nation-state system maintained by a fragile balance of power. In the twentieth century, officials conceived the police role as largely the concern of a uniformed body of men employed and directed by government and dedicated to the maintenance of public order and crime prevention within the territory of sovereign states. Police were, in Robert Reiner’s words, ‘stout men in blue coats’ (Reiner 2000: 6). The Police Idea in the United States The police idea evolved along a somewhat different trajectory in the United States. There the history was largely that of big-city policing that began first in Boston (1837) and then spread to New York (1844), Philadelphia (1854), Chicago (1855), and other cities. The history of police in the United States did not begin as a federal enterprise chiefly because the founders of the republic, and the citizenry as a whole, were generally ill disposed to the idea of a powerful central government. Therefore, most governmental functions (including education,

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public works, care of the poor, and certainly policing) devolved to local state or municipal government. True, the national government established the Federal Marshals Service in 1789, but, with an original complement of only 12 officers, in no sense did it decisively shape the development of American policing. It was not until the early and middle years of the twentieth century that developments at the federal level began to significantly shape the character of police in the United States. By this time, in typical American parlance, the term law enforcement largely eclipsed ‘police’. No one refers to American federal law enforcement agencies as police. The new term denoted a more limited range of competences. In common with the European trajectory, a primary reason for the establishment of police in the United States was the dramatic rise in urban mob violence that accompanied the rapid growth of cities in the nineteenth century. London police served as the initial model, but there were important differences. There was significant innovation and imitation among urban police forces in the United States from early on. Slightly different ideals of modern democratic police characterized developments in the United States. The democratic police ideal of the old world was an agent of a representative government appointed by responsible rulers for the public good and with the consent of the governed. In contrast, the American democratic police ideal was that of servants of a selfgoverning people chosen by those among whom they worked. The more freewheeling and aggressive style of American big-city policing evolved at least partly because of the great cultural heterogeneity and resultant racial tensions that characterized the new and fastgrowing American urban centres. The themes of police brutality, the Dirty Harry problem, and corruption, the invitational edges to police deviance, are recurrent from early on in the history of policing in the United States. The history of the American West also conditioned in fundamental ways the police idea. The seedbed of the frontier’s invitation to violence nurtured the American vigilante tradition. Vigilantism ‘arose as a response to a typical American problem: the absence of effective law and order in a frontier region’ (Brown 1969: 67–68). The legacy of this history lives on in American culture and permeates thinking about what the police are and what they do. The social and political conditions on the American frontier and in American cities were antithetical to continental European notions of a well-ordered police state, which stressed legality in all police actions. History has shown that the European manifestation of the police idea can be extremely problematic, especially when the conditions for democratic government are not manifest, but this has scarcely been a concern in the United States. Rather, the opposite is the case; throughout the history of the police in America there has been a recurrent tendency for policing to be structured more around nominally democratic sensibilities, rather than around the strength of legal norms and centralized; as such, national coordination over policing has been inconceivable, or at least very difficult to foster. The system built up in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards was a tremendous patchwork of municipal, county, and state police forces. These exceeded some 14,000, each with specific geographical jurisdiction and politically defined boundaries, over which a welter of federal law enforcement agencies were gradually superimposed,

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including, but not limited to, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. William Geller and Norval Morris discerned three periods in this process. The first came prior to the Civil War when the federal government had only a negligible influence on policing. The second began after the Civil War and continued until the beginning of the twentieth century, during which federal law enforcement steadily expanded into policing activities that had traditionally been the prerogative of the states. The third phase commenced just prior to World War I and continued for the rest of the century. During this phase, federal US regulatory functions advanced to touch on most aspects of the single market that underpins American industry, commerce, and society. This trajectory charted the fragmentation of the police idea in America into the various diverse tasks of law enforcement via the compounding of numerous centralized federal bureaus, each with different functional competences. Scholars have also recognized the international role that United States law enforcement has played; although it is possible to trace this back to the nineteenth century, it is also apparent that these international tendencies accelerated in the 1980s under the auspices of the war on drugs and gained further speed in the post-Cold War period. The growing prevalence of the language of law enforcement notwithstanding, by the beginning of the twentieth century, public police in the United States had become important elements in the system of modern governance and an essential point of political interface between the state and civil society. This was also the case in every other advanced industrialized society. The meaning of the word ‘police’ had crystallized and its role in modern society concretized around the functional claim of ‘the police’ as repositories for the state’s monopolization of the legitimate use of force in upholding social order. As Egon Bittner put it: ‘the policeman, and the policeman alone, is equipped, entitled and required to deal with every exigency in which force may have to be used’ (1980a: 35). However, by the later years of the twentieth century it had become apparent that these assumptions were no longer easy to maintain. Current Trends in Thinking about Police At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was fast becoming apparent that the Enlightenment idea of police had reached its nadir. The fragmentation of policing competence into the myriad functions of law enforcement, and the consequently vastly complex policing division of labour, virtually guaranteed substantive irrationality in policing policy and politics. This trend reduced the idea of community policing, which had been propounded as an antidote to strained police–community relations and a way of improving the delivery of police and security services, to that of a ‘rhetorical giant’ (Manning, 1997). These dilemmas, compounded by the growth of privatized forms of security provision, undermined Weberian-type claims about policing as an expression of the state’s monopoly of the technologies of social ordering. Moreover, studies of policing in the European Union, and transnational policing more generally, showed that transnational platforms of governance existing above the level of the nation-state exert a growing influence on police. Recognition

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of transnational crime and terrorism has also led to an awareness of the role of various institutions of transnational governance (for example, the Group of Eight, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations) in policing policy globally. Multiculturalism, global diasporic communities, and a revolution in communications and transportation technologies brought the advent of a global ‘network society’, which affected police organizations as much as any other social institution (Castells, 2000). Multiple forces of social change affect institutions of police in every country. Under postmodern conditions, it is extremely difficult to orchestrate the global polity and the associated system of social ordering whilst keeping it in line with notions of the public interest as vested in a community of humankind. There are some signs that the classic Enlightenment idea of police lives on in the early years of the twenty-first century and is globalizing. For example, faced with a catalogue of genocide, crimes of war, and other state crimes, notions such as the ‘responsibility to protect’, ‘humanitarian assistance’ and ‘human’ (as opposed to national) security are animating discussions about global policing (Goldsmith and Sheptycki, 2007; Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011). These ideas are coming into play at the same time as global efforts at enhancing civilian oversight of policing are taking place and international law – including, but not limited to, human rights law – develops with regard to policing. Even the trend to privatized police has attracted serious thinking about how it might align with notions of the public interest (Wood and Dupont, 2006). It is too early to say if the idea of police, as a broad array of governmental practices aimed at ensuring peace and good social order and operating by the consent of the governed, has had its time. The future of the idea lies in choices about the degree of social inclusion and exclusion, and the related roles played by law and coercion, in shaping social order in a globalizing world.

[2] Transnational Policing and the Makings of a Postmodern State1 The category of ‘the postmodern’ is an abstraction and is, perhaps, not one that comes easily to criminologists. John Rajchman has conveniently located the genesis of the term within the ‘hybrid field of social theory, literary criticism, cultural studies and philosophy that helped turn the term into a self-evident journalistic label’ (Rajchman 1991: 119). According to him, the term began its life as a reaction to the ‘modernist’ conventions of art and architecture – the date of conception: circa 1975–6. And yet, he tells us, it was several years before its efflorescence was evident beyond the élite coterie of the avant-garde. However, and as one might expect with an abstraction such as ‘the postmodern’, its genealogy is not as tidy as Rajchman’s analysis suggests. Significantly, for the criminologist of sociological bent, the term was used more than a decade previously by C. Wright Mills. In his estimation we ‘are at the ending of what is called the Modern Age’, which ‘is being succeeded by a postmodern period’. ‘Perhaps’, Mills tells us, ‘we may call it: The Fourth Epoch’ (Mills 1959a: 166). What characterized this postmodern period for Mills was the problem that: … too many of our standard categories of thought and of feeling as often disorient us as help to explain what is happening around us; that too many of our explanations are derived from the great historical transition from the Medieval to the Modern Age; and that when they are generalized for use today, they become unwieldy, irrelevant, not convincing … our major orientations … have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of the world. (Mills 1959a: 166)

In trying to write the present as history we continually come up against the sense that social life is undergoing some kind of transformation but, as David Garland (1995) has warned, the character and scope of the changes involved, especially at the empirical level, are very much at issue. To use the category ‘postmodern’ is to accept that we have entered into something beyond mere refinement, reformation, and rearticulation of what has gone before. It is also to accept that, in such a time, intellectual labour cannot be expected to uncover what can be held up as ‘objective truths’. As Rorty (1989) argues, there is no standpoint outside the particular historically conditioned vocabularies we are using and, if we live in an age where our major orientations (‘final vocabularies’, in Rorty’s terms) have collapsed, then all we can perceive is fragmentation – all explanations appear arbitrary. The term, as Rajchman knows it, is especially imbued with this sense of deep fissure in the fabric of history. Once it escaped from the lexicon of art criticism into broader discourses about the nature of contemporary experience it rapidly became the catch-all adjective into which all 1



Originally published in the British Journal of Criminology, 35(4), pp. 613–35 (1995).

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the forebodings (or proclamations) of great social change – and consequent epistemological flux – could be loaded. To paraphrase Garland (1995), a decade and a half after its incendiary evanescence has rendered it less than recherché to the cultural élite, it has ‘at last reached the distant shores of criminology where its precise implications have yet to be worked out’. Within the locus of criminology the term might be seen as yet another ‘fashion accessory’ adopted by those ‘who hope to impress by their taste in terminology’. On the other hand, the essential contestability of the term might also create the analytic space for new entrants to the field to carve out a distinctive discourse and research enterprise. Robert Reiner (1992, 1994) has begun the attempt to situate criminological analysis of the police and policing within the postmodern rubric. According to him, commonplace conceptions of policing have become anachronistic in an era characterized by a dynamic of fragmentation, disorganization, pluralism and decentring. At the edge of the Fourth Epoch we can no longer conceive of the police as a single body with an omnibus mandate. More than two decades ago Egon Bittner (1974) noted that the modern police were the last of the basic building blocks to be put in place in the structure of modern executive government. The surest expression of governmentality (Pasquino 1991), the modern police were largely a product of the nineteenth century during which the state system was imposed on Europe.2 The pattern varied across Europe, but, generally speaking, the concept ‘police’ began as a broad form of governmentality which included activities as diverse as the regulation of markets and the securing of food supply and distribution, responsibility for street cleaning, lighting and paving, and the licensing of single-sheet newspapers and manufacturing enterprises (Pasquino 1991). Gradually these functions were hived off to specialist agencies, although ‘policing’ still maintained something of this generalist sense.3 Concomitant with this hiving-off process was the rise in the crime control function, especially the management of ‘folk-devils’ (Cohen 1972) and responsibility for the control of civil disorder (Thompson 1963; Vogler 1991). The image of the folk-devil is, of course, a long-standing one – one can think of Pearson’s characterization of the ‘hooligan’ in the late nineteenth century: ‘a hulking lad full of the devil’ (1983: 32) – and the classification and containment of the folk-devil in all his guises remain a central police task.4 2

The history of policing in Europe can be understood as part and parcel of the imposition of the state system as evidenced by the relatively late arrival of the Carabinieri, the national police agency in Italy, which can be explained by the fact that the peninsula was not a unified state until 1870. See Bailey (1979) for a more detailed account of this police history. 3 As an interesting aside, I have observed in Scottish police stations that police have been involved in the fight against the Colorado beetle. One might think that insects are an unlikely illegal alien to be on police wanted lists but, in Scotland, police and Ministry of Agriculture officials are actively co-operating in efforts to control the possible importation of this pest. The hiving-off process has resulted in specialist ‘police’ agencies, but it seems that the police organization still clings to vestiges of a role first prescribed for them almost 200 years ago. This too has taken on a transnational dimension. 4 The designation ‘folk-devil’ is in no way intended to deride the victims of crime or to suggest that the object of crime control is based on a mythology; rather it is intended to signal the place that such elements of disorder have in the drama of crime control, transnational or otherwise. That place is as an object for the crime control apparatus, to be classified, contained, controlled, and otherwise set apart from the ‘normal’.

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In the language of Weber, the state system imposed an administrative monopoly over territory with demarcated boundaries (Giddens 1987: 171). This power was turned inward, enabling the state ‘to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on the members of a society in the name of the common interest or general will’ (Jessop 1990: 340). It was the police agency which came to embody this administrative mandate via a diffuse notion of order maintenance: what Egon Bittner calls ‘a solution to an unknown problem arrived at by unknown means’. As he put it: ‘The policeman, and the policeman alone, is equipped, entitled and required to deal with every exigency in which force may have to be used’ (Bittner 1974: 35). Thus, this standard history of police and policing has led us to understand the notion in terms of a diffuse range of activities intended to secure the order and prosperity of nationally bounded states. Policing is intimately bound up with the imposition of the nation-state system and the state is thus ‘the most powerful reference point for our present understanding of the wider political relevance of policing institutions’ (Walker 1994: 21). Reiner has suggested, however, that this conception of the police is ‘threatened fundamentally by the advent of those social changes labelled as “postmodernity”’ (1994: 756). Transnationalization – A Postulate of Postmodern Policing So the general claim is that policing has entered upon a significant historical transformation that fundamentally changes its institutional framework. Ethan Nadelmann, of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, has commented on an important aspect of this shift from an American perspective. He is worth quoting at length: Until recently, few would ever mention criminal justice and foreign policy in the same breath. Coordination between the State and Justice Departments, for instance, was rarely necessary, especially in matters of criminal law enforcement. This dichotomy no longer exists. Law enforcement, traditionally a domestic function of government, has become more internationalized. Police and prosecutors who rarely dealt with their foreign counterparts now do so with increasing frequency. Diplomats who seldom addressed transnational criminal matters now find them high among their assigned priorities. And politicians who typically identified crime as a local concern now focus much of their rhetoric and law-making on criminals beyond United States borders. These developments do not mark a passing phenomenon but rather the emergence of new and important dimensions to criminal justice, United States foreign policy and international politics. (Nadelmann 1990: 37)

Given the apparent shift currently underway in policing, it might be that we can say that it is becoming in some sense ‘postmodern’. This historic shift, the claim might go, forms part of the broad shift in contemporary society towards transnational social practices and the ‘globalization of the social system’ (Sklair 1991). These changes in our conception and expectations of policing are part and parcel of a broader shift, a shift in discourses about folk-devils. Criminologists are beginning to talk about ‘multinational systemic crime’ (Martin and Romano 1992) a concept which is typically focused on terrorism, espionage, drugs, and arms trafficking (Gilmore 1990a, b; Malcher 1991; Robertson 1991). Yet, there are other

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areas of concern: crimes against the environment (Block 1993; Hemmings 1993; Tysoe 1993), the crimes of ‘big capital’ (Pearce and Tombs 1993), transnational fraud (Commonwealth Secretariat 1991, 1992, 1993; Clarke 1993; van Duyne 1993), art and antiques theft (Esterow 1967; Gregory and Collier 1992), trade in endangered species (Nowikowski 1992), internationally co-ordinated racist violence (Jensen 1993; Witte 1993) and perhaps others.5 These transnational folk-devils seemingly require a transnational police effort, but this removes policing from its nesting site in the state and situates it in the realm of transnational practices. This transnationalization and the corresponding erosion and diminution of the state system, that most pre-eminent of modernist institutions, represents the harbinger of the postmodern. We are at the edge of the Fourth Epoch. That, at any rate, is the hypothesis. But how are we to understand and apprehend this shift to transnational policing? We could begin by noting that concerns with transnational criminality are by no means a recent phenomenon. The idea for the International Criminal Police Commission (Interpol) was first mooted in 1914 although, due to the outbreak of the First World War, Interpol was not constituted as an organization until 1923 (Anderson 1989; Fooner 1989; Bresler 1992). Interpol, the first forum for international police co-operation, took as its brief a wide range of folk-devils including traffickers in stolen art and drugs and ‘white slavers’, as well as the more commonplace fraudsters, thieves, and murderers who sought to dodge the long arm of the law by fleeing across national boundaries. We could note especially that the international ‘war on drugs’, the most active area for transnational police co-operation, was also given its first organizational framework early in the century, following conferences at Shanghai and The Hague in 1909 and 1912. Here we can note that, while the original framework set down at The Hague in 1912 kept virtually all of the responsibility for policing drugs trafficking at the strictly national level, with some scope for bilateral arrangements, by 1943 the League of Nations had become the focus of efforts to create a truly transnational effort (Renborg 1943).6 That there are historical antecedents does not necessarily refute the hypothesis. What is required is a more detailed analysis of recent developments in order to assess the claim that transnational policing has reached a certain mass which makes it qualitatively different from what has gone before. Current developments in police co-operation in Europe offer a perfect test of this hypothesis for, if the underlying institutional and conceptual grid which shapes policing has been embedded in the structures and ideologies of the nation-state system, then the developing patchwork of the European Union provides an outstanding exception (Walker 5

For example, child abduction in custody disputes is commonplace enough and this too can take on a transnational dimension. The Interpol communications system has been used in a number of these circumstances. As yet, there is no commentary on this form of international criminality in the scholarly literature. 6 Following a certain normative reasoning, the large-scale market demand for recreational drugs was seen as having an ‘inevitable consequence’: ‘that drugs must be controlled in all countries and territories’. The logic was that ‘[A] single weak spot constitutes a grave danger, for other countries or for the entire world’. Further, ‘this could be done only by co-operation among all governments, by the elaboration of satisfactory rules for control, by asking governments to accept international obligations to apply at least such rules (by becoming parties to international instruments) and by providing international supervision of governments, to guarantee that they effectively apply the rules’ (Renborg 1943: 3).

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1994: 20). In short, the practices which comprise police co-operation in Europe may provide a new surface of emergence for discourses about the maintenance of social order. Before proceeding to test this hypothesis, however, there are some related issues which need to be addressed. These concern the fact that most crime is local in character; that is, most police work is grounded in relatively small geographical locales. One can think of domestic violence, for example, which accounts for approximately 20 per cent of all homicides and perhaps a quarter of a million assaults annually in the UK (Edwards 1989; Sheptycki 1991a). Criminologists know that the vast bulk of other types of recorded crime is equally local in character, but what criminologists also know is that the transnational trade in criminological knowledge is contributing to a quickened pace of change within disparate police organizations. Again, to take the example of domestic violence, there has been a transnational trade in knowledge about this type of violence and associated methods of policing that has contributed to a growing global awareness of the issue and, hence, a transnational confluence of policing practice (Sheptycki 1991b, c, 1993a). The transnationalization of policing has also developed in other ways. Community policing is a concept which has attained something of a global reach (Bayley 1989; Graham 1990; Mantila 1987; Razdan 1986; Scharf 1989; Skolnick and Bayley 1988) and yet, as a policing technique, it is still connected with low level surveillance, which can be conceptualized as ‘governmental technology’ (Stenson 1993). So the transnationalization of the community policing paradigm could also offer an interesting test of the hypothesis stated above, in so far as it impinges upon the boundaries between the local and the global. One might ask: what does it mean for a phenomenon like ‘community policing’ to become transnational? Although this is a pertinent question, and one which requires an answer, I wish to bracket this off from this discussion as the community policing paradigm warrants analysis in its own right. A second way in which this issue of a fundamental postmodern break can be raised relates to another contemporary transformation in policing. The ‘rebirth of private policing’ (Johnston 1992), where order maintenance functions shift from state agencies to the free market supplied by security firms, is certainly a significant historical break. This shift has been characterized as a ‘quiet revolution’ (Stenning and Shearing 1980) that has fundamentally altered conceptions of policing as state-centred activity (Shearing 1993). This problematic runs entirely counter to notions of ‘the police’ put forth in the first section of this essay and provides another sense in which discourses about police and policing are in flux. Here again, private policing is normally connected with the maintenance of security over relatively small fixed geographical locales and yet it too is a transnational enterprise with private companies bidding for contracts across national jurisdictions (Johnston 1992: 204–24). This shift provides another excellent test of our hypothesis but, again, it warrants its own separate treatment. This essay is intended to focus attention on developments in transnational police cooperation in Europe, a field which gives ample room to test the postmodern thesis. The following section reviews some of the most important literature on this topic in order to ground the analysis pursued in subsequent sections in a concrete way. It provides a guided tour of the myriad organizational forms that have been put in place in Europe to facilitate the transnational police enterprise. Following that, there is a sociological analysis of these fragmented institutional forms, which focuses on the technological infrastructure for police

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co-operation. This, in turn, will allow the discussion to return back to the postmodern thesis in the conclusion. Pieces of the Machinery of Order Sociologists and others who theorize about the nature of police and policing often remark on the problematic nature of these terms (Klockars and Mastrofski 1991). In discussing developments in transnational European policing, problems of terminological inexactitude must be stressed at the outset. One common use for the term ‘police’ in the transnational context refers to the use of military forces for the purposes of intervention in conflict situations (Pugh 1988). Such proposals were put forward at the League of Nations and the United Nations has also become immersed in such efforts – the conflict in Korea was referred to, at the time, as a ‘police action’. Some argue that the fusing together of counter-terrorist policing, intelligence activity, and military operations in the context of Northern Ireland gives this type of ‘policing’ a very active sense today (Tomlinson 1993); others only imply it (Malcher 1991). There is yet further variation in types of policing activity in Europe. In addition to the various measures for policing terrorism and other ‘political’ crimes, there are police involved in special ‘cross-border initiatives’ dealing with illegal immigration, drugs and arms trafficking, and a range of other criminal activity. These units are concerned with policing ports, airports, rail and road links (including the Channel Tunnel) – such units work closely with another policing-type institution: customs and excise. And yet there are still more: tax and revenue policing initiatives to deal with money laundering, various forms of fraud and corruption, for example (Commonwealth Secretariat 1991, 1992, 1993; Punch 1993). Then too, there are the various forestry and fisheries police. One study identified 105 separate police agencies in the UK – but this did not count many in the above mentioned categories (Benyon et al. 1993). It is commonly held that the USA has the most differentiated policing system in the world (Walker 1977) with literally thousands of different police agencies, from the federal to the local level. The overlapping jurisdictions created by the American patchwork have been held to lead to ‘linkage blindness’ (Egger 1990a). Linkage blindness can be understood as a lack of information networking between law enforcement agencies leading to the overlap and duplication of functions and expertise. According to Egger, this overlap may lead to competition between law enforcement agencies or, at very least a ‘systemic myopia’. Europe’s wide variety of law enforcement agencies might be expected to have led to an analogous situation, compounded by the problems of working in a multi-linguistic environment with a multiplicity of legal frameworks. Assessing transnational policing in Europe is a murky business. The most up-to-date effort at mapping this enterprise available in English has been attempted by the Centre for the Study of Public Order at the University of Leicester (Benyon et al. 1993). This study tried to put order to the field by reference to a three-tiered typology which defined policing enterprises at the macro, meso and micro levels. While this typology produced an admirable schema, setting down virtually all of the existing frameworks for transnational police co-operation in Europe in an economical fashion, it did so at the expense of portraying the character of the system

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as a system. Be that as it may, in order to familiarize readers with the current state of play it is at least necessary to lay out the primary structures which are said to lie at the macro level. Most descriptions of transnational policing initiatives in Europe begin with a discussion of Interpol – l’Organisation Internationale de Police Criminale, probably because it is the oldest framework for police co-operation (see Sheptycki 1994a for a brief summary of the history of this organization). Its primary purpose is to promote mutual assistance between police organizations in separate countries and it does so by functioning as a communications network. Contrary to popular images, Interpol does not have its own operational officers who deal with criminal matters – the man from Interpol never arrested anyone. Primarily, Interpol works by facilitating information sharing and message switching between the member police agencies. Police personnel from the various member countries are placed on secondment in Interpol offices at the national level (National Central Bureaux (NCBs)) or in the central bureau at Lyon, France, to help facilitate intelligence gathering and exchange between police agencies in the various member countries. In 1992 this network handled just over one million messages, 80 per cent of which were generated within European countries and 40 per cent of which emanated from European Union countries. The size and importance of the Interpol operation prompted the British government to recommend that decision makers in the European Community avoid ‘re-inventing the wheel for the sake of political innovation’ and that ‘any future agreement on a European Information System should be closely linked to the Interpol network’ (Secretary of State for the Home Department, 1991, Recommendation 18). However, Interpol is a unique policing organization in that it was not constituted through any international treaty, nor any convention or similar legal instrument (Fooner 1989: 45). Rather, it was founded upon a constitution that was written by a random group of police officers who did not submit the draft to their respective governments for approval or authorization. No diplomatic signatures were ever placed on the draft, nor was there a submission of the constitution to governments for ratification. One commentator referred to the organization as a ‘policeman’s club’ (Bresler 1992). Conscious of the sensitive nature of such an organizational mandate to issues of national sovereignty, a basic principle, that such sovereignty should always prevail, was written into Article 3 of its 1956 convention. Thus, Interpol’s mission was defined as the ‘efficient repression of common law crimes and offences to the strict exclusion of all matters having a political, religious or racial character’ (quoted in Fooner 1989: 80). While Interpol did intervene in some of these types of situations on an ad hoc basis, high profile terrorism was considered problematic for the simple reason that conflicting definitions of terrorism might have prompted large numbers of members to leave the organization (Bresler 1992: 162–3). The uncertain legal basis of the organization probably contributed to inaction in crimes of terrorism; it was only in 1972, with the signing of the Headquarters Agreement in France, that the organization attained formal legal status in that country (this despite the fact that its headquarters had been housed there since the end of World War Two). One year previously the organization negotiated a special arrangement with the United Nations and with this recognition came formal arrangements with a number of other agencies including the Council of Europe, the Customs Co-operation Council, and the International Civil Aviation

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Organization.7 Yet still, Interpol remained reluctant to involve itself with anything other than ‘ordinary law crimes’. It was not until 1983 when President Ronald Reagan clarified the USA’s position, signing an executive order designating Interpol a Public International Organization entitled to the privileges, exemptions, and immunities conferred by standing US legislation on such organizations, that things began to change in earnest. At this time expenditure by the American government on the Interpol NCB in Washington DC went from an annual $125,000 to $6m over a ten-year period (Bresler 1992: 177).8 It was also during this period that US law enforcement personnel stepped into key positions in the Interpol organization and the ‘doctrine of the conflict area’ was articulated, allowing the organization to take a more proactive role in policing terrorism.9 It was Interpol’s writing out of ‘political’ crime from its operational brief that prompted a ‘reinvention of the wheel’ during the 1970s. Following the massacre perpetrated by Black September on 5 September 1972 at the Munich Olympic Games and other similar terrorist attacks during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the European Council of Ministers established their own intergovernmental framework for dealing with this type of crime – TREVI. This constitutes the second major macro level network for police co-operation in Europe. TREVI 7 It is generally accepted as fact among informed commentators that Interpol was given full status as an intergovernmental organization in 1971. Bresler states that ‘the United Nations accorded Interpol full legal status as an intergovernmental international organization’ (1993: 131). However, Interpol itself merely lays claim to having a ‘special relationship’ with the Economic and Social Council of the UN. The terms of the resolution passed appear to fudge the issue, stating that the relationship accords to Interpol ‘the same conditions and procedures as are applicable to … organizations having consultative status … with the Council’. That is to say, UN Resolution 1579(L) pertaining to the Special Arrangement for Cooperation between the United Nations and the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) does not say that Interpol is an organization having IGO status but merely states that it is to be treated as if it were. By implication, this means that Interpol actually retains a less exalted status as a nongovernmental organization. I am grateful to Inspector Paul Swallow of the Metropolitan Police International Unit for pointing this narrow although important distinction out to me. 8 The American government put money into international policing in a more direct way. The Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA) has over 60 offices world-wide staffed by over 200 operational agents (Nadelmann 1990: 39). Nadelmann argues that there is an overwhelming American predominance in transnational policing activity, ‘the DEA’s capacity to pursue its objectives world-wide is certainly greater than that of any other law enforcement agency’ (ibid.: 48). In 1993 it was estimated that the DEA had 2,800 agents assigned to drug enforcement at home and abroad and its budget was estimated to be US$718m (Law Enforcement News, vol. XIX, no. 385, 15 September 1993). That is up from some 2,117 agents operating at a cost of $200m in 1976 (Nadelmann 1993a: 149). 9 The Secretary General of Interpol, Raymond Kendal, explained the doctrine of the conflict area thus: ‘We make a distinction between what happens within what we would call the conflict area and what happens outside the conflict area. So, let’s suppose we were dealing with Israel and Jordan: what goes on in that particular conflict area would not be of interest to us for international police co-operation while it remains in that conflict area. On the other hand, if a Jordanian comes to Paris and shoots the Israeli Ambassador, then it does become our concern because it is outside the strict conflict area and in answer to supporters of the PLO who say to me publicly at conferences: “We are freedom fighters and everything else,” I say, “While you are fighting for freedom in your own country, fair enough! But if you use that argument to permit terrorist acts outside the context of what is in the internal freedom struggle, then that takes away from you the protection of being a freedom fighter …”’ (Bresler 1992: 183–4).

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is a high level ministerial group which also includes senior police officers; currently the 12 members of the European Union form the core, but there are also seven ‘friends of TREVI who attend meetings as observers. They are: Austria, Canada, Morocco, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA. This organization’s original brief was ‘terrorism’, but it has since been widened out to include drugs trafficking, serious organized crime, police training and technology, communications and information technology, public order, disaster prevention, and the abolition of internal borders. This organization, together with what Benyon describes as meso level structures – such as the Police Working Group on Terrorism (PWGOT) and the Mutual Assistance Group (MAG, which deals with customs related issues) and the Comité Européen pour la Lutte Anti-Drogue (CELAD, which deals with drugs trafficking), provide formal channels for liaison officers from the various police agencies in Europe to move between and within these agencies in tackling various specific crimes. Liaison officer programmes enable police officers from the various national police agencies to work together on special projects. An excellent example of this mode of co-operation can be found in the efforts to control ‘football hooliganism’ during the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy. Liaison officers from a wide number of police agencies co-operated in this effort. This involved forward intelligence gathering in order to identify ‘key’ actors in an effort to prevent serious incidents before they happened. It also involved small teams of police officers from various national agencies who escorted their own nationals to matches to give aid and assistance, again in pinpointing key individuals, to Italian police (House of Commons 1991).10 However, the most prominent example of this type of activity that the TREVI group has produced is the development of a system of Drug Liaison Officers (DLOs).11 This system includes postings between police in the various European states and some outwith the EU. As can be seen, liaison officer programmes give an operational capacity to this transnational policing structure, albeit one which is mediated through other formal arrangements. The complexity of these arrangements lends the TREVI system an opacity beyond that of Interpol. The TREVI system consists of an elaborate multi-tier structure including a ministerial level, a senior officer level, and a working group level staffed by officials and law enforcement personnel (Walker 1993b). Currently there is no permanent Secretariat and this has prompted some discussion of a ‘democratic deficit’ (McLauglin 1992). In the terms of political science, TREVI has an intergovernmental structure, that is, it is mandated by formal relations between sovereign governments. As such, its decisions remain outside the competence of the European Parliament. It has no headquarters or budget, making monitoring and evaluation of its initiatives all but impossible. Despite, or perhaps because of, the relative secrecy of its decisions, TREVI’s success in acting as a stimulus for European police co-operation, not 10 While police co-operation is well advanced, juridical co-operation is not. Thus, when ‘trouble’ occurs host countries have usually opted not to pursue criminal charges and ‘hooligans’, under escort by police, have simply been ‘herded’ into compounds and, in turn, on to air transport back to their own country of origin. Thus the management of one of the most visible folk-devils in Europe can be seen as a purely technical exercise which has very little to do with the criminal law. 11 Of course there are others. For example, in the wake of widely publicized outbreaks of racist violence in Germany and France in the spring of 1993 the TREVI ministerial meeting at Copenhagen in June of that year initiated an investigation into the possibility of transnational orchestration of racist violence (Guardian, 2 June 1993).

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just in the key areas of terrorism and drugs, but also over a wide variety of issues, cannot be underestimated. However, despite its success, the progress of the European Union may also have sown the seeds of its eventual demise (den Boer and Walker 1993). Before discussing this possibility, the nascent Europol and the effects of Article K of the Maastricht Treaty however, it is necessary to look first at the Schengen Agreement which provides the frame for the third macro level transnational policing effort in Europe. The Schengen Agreement provides one of the key inter-governmental instruments for police co-operation in Europe and constitutes the third macro level structure to be discussed here. The primary objective of the Schengen Agreement has been to ‘harden’ the external borders of the European Community (now Union) and thus make it possible to dissolve the internal ones. The Schengen Agreement of 1985 consolidated and widened an earlier achievement of the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) which effectively removed border controls between those countries. While progress along these lines has encountered some political stumbling blocks, issues about visa and asylum policy in particular, it seems evident that there is a broad degree of consensus among policy makers in Europe regarding the way forward, and this extends to the usual range of subjects, including surveillance of external borders, co-operation between police forces, and legal authorities in matters regarding criminal law, extradition policy, the sharing of criminal information (including information on individuals), and the delegation of the enforcement of criminal judgments, as well as drugs, firearms, and telecommunications policies. This consensus for co-operation may have arisen because, as one well-placed commentator stated: Such co-operation, I would stress, is a worthwhile objective in its own right. This is true for the Schengen countries as it is for the Community as a whole, and it is true whether or not internal frontiers come down. In a Community with internal frontiers, such co-operation has been desirable but optional―and very little progress has been achieved in these fields over the years. In a Community without internal frontiers the work is both urgent and necessary. That is why the list of subjects covered in the Schengen Supplementary Convention is precisely the agenda on which the Community as a whole is now working. (Brittan 1991)

The organizational structure of Schengen, as might be expected, is exceedingly complex. At its apex is an Executive Committee (provided for in Title VII of the Convention) which consists of Ministers and Secretaries of State of the member countries. However, most of the actual work carried out is supervised by the Central Negotiating Group (CNG) which consists of about 120 senior officials and police officers. The Central Group supervises the operations of all sub-working groups and presents decisions to the European Council of Ministers. Underneath the CNG are four principal working groups with a further 11 subaltern working groups, again related to a whole gambit of issues from telecommunications to firearms, drugs, agricultural products, the environment, and much more besides. This structure represents the most ambitious attempt to promote practical police co-operation within Europe. As with the TREVI arrangements, there is something of a democratic deficit, with no parliamentary and very little judicial control of the organization (O’Keefe 1993). Although there may be potential to attribute some jurisdictional competence to the European Court of Justice under Article K3 of the Maastricht Treaty, the accountability of the Executive Committee to the

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national parliaments is severely limited. Article 132 of the Schengen Convention provides that the Committee may decide its own rules of procedure and set up any working groups it wishes. The lack of control of the actions of the Executive Committee has prompted the conclusion that there is a fundamental flaw in the descriptions of the Schengen Convention as a prototype for future co-operative arrangements (Benyon et al. 1993). The fourth macro level structure to be considered here is a relatively new kid on the block: Europol. This is an, as yet, untested policing structure. The idea for such an organization was first put forward by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at a meeting of the European Council of Ministers in June 1991 and was subsequently taken forward by the TREVI ministers. The original intent was to establish a framework for a fully operational Euro-police, akin to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States. This, however, is still a long way off. As Lode van Outrive, the rapporteur on Europol for the Committee on Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs, stated in the European Parliament, ‘we do not have the political, legal and procedural structures we would need for an operational European federal police force’ (Debates in the European Parliament, 21 January 1993, 3–426/281).12 The structure of accountability was explained in the British House of Lords by Earl Ferrers. It will … operate under the authority of a ministerial agreement. Under the terms of the agreement the unit will be accountable to TREVI Ministers of the European Community member states. In this country that is my right honourable friend the Home Secretary. In practice though Ministers will delegate the responsibility for the day-to-day running of the unit to officials. That is likely to require the creation of an executive committee with representatives from each member state which will monitor the activities and the management … the precise arrangements about the frequency of the committee’s meetings and its detailed functions have yet to be worked out, but the coordinator … will report via the committee to TREVI Ministers. (Hansard, vol. 541, no. 85, 27 January 1993)13

12

Mr van Outrive, Member of the European Parliament representing the Netherlands, is an outspoken critic of aggressive law enforcement tactics in the ‘fight against drugs’ (NB: ‘the war on …’ metaphor is frequently watered down in a European context). In particular, he has expressed his extreme doubts regarding costs and benefits of the fight against drugs. Further, he has expressed doubts ‘concerning the efficiency, reasonableness and harmlessness of a repressive military demeanour’ and noted that it is ‘generally known that drugs trafficking is the first and foremost cause of police corruption’. Finally, his argument against the criminalization of recreational drugs rests on questions about the motives of those who campaign for the continuation of the war on drugs: ‘we do not know whether those who advocate the repressive approach, and also the illegal nature of everything to do with drugs, are genuinely concerned about public health and the connections between politics and the largescale economics of drugs trafficking, or whether they tolerate that—precisely through its totally illegal character—the interests of mafias and organized criminals are served, because they obtain extremely high incomes which in turn enable them to fund all kinds of economic and political activity’. (Debates in European Parliament, 15 May 1992, No. 3–418). 13 According to the Ministerial Agreement on the establishment of the Europol Drugs Unit (November 1992, unpublished document) ‘without prejudice to the responsibility of individual Ministers for the control of their national liaison officers, the Ministers will collectively exert a general oversight of the activities of the Unit … the Coordinator will submit a six-monthly written report of his

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So, the nascent Europol emerged from the womb of TREVI. The original motion tabled by Chancellor Kohl called for the creation of a single European Police Office which would combat international and European crime, an idea which approximated the federal structure of the German Bundeskriminalampt (BKA). Although this was accepted by the majority of ministers involved, the UK being a notable exception, this plan was too ambitious, at least in the short term. What has emerged instead came from the successes of TREVI Working Group III on drugs and organized crime; this was a European Drugs Unit (EDU), which was given a mandate to co-ordinate intelligence exchange relating to drug trafficking and the exchange of drugs liaison officers. These ideas were nurtured by the inclusion of Title VI and the Declaration on Police Co-operation in the Maastricht Treaty on European Union. Article K1(9) of the Treaty states that police co-operation is a matter ‘of common interest’ and calls for ‘the organization of a union-wide system for exchanging information within a European Police Office (Europol)’. While Europol is limited to a drugs intelligence unit at the moment, it is clear from a report to the European Council by the TREVI ministers that this is but a first step and that ‘the scope of Europol can be progressively widened so that the experience gained in establishing the drugs capability can be applied to other relevant types of crime which pose a threat to Member States … Without wishing to prejudge the outcome of future work, it is likely that money laundering and aspects of organized crime linked to drug trafficking would be included at an early stage in the responsibilities of Europol.’14 There is every reason to expect that, in the long run, TREVI and Europol will merge back into one another (Fijnaut 1993). Under Article K6 of the Maastricht Treaty these activities may be questioned by the European Parliament, which has the right to be informed by the Presidency and the European Commission. Further, under the provisions of this Article, the European Parliament will hold an annual debate on these issues. However, the control that the European Parliament has over transnational policing co-operation under the terms of the Treaty is weak; there is a procedure set out whereby the Community may acquire legislative competence in some areas of justice and home affairs, but this is not the case for police co-operation or, indeed, even for judicial co-operation in criminal matters or customs co-operation. It is the Co-ordinating Committee created under Article K4, which consists of senior civil servants from the member countries (it is, as yet, unclear how they will be appointed), who will exert day-to-day control. This control will, again, be asserted through a system of subaltern working groups. As such, any control the European Parliament has will be insulated from the workings of this apparatus by several layers of bureaucracy, but there is a second avenue of accountability, as Earl Ferrers stated in the House of Lords:

management and the activities of the Unit. The Coordinator will also provide any other report or other information which is asked for by the Ministers’. 14 Quotation taken from a document entitled: ‘The Development of Europol. Report from TREVI Ministers to the European Council in Maastricht’ (undated and unpublished).

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The Government are fully aware of the need to ensure that Europol and the Europol Drugs Unit are fully and properly accountable to the parliaments of all the member states, including the Parliament of the United Kingdom. (Hansard, vol. 541, no. 85, 27 January 1993)15

Nevertheless, questions about the democratic deficit with regard to this last of the macrolevel institutions to be examined here have been raised. It has been noted elsewhere that as an adjunct to the TREVI group, which has no procedures for democratic accountability, Europol can be open to similar criticism. Some concern has already been expressed in the European Parliament over the lack of control and the paucity of mechanisms for assessing the effectiveness of its operations.16 The respective parliaments of the countries that make up the European Union are no less insulated from this apparatus. Indeed, they may be more so and, hence, may be seen as less likely to offer an avenue for democratic accountability. Thus we have a catalogue of major structures for transnational police co-operation in Europe. As Lord Morris of Castle Morris put it, not without some apparent sense of exasperation, ‘there are no fewer than four major [police] organizations trying to secure business. They are TREVI, Interpol, Schengen and Europol’ (Hansard, vol. 541, no. 85, emphasis mine). Perhaps not surprisingly, given the high-level ministerial negotiations that have produced these mechanisms (that is, with the exception of Interpol) most of the analysis that has been produced of these ‘macro-level structures’ has been carried out by political scientists. What this discussion makes apparent is that much of what has transpired in terms of transnational policing initiatives in Europe remains firmly grounded in intergovernmental agreements, that is: the individual states that comprise Europe remain key actors. Over and between these sovereign units has been thrown a thick web of relations which constitute a multiplicity of transnational social control networks. It appears that this web anchors these sovereign states to each other and bolsters their solidity, rendering them a collective conglomerate. However, a descriptive overview of these structures, while a useful and necessary aid to understanding, does not amount to an analysis of the actual workings of the transnational policing enterprise. A more sociological approach is necessary if we are to evaluate and understand the nature of the changes that are transpiring. Some of the above-mentioned commentators have tried to ask similar questions by reference to the emergence of a ‘post-Hobbesian state’ (Walker 1994; Streeck and Schmitter 1991), wherein the emerging supranational European state is expected to lie somewhere between the ‘sovereign units’ that comprise it. The postHobbesian state, so this theory goes, will be based on diffuse networks constituted by multiple voluntary exchange between such units who will maintain an unambiguous monopoly of the legitimate use of coercive force (Walker 1994: 34). The hypothesis established in this essay, predicated on the postmodern problematic, seeks to penetrate beyond this in order better to comprehend the nature of the fluctuating accomplishments of these institutional mirages.

15 Indeed, Article K2(2) specifically guarantees the retention by member states of their existing responsibilities for law and order and internal (read national) security. 16 ‘Drug Squad to be Part of “Fortress Europe” Strategy’, The Independent, 3 June 1993.

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Fragmentation, Pattern, and Order? Anthony Bottoms and Paul Wiles have argued, persuasively, that the transnational exchange of capital has unfettered it from the state. Capital, so this argument goes, has become so transportable within global financial communications networks that it is no longer really possible for governments to control and direct its flows. This has led states to seek new forms of co-operation, including the creation of supranational institutions like the European Union. According to Bottoms and Wiles, ‘this is one of the processes which has led to what is sometimes called the “hollowing out” of the state’. This hollowing-out process is said to have ‘removed the power of decision making to a macro level beyond the control of the state’ (Bottoms and Wiles 1994: 15). In terms of this discussion about transnational police co-operation, the ‘hollowing out thesis’ seems at odds with the observations made so far. The four macro-level institutions discussed in the previous section seem to exhibit a thickening of state controls over coercive apparatuses, although it is arguable whether this thickening is conditioned by the liberal democratic ideals associated with Western states (McLaughlin 1992). While there is an acknowledged tendency for the emergent structures of transnational policing to compete with one another (van Reenen 1989: 49-50; Johnston 1992: 202), this competition seems at least partly to do with the fact that the transnational structure itself reifies national state apparatuses. That these structures for police co-operation function at all might seem remarkable. However, while ‘there is no immediate prospect of criminal law harmonization in the EC, there is nevertheless a remarkable similarity between European states in their specification of the main categories of crime’ (Walker 1994: 32). Thus it seems entirely possible that these transnational arrangements can continue to function within a state system characterized by heterogeneity (as evidenced by a lack of harmonization of criminal law), purely on the basis of a consensus on the main categories of criminality. Transnational police co-operation, it appears, can proceed on the basis of what has historically been a central tenet of the modern state, its monopoly of formal social control: the folk-devils are dealt with regardless. However, this apparent thickening turns out to be illusory when we examine the technical apparatus upon which transnational law enforcement depends. A key indicator of the growth and change of transnational law enforcement capacity is improvement in telecommunications and information management systems. Technological change signifies a great deal; as Shoshana Zuboff argues, a ‘fundamental change in an organization’s technological infrastructure wields the power of the hand at the turning rim. Technological change defines the horizon of our material worlds as it shapes the limiting conditions of what is possible and what is barely imaginable’ (Zuboff 1988: 387). There is no doubt that there has been a technological revolution of sorts in transnational policing. Looking briefly at the law enforcement situation in the Western hemisphere, in May 1986 Interpol ‘induced the United Nations, through its drug fund for Drug Abuse Control, to finance a telecommunications network in the Caribbean region’ (Fooner 1989: 150). The first stage of this programme was reached by 1989 with a fully operational network covering 26 countries based at the regional Interpol NCB in Puerto Rico. Interpol upgraded its entire global network during the 1980s; some NCBs went from

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using Morse code to fax machines almost overnight (PRSU 1992). By the early 1990s the Interpol central station transmitted some 1 million messages annually (Interpol 1989).17 In the European context, the special focus of this essay, this technological leap has been just as marked and the Interpol network offers a prime example. Estimates range from 400,000 to 800,000 text-messages handled by the Interpol network in Europe annually – depending on where the boundaries of Europe are said to lie. TREVI’s principal communications technology is a secure facsimile network (TSFN), which facilitates a highlevel ministerial trade in information. One of the central preoccupations of TREVI has been to make suggestions on practical frameworks for the introduction of information technology (Walker 1993a). The Schengen Agreement acknowledged the need to abolish obstacles to the free movement of goods and persons, that is: ‘internal’ border controls, and it authorized the detailed discussion of a number of issues concerned with police and criminal justice co-operation, especially criminological data transfer. The Schengen Agreement offers yet another excellent example of transnational policing, since it has its own separate European criminal intelligence system, known as the Schengen Information System (SIS). The SIS was conceived to facilitate information exchange between the national police forces of the nine signatories to the Schengen Treaty through a central data processing unit based in Strasbourg. This system was scheduled to come on line for six of the Schengen member states (Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain) in February 1994, with Portugal, Greece, and Italy delaying until some future date.18 It is expected that in the near future it will be possible to exchange fingerprints and pictures via the SIS: the system has a current theoretical maximum of eight million personal records and a further seven million records on objects. Current estimates are that it will be dealing with two-and-a-half million enquiries annually before the end of the decade. The fourth information management system in the offing in Europe is attached to Europol’s European Drugs Unit (EDU). After some delays Europol headquarters have been established at The Hague with plans for compiling a database of personal information related to drug traffickers. It is early days for this new effort and questions remain as to its relationship with the SIS and Interpol. Europol was suggested in order to create a policing apparatus that has operational capacity within the whole of the European Union and hence represents another significant prototype for what transnational policing might eventually look like. However, this organization is, as yet, only embryonic. In the interim, the information processing systems that currently exist, or are planned for, call for consequent developments of national criminal intelligence systems in order to link transEuropean policing efforts with operational (that is: national) police units. The great concentration of databases on criminals and criminal activity has come out of a perceived need to build in economies of scale and to facilitate transnational communication.19 17

The USA example offers a measure of the extent of increase in telecommunications traffic. The Washington DC NCB processed 4,000 requests for information in 1976; this increased to 48,000 by 1987 (Nadelmann 1990: 47). 18 As of the time of writing (February, 1995), the SIS has yet to come on line for message transfer, due to technical difficulties. 19 The recent trend towards centralization in British policing ‘is partly due to the British police discovering economies of scale …. [and that] the regional structure of the police makes it difficult to co-operate abroad’ (The Economist, ‘Policing the Police’, 26 February 1994).

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In the UK the Secretary of State recommended to Parliament that ‘a National Criminal Intelligence Service be established, with an operational arm operating through a revamped regional crime squad structure and incorporating the existing national intelligence units’ (Secretary of State for the Home Department, 1991, Recommendation 32). He also recommended that the Interpol NCB for the UK should be part of the National Criminal Intelligence Unit (later designated the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS)) and that ‘European Liaison Officers in police forces should also be designated Interpol Liaison Officers’ (Recommendation 10).20 Looking at the growth of information technology in the sphere of policing and crime control in Europe offers a confusing vista. Zuboff argues that: Information technology is a label that reflects the convergence of several streams of technical developments including microelectronics, computer science, telecommunications, software engineering and system analysis. It is a technology that dramatically increases the ability to record, store, analyze and transmit information in ways that permit flexibility, accuracy, immediacy, geographic independence, volume and complexity. Information technology has a unique capability to restructure operations that depend upon information for the purposes of transaction, record keeping, analysis, control or communication. (Zuboff 1988: 415)

Advance in the criminological application of information technology, in this broadest sense, is well underway in Europe. The Interpol Criminal Information System, housed in Lyon, France, is equipped with an Automated Search Facility (ASF) which allows Interpol NCBs, as well as other official services having a ‘police mission’, direct access. The ASF currently contains particulars of some 130,000 persons, about 80,000 of which are drug offenders.21 At the same time there are significant legal and political barriers to comprehensive networking between the numerous workstations in the various organizations. The Ministerial Agreement on the establishment of the Europol Drug Unit, for example, states that ‘the transmission of personal information to non-Member States or to international organizations [i.e. Interpol] by the liaison officers will not take place’, prompting one observer to conclude that ‘the prospect of an integrated international criminal intelligence system is … far from immediate’ (Cameron-Waller 1993). In looking for evidence of the hollowing-out of the state, the vast growth of ‘cyberspace’ in police and crime control efforts gives interesting results. On the one hand, the increase in ‘informated space’ yields a potential for an organizational revolution. However, these 20

The UK Interpol NCB was duly incorporated into the NCIS network on 1 April 1992. It processed a total of 102,346 messages that year relating to some 15,633 cases (National Criminal Intelligence Service Annual Report 1992/93). 21 Currently Interpol is the only transnational policing enterprise with an online capability of this sort. I asked one officer in the International Bureau of the UK National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) what would be the theoretical maximum number of records that the system could house. His answer was that ‘as regards the cocaine side, which is the area that I know about, we know that there are in excess of 70,000 Columbians in London alone … we know that approximately 60 per cent of these are involved in the cocaine trade’. When I asked him to clarify if that meant that there were records on some 42,000 Columbians in London alone his reply was ‘Yes’ (from taped interview).

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technological improvements are being laid down within pre-existing political and legal foundations.22 As Lord Morris intoned, there is a sense in which these various organizations compete for business (Hansard, vol. 541, no. 85). There is a great deal of cross-over of responsibility within these organizations. Frequently one person will be given several roles to play; for example, Interpol liaison officer and European liaison officer as well as an operational role, say on a stolen car squad. Still, the degree of fit between organizations is not seamless. The technological space that is being created in the crime control apparatus remains underpinned by older institutional structures (national and subnational) which prevent the establishment of a unified informated space. The political and legal agreements that have been struck in order to constitute these umbrella organizations are piecemeal and disjointed, reflective of the highly differentiated nature of police organizations operating in Europe. The picture is further complicated when the large number of bilateral arrangements for crossborder policing are taken into account. These arrangements constitute unique organizational arrangements that stand between national police forces mediating cross-border police cooperation, which, themselves, operate in their own ‘informated space’ (Gallagher 1992). The resultant picture is a patchwork quilt. According to Benyon, [i]n addition to the Trevi Group, Interpol, the Schengen Agreement and the nascent Europol, there is a wide array of less formal arrangements for promoting police co-operation in Europe. The number of these law enforcement networks, groups and agreements is large and together they form a complicated, interconnecting, mesh of formal structures and informal arrangements, serviced by a range of information systems (which are often incompatible). (1992: 32)

In short, while technological refitting in the numerous policing enterprises which constitute European policing to date has been dramatic, it has not brought about a unified or coherent police information environment. Benyon characterizes this state of affairs as ‘incremental drift’. The extent to which this verifies or refutes the ‘hollowing out of the state’ thesis depends on how we interpret the nature of this shift. As Zuboff says, only rarely is there a grand design … instead, there is a concentration of forces and consequences, which in turn develop their own momentum. Sometimes the lines of force run in predictable straight paths. At other times, they twist and spiral, turn corners, and flow to their opposite. Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice. In many cases, they are convenient responses to the press of local exigencies. (Zuboff l988: 389) 22 In addition to the barriers that older national organizational frameworks place in the way of a unified ‘cyberspace’, there are also the legal barriers of the data protection legislation. For an overview of these issues see den Boer and Walker (1993). There is, however, an offsetting tendency, as Didier Bigo (1994) argues, which is the trend towards an ‘internal security field’. The ideology of internal security, a domain of practices and ideas which subsumes all of the folk-devils from illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to organized criminals, terrorists, drugs and arms dealers, encourages the future development of a security service to police the enforcement of the new security regime.

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Put another way, looking to information technology to provide a simple unified frame for transnational policing is misguided. Some criminologists argue that institutional responses to crime should properly be seen as fragmented (Ericson and Carriere 1994). They label criminological approaches which are principally concerned with the rational deployment of personnel and technology and the use of strategies and tactics calculated to secure a territory against those who threaten its people and things ‘General Schwarzkopf Criminology’. What is argued for in contrast is an ‘institutional approach’ (Gladstone et al. 1991) which views a myriad groups and organizations (including criminologists and Schwarzkopfs) using crime and its regulation in order to constitute themselves.23 In painting these sociological observations about the apparatus of crime control on to a transnational canvas, a fragmented picture would indeed be the expected result. But to what extent have these changes constituted a hollowing out of the state? On the one hand, it is apparent that older practices and discourses and the nation-state remain alive in these new arrangements – and this has led to an apparent fragmentation. On the other, when we prioritize our perception of these older forms we subsume the real weight of history within our own estimation of a diversity of interests that pervade collective behaviour. Zuboff warns that ‘to narrow all discussion of technological change to the play of these interests overlooks the essential power of technology to reorder the rules of the game’ (Zuboff 1988: 389). This would seem to suggest that this vast and ungovernable patchwork of informated spaces, existing in the transnational interstices of state power, might indeed be a significant diminution of the nation-state’s near monopoly of policing. The Paradox of the Postmodern State In terms of testing the postmodern hypothesis then, our examination of technological and intergovernmental advance is revealing. What seems to be happening is a new unfolding dialectic in discourses on crime and its control (the technical management of folk-devils). This dialectic is situated in a metaphorical transnational space that has opened up in the state system. Where once borderlines on maps held an abstract solidity seemingly more firm than the border guards that policed them, our current discourses reveal a concern about interstitial spaces between governed territories. In the European context, some commentators have put forward the notion of ‘harmonization’, a process by which Europe as a whole can be constituted as a governable territory (Barry 1993). The idea of the dissolution of Europe’s ‘internal borders’, and its corollary the (as yet ill-defined) ‘external frontier’, has raised questions about ‘security’ (Ramsbotham 1991) and conclusions that ‘better policing and intelligence work are more important than physical border controls’ (Philip 1989). Harmonization, something akin to Habermas’s notion of ‘the scientization of politics’ – whereby issues become a technical problem examined and managed by restricted groups of bureaucrats, experts, and professional lobbyists – can thus be interpreted, in part, as a transnational criminological enterprise equipped with the epistemological underpinnings of governmentality. 23

In Mary Douglas’s terms, organizations create themselves by ‘harnessing all informational processes to the task of establishing themselves’ (Douglas 1987: 102).

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The apparent resilience of the will to govern and its attendant vocabulary has led some criminologists to conclude that we are entering upon late or high modernity (Bottoms and Wiles 1994; Garland 1995). Garland has pointed out that while many of the discussions about criminology (and by extension policing, including transnational policing) are infused with the sense of deepening crisis, we can ask if current developments signal a significant historical shift or if this sense of crisis has led us to overdraw the changes underway. For example, he argues that, while Foucault singled out the prison as a modern institution perpetually in crisis and undergoing reform, ‘he might more accurately have noted that all modern institutions share this characteristic, be they schools, or hospitals or even government itself’ (Garland 1995: 20). Crisis, then, is not enough evidence on which to base any claims about the depth of current historical shifts. What would be required is evidence of a deeper social restructuring. The analysis undertaken here leans towards a vision of the current historical conjuncture that depicts social order (social control) as ‘split into a multitude of contexts of action and forms of authority … [wherein] the nation state declines in importance and the cohesive totality is replaced by a multiplicity of sites of reproduction’ (Giddens 1992, as quoted in Reiner 1994). Like the modernist institutions which are but subunits of the state (the prison, police organizations, and the like) the authority and self-identity of the nation-state is not a stable, circumscribed conception but a boundary of separation which must be constantly policed and this holds doubly true for the nascent European suprastate. The tension emerging in Europe is that two principles of organization currently vie for the right to define that which must be separated out. Until very recently state-centred modes of order policed and managed technically the usual suspects: terrorists, drug dealers, mafiosi, and other ‘folk-devils’. In the current conjuncture new – transnational – organizations also claim the right to manage these outsiders. This management is a costly enterprise, more so because of its fragmented nature. Ironically, it is an expression of governmentality that seems free floating (i.e. ungoverned), in so far as it is not beholden to an identifiable source of legitimized political power. Yet it must be stressed, in spite of the fragmentary nature of this policing enterprise, it has a coherence; the pattern of the patchwork quilt emerges from the folk-devilry it seeks to order. The history is too short to make predictions as to what or, indeed, if a coherent and unified institutional framework will emerge from these processes; we know not what the Fourth Epoch may bring. In the interim we are left with a fragmented vision. We can see both a thickening and a hollowing out of the nation-state, we can see both the emergence of transnational policing and its firm anchorage in sovereign units, we see both fragmentation and unity in the technical capacity to manage deviance and disorder. Order maintenance itself is subject to contingency, the chaos of ruthless fate and fumbling chance. In effect, police, criminologists, and other experts on social control are no longer really modernists but they have yet to assume a new coherence and identity. If we assume that there is a new distinctive identity which may emerge in the Fourth Epoch we could say that, at present, we are merely postmodern.

[3] Law Enforcement, Justice and Democracy in the Transnational Arena: Reflections on the War on Drugs1 If we arrest a drug dealer here in the Netherlands he will be given a penalty of a maximum of six months in prison. If we arrest him in Germany he will get a maximum of six years. We arrest them in Germany. It is better I think. (Dutch police officer, from taped interview, 1995)

Introduction Sociologists have introduced the notion of a ‘global system’ (Sklair 1991) and have already begun the attempt to map out the transnational order and its institutions. The thesis that this emerging sociology rests on is that the transnationalization of capital and capitalist institutions has, particularly in the post-Cold War era, fundamentally changed the nature of the international system. As even the casual observer will know, capital can be moved so easily and rapidly around the world that it is no longer really possible for governments to control or direct its flows. This has set in motion a number of global processes that has removed the power of decision making to a macro level beyond that of the nation-state qua state. At the same time, researchers employing the concept of ‘transnational social practices’ also point out that the concept of the state is frequently reified and seek to better illuminate how subordinate institutions, which together comprise ‘the state’, function as semi-autonomous organisations (Anderson 1994). Taken together, these two developments in our thinking about the transnational world order have opened up room to discuss the transnational practices of institutions which, until now, have been ignored as actors in the international arena (for a critical discussion of the concept of ‘transnational’, see Halliday 1994). Taking note of these processes, however perfunctorily, raises the prospect of examining the relationship between the globalization of law enforcement and democracy (together with its attendant legal norms). Monopoly of legal discourses and the apparatus of social control has been at the very heart of the institution of the nation-state and the degree to which specific states were, or were not, democratically conditioned shaped their character is way no less pertinent than under contemporary conditions of globalization. In the emerging global village (McLuhan and Fiore 1989) or, perhaps, Global Neighbourhood (Commission on Global 1



Originally published in the International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 24(1), pp. 61–75 (1996).

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Governance 1995), law enforcement will again play such a role. So we should take time to ask ourselves some fundamental questions about the system of Justice that is emerging as the business of crime control becomes a transnational practice. This essay is a further contribution to work on transnational policing (Sheptycki 1995a). It aims to describe the slow and continuing emergence of transnational criminal law enforcement practice. This is an important development in policing since transnational law enforcement, by definition, involves policing in multiple legal jurisdictions. As the quotation set out at the beginning of this essay illustrates, operating within and between legal jurisdictions has given police the power to make extra-judicial legal decisions. This means among other things, policing agents have, in some circumstances, acquired the power to make decisions about the fit level of punishment for a given offence. Law enforcement as currently practised in the transnational arena well serves to illuminate the issues of democracy and justice in that sphere. What follows is a guided tour of some of the more salient developments in transnational law enforcement relating to drugs trafficking, which reflects on the possibility of a transnational democratic world order. Some Preliminary Considerations In considering the emergence of supra-national state entities, it can be helpful to begin by reminding ourselves of some basic conceptual building blocks in democratic theory (Weiler 1995). One of the most important is a staple of classical political theory: the distinction between the demos and the polity. The Ancient Greek notion of the demos denotes ‘the people’ or ‘the commons’, and its attendant notion, democracy, denotes a state in which governance is vested in the people as a whole. In contrast, a polity is merely a political system. This concept refers to the institutional form of administration, that is: the practical form of political organization. To illustrate these concepts, it can be stated that Christendom in the Europe of the Middle Ages comprised a polity, but it was not a polity of demos. Weiler argued that, in a Europe cross-cut by competing linguistic and cultural nationalisms, it is not possible to talk of a demos at all. On the other hand, the polity of the European Union, while a complex of overlapping institutions which defies easy summation, is recognizable as such. Such a view is, mutatis mutandis, no less applicable to the New World Order. The distinction between the demos and the polity points to what might be understood as the ‘pure’ definition of democracy. While no doubt resting on idealistic assumptions regarding the will to power human affairs, this definition encourages us to be sceptical about the possibility of a democratic political order, either in Europe or within the emerging transnational world order. Regardless of the scale on which these concepts are to be applied, the crucial point is that for the political order to be definable as democratic, the demos must know itself as such and the power of decisionmaking must reside there. The term ‘democracy’, however, is an essentially contested concept (Gallie 1962; Connolly 1983) and, as might be expected, there are radically differing conceptions of the term. One which might be deemed to have particular relevance for the analysis to be advanced in this essay emerged from realist political theory (Schumpeter 1961) which put forward a notion of ‘democratic élitism’ (Bachrach 1969). In this version of the term, democracy itself becomes

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a type of polity. According to Schumpeter, democracy is ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’ (1961: 269). In this ‘realistic’ version of democracy, there is no need for a demos as such – what is important is that, while the people (the demos) cannot be the source of political ideas or initiatives (because of their essentially divided and conflict ridden nature), they can act as the source of legitimate power which competing élites vie for (cf. Mills 1959a; Packard 1959; Baltzell 1964). All that is necessary, according to this conception of democracy, is that periodic elections take place in which the electorate has the opportunity to remove an incompetent or malevolent elite from political office and replace it with another élite whose governance is more in keeping with the needs, hopes and dreams of the electorate. One claim that this realist theory makes is that when a demos is divided, élites are best able to compensate and balance competing interests and, so, mitigate against the ‘tyranny of the majority’. We thus have two quite differing views of democracy, and there are others which range between them. However, it is not necessary to discuss the whole of democratic theory here (readers interested in these questions as they pertain to policing might consult Jones et al. 1994). Rather, in order to keep this discussion brief, we can rest the analysis on three crucial aspects. The first is that the political process should be transparent. In a democratic polity, it is usually assumed that the process of decision-making will be clear to citizens. Secondly, and relatedly, it is also assumed that the persons responsible for political decisions will be held to account for them and may be removed from office for failure to perform their duties properly. Lastly, democratic political structures are also assumed to be constituted within the ‘rule of law’, which binds ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1991) by and through legal authority. This means that all citizens of the polity are bound by the same set of legal rules and institutions. This often presumes a separation of legislative, judicial, and executive authority. In the context of the analysis pursued here, this separation implies that law enforcement is bound by a priori legal codes and does not work outside them. With this notion of the democratic ideal and its attendant legal norms in mind, let us examine the practical emergence of transnational law enforcement. If democracy, articulated in whatever form, is the supposed foundation of the criminal law enforcement enterprise, then study of the latter will be the best test of those foundations. Law enforcement is coercive power and is a basic form of politics. By looking at transnational law enforcement practice we can come to better understand the political form of the emerging world system. The question here is: what evidence do we have that transnational law enforcement is conditioned by democratic and legal norms? Transnational Law Enforcement, Legal Doctrine and Drug Trafficking A plethora of folk-devilry sustains the transnational law enforcement enterprise (Sheptycki 1995b). The list of folk-devils is impressive including: war criminals, terrorists, drugs and arms traffickers, fraudsters, art and antiques thieves, racists and neo-Nazi groups, and child

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abductors, to name only some of the more obvious ones.2 With the possible exception of war criminals, all of these categories of deviance are well known to criminologists in the more mundane settings within national bounded states, but transnationalization has taken these forms of criminality outside those boundaries giving functional justification for a parallel transnational law enforcement enterprise. This enterprise comprises a bewildering array of agencies that can be characterized as a patchwork quilt of overlapping and competing agencies; the fabric of a post-modern state system (Sheptycki 1995b). The problem of crime and transnational world order is a complex one. We are interested here to establish something about the degree of democracy that this emergent political system sustains by looking at policing in relation to one particular folk-devil mentioned above: the drug trafficker. This example is singled out for examination because it is second to none in terms of the amount of energy (in terms of money, personnel, time and rhetorical justification) devoted to it and is, as such, the paradigmatic example of transnational policing. There are many agencies that operate in the transnational sphere which facilitate the war on drugs. Some of them are departments of national governments, the United States Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) being the most well known. In contrast there are many transnational organizations about which very little is known. In the Americas, for example, there is the Air Smuggling Investigators Association (ASIA). In Europe, the Northern Working Group on the Suppression of Drug Trafficking (NWGSDT) brings together operational police officers. Despite the proliferation of these umbrella organizations, most of the operational work of combating drugs trafficking is even less formalized. Most Western nations participate in the exchange of drug liaison officers (DLOs), whereby members of national, state, or municipal police forces facilitate communication and co-operation between their various agencies. Many transnational law enforcement accomplishments are achieved under these arrangements. For example, officers from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) may operate out of DEA office in Miami, working with the FBI and other foreign police agencies to tackle smuggling operations in the Caribbean basin (cf. Rodgers 1991). In Europe, the DLO network was established under the provisions of the TREVI agreement (Fijnaut 1993). Indeed in Europe policing this type of crime had, by the 1990s reached something of a critical mass, so much so that, within the context of the politics of the Europe Union, it was is the first form of criminality to win approval for the establishment of a pan European police agency with the potential for operational capability. Europol has been initially limited to this specific role but there are plans for future development. However, this organization is a long way from providing the kind of operational cover achieved through the liaison officer system, if indeed it ever will. But the co-operation of these various national and sub-national police agencies is also facilitated by subterranean police networks. Networks of personal contacts between police agents from these many and varied agencies have been widely documented (Benyon et al. Law Enforcement News (Vol. XXI, No. 427, 20 July 1995) reported an interesting development in the police information revolution noting the development of the ‘Children’s Interpol’. This is a network dedicated to dealing with missing children which, as of this writing, links organizations in the USA, Canada and Mexico, with plans to bring in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece and Australia. Linked by telephone/fax/e-mail, this organization has laid claim to the ‘recovery’ of 47 children and the bodies of eight dead children. 2

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1993; den Boer and Walker 1993; Bigo 1994), giving rise to some concern about their lack of accountability (McLaughlin 1992). There are other networks, for example the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) and a host of others interested to articulate the views of police professionals. These organizations function transnationally and have gained some attention for their role in furthering the policy dimensions of the war on drugs (Nadelmann 1993b). However, there is one agency that has an almost mythical status, so much so that it is virtually a household name. Interpol or, more correctly, the International Criminal Police Organization (ICPO) traces its roots back to the 1920s (Anderson 1989; Fooner, 1989; Bresler 1992). Interpol is a unique policing organization in that it claims status as an Intergovernmental Organization under the auspices of the United Nations, despite the fact that it was not constituted through any international treaty, nor any convention or any other similar legal instruments. There is no shortage of police personnel pursuing the transnational war on drugs and they are networked in a way that, while a degree of operational effectiveness may be achieved, is difficult to monitor. The lack of transparency, especially with regard to the subterranean police networks, might be said to constitute clear evidence of a democratic deficit. However, while transparency is a fundamental aspect of democracy there is more of a case to be made. What about questions of accountability and the rule of law? A US Supreme Court decision reported in the Commonwealth Law Bulletin (1992), concerning the case of United States v. Alvarez-Machain is illuminating. The facts of the case are, in essence, as follows. In April 1990 a Mexican citizen, one Dr Humberto AlvarezMachain, was forcibly kidnapped from his place of work in Mexico and flown by private aircraft to Texas whereupon he was arrested for alleged participation in the murder of a DEA special agent who had been operating in Mexico. It was concluded in the US district court that DEA agents were ultimately responsible for the abduction of Machain, although they did not personally take a part in it. The decision by the US Supreme Court to uphold Machain’s conviction, despite the fact that his appearance in court was facilitated by a criminal act, could be said to be tantamount to the sanctification of ‘state sponsored delinquency’ (Commonwealth Law Bulletin 1992).3 On the other hand, the decision was justified by the extension of a longstanding principle in American law, known as the Ker-Frisbie doctrine, that forcible abduction does not offend due process and does not require a court to dismiss an indictment for loss of jurisdiction on those grounds (cf. Coggins and Roberts 1991, discussing United States v. Verdugo-Uquidez). This harkens back to the American frontier tradition (Brown 1969) when law men sometimes had to ‘repatriate’ criminals who sought to dodge the long arm of the law by fleeing across jurisdictional boundaries. In a globalizing world this has profoundly undemocratic implications for international criminal law. The second example to be pursued here is of a real legal innovation. In his exhaustive study of what he terms the ‘internationalization of law enforcement’ Nadelmann (1993) demonstrated how the use of ‘controlled delivery’ method was introduced onto the menu of tactics utilized by law enforcement agencies in Europe. This technique involves police officials allowing shipments of illicit drugs ‘to go forward under [their] control and surveillance … in order to secure evidence against the organisers of such drug traffic’ (1993: 236). This 3

It should be pointed out that there was no real need for the kidnapping since there are formal methods to pursue extradition between the two countries.

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method of pursuing the war on drugs was not legally condoned in Europe when it was first used, but it was strongly espoused. As Nadelmann explained ‘… European agents respond to the legal prohibition of a valuable investigation technique first by discreetly employing it anyway, then by persuading and pressuring prosecutors to sanction it and, ultimately by inducing judges and legislators to legalize it’ (1993: 236). Ultimately, the legal status of this innovative technique was sanctioned, not just by courts in individual nation-states but also by international bodies like the Council of Europe and the United Nations. The practice was codified in the 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Gilmore 1991). All of which nicely confirms ‘Brodeur’s Law, which states that whenever a contradiction between policing practice and legality arises it is most likely the law that will be modified, not the practice (Brodeur, 1984: 36; see also Fijnaut and Marx, 1995: 49) The third example to consider is not so much a case of evolving legal doctrine, although it can be introduced in that way. Indeed, this example sits somewhat awkwardly beside the two preceding ones but, for reasons that shall become apparent in the analysis, it is a crucial piece of evidence for understanding the questions at hand. In relation to the International Law of the Sea, there has been considerable discussion focused on the mechanics of drugs interdiction in international waters. The most important legal instrument here had been the 1982 Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which states simply that flagship nations are obliged to ensure safety and compliance with all laws of shipping. It also upholds the principle of the freedom of the seas: that all ships should travel unhindered on the high seas, and that responsibility to ensure this lies with the flagstate. Historically then, many countries have been reluctant to employ maritime and/or military vessels in anti-drugs operation (Seward 1992: 21). This situation was radically altered by the widespread adoption of the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (1988). In essence, Article 17(3) provides that ‘A party which has reasonable grounds to suspect that a vessel … is engaged in illicit traffic may … take appropriate measures in regard to that vessel’ (Gilmore 1991: 32). However, this legal innovation was not the only impetus for change in these practices; there were very important background factors at play. As Valerie Seward noted: With the collapse of communism, defence forces are looking for a new role as they face severe cutbacks in most European countries. Some national forces have already assumed a secondary involvement in anti-drugs work; the U.K. for instance has an arrangement whereby their services can be used up to interdiction level. (Seward 1992: 21)

There was not too long a wait before the British Navy found an opportunity for its new ‘secondary role’. On 18 November 1993, the Daily Telegraph reported that the Type 21 Frigate Avenger, together with a fisheries protection vessel and a fleet auxiliary ship, chased and boarded the West Indies registered vessel St. Vincent (erroneously reported as the Poseidon in the Telegraph article) in international waters. Apparently the St. Vincent had been used as a ‘warehouse vessel’, the practice of which was to off-load quantities of cannabis onto smaller vessels for landing on the mainland. What was not reported was that the Royal Navy participated in the seizure of this vessel under the legal rubric of ‘constructive presence’ and the international right of ‘hot pursuit’. What we see here in this third example is military

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hardware being employed in a law enforcement capacity, which is, to say the least, something of a convergence of the traditional division of labour between the police and the military.4 But the Royal Navy is not the most unlikely agency to become involved in the transnational war on drugs. In the UK, currently both MI5 and MI6 are competing for a slice of the enforcement pie (Clutterbuck 1990). With a notable lack of foreign political adversaries and a hiatus in terrorist activity all over Europe, these organizations are looking for a continuing mission, and the sheer scale of the war on drugs seems more than able to accommodate these new players. So what do these examples lead us to think about the politics of transnational policing? The implications of these examples will be taken up in the following section. Transnational Law Enforcement, Democracy and Justice The three examples given in the previous section provided a substantial backdrop upon which to project questions about democracy and justice in the field of transnational law enforcement. In terms of the possible range of definitions of democracy proposed at the outset (and the three fundamental aspects that they are taken to imply), it seems incorrect to describe the transnationalization of drug law enforcement by reference to the term. Partly as a consequence, the justice achieved by the transnational war on drugs also seems to be questionable. An essential element of the democratic political form is that decision-makers are held accountable for their actions and are replaceable, whether on the grounds of incompetence, malevolence or other shortcomings. The theory of democratic elitism postulates competing groups which vie for access to the machinery of political power. The emerging transnational law enforcement enterprise, within its host of agencies both national and transnational, constitutes a mercurial organizational mélange and there is, indeed, competition between the different agencies. As Lord Castle of Castle Morris put in a debate in the House of Lords on police co-operation in Europe, ‘there are no fewer than four major [police] organisations trying to secure business. They are TREVI, Interpol, Schengen and Europol’ (Hansard Vol. 541, No. 85, emphasis mine). There are many more agencies, organizations and networks in this lucrative market of transnational law enforcement than Lord Castle showed awareness of, but the point to be made here is that the competition of the market is not the same as the strictures of democracy. Further, there seems to be more in the way of an oligopolistic carving up of the 4

This connection between the police and the military is not unique to the UK. For example, on the West Coast of Canada, joint operations involving the RCMP and the Canadian Department of National Defence, dubbed ‘Sovereignty Patrols’ are becoming a prominent feature of anti-drug smuggling operations. This involves police operating in an ‘investigative capacity’ from military ‘platforms’ (i.e. naval vessels and surveillance planes). Ten such patrols were scheduled to take place during 1995. The military/police linkage in the Pacific North West is a new development and has a transnational dimension through the North Star Project which brings together both Canadian and US officials from a range of agencies, including Customs, the Coast Guard, the Military and various police organizations in the two countries. The previous success of drug interdiction on the West Coast can be measured by reference to the seven seizures that took place between 1978 and 1993, involving quantities ranging from 1500 pounds to 66000 pounds. To date, no significant seizures involving this military/police joint operational capacity have been registered. Instead, these operations have focused on ‘data gathering’, that is: compiling a database of photographs of all vessels sailing in the waters off the West Coast.

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market than true market competition. In short, rather than a guarantee against a ‘tyranny of the majority’ technocratic transnational police professionals cannot easily be held to account under any mechanism nor do they seem to be removable from office. What is at issue here is not the rightfulness of the policy of criminalization of drug trafficking. The question is: are transnational drug enforcement practices conditioned by democratic principles? It seems we must answer in the negative. In the case of Alvarez-Machain and again in the example of the introduction of ‘controlled delivery’ into the European theatre of operations, what is evident is that law enforcement agents operating at the middle level of their respective agencies are putting together criminal cases which test the limits of the law with the aims of extending those limits. In Alvarez-Machain, police officials encountered a Bench that was quite sympathetic to the law enforcement point of view. In the example of controlled delivery, somewhat greater pressure had to be brought to bear over a more protected period of time, but in both instances we see the legal climate actually being determined and conditioned by the convenience of bureaucratic law enforcement personnel who are not held politically accountable in any jurisdiction. ‘We are moving toward a global community’, argue international lawyers Paul Coggins and William Roberts, ‘and at some point an over-reaching legal framework will be necessary. Such a framework will not be developed by international convention but on a case by case basis as the developed economic world perceives the value of predictable legal standards’ (Coggins and Roberts 1991: 48). In the field of law enforcement and drugs trafficking we can see that legal standards, such as they are, are being established in the wake of law enforcement action, rather than law enforcement standards being set by pre-established legal criteria. I would want to argue that this is akin to what Habermas (1969) once referred to as ‘the scientization of politics’, whereby an issue, in this case global drug trafficking, becomes a technical problem to be managed by restricted groups of bureaucrats and designated ‘experts’. Further, this scientization of politics seems to be conditioned only by oligopolistic market practices and this does not amount to democracy in any of its guises. To recall the terms introduced in our preliminary considerations, the new global order is a polity of bureaucratized experts. In the terms reminiscent of classical political theory, we might say it is a transnational oligarchy in which police agents have some of the best seats at the decision-making table. The superabundance of law enforcement agencies looking to offer their services in the transnational sphere is nowhere more evident than in the UK where agencies formerly engaged in pursuit of a Cold War enemy are now looking to involve themselves in policing. John Newing, Chief Constable of Derbyshire, stated in January 1993 that ‘putting MI5 into policing is a retrograde step’. Calling it ‘centralization by stealth’, he went on to question the accountability of the agency and insisted that an institution established to carry out espionage was inappropriate for law enforcement work. Barry Irving, Director of the Police Foundation, noted that ‘to allow MI5 into organised crime is allowing them into the policing arena’. He noted that ‘police performance is being evaluated as never before’ and asked, rhetorically, ‘is MI5 being brought in as a secret force to do the sort of things that the police used to get away with?’ (quotations taken from the Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1993). Already , the Metropolitan Police have been giving courses to MI5 personnel on how to present evidence in court in anticipation that they will become involved in pursuing this type of crime. This seems almost conclusive evidence of the oligopolistic practices of the transnational law enforcement

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community. Although there is manifest resentment and ongoing ‘turf wars’, there seems room to incorporate every agency within the polity of bureaucratized experts that comprises the transnational police enterprise. As for the question of justice, the case of Alvarez-Machain is very instructive. The kidnapping of Dr Machain is a clear violation of a well established customary rule of international law, that enforcement jurisdiction is strictly territorial by nature (cf. Brownlie 1990). However, to see this case as an affront to the national sovereignty of Mexico is to miss the point since treating individuals as mere ‘objects’ of international law sits uneasily with the major advances in the human rights field. As one commentator put it: The public interest demands not only that the guilty are brought to conviction, but also that they are brought to conviction in a civilised and publicly acceptable manner, In other words, the public has an interest not only in the conviction of the guilty, but also in the moral integrity, or to put it more simply, the quality, of criminal proceedings. (Commonwealth Law Bulletin 1992).

In examining the justice dimension of this question, however, it is the symbolic demeanour of the ‘war on drugs’ which gives the greatest cause for concern. As discussed in our third example, military resources made redundant at the end of the Cold War have been given a new lease of life pursuing the war on drugs. It is already apparent that the law enforcement agencies are setting the tone for jurisprudential reasoning. As more militaristic and clandestine institutions become involved in these processes it is appropriate to ask questions about the likely direction of future legal interpretations. The prospects are not good, especially since the opportunities for exerting political pressures on these processes through some form of democratic mechanism are lacking. As institutions that have historically derived their mandate from military traditions, rather than from the civil criminal law tradition, increasingly involve themselves in transnational policing it seems likely that they will exacerbate this trend. The war on drugs is becoming precisely that and, by definition, there can be no such thing as a Just War. Conclusion Turning again to the more general theme of this essay, I have sought to introduce the transnational practices of police agencies into the criminological and socio-legal debate and, further, to ask questions about how the study of such practices can illuminate issues of democracy and justice in the transnational sphere. Obviously not all that is transnational policing could come under the microscope here. However, the transnationalization of drug law enforcement provides ample material to begin an examination of these issues. This essay suggests in a preliminary way that the discourse of democracy, is peripheral in the emerging transnational policing system. An alternative notion of the ‘polity of bureaucratized experts’ seems to describe transnational policing better. This notion seems to fit better because the mid-level bureaucratic management that currently sets the pace of practical efforts in transnational law enforcement, and defines the agenda for legal precedent, is not conditioned

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by any democratic process. Many of the police networks are subterranean and even where they are not, as in the case of Interpol (ICPO), there are no democratically elected members of the public to oversee policy decisions; in the words of one commentator, Interpol is more of a ‘policeman’s club’ (Bresler 1992). This club very evidently has many levels of membership and extends beyond holding ICPO credentials. What emerges from this analysis, then, is that transnational policing networks and organizations, which operate with varying degrees of visibility to the public (ranging from clandestine to clouded), operate in a way that sets the legal framework for their operation rather than being confined by that legal frame. Further, on a transnational level these actors are moving ever closer to an oligarchic monopoly over the transnational machinery of policing. It is too soon to say that all of the developments in the newly emerging transnational police enterprise will necessarily evolve in similar ways. A wide range of police practice comes under this rubric. War crimes are not the same as international white collar crime; transnational traffic in stolen vehicles or fine art are different again and there are yet other issues. These different phenomena are policed by different agencies and the ideological meanings they invoke are also different. We might, therefore, reasonably expect that the social and political processes that condition them will be somewhat varied. Criminologists have a great deal of work to do as they open up the transnational domain for consideration. All that it is possible to say at this point is that the initial signs are not hopeful. The war on drugs comprises the single largest law enforcement effort in the world today, both transnationally and within most national domains. The real danger is that the bad habits developed in its pursuance will condition other forms of policing as they emerge in the transnational domain. Let us hope that this is not so. Acknowledgements Funding for the Research on which this essay is based was provided under ESRC Grant Number H524 27 00061 94. The Nuffield Foundation Grant Number SOC/100(757) and the British Council Young Research Workers Scheme. The author would like to thank William Gilmore and the anonymous reviewer for their help and advice regarding aspects of international criminal law.

[4] Policing, Postmodernism and Transnationalization1 Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.2

Throughout the incandescence of the York Deviancy Symposium, during the period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, criminology was in a period of more or less permanent scientific revolution (Downes 1988). There is one strand of thinking that suggests that subsequent to this period of epistemological flux criminology has, because of changes in the funding mechanisms for such research, become committed to routine research competence in the service of policyoriented empiricism (POE) (Rock 1988). Even where the fragmentary nature of criminology is accented, POE has been identified as the predominant strain (Ericson and Carriere 1994). ‘Crime’, Paul Rock tells us, ‘now looks more sober, abundant and distressing than before’ and thus, faced with the brutal facts of riot, urban disorder and high rates of criminal victimization, criminology is ‘no longer a discipline besotted with the idea of big ideas’ (1994: 145–7). It is thus with somewhat pleasing irony that a term like ‘postmodernism’, with its attendant attitude of theoretical cannibalism – where the intellectual is exhorted to appropriate ideas as the postmodern artist appropriates styles, throwing them together at will, jumbling the different theoretical idioms without commensurating them into a single coherent language, splashing them on to the page in a celebration of intertheoretical and international elasticity – enters criminological vocabulary at this point. Just as concepts have ebbs and flows in usage – one might use the term ‘fashion’ (Thorne 1993; Garland 1995) – they also have etymologies or histories of usage. In the case of the concept of a ‘postmodern age’ that history goes back much farther than most suppose. Indeed, it seems that Toynbee coined the term in the crucial year of 1939 when he wrote that ‘our own Post-Modern age has been inaugurated by the General War of 1914–18 …’ (Toynbee 1939: 43).3 C. Wright Mills’s use of the term in The Sociological Imagination (1959b) is

Originally published in the British Journal of Criminology, 38(3), pp. 485–503 (1998). All things change and we change with them. 3 Toynbee’s use of the term was directed at the eclipse of European civilization on the world stage. Put simply, since the modern period was synonymous with the rise of Europe, the transfer of global political, social and economic power away from that tiny peninsula and its clutch of small islands on the western edge of the Asian land mass presaged the dawn of a new civilization. Hence the historical cleavage bespoke by the term ‘postmodern’. 1 2

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better known to criminologists (Reiner 1992; Sheptycki 1995b).4 ‘In applying this term these thinkers intended to illuminate a basic transformation in the political economy and the cultural and social order of contemporary societies, imbuing their idea of history with a sense of deep fissure. More recently, and perhaps notoriously, thinkers who have adopted the term have also sought to identify, exemplify and amplify an epistemological break with Enlightenment Rationalism. This break plays on the inevitable irony of historical contingency seeking only solidarity and thereby eschewing universal truth claims (Rorty 1989). This notion of fissure in both the social structure of society and its philosophical (ideological) framework is, in contemporary usage of the term, accompanied by the postmodern (née McLuhanesque) style already alluded to as exemplified by Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida. History is not, as Winston Churchill is purported to have said, one damn thing after another. It is a social process of becoming. In trying to write the present as history, the category of the postmodern allows us to approach the present without reference to an overarching and totalising ‘truth’ as, for example, Whiggish or Marxist history did. Rather, by writing about the present in contradistinction to what has gone before, and by focusing on processes of disintegration, fragmentation and change, the historian of the present is trying to capture that sense of becoming and, further, to identify where we might be going. It is a dangerous exercise – ‘futurology’ is the scornful label for such efforts – and yet, even while the study of history cannot help but inspire a scepticism about a recurrent belief in decline, a recognition of deep change is necessary in order to gauge if the degree of fruitful novelty is keeping pace with the obvious destruction. If there were not such striking, and all too often violent, shifts in modes of governance visible in the world around us there would be no point in discussing the nature of the so-called crisis of our time and the character of the turning point which we are said to have reached, or passed, or sighted ahead. Examining the present state of governance permits us to form at least a tentative conclusion about the magnitude of the present epoch. Criminology can and should contribute to this intellectual project. This essay focuses on but one aspect of the historical changes contemporary people feel themselves to be in the grip of. It is the feeling that crime stalks our cities and the idea that its suppression is neither feasible nor in keeping with enlightened thought. Coupled with this increased sense of insecurity are significant changes in our primary institutions of social control. My analytical focus here is on police rather than, say, the institution of punishment; for it is with this concept, and the practices embodied by it, that the phenomena of crime and social control are most broadly related. However, in order to engage with contemporary manifestations of ‘police’ we must first discuss its genealogy; we must know where we have come from in order to guess where we are going. Historia magistra vitae (history is the teacher of life).

4

Mills’s use of the term, while also pointing to the importance of historical cleavage in social theorizing, suggests the centrality of an earlier transformation. For him, too many sociological terms were forged in an attempt to understand the import of the industrial revolution and the transition from the medieval to the modern age but, ‘generalized for use today they become unwieldy, irrelevant, not convincing’ (Mills 1959b: 166).

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A Genealogy of ‘Police’ The ‘science of police’ is much neglected in conventional histories of criminological thought (Reiner 1988), the primary exception being Radzinowicz’s encyclopedic History of English Criminal Law (1956), the third volume of which is largely devoted to an account of it. Standard histories of criminology make reference to Beccaria and Bentham, Quetelet and Lombroso, but very often fail to mention Colquhoun, or do so only in passing. More obscure figures, such as Georg Obrecht, do not feature in the criminological pantheon at all (Pasquino 1991). This seems due to the current state of criminology, rather than because the science of police was marginal in the earlier period. Indeed, when Adam Smith referred to it as ‘the second general division of jurisprudence’ he merely confirmed policing as a much broader enterprise than what criminologists mean when they refer to ‘classical criminology’. The term encompassed the whole art of government in the sense of regulation, management and maintenance of population – that is: ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1991). This sense of police is still with us today, as the literature on community policing and its variants testifies (Bayley 1994; Goldstein 1990; Skolnick and Bayley 1986); and yet much of contemporary criminology views the study of police as a mere topic under the more general heading of criminal justice systems. Examining changes in the way social order has been achieved is essential for understanding the scope of the concept. The concept of police was introduced into the English language during the first half of the eighteenth century and, as Radzinowicz noted, it was originally a suspect term being derived from contemporary French usage. As previously mentioned, the meaning of the term was cast widely, to indicate something like the government of great cities or the regulation of the inhabitants of a country or city. Pasquino (1991) links his own definition of the term to Foucault’s notion of governmentality. Initially, he tells us, police were spoken of positively as cura promovendi salutem (concerned with the promotion of safety or the public good). Gradually, a negative definition came to the fore whereby police were conceived of in terms of cura advertendi mala futura (concerned to avert future ills). Both Radzinowicz and Pasquino agree, although they use very different theoretical vocabularies, that the notion of policing was gradually refined throughout the eighteenth century until circa 1780, when the task of policing was conceived as being firmly rooted in the role of a uniformed body of men concerned with the maintenance of public order, riot control and crime prevention. Police became, in Robert Reiner’s words, ‘stout men in blue coats’ (Reiner 1988). The first body of such police in the English-speaking world came into being in 1786 with the passing of the Dublin Police Act under the stewardship of Robert Peel, then Secretary for Ireland (Palmer 1988).5 It was not until 1829 that London got a similar force and the extension of this strategy for social control over the entirety of the British Isles took practically the rest of the century (Devlin 1966). Social historians have noted that it was the threat posed by the disenfranchised and economically marginalized ‘dangerous classes’ at the beginning of the Industrial Age that galvanized the political classes into creating the police institution and giving it a mandate to secure public space through various legal instruments aimed at public disorder, theft and 5 The first legislation to establish a police organization in the New World came three years later when the Federal Marshals Service was set up in the new republic of the United States. It had a complement of 12 officers.

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violence (Chesney 1972; Gurr et al. 1977; Linebaugh 1991; Jones 1984; Vogler 1991). What this social history makes apparent is that policing gradually evolved as the threat of capital punishment was pared back and the role of the military was slowly confined to the frontiers of the evolving nation-state system. We could say, in terms inspired by Foucault, that the specific form of governmentality practised by the police institution was a manifestly modern one, intended to secure the good order and, hence, prosperity of nationally bounded states. There are, of course competing (or complementary) definitions, most notably Bittner’s (1970) notion that ‘police’ is best defined by reference to the capacity for the legitimate use of coercion; but this essentialist definition, while no doubt indicative of an important feature of the practice of policing, is too narrow to delineate all of its practices. Indeed, when we consider that British police officers were still inspecting weights and measures in the immediate post-war period (Young 1991) and that the current fashion of community policing may even extend the police role to facilitating the repair of broken windows, Bittner’s essentialism needs some qualification. The genealogy of police reveals it to be a form of governmentality based on the rule of law, with a mandate to use force in the maintenance of social order broadly conceived. Central to this form of governmentality was the imposition of the nation-state system in Europe; and as this system settled into a more or less stable set of institutional arrangements so too did the new agencies of social control. Following Weber, sociologists define the state as an institutional form that successfully upholds a claim to binding rule-making over a territory by virtue of commanding a monopoly of the legitimate use of force (Mann 1986). Following Gramsci, sociologists also note that a successful and stable state will not resort to coercion routinely but will obtain a consensual predominance over its citizens, summed up in the concept of hegemony (Jessop 1982). The notion of police which arose in Europe was, in its very essence, an expression of both these ideas. The power of the sovereign state was based on its ability to ensure stability and plenty. The police agencies that came to life during the nineteenth century were the concrete expression of the state’s monopoly of coercive force within its territory, just as the various branches of the military were the expression of that power at the borders. It should not escape our attention, however, that police had, from the end of the eighteenth century onwards something of a global reach inasmuch as the ‘colonial model’ of policing was exported from Europe (Cain 1995; Anderson and Killingray 1991, 1992). Actually, as the history of our own era testifies, the state system is less stable than this picture suggests. Significantly, however, the system achieved a high degree of stasis in Europe during this period.6 It was during the relatively peaceful mid-nineteenth century, when states’ 6

It should be pointed out that the hegemony of state forms of policing was not so pronounced in the United States where the radical democracy of the ‘vigilante tradition’ looms large even today (Franz 1969; Brown 1969). We might agree with Tocqueville when he spoke of the ‘tyranny of the majority’, and said that ‘what I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny’. In this regard he characterized the police as ‘nothing but the majority under arms’ (Tocqueville 1969: 252). He notes, with a European’s distaste, the ‘anarchy’ and ‘apparent disorder’ that arises from the lack of general regulations for police, a lack which is ‘acutely felt’ (ibid.: 90). Thus, ‘in Europe the criminal is a luckless man fighting to save his head from the authorities; in this sense the population are mere spectators of the struggle’. In America, where the ‘tyranny of the majority’ reigns, the criminal becomes ‘an enemy of the human race and every human

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coercive forces were exercised by the problems of maintaining internal order, that police agencies in the modern sense were established. The revolutions of 1848 that so captured the imagination of Karl Marx loom large here. In general, we may say nation-states that were established early, such as France, also established a police tradition early and those that came later, such as Italy, lagged behind. In the case of Italy, the Carabinieri were not established until shortly after the peninsula became a unified state in 1870; in France, the police tradition dates from 1667 (Bayley 1975). The specific form of police institution differed somewhat from country to country in Europe, but once police institutions were established within a relatively stable nation-state system they could go on to develop an internal historical trajectory ­– that is: one determined partly by their own internal logic.7 Thus, the process of scientization that August Vollmer, Edward Henry, Dr Johann Schober and others advocated could unfold, later yielding such innovations as fingerprint classification, radio-dispatched car patrol, intelligence led policing, and forensic evidence techniques to name but a few (Douthit 1975; Hannant 1995). Of course, this internal history forms only part of the story and, as the tendencies of the nation-state system played themselves out (for example, during the world wars or by the great multiplication of states in the aftermath of World War II), so too was the history of the police affected. Yet as long as that ‘inter’-national state system remained, it served as the central reference point for our understanding of policing institutions (Walker 1994). That system is currently undergoing profound change which is visible through changes in police organization. Four Postulates of Postmodern Police It has been suggested that the ‘belief in the postmodern is almost the touchstone of a new universal truth’; and, further, that to use the term is to evoke ‘the rise of an overarching shift to a new totalised order’ (O’Malley 1996). In what follows I hope to avoid this pitfall. Rather than trying to grasp the totality of the New World Order, a Herculean task, I propose to use four ‘postulates of postmodern police’ as a thread through the labyrinth of conflicting signs, images and data (hyper reality in Baudrillard’s terms) about crime and social control. Those postulates should be seen as two dual processes or dyads. The first duality is the marketization of insecurity and of state-provided social control; the second is the transnationalization of clandestine markets and of policing. Together these two twin processes appear as part of the larger global process of the restructuring of the nation-state system – one acting, as it were, ‘from below’ and the other ‘from above’.8 being is against him’ (ibid.: 96). The vigilante tradition in the USA might explain why it is that the marketization of insecurity is so much more advanced there. 7 This broad brush approach to police history obscures much that is important about the evolution of the various national police traditions and, as Bayley warns, ‘by fitting diverse situations into a Procrustean mould, loss of empirical richness is assured’ (Bayley 1975: 329). However, the more general point, that police institutions in their modem form were contingent on the development of the nation-state system, is, for the purposes of this discussion, important to establish. 8 Here the reader can see that the notion of the postmodern, especially as it is operationalized in these four postulates, is functioning as what Herbert Blumer (1969) referred to as a ‘sensitising concept’.

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The Marketization of Insecurity The discipline of criminology has been enthused by the ideas of Oscar Newman for over 20 years. In Defensible Space; People and Design in the Violent City (1972), Newman suggested that criminal victimization taking place in public space could be virtually eliminated by tactical thinking on the part of architects and town planners. Ideas such as creating ‘zones of territorial influence’, fostering ‘natural surveillance’ within such zones and marking-off of specific locales through ‘symbolic boundaries’ (i.e. gates and other barriers) came to hold as much currency in urban design as they did in criminology. There were methodological flaws in Newman’s original study (Bottoms 1974), but the marketing potential of such low-risk, secure environments could hardly be ignored by property developers, particularly in the USA. In effect, ‘fear of crime’ became a marketing tactic and a successful one at that. It is estimated that there are now more than 30,000 ‘gated communities’ in the USA and a further 30,000 are projected to come into being within the next decade (Clark 1995). The marketization of insecurity is changing the shape of some of the world’s major cities as they are carved up into zones of risk suppression.9 Twenty years after Newman’s innovative thinking was first put forward, his ideas are a driving force in city planning. Nowhere are the results more clear than in contemporary São Paulo. Teresa Caldeira has noted that ‘social and spatial segregation constitute cities, although the forms they acquire vary considerably’. She shows that ‘the new residential enclaves of the upper classes, associated with shopping malls, isolated office complexes, and other private controlled environments represent a new form of organizing social differences and creating segregation in the city of São Paulo’ (Caldeira 1992: 337). More worrying, she argues that the processes that have created this segregation promote a type of policing that bypasses the legal institutions of social ordering in the resolution of social conflict (1992: 159). Private security operates alongside the public police, to erect walls that separate the risky from the at risk – that is: the poor from the wealthy. Sociologists of the police researching in other Latin American countries have shown the importance of symbols of class membership in decisions of the state police to use force (Huggins 1991; see also Birkbeck and Gabaldón 1996, for a discussion of these processes in Caracas). In São Paulo the state police react to the crime problem outwith the protected enclaves with the routine use of violence. The use of extreme force by the public police is not only considered an effective means of controlling criminality, it is seen as a necessity. Indeed, statistics relating to the number of people killed by the police are announced monthly in press releases as a grim performance indicator of police success in the fight against criminality (Caldeira 1992: 162). In contemporary São Paulo, the security of the enclave has become the sine qua non of élite status. The cultural processes underway there invite direct comparison with ‘Fortress LA’ (Davis 1992). To quote at length:

Thus, in keeping with the spirit of sociological enquiry exemplified by Blumer and other members of the Chicago School, the main emphasis is on the social world, not the abstract concepts. In this view, the social world should be allowed to ‘speak for itself, rather than being subjected to the distorting lens of an overly abstracted theorization’ (Blumer 1969; see also Mills 1959b). 9 For further discussion of how the idea of risk suppression can be used in explanations of changes in security, social control and perceptions of risk, see Sheptycki (1997a, 1997b).

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Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defence of luxury life-styles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous ‘armed response’. This obsession with physical security systems and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become the zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s … We live in ‘fortress cities’ brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ of affluent society and ‘places of terror’ where police battle the criminalized poor … In cities like Los Angeles, on the bad edge of postmodernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security structure. (Davis 1992: 223–4)

The merging of urban design and policing into a comprehensive security structure is not without historical precedent. Such precedents are decidedly, and despite the pretensions of architectural discourse, pre-modern. In the contemporary period, urban ethnographers find themselves confronted with the New Feudal City.10 Nor are these strategies of risk suppression confined to a few places. On the contrary, the marketing of secure zones is evident in many American cities as well as in South Africa, Israel, India, Egypt, Indonesia and elsewhere (Law Enforcement News 1992: 18: 371, December; Brogden and Shearing 1993; Findlay and Zvekic 1993). The process has found its advocates in the UK (Wheeler et al. 1989) and its critics (Loader 1997a). On the whole, Europeans are noticeably less enthusiastic consumers of this form of risk suppression; however, the process of enclavization is beginning to emerge in Germany and France (Nogala 1996; South 1994).11 The Marketization of Public Policing Within the literature on governmentality that has emerged since Foucault’s death, there has been a concerted effort to analyse neo-liberal strategies of governance. Neo-liberalism is accurately summarized in this literature as a radical programme of government, concerned with correcting the so-called pathologies of the welfare state – in particular, those intrusions into society and the economy wrought by socialized healthcare, compulsory state insurance, 10

Los Angela City Council approved the installation of seven metal gates on public thoroughfares, effectively sealing off the suburb of Whitley Heights to non-residents. This was later overturned in the California Supreme Court, whose decision referred to these enclaves as a ‘return to feudal times’ (Lind 1995: 213). 11 Some readers may object that Europe has not seen the emergence of the enclave community. It is too early in the history of the processes of transnationalization that are described here to commit to a European exceptionalism in this regard. It would do to note, however, that some research has documented enclavization in Great Britain (Loader and Sparks 1997), although in a muted form – notably the absence of ‘armed response’ and the use of much more subtle symbolic boundaries (traffic quietening, for example) to achieve the same ends: the separation of the risky from the at risk. According to these researchers there is a very real worry held by middle-class English people about ‘travelling crime’, that is, crime that comes in to their communities from ‘outside’. They talk about a ‘violation of the cocoon’, the sense that people feel a need to retreat from a hostile and dangerous world. The residents of such developments as the Barbican Centre in the east end of London depend on (unarmed) private security to secure the space around the buildings. It remains an open question, but perhaps this is the seed of an armed fortress in London’s midst?

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tax-funded social security, employment benefits and the like. These mechanisms of the welfare state have, neo-liberals argue, interfered with the efficiencies of the market, sapped the entrepreneurial spirit and introduced a culture of dependence, all of which undermine the ‘true’ welfare of individuals (Garland 1996). By the mid-1970s, the rationalities which these mechanisms represented were commencing a retreat which, with the election of Thatcher and Reagan, became a route. The successful marketization of security discussed in the previous section is symptomatic of this process; so too is the commodification of services offered to the public by the police; and both are linked to the triumph of cultures of consumption over those of production (cf. Riesman 1950). Robert Reiner (1992) has remarked on how police élites have turned to the language and style of consumerism. Under the influence of the Audit Commission, police in the UK have undertaken consumer audits, quality-of-service assessments, mission statements, charters and the vocabulary of private sector management gurus, and these affectations are not unique to British police; evidence of this trend can be found elsewhere in the Commonwealth (O’Malley 1996), Europe (Robert and van Outrive 1993) and North America (Bayley 1994).12 One of the central strategies of public police agencies has thus become what David Garland (1997), among others, has referred to as ‘responsibilisation’. This is currently manifest in the promulgation of ‘the partnership approach’ in crime prevention and community policing (Home Office 1993). The approach was perhaps best summed up by Herman Goldstein, doyen of Community Policing, when he said that ‘we must restore a balance between citizen and police responsibilities that reflects a more accurate assessment of actual capacities and acknowledges that effective social control cannot possibly be achieved by hired hands alone’ (quoted in Koller 1990). Clearly, the partnership envisaged has a particular balance. It is not the case that police and community organizations are thrown together haphazardly, rather that ‘partnership policing [is] where police take a proactive leadership role in bringing disparate community groups such as the public, elected officials, government and other agencies together to focus on crime and community disorder problems’ (Hunt, quoted in O’Malley 1996). The model is of police officers as professional community organizers and the community policing literature is full of anecdotes and ‘heroic stories of police constables being catalysts of change in social housing projects by empowering residents to expel the crack dealers in the tradition of St Patrick and the snakes …’ (Offer 1996). Criminologists have noted ‘the reconceptualisation of policing as a service and the redesignation of the community as customers’ (McLaughlin 1992). 12

The beginning of this process in the UK is usually taken to be the 1983 Home Office-issued Circular 114, entitled ‘Manpower, Effectiveness and Efficiency in the Police Service’, which, although couched in general and at times vague terms, presented an unambiguous message which sounded more like a recipe for corporate downsizing in the automobile industry than anything previously heard in policing circles. Police managers were given a number of basic options: (1) substitute capital for labour – that is, reduce labour costs through investment; (2) find cheaper forms of manpower (i.e. make more use of civilian workers in administration and volunteer police ‘special constables’); (3) substitute external sources of supply for internal contracting-out; and (4) improve the management of available manpower (see: Morgan 1986; White and Brown 1986). The subsequent history of this initiative reveals that, although the British police were slow on the uptake of this neo-liberal philosophy, they nevertheless came to embrace it with notable enthusiasm.

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Much of what has gone on under the rubric of community policing has gone unevaluated by professional social scientists and much of what passes for evaluation is merely self-interested reportage produced by individuals who have a direct stake in the success of the projects. It is evident that the motivation of the Audit Commission in the UK, and like-minded bodies elsewhere, is to promote fiscal responsibility and even to cut back the cost of state-provided social control, at least relative to the sum total of such provision.13 ‘Customerisation’, as this strategy has also been christened (O’Malley 1996) might be seen as a grab-bag of techniques by which a rump public-police infrastructure is connected with other control providers (not least private security firms patrolling gated communities, or insurance firms). In this bigger picture, public police are dwarfed by the private providers of security. Taken together, the two processes of the marketization of insecurity and of public policing are indicative of a shift in the provision of social control away from the state sector and towards private forms. Some criminologists refer to a ‘hybrid model’ (Johnston 1992; Jones 1996) wherein private and public forms of security provision work in uneasy alliance; but this picture is too static. If we examine this process over a period of time, since, say, the 1970s, it is possible to see that it is not so much a new hybrid but a process of evolution away from a position where the state was the virtual monopoly-provider of security and social control, towards a situation where state provision is less and less predominant (see Walker 1978; Stenning and Shearing 1980). The Transnationalization of Clandestine Markets14 When US President Bill Clinton announced in his 1996 State of the Union Address that, after years of neglect, ‘this administration has taken a strong stand to stiffen our borders … we are increasing our border patrols by 50 per cent’, he was not focusing worry on a communist invasion or Kidd’s Band of Wild Indians.15 The issue at hand was brought into close focus by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for law enforcement and crime, Jonathan Winer, who later said ‘[e]very country must develop tough new policies aimed at restoring its borders 13 Adam Crawford (1995) argues, further, that the ‘appeal to community’ found in this literature also serves to shift the blame for programme failure on to the community and away from the police institution. He extends the notion of ‘victim blaming’ to that of ‘community blaming’ and notes that many geographical locations have been pathologized as ‘no-go areas’. He goes on to argue that this strategy serves to further undermine the legitimacy of state centred policing since ‘the redistribution of the cost of personal and communal safety, from government and state institutions to individuals and groups, raises political questions about the state’s competence … [since it calls] into question the ability and legitimacy of the state to effectively “do the job” of crime control’ (Crawford 1995: 112). What then emerges are spaces which are subject to ‘forms of extra-state policing and growing vigilantism’ and Crawford reiterates a point made by Dahrendorf, warning of the Hobbesian implications if policing becomes merely the exercise of private power (ibid.: 113). 14 I am grateful to Peter Andreas for discussions on this point; his insights clearly shaped my thinking on this issue. 15 I refer here both to former President Ronald Reagan’s worries about communist contagion from Latin America, specifically from Sandanista sources, in the early-1980s and to much earlier worries about cross-border brigandage; specifically ‘Kidd’s Band of Wild Indians’, who operated across the Mexican border in the very late nineteenth century.

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so that they are again meaningful protection against criminals, drugs, weapons and illegal immigration’ (quoted in Andreas 1996). The integration of clandestine markets has become one of the key foreign-policy issues, not only for the USA, but for Europe (Andreas 1995; Hopkinson 1994; Seward 1993). In January 1995, a subcommittee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in England and Wales began a 12-month review of cross-border crime. The (unpublished) report that subsequently emerged became known as the Phillips Report, after Colin Phillips (then Assistant Chief Constable of Greater Manchester) the chairman of the committee which produced it. While it is clear in the report that international crime is not the looming monster feared by some (Martin and Romano 1992) – less than 10 per cent of in-force Central Squad Operations were targeted at international crime per se – the report did focus considerable attention on what was termed ‘market crimes’ (Phillips 1996). Phillips was later quoted in Policing Today (Howe 1996) as stating that ‘market offences are distinguished by the fact that they are committed with the aim to supply an illegal service or product to willing buyers’ and, further, that ‘these types of offences are often not reported to the police and there is no accurate means of measuring the extent [of them] – all the indications suggest, however, that it is rising.’16 Although the report did mention other types of offence (for example, specific mention was made of the investigative difficulties posed by serial sexual assaults and murders by travelling offenders) most of the energy of police operations in the transnational arena was clearly absorbed by market-type offences: in particular, drugs trafficking (40 per cent); fraud, traffic in counterfeit credit cards and other monetary instruments (36 per cent); traffic in stolen vehicles (9 per cent); and 14 per cent undefined.17 Geographers have long talked about the phenomenon of time-space convergence (Carlstein et al. 1978). At its most basic, the point made is that at the beginning of the twentieth century it took four days to travel across North America and one hundred years later that time had shrunk to five hours. This time-space convergence has had important implications for the reach of markets. In our own era it is possible to have fresh produce from every corner of the globe.18 Time-space convergence, coupled with the opening-up of borders to trade, advocated by transnational financial regulators (for example, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), has unintentionally magnified the potential for clandestine trade. Opening economies through the liberalization of markets reduces the ability of governments to withstand market pressures; after all, countries that follow the tenets of neo-classical economic theory should specialize 16

A report drawn up jointly (but unpublished) by the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Home Affairs in the Netherlands in 1992 estimated the total cash turnover within the clandestine economy of 10 million guilders per annum. The report went on to say that ‘organized crime thus belongs to one of the biggest sectors of the Dutch economy’ and, further, ‘predicts a further rise due to the internationalization of economic traffic’ (‘Organized Crime in the Netherlands: an outline of the threat and the plan to tackle it’ (p. 3)). 17 A significant, although unquantified, proportion of this was linked to illegal immigration (personal communication to author). 18 An example of time-space convergence in the global marketplace is the reaction of McDonalds to the crisis around BSE in British beef in the summer of 1996. Within a week of the panic-induced burger boycott McDonalds was able to announce that no British beef was contained in their products; some of it was said to come from as far afield as Argentina.

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in those exports in which they have a competitive advantage. This may mean that the only market niche open to some entrepreneurs in some regions is unseemly, to say the least: immigrant labour, white slavery, weapons, plutonium, toxic waste, drugs, stolen cars – all can be brought to the transnational black market to be realized at their truest value. Thus, as freemarket reform reshapes the state system, shrinking the regulatory system of the nation-state proper (even while creating or expanding transnational regulatory regimes such as the EU or NAFTA),19 market prohibitions push to expand the policing dimensions of the state proper. Public policing, as a manifestation of the nation-state’s renewed commitment to controlling market prohibitions, is consequently pulled further into the transnational realm.20 This process was revealed by FBI director Louis Freeh in his statement to the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Foreign Operations in March 1996, where he remarked that the number of legal attachés working at the US Embassy in Moscow had risen from 20 to 200 during the previous 20 months. The reason given for such a large FBI presence in Eastern Europe was determined to be the presence of organized crime in the marketplace. As Freeh put it: Organized crime activity in Russia includes monetary speculation, manipulation of the banking system, and embezzlement of state property, as well as contract murder, extortion, drug trafficking, prostitution, protection rackets, and infiltration of legitimate business activity. (http://www.fbi.gov/intrcrim.htm)21

While the spectre of Russian organized crime is a particularly potent folk-devil, the problems of market-based crime are quite commonplace in European discussions. The debate in the House of Lords on the remit of Europol is interesting in this regard. The opinion of the 19 The best recent example of new transnational regulatory/policing bodies is the creation of the Financial Action Task Force in 1989, which, although it is currently housed in the OECD Headquarters in Paris, is not part of that organization. The basic brief of the FATF is the facilitation of the internal or self-policing of the transnational offshore banking system, with specific reference to ‘money laundering’ and the banking of the proceeds of crime. (For a detailed discussion, see Sherman 1993.) 20 It is important to note that there are older examples of global prohibition regimes. An especially apt one is the case of the anti-slave trade regime imposed by the British navy. This effort at suppressing a global market in human beings was embarked upon in 1807 when the government of the day banned the institution in mainland Britain. This step was extended to the colonies in 1833. Throughout the nineteenth century Great Britain devoted between a sixth and a quarter of its warships to suppressing the traffic in slaves. The way in which a global prohibition regime is policed and upheld sheds a great deal of light on the nature of the extant state system. For example, today the pursuance of such a policy would be made, at least in part, through transnational institutions that simply did not exist then. Interpol and the United Nations are only the most evident of these. The crucial point for the analysis pursued here is that, because of the phenomenon of time-space convergence, there has been such a quantitative shift in the vibrancy of transnational markets generally that it amounts to a qualitative shift. For an excellent overview of the history of global prohibition regimes, see Nadelmann (1990). 21 The incorporation of contract murder into this list is reflective of the particularity of illegal markets: namely, the absence of a formal apparatus that guarantees the security of contracts. For a discussion of the organizational sociology of organized crime and clandestine marketing, see Arlacchi (1996).

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committee was that ‘the crimes within the initial remit of Europol … appear on the list … because they are particularly transnational in character and therefore require a transnational response’ (House of Lords 1995: 26, para. 86). Those crimes were revealed to be ‘drug trafficking, crime connected with [trafficking in] nuclear and radioactive substances, illegal immigrant smuggling, motor vehicle crimes (in particular trafficking to other States and theft of goods in transit) and illegal money-laundering activities in connection with these forms of crime’. Indeed, the only type of crime mentioned in connection with Europol’s remit that did not have some connection with clandestine markets was terrorism; and the Lords voted to delay this addition to the list (ibid.: 12, paras 24–9). What seems clear from discussions within law enforcement circles and from policy makers is that transnational clandestine markets have become a particular cause for concern. This is not to say that this is a new phenomenon – when Interpol was in initial operating stage in the 1920s, black market crimes were of some, even considerable, concern (Bresler 1992) – however, there is a perception that this type of activity has increased by a considerable degree since the end of the Cold War. Hence, public police agencies are increasingly drawn into the transnational realm; but this only confirms an already well-known tendency. The Transnationalization of Policing Transnational policing is not, in itself, a new phenomenon, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out.22 The transnationalization of policing seems to be part and parcel of the internal history of the police organization in the twentieth century; certainly, as mentioned in a previous section under the heading ‘A Genealogy of “Police”’, the exportation of the ‘colonial model’ in the nineteenth century reveals policing to be, in a sense, transnational from the outset. In this century we may cite the early formation of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), noting how it fostered the dissemination of European developments in police science, notably fingerprinting (Hannant 1995). Then too, there is the conception of Interpol during the same period (Anderson 1989), even if its birth did not occur until after World War One. The necessity of transnational policing has always depended on a variety of folk-devils, its efficacy always resting on certain technical means for capturing them. For example, there is 22

Arendt (1951: 284–6) noted that in Europe during the interwar period there were significant dislocations of population and a consequent huge rise in the numbers of ‘stateless persons’. She talks in terms of millions of Spaniards, Poles, Italians, Balkans—waves of refugees or economic migrants in the parlance of today—moving across the newly imposed and reimposed national boundaries. In the resulting tumult ‘the nation state [became] incapable of providing a law for those who had lost the protection of a national government [and] transferred the whole matter to the police … under the pretext of “national security”, the police of a number of democratic countries had embarked on so close and organized a co-operation with the Gestapo and the GPU that one could well speak of an independent police initiative in matters of foreign politics. The co-operation, for instance, between the French police and the Gestapo was never closer and never functioned better than under the anti-Nazi government of the Popular Front.’ It is evident that Arendt is here talking about police conducting their own foreign policy independent of their respective foreign ministries, which is but an extreme form of what I mean when I refer to the transnational practices of police agencies.

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the story of Detective Sergeant Faurot, an NYPD officer who had been sent to London to learn about the Henry fingerprint classification system. As Ethan Nadelmann explains: Back on footpatrol in New York he happened to arrest an Englishman who was lurking suspiciously at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Uncertain of his true identity, Faurot sent the suspect’s fingerprints to Scotland Yard. The reply, some two weeks later, confirmed that the suspect was a professional hotel thief and a fugitive from British justice. (Nadelmann 1993: 85)

The above scenario is striking, not only for the pettiness of the folk-devil in question, but for the length of time that the transatlantic communication took. These days the suspect in question is more likely to be a paedophile and certainly the communication time lapse is expected to be far shorter.23 The ‘information revolution’ has had a profound impact on policing, making the possibility of police communication over long distances a matter of relative ease. In the recent past, cross-border links between police forces have been greatly enhanced by this process and police managers have been quick to grasp the invitation to extend transnational operations (Sheptycki 1995b, 1996, 1997a, b). When politicians and policy makers highlighted the problems posed by the integration of clandestine markets, they found a transnational police infrastructure already in place. This infrastructure, albeit only skeletal, did not need any reorganization of its principal features in order to take on this enhanced mission. Indeed, the major problem for senior police managers is that they have had to share the turf with agencies rendered largely redundant by the ending of the Cold War. In the United States the CIA has been given a role to play in the new transnational police enterprise, while in Britain both MI5 and MI6 have been similarly accommodated. In both the US and the UK instances the military and its vast array of technical hardware have also been brought into the frame. What is clearly evident is that the transnationalization of policing is occurring at the convergence of several major global restructurings – the opening-up of global markets, the information revolution, and the end of the Cold War. All lend to the enterprise a considerable import, and one which goes far beyond a mere continuance of the police fraternity’s seemingly natural inclination to transnational networking.24 One way to illustrate the exponential growth of transnational police in recent years is to look at the acquisition of information technology intended to foster such efforts. Elsewhere I have shown the growth in macro-structures of information exchange for transnational policing (Sheptycki 1995b), including the advent of Interpol’s Automated Search Facility (ASF), the Schengen Information System (SIRENE), and Europol’s phone/fax network. My 23 I refer to the tragic Dutroux case in Belgium during 1996 which involved a ring of paedophiles operating transnationally within Europe. This case has served not only to intensify the consolidation of Europe’s internal security field, but also to offer a rationale for a wholesale reorganization of Belgian policing more in keeping with her neighbours. (See the International Herald Tribune, 27 August 1996.) 24 This natural inclination is also evident in the police custom of referring to their cross-border counterparts as colleagues. It is also evident at the CRI Headquarters (Criminal Intelligence) in The Hague, where all the meeting-rooms are not numbered but named after police agencies. Meeting-rooms are officially designated as the RCMP room, the BKA room, the DEA room, the Police Nationale room, etc.

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fieldwork in north western Europe has also uncovered two micro-structures, the LinguaNet Project and the PALMA project, both transnational regional networks for information storage, retrieval and exchange.25 So-called soft information, or ‘criminal intelligence’, is exchanged through informal networks (Bigo 1994). This process is also evident within the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) – information sharing between Canadian and American law enforcement has been routinized by way of an interface between the Canadian Police Information Exchange Centre (CPIC) and the National Crime Information Centre (NCIC), facilitated by the Automated Canada USA Information Exchange System (ACUPIES) (see Interpol Ottawa 1995). This system allows patrol officers on either side of the border to access their respective national criminal databases on a 24–hour basis. Inquiry response times are estimated to be between three and five minutes. Information types range from expired driver’s permits, to criminal records, to records of convicted persons on supervised release and much else. There is even some indication in the scholarly literature that the RCMP and FBI have on-line access to criminal intelligence files themselves (Anderson 1993a: 50), and certainly in the stratosphere of ‘high policing’ these linkages have been documented (Brodeur 1995: 96). The research to date on the growth of information technology in police organizations reveals a quantum leap in communications capabilities in the transnational arena. This development amounts to an institutionalization of transnational police co-operation (cf. Fijnaut 1995). Another way to illustrate this is to refer to the growth of legal instruments to facilitate transnational law enforcement (Commonwealth Secretariat 1991, 1992, 1993). The variety of newly available legal instruments, from the highly formalized Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) to the less formal Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) and many others, provide a central pillar in the growth of the transnational police enterprise (Sheptycki 1998a). The multiplication of these legal instruments beyond the historical base-line of the Extradition Treaty again shows that the variety of police work and its volume have reached unprecedented proportions. Discussion The thesis is that police organizations around the world have had nation-states as their nesting sites and, further, that the character of the nation-state system is currently undergoing a significant transformation that is both visible in changing forms of policing and constitutive 25 LinguaNet is the second generation of the Police Speak Project (Police Speak 1993) and is thus already well documented. Currently, this system links up police stations at 12 locations in four countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Great Britain) and is expected to continue growing. The project recently attracted some 1.5 million ECUS from the European Union for its further development. The PALMA project (Police, Aachen, Liège, Maastricht) was initiated by police in the Netherlands in conjunction with computer scientists at the Maastricht Technological Research Institute (MTRI). At present there is nothing available in English on this project; however, interviews I have conducted with police officials at the International Contact Centre (ICC) in Maastricht, the Ministry of Interior in The Hague, and with computer scientists at the MTRI, indicate that the long-term plan for this system is to provide a means of transnational information exchange with regional partners for all Dutch police stations adjacent to the border.

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of those new forms. Policing is being transformed ‘from below’ by the twin processes of the marketization of insecurity and of state-provided social control. The first is a process by which citizens become consumers of security services and the example of the growth of enclave communities was held up as the best example of this process. On the other hand, we can see that the state is being internally transformed. In the social-control industry one sure indicator of this is the adoption of private-sector ‘management speak’ by senior police officers, another is the so-called ‘strategy of responsibilization’ articulated by senior policy makers in governments throughout the Commonwealth and elsewhere. Together, these strategies make communities, citizens and other organizations actively responsible for their own risk management and thereby lessen the responsibility of the state, through the public police organization, in this area of social provision. All this must be seen against the background of the ongoing fiscal crisis of the modern state – wherein national governments are suffering from an extreme form of indebtedness. A discussion of these economic facts is beyond the confines of this essay; nevertheless it seems safe to say that the provision of security and crime control, a virtual state monopoly since the mid-nineteenth century, is poised on the precipice of this fiscal crisis. Already new forms for the management of insecurity are taking shape in the interstices of the old police system. In my estimation they are, if anything, premodern; but, regardless of the label, they are the harbinger of a significant transformation of the state system which gains its impetus ‘from below’. In the transnational arena there is also clear evidence of the magnitude of transformation in the nation-state system. Nations are being reconstituted downwards into regions, even as the transnational realm becomes a significant domain for the negotiation of governance. This essay identified a second set of dual processes occurring at this level and clearly visible to criminologists, namely: the transnationalization of clandestine markets and of policing. These processes are linked, but there is also a sense that they are independent. On the one hand, the growth of transnational black markets is symptomatic of the freeing-up of global trade generally – that is, this growth is another indicator of the sweeping changes in the state system. On the other, the transnationalization of policing has a long history which has perceptibly accelerated within the last decade. These dual processes are symptomatic of the larger global processes of transnationalization. Following Toynbee and shifting our vision to the broader historical vista, we might say that these are signs of an epochal shift which, if not on a par with the great withering away of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Christendom, are indicative of a shift at least as momentous as the rise of the Atlantic economies and the colonial hegemony of Europe at the dawn of the Modern Age. Small wonder there are so few certainties, epistemological or otherwise. For a generation of criminologists locked in the Realpolitik of policy-oriented empiricism (POE), this wider horizon may be only dimly visible or, worse, visible only through the kaleidoscopic lens of television news, where history is compressed into a 30-second soundbite. Discourses on the postmodern coloured, as they are, by visions of the ‘hyper real’, are one way to force an ironic dénouement: the Utopia visualized by neoliberals is falling apart before its completion; the postmodern implodes into the detritus of its own panic scenes. And yet many are irritated by the confessed intentions of criminologists working in a postmodern vein, who forsake crisis management on behalf of ‘the crimino-legal tradition’ in favour of a ‘strategy of exacerbation’ (Young 1996: 3). Whatever else, the progeny of the postmodern era,

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whose lives are ultimately, if precariously, built on the shifting sands of a transnational state system that is emergent, fragile and insecure, will have to make choices. But those choices will be made on the basis of the unknown, and the barely knowable. A POE-fixated criminology provides too narrow a vision to illuminate the broad sweep of history; its collective product merely contributes more information to the hyper reality industry which endlessly refracts understanding nightly on the television news. The poetic abandon of much self-avowedly ‘postmodernist’ criminology is meant to be corrosive of this process and yet purveys only a sense of desperation and powerlessness. Caught between forms of governance that, by virtue of their remoteness, continually escape our control and understanding and the overproduction of myopic simulacra of ‘valid knowledge’ that clouds our vision, we merely cope. De minimis non curat vires (power does not take account of trifles). No more the Enlightenment’s sense of rationality and the historical march of human progress, instead, mere damage control. Acknowledgement Thanks are due to Zenon Bankowski and Neil MacCormick, who corrected my Latin.

[5] The Global Cops Cometh: Reflections on Transnationalization, Knowledge Work and Policing Subculture1 Introduction The notion of subculture has suffered greatly from overuse. It is not that the term cannot be used with precision more that, most often, it is evoked in a lazy and imprecise manner. Echoing David Downes (1966) we can say that it is not at all illuminating to label as ‘subcultural’ well known differences between different sectors of complex societies. In trying to think within a transnational frame of reference this problem is compounded if we take as our starting point ‘world society’ (Burton 1972) or ‘world culture’ (Featherstone 1990). By thinking about various types of global ‘sub’-cultures merely through such theoretical abstractions the sociologist invariably sacrifices precision for theoretical breadth. In what follows the term ‘subculture’ is constructed around a specific problem, that is: the emergence of a transnational police enterprise. It involves a word inversion which establishes a cognitive space – that space lying between the notions of the transnational subculture of police and the subculture of transnational policing. The goal is to illuminate this complex sociological phenomenon – one which is of such recent vintage that we have not yet developed a theoretical schema that is capable of doing so. In such circumstances it is possible that the sociologist can profit by ‘retooling’ old terms and applying them to new circumstances. Subculture Revisited In retooling the term ‘subculture’, I take as my starting point not only the subculturalist approaches to deviance, but also the important contributions of Skolnick (1966) and other sociologists of the police organization. In developing his notion of the police officer’s ‘working personality’, Skolnick, in common with the subcultural theorists more generally, viewed it as a set of ‘learned problem solutions’. In the case of the police officer these problem solutions are said to be embedded in the routines of ‘the job’. Conceptualizing cop culture in this way allows the sociologist to avoid the pitfall of visualizing the occupational subculture as a concrete entity (reification) to which various attributes (overt masculinity, racism or clannishness, for example) are attached. Such oft-mentioned attributes of police subculture, it

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must be said, are not confined to the police organization; indeed, they are far more widespread than the notion subculture implies. A more profitable way to construct an understanding of police occupational subculture is to build up the concept from basic, and observable, features of police work. Skolnick did so by reference to notions of danger, authority and the need to get something done. In so doing he focused attention on certain specific features, notably the role of the symbolic assailant, police suspiciousness and solidarity and the concomitant social isolation that characterizes the archetypal police officer. Skolnick’s fieldwork focused attention on police patrol and, to a lesser extent, detective work. More recent analyses of public police institutions have focused on police as ‘knowledge workers’. Chatterton, for example, noted that field researchers on the lookout for ‘real police work’ are tempted to ‘switch over to someone else who is remaining out on patrol when a police officer under observation announces her intention to spend time in the police station writing reports’ (Chatterton 1989: 108). This skews our understanding of police work. Sociologists of the police organization have reported that detectives spend approximately one-half their time doing reports and even more reporting on their investigations than in the conduct of investigations per se (Ericson 1981). Further, by managing calls for service, computer-aided dispatch systems have so converted the job of uniformed police patrol that there is nothing but knowledge work (Manning 1988). Sociologists have paid scant attention to the large numbers of personnel, both uniformed and civilian, within the police organization devoted to knowledge production and management at every level. Strategic planning units, media liaison offices, environmental scanning units, quality assurance teams, community involvement teams, criminal intelligence analysts and a whole range of other sub-specialisms are devoted to the creation and dissemination of knowledge without which the modern police institution would cease to be. In the information age police officers of both staff and line spend far less time directly protecting persons and property from crimes than is commonly supposed and far more time processing and exchanging knowledge about crime and insecurity. For Ericson, knowledge work, particularly the processing of pre-formatted knowledge for other ‘risk institutions’ (insurance companies, regulatory agencies, the automobile industry and the like) has become the pre-eminent raison d’être for police (1994a). This may somewhat overstate the influence of actuarialism on public policing; however, there is no denying that knowledge work has come to dominate the structure of the organization to such an extent that to conceptualize the occupational subculture of the police purely around high-speed car chases, pub brawls, and the apprehension of ‘good prisoners’ is to mistake the jam for the sandwich (cf. Holdaway 1983). Instead, I want to suggest that we shift our attention away from the danger/authority nexus and on to policing as knowledge work. This shift in our conception of the occupational subculture of policing is, in many ways, analogous to Riesman’s classic discussion of the characterological transformation that people in various occupations undergo when, on promotion, they take up management positions (Riesman 1950). ‘To sit at his big new desk’ Riesman notes, ‘he has to learn a new personality-oriented speciality and un-learn or at least soft-pedal his old skill orientation’ (1950: 134). The characterological transformation of which Riesman wrote was not so much about occupational advancement within institutional hierarchies as it was about an overall characterological shift (from ‘inner directed’ to ‘other directed’) in response to the changing

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social structure of society. That shift was seen as the result of a move from a production oriented society to a consumption oriented one. In the terms developed in this essay, the shift is seen as a response to the creation of informated space (Zuboff 1988), the resultant information revolution (Castells 1989) and the creation of the knowledge society (Giddens 1979; Ericson and Shearing 1986; Stehr 1994). Looking at policing as knowledge work produces a different matrix of problem-solutions than the danger/authority frame put forward by Skolnick. In the wake of the information revolution, the degree to which police work has shifted away from that which was described by Skolnick and others is striking. It is almost as if every police officer, bar those few who are left in specialist departments directly marshalling coercive power (public order police, firearms units, siege management units and the like), has been swept into the knowledge society. Indeed, even in units which are expressly dedicated to the co-ordination of coercive force, the amount of time devoted to knowledge work far outweighs that of actual ‘hands on’ danger time.1 The vectors of danger and authority have been elided; they no longer constitute the primary space within which the problem-solutions of the occupational subculture of policing emerge. A characterological transformation analogous to that which Riesman talked of almost fifty years ago has become general to all those professions where knowledge work has become the primary preoccupation. Policing, and certainly transnational policing (as will become apparent), has been no less affected by this societal shift.2 1

Consider the Football Intelligence Unit at the National Criminal Intelligence Headquarters (NCIS). The main hub of this enterprise is a wall of video display terminals. Personnel in this unit spend an incalculable amount of time (re)viewing video footage (processing knowledge) taken of crowds and individuals in and around football grounds and other public places in order to identify ‘known trouble makers’. Photographs of such individuals are collated and disseminated to officers whose job it is to ‘spot’ known faces at strategic places; pubs near football grounds, train and subway stations and, especially given the interests of this essay, at ferry terminals and airports. The goal is to attempt to prevent these individuals from travelling to football matches where they might cause trouble, thereby pre-empting the need for large-scale public order operations. Officers who work in this unit maintain that the video camera itself has a deterrent effect; knowledge work itself is credited with producing a crime control effect over and above any coercive force that may come in its wake. 2 It might be argued that this shift to knowledge work in policing is merely a product of new paradigms in sociology, rather than actual changes in police practice. While police work has always had knowledge as an important component (contained, for example, in the police adage to ‘know the ground’), knowledge work conceived of as the collection, collation and dissemination of bureaucratically framed knowledge is something rather different and is a relatively recent development. The first kernel of this new way of policing was planted during the Progressive Era in the USA by August Vollmer who argued that policing needed to be made more ‘scientific’. He characterized police in the pre-knowledge work phase as ‘frequently unintelligent and untrained; they were distributed through the area to be policed according to a hit-or-miss system and without adequate means of communication; they had little or no record system; their investigative methods were obsolete …’ (Douthit 1975). The innovations he wrought on some, few, police forces carried tremendous implications but they were by no means general to policing prior to World War Two. Indeed, it was not until the advent of computerization, especially for records and communications systems and other social scientific techniques for evaluating police efficiency and effectiveness, that this process attained a critical mass. Policing as knowledge work, in the sense employed here, is thus relatively recent. These changes have given rise to a new set of questions for sociologists of the police organization.

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The Correlates of Police Subculture in the Knowledge Society We can begin by identifying four correlates which lie along two axes and which describe the space in which the occupational subculture of policing takes its form. Those correlates are: the technological and legal infrastructures and the political and managerial regimes, all of which are forms of knowledge production. The intersection of these vectors creates a space of tension requiring collective response. It is that collective response which counts as an occupational subculture. The Technological Infrastructure Taking the first of these correlates we might begin by noting the striking degree of technological innovation within the police organization in this century. In our current time developments in that technological infrastructure include the rapid deployment of information technology, especially software capable of handling large-scale data sets pertaining to suspect populations (Colton 1978; Doney 1990; Egger 1990b; Leonard 1980). A classic historical example is the development of fingerprint technology (Hannant 1995).3 A technical development that has generated considerable discussion amongst sociologists of police revolves around the radio dispatch of car patrols (Manning 1980, 1983, 1988; Waddington 1993). Another area of technological innovation which has captured the imagination of police, police watchers and public alike is the latest development in forensic medicine: DNA profiling (Alldridge et al. 1995). Taken as a whole, what the literature on technological innovation within the police organization in this century reveals is an almost constant reconfiguring of police work as each new wave of technology is adapted for use. Each generation of police officers has been compelled to reform the parameters of ‘the job’; the occupational routines are recast as the new tools are brought to bear on the police task. As the drama of police work is changed by technological innovation, the occupational subculture shifts along one dimension. When we examine the literature on what is variously described as cross-border police ‘co-operation’ (Anderson et al. 1995), the ‘internationalization’ of policing (Fijnaut 1993; Nadelmann 1993b) or its ‘transnationalization’ (Sheptycki 1995), the role of information technology is recurrent. Particularly problematic is the expanding surveillance capacity of police in the transnational realm (McLaughlin 1992). Police officers at the transnational level are intimately wedded to this technology, as practically everything that they do is done in 3 In its earliest phase of use, in India, fingerprinting exemplified the application of scientific knowledge to attain greater political control on the shifting and politically volatile populations of the subcontinent. It subsequently became known as a criminal procedure and the mythology of its technical infallibility largely came on the back of this, but the technology ‘did not entirely lose its political character’ (Hannant 1995: 43). It was Sir Edward Henry, a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Indian Civil Service, who initiated the perfection of the fingerprint classification system that today bears his name. In 1897 the Indian government adopted the Henry classification system as a criminal investigation method. In 1901, the year of Henry’s appointment as Assistant Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, it was adopted for the same purposes in England and Wales. Significantly, one of Henry’s first jobs was to maintain surveillance of Indian revolutionaries in England.

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informated space (PRSU 1992; Sheptycki 1995c). Thus, the central place that information processing has in transnational policing ensures that this correlate plays a significant part in the working personality of the police officers who take on this role. This is not to understate the place of such technology at the more local level that sociologists and criminologists are used to studying, merely to emphasize that, in the absence of advanced technology, the transnational sphere would be all but out of reach. The Legal Infrastructure The correlate on the opposite pole of this vector is the legal infrastructure. Contemporary jurisprudence conventionally holds that policing is bound up with the application of criminal law and, for the most part, it is. However, this view of the relation between policing and the law creates tensions for the way police operate, as Goldstein’s (1960) classic, if somewhat idealistic, jurisprudential reasoning demonstrates. These legal tensions have been described by others as being established by the opposition between law as a vehicle for ‘crime control’ and law as adherence to ‘due process’ (cf. McConville et al. 1991; Packer 1968). Whatever the ideal relation between police and the law might be deemed to be, it seems clear that policing takes place under the law, but is not driven by it (see, for example, R v. Metropolitan Police Commissioner ex parte Blackburn (1968); R. v. Metropolitan Police Commissioner ex parte Blackburn (1973)). In the terms developed here we might say that legal knowledge provides a rhetorical form in which police practice is discursively constituted. Practical mastery of that type of knowledge production is an occupational survival skill which is learned in close association with others who also have to contend with the ambiguities and tensions of the (criminal) law itself. This facet of the police occupational subculture is well known (cf. McCabe and Sutcliffe 1978; Chan 1996). The complexities of (criminal) law at the purely national level have given rise to some ambiguities in policing and, hence, have lent a certain complexion to the occupational subculture, and sociologists, at least since Skolnick’s work, have been well aware of this. This complexity is manifold at the transnational level where overlapping jurisdictional boundaries and a welter of treaties of both a bilateral and multilateral nature have built up a kaleidoscope of legal rules. The exchange of Memoranda of Under-standing that facilitate the smooth operation of policing in specific cross-border situations is one type of legal instrument, as is the Extradition Treaty; more involved still are Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties. Police operating in the transnational realm are expected to master the legal rules that pertain to the sovereign ground that they police, as well as know the framework of transnational law which aims to facilitate cross-border policing initiatives. Lastly, they need more than a passing familiarity with criminal and procedural law in other police jurisdictions with which they might seek to co-operate. A practical example of this are the Policing and Frontier Protocols and the Security and Defence Protocols incorporated into British and French law under the provisions of the Channel Tunnel Act. These protocols are intended to deal with all aspects of policing and security that emanate from a unique transnational location: the Channel Tunnel. They provide the legal framework through which police officers and officials from various other enforcement-type agencies exercise their law enforcement powers on foreign soil (but within defined ‘control

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zones’). This legal framework allows police actions such as arrest and seizure of property by French and UK police authorities on their respective territories; it also allows the French police to operate armed, as they are accustomed to, on the British side of the Channel and it allows the British police to maintain a Police National Computer (PNC) terminal on the French side. In effect, these legal instruments return policing from the transnational realm to the national by the reciprocal constitution of sovereign territory in the domain of the other. Other transnational legal instruments, such as the series of treaties between the Benelux countries (that facilitate such police actions as the ‘right of hot pursuit’ or the mounting of surveillance operations and arrests on each other’s territories) are even less concerned to symbolically uphold sovereignty. In the North American context, Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties have provided for the routine and wide-ranging exchange of crime data and criminal intelligence between a myriad police agencies as well as other operational capacities. In general, in order for them to operate, the police require familiarity with the law. Such knowledge is all the more hard-won in the transnational setting. This specialist knowledge is part and parcel of the subculture of transnational policing; without it, movement between the transnational and national realms cannot be negotiated. Tensions between the Legal and Technological Infrastructures The seemingly ever widening vistas opened up by continual technological innovation create lacunae and areas of ambiguity in the law, while creating at least the appearance of an increased capacity for control. This produces a dynamic tension which gives rise to the sorts of collective solutions which, in part, circumscribe police occupational subculture. Technology tends to develop and be employed within the police institution prior to adjustments of the legal framework in which police operate. The extent of this tension is evident with each wave of technological innovation, but the historical example of the adaptation of fingerprint technology is most instructive with regard to this point. The campaign for fingerprinting was one of the first truly international efforts made by the public police (in contradistinction to ‘private police’ – i.e. Pinkerton Agency etc.). The International Association of Chiefs of Police urged all police forces to adopt the technology and promoted the idea of universal fingerprinting at a conference held in New York City in 1925 (Hannant 1995: 52). To the frustration of police officials in Canada, Britain and the USA, laws pertaining to the use of the technique remained restrictive. As one might expect, J. Edgar Hoover was one of the most zealous promoters urging American police forces to fingerprint everyone who they thought it ‘desirable to fingerprint’. Under Hoover the technology became an overtly political tool. In 1933 the FBI established its Civil Identification Section ‘receiving as a down payment the fingerprints of more than 140,000 US government employees’ (ibid.: 53). By 1939 that collection had burgeoned to over 10 million fingerprints about half of which belonged to individuals with no criminal label as such. Hannant quotes a writer in Good Housekeeping who, upon seeing the scale of the Bureau’s collection felt moved to write: To me it was symbolic – that little [sic] file of fingerprints of public-spirited Americans with nothing in their pasts to hide, who trusted their Federal law-enforcement officers and were

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thankfully accepting their protective care. No communism in the minds of these individuals. No red revolution. Simply old-fashioned American faith in American institutions. (ibid.: 54)

Nor was this political edge to the application of the technology limited to the USA. Greg Marquis (1993) has noted that the need to scientifically collect, store and disseminate information on the ‘criminal class’ led to the creation of the Canadian Criminal Identification Bureau in 1911. In the inter-war years this fingerprinting system was extended to the role of ‘security vetting’, but ‘no Canadian government brought it [security vetting] to the public’s attention, let alone sanctioned it by legislation’ (Hannant 1995: 79). During the period of the War Measures Act this system was both widened and deepened. Eventually approximately 20 per cent of Canada’s working population was brought under surveillance using this system. The question as to why the Canadian Federal Government never legally sanctioned the build-up of large-scale security screening remains something of an enigma, but non-criminal fingerprinting did remain extra-legal up until 1946 and security screening itself was never approved by elected politicians. It is commonly believed that the Canadian state introduced security screening only in 1946 in the wake of the defection of Igor Gouzenko. However, 1946 does not mark the inception of such policing in Canada, but merely the point at which some ‘rudimentary operating rules’ for the operation of the screening system were introduced (Whitaker and Marcuse 1994: 253). Regarding our central theme, this history reveals that the tension between the promise of technical innovation and the brake of legal prescription create a space wherein subcultural modes and practices particular to the police occupation reside. It is this space which most often exercises our darkest imaginings about the police organization, and not without reason. The Political Regime In the transnational knowledge society it can come as no surprise that foremost amongst the legal instruments within the police domain are those that deal with data protection. This is certainly so in Europe where the increased surveillance capacity of police agencies fostered by the simultaneous information revolution and the coming together of the European Union have created quite widespread concerns about civil liberties (Bunyan 1993; Raab 1994). In so far as police work is transnational it is virtually pure knowledge work; yet it is a standard proposition in the sociology of policing that police work is ‘results’ oriented (Reiner 1985: 88) very often expressed in terms of ‘clearance’ rates (Skolnick 1994: 162–8) or ‘clear-ups’ (Young 1991: 281). This is so often repeated in the literature that it is uncritically absorbed; so much so that there is a tacit expectation that all police work is geared toward this end. In looking at the role of policing in the transnational realm, what is striking is that, there being no ‘operational’ transnational police officer, virtually every task undertaken is pure knowledge work. What we find is an almost exclusive concern with information or ‘intelligence’ exchange and the lack of operational capacity is compensated for, to an extent, through the various legal instruments previously mentioned which, as was explained, bind transnational policing efforts to national or sub-national police agencies. The situation of Europol is particularly informative in this regard, since, according to the Treaty of European Union (TEU), the tasks of Europol are to be restricted to collecting and

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analysing information and intelligence, preparing situation reports and crime analyses, and maintaining a central database for specific crime areas, namely money laundering, international arms and drugs trafficking, counterfeiting of money and credit cards, and abduction. While some politicians, notably Chancellor Helmut Kohl, have argued that Europol should have an operational role, before this could come to pass a number of other institutional developments would have to take place. Present legal conventions would have to be extended, Europol would have to be extended the power of arrest and there would have to be developed some kind of European Prosecutors Office to process charges for court. In addition, the remit of the European Court of Justice, based in Luxembourg, would have to be extended (a development which is further complicated by the overlapping interests it shares with the European Court of Human Rights based in Strasbourg) and, lastly, there would need to be a European-wide police complaints system established. Given the political complexity of establishing these institutions it seems likely that transnational policing in Europe will continue to be virtually pure knowledge work, as the present remit of Europol and the practices of other transnational police initiatives reveals it to be.4 The complexities of the political regime create very real limitations for transnational policing which, in turn create space for learned problem-solutions. Symptomatic of this are the subterranean networks of police officers in the transnational realm (Sheptycki 1995b). We could say, with a slight degree of irony, that networks such as the International Police Working Group (a network of undercover police operatives in Europe that is fostered under the Europol system) do not constitute a subculture so much as a police club. The Managerial Regime Casual observers of the police may not realize the fragmented nature of the enterprise but the managerial space within which policing takes place must be seen in all its complexity. Consider the USA with its welter of police agencies at local, state and national levels (Walker 1977). One study conducted in the USA which looked at 1,827 agencies providing police ‘services’ noted that informal inter-agency assistance is common (Ostrom et al. 1978). This informal networking is inherently labyrinthine and some commentators have pointed out that overlapping legal jurisdictions may lead to competition and/or ‘linkage blindness’ (Egger 1990b). Nor need this view of the managerial regime be restricted to large-scale states like the USA. For example, this fragmentation was a feature of policing in the Netherlands until the early 1990s which, prior to that time, had 148 municipal police forces, a national police force, a waterways police, a specialist traffic police, an aviation police and a military police force (Jones 1995). This fragmented managerial regime might have had negative effects for policing in the Dutch context, but despite that manifest ‘administrative confusion’ (Mawby 1990), it was the process of Europeanization (a sub-species of transnationalization) that yielded the 4 Police work that goes on under the rubric of the Schengen Convention has an operational edge insofar as it allows for the exchange of information on criminals and criminal activity, the mounting of proactive criminal investigations by means of covert cross-border surveillance (including the technique of ‘controlled delivery’), the right of hot pursuit across borders and the stationing of liaison officers in other Schengen member states. NB: such action is only sanctioned in the case of serious, that is extraditable, crimes.

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real impetus for the administrative reform that resulted in the present structure of twenty-four regional police forces and one national organization exercising its control through the CRI (Criminal Intelligence Agency). Prior to that restructuring it was the subcultural ‘ways and means’ approach which served as a social lubricant to ease the operation of this exceedingly complex machine.5 In my own observations of policing in the English Channel region, it is evident that co-operation between police and other police-type agencies (Immigration, Customs, Private Security etc.) create a tremendously complex inter-agency form (Sheptycki 1995c). In terms of transnational policing, the managerial regime offers something of a counterweight to the problems inherent in the political regime. While the latter is a product of the requirements of state sovereignty, the former is produced by the exigencies of policing in an inter-agency frame. It is important to stress, however, that the managerial regime is not reducible to this role of counterweight in the transnational realm. For example, the Combined Law Enforcement Unit (CLEU) which operates in the greater Vancouver area on the west coast of British Columbia, brings together RCMP and municipal police forces. This hybrid organization only incidentally facilitates cross-border policing initiatives. Its primary raison d’être is, as its name suggests, to combine the efforts of police agencies that are administratively distinct. The practice of forming ‘task forces’ for particular police operations in the US context is another management technique for overcoming administrative fragmentation. In the transnational context, the Cross Channel Intelligence Conference (CCIC), which operates in the English Channel region, was formed in 1968 expressly to facilitate policing initiatives between the Belgian and UK police in the absence of a political regime capable of doing so. Any of these managerial regimes will require subcultural understanding (a lingua franca) sufficient to facilitate their smooth operation, as the notable failure of some ‘task forces’ in the USA amply, if negatively, demonstrates. The degree of balance along the managerial/political vector establishes an additional dimension along which the correlates of the occupational subculture of policing can be said to lie (cf. Verbruggen 1995).6

5 One Dutch police officer recounted to me a story from early in his career, prior to the relaxation of border controls in the Low Countries. This involved an accident along the narrow corridor at the far southern tip of the Netherlands leading into the Limburg region, a strip of the country barely five kilometres wide. A lorry carrying several tonnes of steel crashed into a highway overpass, bringing the bridge down and constraining traffic into Maastricht, the region’s principal city. Through professional acquaintances in Belgium my informant was able to create a cross-border traffic diversion which bypassed customs procedures. This informal arrangement was maintained for three days until the wreckage could be cleared and the traffic rediverted back on to Dutch roads. My informant described this as ‘totally illegal, but effective’. 6 Verbruggen provides a tour de force of comparative analysis between US and European federal police structures that clearly and comprehensively illuminates the tensions between what I am calling the managerial and political regimes.

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Coercive Force, Overdetermination and Police Subculture In addition to the four correlates of police subculture noted above we will have to add one final element and that is Bittner’s (1970) observation that coercive force lies at the core of the police role. We can incorporate Bittner’s insight into our analysis of police subculture, and avoid the essentialism of which he is often accused, by making use of the concept of ‘overdetermination’. Garland defines the term succinctly as the convergence of a range of conflicting and connecting forces that produce a given social phenomenon (1990: 124–5, 280–1). Even when police work is primarily knowledge work it is multidimensional. Thus the correlates of the subculture so far outlined can be seen both as independent effects, each of which make up facets of the police subculture, and as contradictory forces which open up the space within which this subculture can be said to lie. Having said this, it is equally important to stress that police work is bound up with the orchestration of the capacity to muster coercive force. Many kinds of work in the knowledge society have become knowledge-based. As a consequence, surveillance has become a dominant modality in virtually every professional occupation. Here we might draw a deliberately remote analogy with the practice of medicine. While it is true that physicians have been increasingly affected by the production of knowledge in informated space – so that diagnosis is now done in dialogue with ‘expert systems’ and treatment is prescribed with reference to the knowledge criteria based in economics, the law and risk management – it is meaningless to suppose that we could conceive of the occupational subculture of the healing professions without reference to disease, pain and death. Just as any formulation of the occupational subculture of the hospital and the medical profession must take account of the multiple effects brought to bear by the ‘core’ task of healing and the complexities of the institutional arrangements constituted by the knowledge society, and within which medical practice is precariously negotiated, so too must our understanding of policing be shaded by reference to the role of coercive force. Only when we take into account all of the relevant correlates have we adequately grasped the overdetermined nature of either occupational subculture. Styles of Policing This essay is not merely concerned with subculture as defined from the standpoint of major political institutions like the state, or from the standpoint of the sub-institutions, groups and language games (legal and otherwise) into which the state (and other forms of political institution) can be divided for the purposes of formal analysis. While the formal approach is both useful and necessary to understanding the constitution of an abstract analytical category like ‘police subculture’, our interest must also turn to the process by which people become related to this abstraction. Obviously an abstraction like police subculture cannot be neatly drawn. This is one reason why, in speaking of the consequences of police subculture for those who give it life on a daily basis, I use the impressionistic term ‘style’. To paraphrase Riesman (1950), if the drama of policing is a play on a stage set by history, style tells us neither whence the actors come nor whither they move but only in what manner they play their parts.

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The police occupation as it exists within the transnational knowledge society gives rise to four styles that can be adopted by individuals. They are: the technocrat, the diplomat, the entrepreneur and the enforcer. There is one other residual style that can be identified, what Reiner (1978, 1985) termed the ‘uniform carrier’, that is: the completely cynical and disillusioned time server. This residual category is unknown in the transnational domain because, in order to get into such a position, officers must pass muster. This category need not exercise us much anyway, for its expressions have been well described elsewhere in the literature. Another reason for fleeting past this style of work, if one can call it that without being contradictory, is that it is not limited to the police organization and can be found readily in most human organizations, including the halls of academe – our intimate acquaintance with this style renders it analytically uninteresting. Of the four that are of analytical interest, the first three are stylistic adaptations that are intended to facilitate the bridging of the multiple contradictions inherent in the relationships between the technological and legal infrastructures and the political and managerial regimes. The latter aims to cut through them. The technocrat appeals to the apparent capacity for control seemingly inherent in the new information technology and technologies of surveillance. For the technocrat it is the efficient gathering and management of data and the constant patrolling of the informated security field that offers the promise of overcoming the problems of disorder conceived of both externally, out there in the ‘real world’, and internally, within the complex and fragmented police system. It was the technocrat who spoke for Interpol as that organization dodged the provisions of the French Data Protection Act; ‘if we were governed by French law, we could only enter pure statistics – how many drug seizures were made last year or whatever – and that would hardly be of the greatest value’ (Bresler 1992: 172) What the technocrat needs is access to data about actual persons. Access to ‘nominal data’, not only on police computers, but also on civilian computers like those operated by telephone companies, credit card companies and the like lends police a powerful tool with which to pursue the project of social ordering. The logic pursued here is reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984: complete infiltration, total surveillance and perfect knowledge on behalf of a Ministry of Truth that puts everything in order. However, it has been pointed out, and my own observations confirm this, that this growth of information systems is so great that even the bureaucratic and professional custodians of it do not have this kind of control and, ultimately, their poor grasp curtails the reaches of the system (Ericson and Shearing 1986). Nevertheless, the mere existence of this style of policing has given rise to legitimate concerns about the implications of the new technologies of surveillance for the institution of privacy. This style will persist as long as the technologies currently being applied in the policing organization offer the promise of control and the legal frame for its application remains ill-suited to the task required. The diplomatic style offers another role for the police officer and one that can attempt to bridge the contradictions of the police world. The reader might be tempted to confine this character to an embassy office. Indeed, many liaison officers do operate out of their countries’ embassies, attending to both their recognizable ‘police duties’ and to the diplomatic circuit. However, there are many institutions and situations that occur within the variegated institutional terrain inherent in the political and managerial regimes described above where such a style can be usefully displayed. The diplomat police style is one calculated to overcome the problem of ‘turf battles’ between different police organizations and, further, one which is

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attuned to the nuances of legal, bureaucratic and political differences embodied in the many institutional settings in which policing takes place. The diplomatic style might be tactfully employed to bridge the gap between different federal police agencies and local police agencies that are brought under the umbrella of a ‘task force’ established to deal with a specific problem in the US context. This style is no less attractive to the truly transnational police officer who finds herself working in a liaison capacity in a foreign country. This is the most difficult and, hence, the rarest stylistic adaptation; it entails not only a wide-ranging appreciation of bureaucratic and legal rules and, very often, skill in two or more languages, and it also requires a skill shared by sociologists: the capacity to step outside one’s own narrow cultural frame of reference and appreciate another way of viewing issues that come to hand. This capacity for what Giddens (1976) refers to as ‘reflexivity’ is hard-won and one not a little at odds with a police mission – very often narrowly construed in terms of ‘law n’ order’ – nevertheless, it is a style that, through its great utility, continues to surface from time to time. Another style which police officers might adopt is that of the entrepreneur. Successful policing is about the application of technique, and techniques are continually evolving. From Edward Henry’s fingerprint classification system to new database management techniques for tracking serial offences, each method had to be sold to a police consumer. Here again, the historical example of fingerprint technology is illuminating since it had a rival, the Bertillion System. Indeed, for some years both systems were successfully ‘marketed’ to police agencies.7 Two excellent examples of the entrepreneurial style emerge from my field notes. The first such example concerned an officer working on the Police Speak Project (Police Speak 1993) who, after successfully using the institutional competition between the two national police agencies in Belgium, the gendarmerie and the judicial police, to sell what amounts to an e-mail terminal and network facilities to the latter force, confidently claimed that he ‘could sell Bovril in a Marmite factory’. The second concerned RCMP officers involved in the development of the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS) data management software for handling information pertaining to serial murder and other forms of serial crime. This technology, based on networked desk-top computers, is in market competition with an older American system, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) which is a centralized automated computer information system. These officers informed me that they had not only sold the software to police forces in the Commonwealth (New Zealand and Australia), but had also sold it to several European police forces including: Belgium, Holland and Austria. It is evident that the marketing of technical solutions to police problems provides a way of bridging the gaps between and within police agencies. The entrepreneurial style smooths over the tensions inherent in the structural form of the contemporary police organization. It is a successful adaptation to the dynamic tension established by the correlates of the police subculture since it is predicated on the discovery and selling of techniques calculated to overcome those very tensions. 7

The Bertillion system was a complex identification method based on a variety of measurements of the human body invented during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most successful ‘sale’, certainly the most famous, was when it was adopted as a way of identifying the criminals who were expected to prey on the World’s Trade Fair in Chicago in 1893. Fingerprint classification was manifestly superior, however. Among its benefits was the simple fact that criminals do not leave their Bertillion figures at the scene of a crime.

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The final style open to the police officer is the enforcer. This is a classic term from the literature on police occupational subculture defined most succinctly by William Ker Muir (1977). For Muir, the enforcer style is predicated on an enhanced belief in the efficacy of coercion; in effect, the enforcer takes Bittner’s assertion about the ‘core task’ of policing and runs with it, forgetting the caveat placed upon it – that the skill in policing consists in finding ways to avoid the use of coercion. In the transnational realm this style is most evident in the actions of US law enforcement officers pursuing the ‘war on drugs’ (Sheptycki 1996). It is clear in the words one DEA official used to describe the ‘puny’ efforts of US law enforcement in their struggle to deal with the ‘menace’ of the Colombian cocaine cartels: ‘Think of an ant, crawling up an elephant’s leg [pause] with rape on its mind’ (BBC 1991). This style differs from the three previously mentioned in that it seeks to cut through, rather than bridge, the complexities of the police institution as it is constituted within the transnational knowledge society. In Muir’s formation, the enforcer style is symptomatic of a loss of contact with the complexity of reality and a tendency to grow ever more reliant on the exercise of force. All ideas of restraint are jettisoned and what is left is a standing temptation to use violence (1977: 294–5). This style is as evident in the legacy left to the LAPD by Daryl Gates as it is in the transnational declaration of war against the pax Mafiosi. It will persist as long as the metaphor of the ‘war on crime’ continues to have popular political appeal. These, then, are the adaptive styles observable within the occupational subculture of policing. A caveat is in order. These ‘styles’ are ideal types and no one individual police officer conforms to one type. Real people are blends, more complicated and various than any scheme can encompass. A particular police officer may, on the whole, adopt a diplomatic style but certain situational determinants may prompt him to adopt an entrepreneurial cloak. Similarly, one type of police work, say having to do with drug smuggling, may trigger the adoption of the attitude of an enforcer, whereas car theft or credit card fraud will signal a shift to the technocratic mode. But these ‘chameleonings’ of character are not the only brake on our application of this particular schema. Perhaps more importantly, the crisis mood of much contemporary thinking, not only about the police but more generally, which is brought about by the apparently constant shifting and revolutionizing of our social world characteristic of the post-industrial knowledge society (née postmodern age), may in itself be enough, or virtually enough, to explain the lack of development of new styles of policing (or again, more generally, new political modes of governance) based on collective tolerance and social difference. Any such developments that may come await the freeing up of human imagination; sociological reflection is one path towards that end. Conclusion: The Hollowing Out of Character Implicit throughout this discussion has been the notion of a cataclysmic characterological shift symptomatic of the knowledge society. With recourse to Riesman’s terminology, we have moved along a continuum of characterological development from tradition-directed, through inner-directed to other-directed and beyond. Finally we reach the current stage where character no longer resides in individuals, whether it be in the pre-scripted and learned tradition-direction, the inner-direction based on a metaphorical ‘internal gyroscope’, or

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the other-direction of the, again metaphorical, internalized ‘radar’. Rather, character, the capacity to ensure individual social conformity through the internalization of the precepts of a mode of conformity, has been externalized – embedded in the surveillance capacity of the technologically grounded knowledge society. This externalization implies the hollowing out of character. Policing in this era is dominated by the rationalization of surveillance practices already firmly in place. Surveillance, in the sense used here, denotes simply the bureaucratic production of knowledge about suspect populations. One of the ironies of surveillance inherent in the concept of the transnational knowledge society is that police themselves constitute a suspect population; since the crime control system is already structurally arranged to give police access to legal, scientific, electronic and personal/confessional knowledge about suspects and suspect populations (that is: ‘system rights have displaced suspect’s rights’), the only recourse to control over the process of police investigation is to turn surveillance back on the system (Ericson 1994b). The result is the further development of rules and technologies that foster criminal justice agents’ surveillance of each other. Sociologists may be forgiven an initial sense of foreboding here, since this trend is evident across the whole range of social institutions, the university not excepted. But surveillance can be no more endlessly recursive than Escher’s Drawing Hands. As the political cartoonist Walt Kelly aptly put it, ‘We have met the enemy and he is us’. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Ben Bowling, Frank Gallagher, Paul Rock, Paul Swallow and Squire T for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Part II Field Studies in Transnational Policing

[6] Reflections on the Transnationalization of Policing: The Case of the RCMP and Serial Killers1 Introduction Of the perennial questions that lecturers of introductory criminology face surely the most consistently asked regards so-called serial killers. Even the most casual observation of the book titles on offer in the ‘criminology’ sections of most mainstream book shops will reveal rather grim statistics – all too often nearly one-half of the books on the shelves of such sections are devoted to one subject: bizarre serial sex slayings. This might explain why so many students enquire about the phenomenon, often revealing a macabre curiosity. This subject has been left almost exclusively to pop-criminology (Sheptycki 1993b) and so, with this in mind, I decided it would be worthwhile dedicating some of my research efforts in this direction, if only to have to hand some reasonable answers for my students. Feminist theorists have long argued that male violence is a primary tactic for the control of women in a patriarchal society and, in particular, that the mythology of the serial killer is a powerful weapon of male control and dominance over women (Brownmiller 1976; Hanmer and Saunders 1984; Cameron and Fraser 1987; Caputi 1987; Radford and Russell 1992). The functionality of the myth of the sex slayer for patriarchy often overstates the rapaciousness of masculinity and underemphasizes the dimension of chivalry (Sheptycki 1995d). This is not to deny that such myths are pervasive or that there is a certain sociological functionality to them. On the contrary, they establish boundaries between the normal and the abnormal and thus provide an important basis for social ordering. Certain strands of feminist analysis encourage us to view the mythology of the serial killer and the rapist as a way of gender ordering (Soothill and Walby 1991) whereby women’s fear of crime is magnified as a result of promulgation, and women are terrorized out of the public domain (Stanko 1985), but this ignores a second side of the process. Broadly speaking, social formations are reinforced by frightening folk-devils (Cohen 1972) against which social groups unite, and this dynamic is predicated on the formulation of heroic images to which society can aspire (Erikson 1966).1 Without the protective hero, whether it be the psychological profiler of the famed FBI 1 The dictionary definition of the term folk-devil reveals it to be any stereotypical, ‘socially constructed’ cultural type identified as socially threatening by members of society. Such a cultural type is not a fiction but a stereotype built up on the basis of an ontological a priori. In using this term the

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Behavioural Sciences Unit or ‘Dirty Harry’, the folk-devil is simply left ‘on the loose’. In the case of the serial killer, this would be dysfunctional in the extreme and would approximate the result anticipated by the type of feminist analysis mentioned above (see also Downes and Rock, 1988: 108). The serial killer is widely understood to be a real danger and his status as a premier folk-devil virtually guarantees that police resources will be targeted at this type of crime.2 This essay is concerned with the way in which police agencies have reacted to the phenomenon. It gives an account of how police have gone about being seen to respond to this type of crime and of the technological and organizational innovations that have sprung up as a result. Its special focus is on the role of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in the transnationalization of policing responses to this type of crime. Into the Unknown: An Ethnographer Enters the Realm of the ‘Manhunters’ In 1995 it seemed impossible to study the police response to this extreme form of violence away from the shadows of these folk-devils. In the UK, the trial of Rosemary West brought to light a gruesome career she shared with her husband Fred West that rivalled all. In Canada the deeds of another husband and wife team, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, were well known. Such cases gain a tremendous amount of media attention, which itself has been conceptualized as an element of the crime problem (Surette 1984). At that time, however, I was more interested to learn about how the police organization itself responded to this type of crime and my opportunity arose in September of that year. My initiation into this world proved to be very uncomfortable. I had obtained permission to spend time with officers of the RCMP in order to gain some familiarity with the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS), a new development in police computer technology, and my orientation began with a presentation aimed at police managers. I was, in effect, a privileged viewer of a dress rehearsal, sitting alone in the front row of a large auditorium while two officers told me about the latest in police investigative techniques. A woman police sergeant from the RCMP spoke first: ‘We work on the basis that the MO [modus operandi] is learned behaviour and, if we can obtain a large enough database, it might allow us to predict what might happen in a given situation.’ ‘However,’ interjected her male colleague, a member of the Vancouver Police Historical Homicide Squad, ‘before going on to explain how to use the ViCLAS system itself, we would like to give you some background on this type of crime.’ What followed was a slide presentation which began with some multicoloured barcharts detailing statistics relating to crime rates in Canada and British Columbia (BC) specifically. A series of such slides depicted a general rise in homicide rates, ‘sex crimes’, and ‘abductions’. drama of crime and its control is emphasized, but this in no way suggests that there is no factual basis for the mythology. It merely asserts that the socially constructed meaning of the term ‘serial killer’ has an impact beyond the facts of his existence. 2 Some scholars in the field point out that the stereotype of the serial killer as male is not borne out by the evidence (Hickey 1990, 1991; Kiger 1990). Indeed, there are numerous instances of female serial killers in police case files. However, this particular folk-devil is almost always understood as being a white male.

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The viewer was led inexorably to the conclusion that the homicide rate was higher in BC than the rest of Canada and the sexual assault rates were significantly so. Further, while ‘solve rates’ were showing a declining trend nationally for both homicide and sexual assault, solve rates in BC were consistently lower than the national average. The scope for serial homicide was seen as coming within the rising number of stranger homicides, an increasing proportion of which were remaining unsolved. It was intimated from these data that serial homicide was on the rise in the region. This series of slides ended, punctuated by a slide explaining: ‘The next part of this presentation moves from abstract numbers to real cases, involving real people and real consequences.’ The female officer voiced over this slide: ‘The graphic material that follows is used to grab managers by the short and curlies, because they have not seen this stuff for quite a long time.’ The slides in the next sequence were very distressing. They depicted six cases of sexual assault, five of which resulted in the death of the victim. The crimes were extremely violent and horrific. They had been committed in five different cities in western Canada. All the victims were female, their ages ranged from 3 to 67 and they had suffered the most horrendous attacks. Even now, months later, I am nauseated as I go over my notes and can scarcely bring myself to listen to the taped record. The pictures of the crime scenes were both gruesome and artful, but I withstood this assault by visual-aid. Then the lights went up and the officer from the Historical Homicide Squad switched on a tape recorder. The audiotape that followed was a three-minute recording of a 911 call received by police in an unnamed US jurisdiction. A disembodied voice pleaded and screamed for help through the static while a man battered down her door and raped her. This was only the warm-up to the audio portion. Next came 12 vicious minutes of selected highlights from the audio diary of an unnamed American serial killer apprehended in the mid-1980s. In the course of 30 minutes the audience was taken on an emotional roller-coaster ride. The presentation had all of the impact of any of the full-length movie treatments of the subject, and then some. Ethnographers who work in the police field doubtlessly encounter upsetting situations but it is seldom, I think, that such extreme distress is experienced in a police administration building. Certainly I had come unprepared for the experience. It was only by forcing myself to try to think like a sociologist that I could keep myself from fleeing. I reasoned that this multimedia presentation illustrated that the police themselves capitalized on the functionality of the mythology of the serial killer; in effect they are not cultural dupes, but knowing manipulators of the myth. In this case the manipulation was being used to instil in police managers a sense of mission so that the tedium of data entry on the ViCLAS System would not weaken the resolve to use it.3 I also asked myself some fairly obvious questions, for example: how had Canadian police officers come to possess these audiotapes from criminal investigations south of the 3 The paper version of the ViCLAS Crime Report form is 36 pages long and contains 262 separate question fields. The level of detail required is high: for example, the question on types of weapon used includes 12 different types of knife and lists 60 different types of weapon overall. Nor are all the fields of the preformatted type; 29 require some form of descriptive analysis, ranging from an account of the victim’s lifestyle to a sequencing of events during the attack which requires of the officer that they be ‘explicit and clinical in [their] language’ and that they ‘list every event, step by step’. The completion of this Report Form could take many hours. Given the prominence of a theory of escalation (whereby offenders begin their careers with relatively minor offences – for example, indecent exposure – and

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border? My curiosity in this regard was partly satisfied by a sequence of slides presenting material on serial rape investigations gleaned from the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. A behaviourist theory of offender psychology, using two studies by the FBI as illustrations, was then related. Next, the facticity of the geographically mobile serial killer was asserted and related to the phenomenon of ‘linkage blindness’ and, finally, there was an overview of the ViCLAS system itself. The entire presentation had taken just over one hour. Linking up the Manhunters – National Developments in Three Countries Linkage blindness has been put forward as an important organizational shortcoming of the police institution in the investigation of all types of serial crime. As one scholar put it: Linkage Blindness is the real and ever-present cause of law enforcement’s inability to respond to serial murder in a timely and effective manner … [it can be] defined as the lack of sharing or coordination of investigative information and the lack of adequate networking among law enforcement agencies and law enforcement officers. (Egger 1990a: 174)

The genealogy of the term is instructive. It seems to have first entered the lexicon of investigators in the Behavioural Sciences Unit (BSU) of the FBI (later made famous in the film Silence of the Lambs) around 1980. In 1981 William French Smith, then US Attorney General, created a Task Force on Violent Crime which was expressly intended to examine ways in which to improve interagency co-operation in such cases. In July 1983 the conceptual model for the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) was first put forward in the USA. This was established in 1984 and located at the FBI training centre at Quantico, Virginia. In 1985 the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) computer went online. In 1986, with funds procured from the National Institute of Justice, a twoweek conference held at Sam Houston State University in Texas produced the Multi-Agency Investigative Team Manual (MAIT). The development and interpolation of this concept in the vocabulary of law enforcement gave central (i.e. US federal) control over crimes that were designated to fall under its purview. The NCAVC provided the hub of the infrastructure, ViCAP its communications capability and the MAIT its operations manual. It was during this period that an intensive effort was made to quantify the size of the problem. Estimates that emerged in the popular press settled on a figure, later disputed as grossly inflated, of about 4,000–5,000 deaths per annum perpetrated by anything up to 500 serial killers (Jenkins 1994). These law enforcement estimates emerged during a period of intense media coverage of notorious serial murder cases. Henry Lee Lucas was apprehended on 11 June 1983. He was credited with over 360 victims (a number which, again, was later discredited as grossly overinflated) making him ‘the most prolific serial killer’ (Egger 1990a). Lucas received unprecedented media attention, including several televised interviews from prison and a full-length interview in Penthouse in 1985. During this period Canada was coming to terms with its own incarnation of this folk-devil – Clifford Olsen’s case was decided gradually move to more serious types of attack), such forms do indeed become very routine as they are to be applied to a very extensive range of offending behaviour.

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in a British Columbia Court in 1982 amidst a flurry of media coverage, which Canada’s sub judice rules only partially confounded. In the UK Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper, was apprehended in January 1981. After a criminal career that lasted more than a decade and which attracted considerable media attention (which was, in part, amplified by police ineptitude and intense campaigning by various feminist organizations) public concern about the issue loomed large indeed. The American system that emerged in this period was predicated on a centralized model. According to Pierce Brooks, an official at the Justice Department and principal author of the MAIT, the crux of the problem was the lack of a centralized automated computer information and crime analysis system (Brooks et al. 1987). It was argued that only a centralized (i.e. federally controlled) system could co-ordinate the process of identifying patterns of serial homicide, disseminate the necessary information to the appropriate law enforcement agencies and co-ordinate ongoing investigations. A prime example of what such a system could do was the identification of ‘signature patterns’ in the modus operandi of individuals perpetrating serial crimes in a number of different jurisdictions. Thus, ViCAP was put forward in order to overcome what was characterized as a ‘systemic myopia’. This programme was originally funded through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), under the wing of the Integrated Criminal Apprehension Program (ICAP) co-ordinator Robert O. Heck who, incidentally, was one of the principal popularizers of serial murder-victim estimates in the 4,000–5,000 per annum range (Egger 1990a; Jenkins 1994). Canadian police agencies also perceived a problem of systemic myopia and were not far behind in the development of similar systems. Before the end of the decade the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) became operational with its own Major Crimes File System. Belying the generality of its name, this system was limited to serial murder investigations in its first incarnation. As a representative of the RCMP explained in 1988, the system was intended … to bridge the gaps among record systems maintained by member forces of the Canadian police community and encourage investigators to communicate, to share information and to link major crimes, initially those believed to involve homicide, thereby leading to the rapid apprehension of serial offenders. A crime-portrait computer file, where similarities and patterns are identified, can effectively compare a major crime in Vancouver with one in Montreal and may lead to a specific suspect. (Quoted in Egger 1990a: 196)

However, in contrast to the American system in which the hardware itself was centrally administered, the Canadian model allowed police to employ this software on stand-alone desktop computers in situ using standardized data-entry procedures and a hierarchy of regional co-ordinators to disseminate the data across the country. This represented a significant difference in organizational philosophy, although in investigative terms the approach would be similar. It might be tempting to ask questions about the relative utility of the centralized versus decentralized models. Such questions miss the more sociological point that the introduction of information technology into large-scale institutions, including police-type agencies, tends to reproduce the already existing organizational features of those institutions. As Zuboff (1988)

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noted, the structure of access to information expresses underlying relations of authority (see especially pp. 392–396). Thus, in the United States there is an absence of consensus around the general principles of federal, state and local enforcement jurisdiction which historically impeded the development of a strategic architecture for policing. This is compounded by the belief that a multiplicity and diversity of police forces is the best guarantor of freedom through a ‘healthy system of checks and balances arising out of interagency competition’ (Gellner and Morris 1992: 247). This competition is palpable between federal and local levels and even more tangible between federal agencies (see also Fogelson 1977). Interagency competition fosters a tendency to ‘hoard intelligence’ (Gellner and Morris 1992: 248), hence the desire by FBI officials to centralize data-management systems in the context of serial homicide investigation. In contrast, in Canada the RCMP has an undisputed federal mandate for police action as well as functioning as a provincial police force in eight out of ten provinces (Brodeur 1995). At the same time, and unlike the ‘continental model’, the Canadian system is also highly decentralized with many local-level police departments (Mawby 1990) and consequently many local–federal police partnerships where intelligence exchange is formalized and routine. The contrasts between the ViCAP and ViCLAS systems are thus understandable in terms of these underlying differences. Some of the literature on the working of electronic communications systems suggests that the decentralized approach to information management, processing and exchange is more optimal (Zuboff 1988). However, within policing-type organizations, the relative merits of centralization or decentralization, for a range of issues and functions, is by no means straightforward (Reiss 1995). Within the context of serial homicide investigation there has yet to be a definitive evaluation. Developments in North America continued apace, but UK police agencies also had concerns and their own efforts were no less far-reaching. The most notorious of these concerns was the criminal career of the Yorkshire Ripper which extended over a decade. Peter William Sutcliffe was first arrested in 1969 for carrying a hammer and was subsequently convicted for ‘going equipped for theft’. Later in that year he was accused of attacking a woman in the red-light district of Bradford with a weighted sock but no charges were brought. His career as a serial killer was brought to an end in January 1981 when he was finally arrested and charged with murder. It is interesting to note that the arrest was a relatively simple, even fortuitous, matter of routine law enforcement. Sutcliffe was apprehended as he sat in his car with a prostitute whom two police officers had decided to arrest for soliciting. During the stop it was determined that the licence plates on the vehicle were false which led to further enquiries. These led to the recovery of some tools (specifically a hammer and a screwdriver which had been used as murder weapons) and to Sutcliffe’s eventual confession. The history of this investigation was analysed in great detail in order to glean lessons for future investigations (Doney 1990). In this post-mortem, if one might use that term, it emerged that Sutcliffe had been interviewed by the police on nine separate occasions from 1975 onwards, which was a matter of some considerable embarrassment for the UK police. It was pointed out in their defence that the investigation was unprecedented in size. Some 268,000 names were amassed in the investigation, 21,000 people were actually interviewed by police and 31,000 statements were taken. Further, 5.4 million vehicle registration details were screened by the 250 police officers dedicated to the investigation which was calculated

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to absorb some 5 million hours of police time at a cost of £4 million. A final illustrative statistic, perhaps the most important from the point of view of the Police Department of the Home Office, was that the paper records pertaining to the investigation weighed an estimated 24 tons. This was taken to be indicative of the urgent need to computerize police investigative procedures. It was this investigation, more than any other, that prompted the development of the Home Office Large Major Inquiry System (HOLMES). This system, like the Canadian model described above, depended on the use of information technology and standardized data gathering and formatting to lend an overall national coherence to these types of investigation and, again in contrast to the US model, the hardware itself was not centrally based and administered. The details that emerged through the inquiry into Sutcliffe’s criminal career show that there are two essential characteristics of information technology that are of utility in this sort of criminal investigation. The communication links, afforded by either centralized computerization (along the American model) or through more decentralized networks (along the Canadian and British models), both aim to overcome linkage blindness. Computerization also helps to overcome the problems associated with the massive amounts of data that these investigations generate. These two perceived advantages of information technology have made computerization the sine qua non of serial murder investigation. Developments in Canada, the USA and the UK all indicate that information technology was intended to both increase the capacity of police forces to process large quantities of data and to bridge the organizational boundaries between the various police institutions that comprise the ‘police community’.4 Moreover, it is assumed that these developments have relevance in the transnational realm as well. While there is, as yet, little indication that serial murder is a transnational phenomenon, Steven Egger has pointed out that Interpol ‘is an international network and communication system [already] in place to respond to the transnational character of serial crime’ (Egger 1990a: 196). Citing the official mission statement of the organization ‘to facilitate, co-ordinate and encourage international police co-operation as a means for embattling crime’, Egger noted that Interpol is ‘an increasingly important tool for criminal investigation in the United States to satisfy investigative leads that go beyond the border of this country’ and, further, that ‘the in-place system of this organization is uniquely qualified to provide assistance to investigation of a serial murder with potentially transnational characteristics’ (ibid.: 196).5 Thus, we can see that serial murder has been looked upon as an issue necessitating the informational stitching together of the boundaries between police organizations. Institutional 4

It might be worth stressing here that in many countries there are a large number of police agencies in need of networking in this way. Sam Walker estimated in 1978 that the USA had approximately 25,000 police agencies (Walker 1978). Belgium might offer an even more extreme example. A report commissioned by the Belgian government in 1987 estimated that the country had over 600 police agencies – this in a country with a land area of just 30,000 square kilometres, scarcely bigger than Vermont and Rhode Island combined. Even in the UK, which has a relatively homogeneous police system largely, although not exclusively, demarcated by territory alone, linkage blindness is perceived to be a pervasive problem. 5 Interpol is a voluntary system of information exchange between member police forces. National systems are more likely to be compulsory.

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boundaries are seen as, all too often, engendering conflict between agencies that, theoretically, ought to operate in concert. Co-ordinated exchange of information is therefore the panacea for an organizational problem. As Egger put it: … where conflict remains between two organizations there may be less of it when an outsider holds an acknowledged monopoly of relevant information. Thus, the ability of these agencies to access and retrieve information from a centralised investigative network may further reduce the conflict between involved agencies. (Egger 1990a: 196)

Serial Homicide and Global Police Networks Apparent in the above discussion is that the FBI has constructed the issue of serial homicide as a federal law enforcement task. At the same time, police agencies in both the UK and Canada have also been pursuing similar ends, manufacturing (or reconfiguring) co-ordinated national networks of police officials to pursue investigations into this type of crime. We can also see that at least one police organization (Interpol) has been invoked with regard to establishing a transnational police capability for discovering possible links in serial homicide investigations. While this analysis shows something of how this enterprise transgresses geographical and jurisdictional boundaries, it does not illuminate these processes fully. In this section I want to examine further the transnational networking of police officers who have consolidated their role as experts in serial homicide investigation. The transnationalization of police work can be described with respect to three interconnected processes: the circulation of knowledge, the exchange of investigative techniques and technology transfer. Together, these three processes can be said to constitute the transnational police response to serial homicide investigation. Turning first to the circulation of knowledge, we must first take steps to define our understanding of the concept of ‘knowledge’; in the sense used here it refers specifically to bureaucratically classified information about crimes, criminals and victims (Ericson 1994a). The presentation dress rehearsal described above used a number of exhibits that are artefacts taken from this knowledge base. Importantly, the audio exhibits were of American origin, giving us an example of the transnational trade in knowledge, but the visual exhibits also transgressed inter-Canadian jurisdictional boundaries, if not national ones, again showing the mobility of such information within police networks. Another illustration of the geographical mobility of police knowledge also became evident during that presentation; it emerged during the discussion of the fifth victim, who had been abducted and murdered during the course of Valentine’s Day 1987, that the modus operandi of the crime (particularly the method of body disposal) displayed certain common characteristics with several other cases that had taken place over almost ten years: two in the USA, one in eastern Canada and a fourth in northern British Columbia. The implication was that a geographically mobile serial killer might have been at work, but this investigation was still ongoing and so any real connections between these commonalities had yet to be established. While such linkage remained indeterminate, this example clearly illustrates the great distances (in both time and space) that police knowledge can travel.

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The circulation of such knowledge is inextricably tied to the circulation of investigative techniques and expertise. One practical example of the cross-jurisdictional application of techniques is the way Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are being used to map serially related crimes. GIS allow investigating officers to produce maps which display details of crimes, such as locations of abductions, body ‘dump sites’, and other important places (Rossmo 1994, 1995). Routine activity theory hypothesizes that perpetrators of serially related crime will largely confine their criminal activity within an area bounded by their everyday use of space; this theory of a ‘sphere of routine activity’ lends such maps a potential investigative utility (see Brantingham and Brantingham 1981 for a general discussion of this approach). Using data from investigations of crimes that are presumed to be serially linked, GIS programmers attempt to construct probability maps of criminals’ use of space. One Vancouver City Police officer that I interviewed, who specialized in this type of work, claimed to spend up to 50 per cent of his time on investigations for other municipal police forces, most of which are in the United States. Indeed, at the time of my interview with him he was working on a series of homicides in San Diego, California. Such an investigation entails the circulation of knowledge within police networks: that is, knowledge crosses jurisdictional boundaries. But it also shows how investigative techniques essential to the generation and manipulation of such knowledge are shared across such boundaries. In order for the knowledge pertaining to a particular crime, or series of crimes, to have investigative utility it must be formatted in accordance with the needs of the investigative technique being brought to bear. Thus, the circulation of knowledge and the exchange of techniques are inextricably linked. The ViCLAS system is an example of a permanently linked network in which knowledge circulates, and this knowledge depends on the technique of crime profiling. Crime profiling depends on the encapsulation of the facts of specific crimes within a preformatted, bureaucratically managed and routinized system of knowledge circulation. These encapsulated facts are a form of police knowledge and, again, the utility of such knowledge depends on a certain technique: crime profiling. The theory is that crime, in this instance serial homicide, is learned behaviour and that each individual instance will bear common traits with others committed by the same person. The technique of crime profiling allows police to discover possible links between crimes separated in time and space that might not be visible otherwise. As the Valentine’s Day homicide example mentioned above shows, such common characteristics only appear as links; they may, in fact, be an artefact of the application of the technique. Confirmation of any particular hypothetical linkage awaits the successful conclusion of an investigation. This technique is still relatively new and criminologists have, as yet, no precise indication of its efficacy. The spread of this technique between police agencies, however, is ongoing. Lastly, we can see that the circulation of knowledge and the spread of investigative techniques is dependent on the transfer of technology. GIS technology is finding many applications within police agencies across the developed world, and technology transfer is clearly evident in the case of the ViCLAS system. One document that illustrates this technology transfer quite well is a list of participants for a ViCLAS workshop which took place in early 1995. This is summarized in Table 1.

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Table 1. ViCLAS Workshop 1995: Forces Attending

Police force represented

Number of officers Location

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

1 St Johns, Newfoundland 1 Halifax, Nova Scotia 1 Fredericton, New Brunswick 5 Ottawa, Ont. 1 Winnipeg, Manitoba 1 Regina, Sask. 2 Edmonton, Alta. 6 Vancouver, BC

Other Canadian Police Forces Quebec Provincial Police Montreal City Police Ontario Provincial Police Toronto Metro Police Hamilton City Police Vancouver City Police Niagara Regional Police

1 2 3 2 1 2 1

Montreal. Que. Montreal, Que. Orillia, Ont. Toronto, Ont. Hamilton, Ont. Vancouver, BC St. Catherine’s Ont.

Police Forces, USA Iowa State Police Federal Bureau of Investigation Minnesota State Police New Jersey State Police Washington State Attorney General

1 1 1 1 1

Des Moines, Iowa Quantico, Virginia St Paul, Minnesota Trenton, New Jersey Seattle, Washington

Police Forces, European Netherlands National Police Austrian Ministry of Interior

1 1

Total



Zoetermeer, Netherlands Vienna, Austria

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It is apparent from this table a considerable number of the participants were from outside Canada. The extent of participation of European police agencies and other far-flung police organizations indicated in the table appears somewhat limited. However, police officers interviewed at RCMP Headquarters in Vancouver indicated that police agencies in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the UK were also interested in acquiring the system, as were police in Australia and New Zealand. Thus, transnational technology transfer, the attendant exchange of investigative techniques that it entails and, ultimately, the circulation of knowledge that follows from it are well underway. This was a matter of pride for the RCMP, since the software for the ViCLAS system had been designed ‘in-house’. Looked at in combination, technology transfer, the exchange of techniques and the circulation of knowledge show clearly the interconnectedness of police operations and investigations, irrespective of national or other jurisdictional boundaries. The transnationalization of police

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work is both product and productive of these linked processes. Interestingly, such processes do not seem especially dependent on any particular institutional forum for police co-operation. Thus, organizations as various as TREVI, or ‘Friends of TREVI’, Interpol or the International Association of Chief Police Officers, and more informal networks of police officers, are all implicated in these processes of transfer, exchange and circulation. Some Conclusions and a Postscript A functional theory of deviance would put forth the proposition that formal agents of social control would seek to establish themselves as highly visible protectors and, further, in the case of extreme folk-devils such as the serial killer, would try to maintain an image of themselves as boldly efficacious. Douglas (1987) has argued, in the Durkheimian mould, that institutions seek to gain legitimacy by first identifying problems and latterly by showing that a specific set of instituted rules, procedures and practices embodied in the institution which has identified the problem constitute the only reasonable answer to it. Jenkins (1994) has persuasively argued that the development of the FBI’s expertise in the domain of the geographically mobile serial killer was instrumental in extending the mandate of the FBI, facilitating the penetration of federal police into local agencies and, further, that the magnification of this particular folk-devil was an almost inevitable result. Other scholars (e.g. Egger 1990a) have shown that technical advances in crime detection have been instrumental in this process. The utility of these data-handling systems is not incontestable (Lyon 1994) and, indeed, has been said to result in ‘police inflation’ (Ericson and Shearing 1986) whereby police ‘turn the facts of crime into virtues, arguing for more manpower, legal resources and scientific resources in an amplifying spiral’ (ibid.: 136). This essay has contributed something new to this. Specifically, it has shown that these processes are reproducible in the transnational domain as well. As if to confirm this very point, a horrific drama unfolded in Western Europe while this essay was being written. In Belgium, the arch folk-devil of the serial killer was fused with another equally powerful demon, the paedophile, in the notorious case of Marc Dutroux. As the details of the case became known over the course of 1996, the consequences for police agencies of not responding, and being seen to respond, became readily apparent. The Economist (26 October 1996) reported in the wake of the storm of protest over the Dutroux scandal ‘[w]hen 300,000 Belgians took to the streets … they were not just expressing sympathy with the parents of the four girls killed so gruesomely by a paedophile ring’. A statement from a spokesperson for the families of the victims made clear what the substantive concern was: ‘It is our conviction that it was neither fate nor incompetence that botched the investigation into the disappearances, but rather protection and blackmail’ (Guardian, 7 March 1997). The scandal fostered a widespread conviction in Belgium that police and judicial complicity, extending to the highest levels of the Belgian criminal justice system, resulted in the perpetuation of a series of horrendous crimes. The official parliamentary inquiry elided the accusations of complicity, instead focusing on what was characterized as a ‘catalogue of errors’, stating that investigators were slow to get on to the cases, ignored vital evidence, were cold and dismissive towards parents, jealously guarded information and had insufficient resources which were used in a badly co-ordinated

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and inefficient way (The Scotsman, 10 April 1997). In short, the problem was not complicity but organizational incompetence. However, the consequences of this affair were not limited to Belgium. The very month that the mass demonstrations took place in Brussels an inquiry was quietly launched in Saintes, in the Charentes Maritime département of France, into what appeared to be a network distributing pornographic videos involving very young boys and girls, some as young as six months old (Guardian, 13 March 1997). The first arrests from this investigation were made in January 1997, but it was not until March of that year that more than 200 people were detained in a nationwide operation undertaken by the French gendarmerie. In June of that year, the trial of 71 men involved in this network commenced (The Independent, 18 June 1997). Alain Honoré, General Secretary of the French Federation for Health and Social Work, noted as the trial got under way that this network came to light because of publicity given to scandals in other countries: ‘That opened people’s eyes and they started to wonder whether that sort of thing might not be going on here’ (The Times, 21 June 1997). Significantly, among those detained in the original large-scale operation in March were an unspecified number of French judicial officials. Meanwhile, the trans- European nature of this network was made evident by both Interpol and UNICEF (The Times, 21 June 1997). Poland had been identified as the hub for European paedophile networks, producing videos for consumption abroad and functioning as a destination for sex tourism. That gave further impetus for a tightening-up of linkages for police co-operation throughout the region. This analysis yields some insights into the process of transnationalization as it unfolds within police institutions. Globalization, a process that is said fundamentally to alter the nature of international boundaries, is a concept that has gained widespread usage amongst social scientists, many of whom are seeking to provide empirical evidence about how this process is being experienced by a wide range of people and organizations. An understanding of such processes as they pertain to deviance and social control ought to be of central importance, since the ways of maintaining social order (both practically and symbolically) are central to social life regardless of the territorial boundaries that circumscribe it. As social life is increasingly acted out on a stage that is transnational, so the methods of achieving social order take on a transnational aspect. The empirical evidence presented here shows that the principal method adopted to achieve that end is predicated on the establishment of a technological infrastructure that will facilitate the collection, retrieval and exchange of knowledge (within and between police organizations) about suspect populations and individuals. This can be understood in terms of three specific and interrelated processes: technology transfer, the exchange of investigative techniques and the circulation of knowledge. We end where we began, however, by noting that while these methods are being adopted across the whole range of police work, as far as it concerns serious criminals such as the serial killer, they take on an added dimension of importance as a symbol of order itself. Such folk-devils may be responsible for a relatively small number of crimes, especially in comparison to, say, wife battery (Sheptycki 1993a; Canadian Journal of Criminology 1995); however, they are a central symbol of disorder and hence remain a central target of the forces of law and order. While development of expertise in this field of criminal investigation is commonly supposed to be the special province of US law enforcement, particularly the FBI, research reveals that it is also a preoccupation for many other police agencies, not least the RCMP, and, indeed, that it has taken on a transnational

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aspect. In the coming years the further development of European police co-operation and even global policing (Sheptycki 1998a) will likely ramify this tendency. Acknowledgements Research for this essay was made possible by a grant from the British Council of Canada and from the Faculty of Law, University of Edinburgh, and was undertaken as a Visiting Research Fellow at Green College, University of British Columbia in 1995. The author is an ESRC Junior Research Fellow (Grant Number H524 27 00061 94). I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer of this essay and Richard Ericson for their input.

[7] European Policing Routes: An Essay on Transnationalization, Policing and the Information Revolution1 Introduction Born within the confines of the nation-state, criminology has been slow to recognize the impact of the processes of globalization on its intellectual domain (Sheptycki 1997a). This essay is an attempt to bring the study of crime control to bear on two important yet seemingly contradictory facets of the human condition in the contemporary period. On the one hand, we have the world of the airport transit lounge, wherein everybody is on the move, signalling one of the highest ideals of the transnational age: the free movement of people. On the other, we have the machine-readable passport and the new technology of surveillance which serves to bind people to territory. Keeping people in their place remains a priority since the potential for free-ranging crime and disorder has been projected as a significant danger for the global village. Of course, both free movement and boundaries are as old as our varied conceptions of crime. As James Clifford has observed, roots do not precede routes – the restless movement of people and things is as fundamental to our humanity as is settlement (Clifford 1997: 2–3). On the other hand, the attempt to corral human populations is as old as civilization – the Great Wall of China was a monument to failure (ibid.: 332); we could add Hadrian’s Wall, Stalin’s at Berlin and many others. While there is no doubt that there are recurrent patterns in human history, this essay is concerned with the ways in which these old habits of the species are being made afresh. By reference to grounded ethnographic data pertaining to the practices of transnational policing in the north-western part of Europe – between and across the frontiers of the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands – it seeks to show how policing has moved to secure the territory of the transnational realm and to survey the restless population that continually transgresses that space.

Originally published in H. Bruisma and J.G.A. van der Vijver (eds), Public Safety in Europe, Twente: Twente Police Institute, pp. 221–42 (1999). 1

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Ethnography, Transnational Police and the Channel Tunnel The locus of ethnography work is ‘in the field’. This form of empirical science requires the researcher to leave the sanctuary of the office or library and engage with the ‘real world’. However, there is an important sense in which the depiction of fieldwork has changed in the recent past. The anthropologist is now no longer exclusively concerned to be seen as one who has dwelt in a strange place. As a result, the practice of ‘dwelling’, as practised by the anthropologist, has been displaced by a cross-cutting metaphor: fieldwork as travel encounters (Clifford 1997: 66–67). In the transnational age geographically settled communities are no longer the exclusive site of social life. Travel, once the prerogative of the relatively well-off, has become a common social practice. Distance is now no longer the great gulf that separates social worlds; ‘time space convergence’, as the social geographers call it, has shrunk the world (Carlstein et al. 1979). Some sociologists have come to talk about transnational communities – groups of people who sustain themselves and their interactions using the web of communications and transport technologies in defiance of geographic distance. Thus, we have the possibility of an anthropology of a voodoo priestess, with the researcher travelling almost daily from her home in Manhattan by subway to an ‘exotic location’ in Brooklyn – a study nicely rounded off when both the researcher and the research subject travelled to Haiti together (cited in Clifford 1997: 55–57). Other anthropologists have conducted research on cultures of diaspora, which have required new techniques of multi-locale fieldwork, an oxymoron by earlier standards of ethnographic methodology. One study exemplifing this new form of fieldwork, cited approvingly by Clifford, was undertaken by David Edwards and concerns a dispersed community of Afghan refugees. Edwards’ ethnography consisted of fieldwork in a variety of places, including the city of Peshawar, Pakistan, and various refugee camps scattered around the Northwest Frontier Province, as well as inside Afghanistan where a group of mujahadin were directly observed. This study also included observations and interviews with Afghan refugees in the Washington DC area and the monitoring of activities of an Afghan Internet news group (ibid.: 57–58). Clifford has suggested that ‘the field’ in cultural anthropology has been constituted by a historically specific range of distances, boundaries and modes of travel. As new technologies of transportation and communication are deployed, the historically specific form of fieldwork as ‘dwelling in an exotic location’ has shifted. I entered the field in 1993 with the expectation that I would dwell in a place. The research site that I had chosen was an edifice that was, from its inception, symbolic of the transnational age – an age of the free movement of persons, things, ideas and information. Based at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel at Folkstone in Kent, my specific institutional location was to be the European Liaison Unit (henceforth ELU). This police unit was housed in Longport police station, on the periphery of the 22-acre site where the customs offices, loading platforms, restaurants and shopping facilities that are the sine qua non of travel in the contemporary period are located. It was from here that I intended to study the transnational practices of police agencies as they were enacted in the English Channel region. This site was a good one for studying transnational policing because from this communications hub police activities for the region gain coherence as a comprehensive set of transnational practices. The ELU was a nerve centre for all the police communications traffic pertaining to all the ports

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of entry in the south-west of the United Kingdom. It served as a data repository for border policing in this region, as well as a communications node in a dispersed communications network of police agencies in four countries: France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The ELU facilitated police dataveillance (Lyon, 1994, 47–48) and communications that tied together not only the great variety of nationally-based police agencies from these four sovereign states, but also such transnational policing institutions as Interpol and Europol. Many thousands of people travel across the borders in this region daily. Largely unbeknownst to them, there is a constant police presence watching over them, guarding them, inquiring about them and, only occasionally, intervening in their constant movements. I originally conceived of my fieldwork as place-specific. I planned to dwell at the Channel Tunnel site, in the manner of George Herbert Mead or Franz Boas, studying the ‘natives’ (that is, the police) in order to better understand the nature of the transnational police mission. However, while there was much to learn in the offices of the ELU, I soon discovered that my research would itself require many travel encounters, since the officers with whom I was working were travellers themselves. I found that it was frequently necessary for them to journey abroad – to undertake enquiries, renew acquaintances with foreign colleagues, attend seminars on legal, technological or organizational developments in their institutional habitus and, of course, for personal reasons. Thus, my research became increasingly rootless as I strove to map the contours of the amorphous network of police co-operation in the region, an effort that was, inevitably, only partially successful. It was not necessary to meet every person who contributed to this cross-border police community in order to understand its modus vivendi. The network comprised an astonishing array of people, some of whom could be classed as core participants and others who were more peripheral or played their parts only episodically. Like any transnational community, it gained coherence through an array of signifiers, purposefully employed, and, as I travelled about the region, meeting with officers in police stations, railway centre coffee shops, ferry terminal and hotel bars, I strove to master their content. In the end, I became an ethnographer of police routes, struggling with the problems of travel and translation that such a task entails. Like the police officers who work in this borderless frontier region, I strove to become a member, albeit peripheral and temporary, of a community of people who sustain themselves as a group using a web of communications and transport technologies in defiance of geographic distance. Data Sources I entered the field with the promise of access to a unique data source, the case files of the ELU. An agreement with the Kent County Constabulary (KCC) had been reached whereby access to these records would be granted for the purposes of a systematic analysis of their contents.2 The principal goal of such a content analysis was a workload analysis – an undertaking to quantify the nature and number of cases undertaken by the ELU (ESRC 1998). This was accomplished by taking a sample of ELU files (471 files in all, amounting to just over 10 per 2 This was done subject to a signed agreement, a contract of confidentiality, which specified that the use of these data would conform to the strictures of the Data Protection Act and the Official Secrets Act.

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cent of the case files over the designated time period). These files allowed a systematic picture of the communications traffic between all the participating police agencies in the region to be built up. Supplementary to this was a series of interviews with the officers in the unit. These were partly to explain and clarify the contents of the files and to shed light on what the files did not contain. It was also necessary to travel to locations across the region to interview police from other policing agencies and to observe operations at certain key points, especially border crossings and surveillance centres. Thus the primary locus was the ELU, but extended field trips to the headquarters of the Police Judiciaire in Bruges and the International Contact Centre (henceforth ICC) at the police headquarters in Maastricht provided a view of the network from other regional centres. There were a number of other locations that were studied, notably the UK National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) Headquarters in London, which included interviews and observations at the offices of Interpol, and interviews with specialist officers in the National Drugs Intelligence Unit and the National Football Intelligence Unit. The Centrale Recherche Informatiedienst (CRI) in the Netherlands was another communications nexus that received multiple study visits; this included discussions and observations with operators on the Schengen Information System (SIS) and the Supplementary Information System (SIRENE) and Interpol officers with a variety of specialisms. Generalist operational police stations were also the subject of study visits, these included: in Belgium, the Gendarmerie headquarters in both Ghent and Ostend; in the Netherlands, police stations in Amsterdam, Maastricht, Middelburg and Vlissingen; in the UK, police stations at Maidstone, the Hythe, Dover harbour and Heathrow airport; and, in Germany, the police headquarters in Aachen. A series of useful interviews was also undertaken with RCMP officers at the Canadian High Commission. Other interviews with computer engineers in the UK and the Netherlands who had designed police data handling and exchange systems gave me insight into many issues, not least of which is the security of these channels of communication. Observations of the surveillance systems and control points on the Channel Tunnel system at Waterloo, Ashford, Folkstone (including the customs area and French ‘control zone’), Lille, Brussels and Paris stations, as well as the ferry terminals at Dover, Ramsgate, Ostend and Calais were a necessary supplement to the work ‘behind the scenes’ in police stations and the like. Altogether, this fieldwork, which took place over a four-year period from 1994 to 1998 provided the necessary observational data to make sense of the documents provided by the ELU. An unexpected source of data was presented to me while in the process of fieldwork. The Police Judiciaire in Bruges, Belgium, was able to provide me with extensive documentary evidence relating to the development of transnational policing in the region from the late 1960s up to the present day. These were the minutes of the Cross-Channel Intelligence Conference (CCIC).3 The documentary evidence provided by the ELU and the Police Judiciaire in Bruges are especially revealing sources of data because both were assigned a projected internal career (Meehan 1997), meaning that the police officers who participated in the manufacture of these records understood them to be for internal police use only. Documents with a projected internal career display a degree of frankness that is missing from documents which have a projected external career. The files that comprise the ELU data had some use as a basis for estimating the productivity of both staff and the unit itself (account-ability) and thus, in any subsequent 3



Two essays based on this data have been published to date. See Sheptycki 1997c and 1998c.

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interpretation of such documents, awareness of the attendant organizational qualities that such records exhibit needs to be foregrounded (Meehan 1997). However, account-ability was not the only purpose of these files. They also had some limited use as records of police intelligence and as an operational source of information about crime and other aspects of disorder affecting the region. The CCIC records are even more revealing because they were never intended to be used for accountability purposes – they are files pertaining to direct police-to-police communications in the furtherance of police duties. All of these data provided the necessary material to build up an ethnographic account of the transnational practices of police agencies in the north-western region of Europe. Communications Nets, Nodes and Relays I began my fieldwork at Longport police station in April 1994, within months of the station becoming operational. A series of entries from my field diary bring back the images of those first days: Longport Police Station is a shining white box sitting amidst weed infested flower beds that have not yet succumbed to law and order. It is Kent’s newest police station; complete with cells, medical examination suite, exercise yard, 2 kitchens (one for the prisoners) locker rooms and, of course, offices … built at a cost of three million pounds, paid for by Eurotunnel, it has a secured perimeter surrounded by high steel fences on three sides watched over by closed circuit television cameras from every angle … a car park is within the fenced perimeter. Opening onto the parking area are two electric garage doors, one of these opens into a room which contains a variety of exercise equipment for the use of the officers. The other door opens into a secure compound; vans with prisoners will drive in here eventually … The canteen and recreational areas are often populated by contingents of police officers dressed in dark blue fireproof jump-suits, these are the ‘law and order police’ being trained in emergency procedures for the tunnel … in the communications room on the main floor is an open plan office with seventeen computer terminals, a bank of four CCTV screens placed high up on one wall and approximately one dozen phones. There are usually no more than three officers in this office, but in an emergency situation, when the whole system is activated, there could be many more. Off to one side of this room are two offices which house the central intelligence bureau for this police station. In this room is the ‘nominal index’, a database containing information on known offenders operating in the area, my access does not allow me to spend much time there … upstairs, where I spend most of my time, are more offices and meeting rooms. The superintendent’s office is there – the ELU, Special Branch and offices for other people involved in planning and co-ordination as the new facility is gradually put in order. (From field notes, April, 1994)

The European Liaison Unit was an important node in a dispersed communications network that spans Western Europe and, potentially, the globe. At the time of my fieldwork this unit handled over 1,000 enquiries annually; approximately forty-seven per cent emanating from France, a further twenty-eight per cent from police forces within the UK, just over sixteen per

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cent come from Belgian police agencies and the remaining nine per cent from the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe (ESCR 1998). The ELU receives calls – by telephone, fax or electronic mail – from a great variety of police and civilian sources.4 These enquiries potentially relate to the entire spectrum of police work from arson to young offenders in custody in a country not their own. The job of the officers in this unit, in any of these matters, was basically the same: to act as a relay point, data source, and advice centre facilitating a police work. These officers are pure ‘knowledge workers’. As one Divisiechef for Limburg who was, among other things, responsible for oversight of the ICC in Maastricht, succinctly put it, ‘Policing is reducible to the collection and exploitation of knowledge’ (from field notes, May, 1996).5 My own observations tended to confirm this. Again, from field notes: The unit [the ELU] is part of a network of similar relay stations all over Europe … as a whole [it] can be thought of as one giant information system. Some commentators have made much of the incompatibility of computer systems employed in the various agencies … in practice this is not even a minor hitch … the data-bases in the various Regional and National Police Headquarters (NCIS for example), at Interpol, even the small ones held at local police stations, which are maintained by local intelligence officers, are not connected electronically, 4 The European Liaison Unit has been involved with the PoliceSpeak Project since its inception (PoliceSpeak, 1993). Later rechristened Linguanet, this project was the development of a closed regional area e-mail network. To date there are 15 terminals at 15 separate sites in the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands that have access to this system. The Linguanet aims to be able to provide machine translation for a variety of pre-scripted types of police-to-police communications. In its first stage, machine translation has only limited feasibility with regard to messages pertaining to vehicles. While machine translation is, perhaps, a future development, the Linguanet still provides a secure electronic communications environment for the exchange of police-relevant information across the whole ambit of police-related chores. In the Netherlands there are two separate systems that are worth mentioning in this context. The first is the Euregional Multi-Media Information exchange (EMMI) project which became operational in a limited form in 1994 and has been developing ever since. This is an electronic information sharing network that not only provides channels for police-to-police communication, but also links relevant local government offices, and the fire and ambulance services. EMMI can provide comprehensive electronic communications links for a wide variety of scenarios, including crime-related ones, but its most valued application is thought to be in the area of disaster and emergency management. This regional system currently links police and other emergency services in the north-west of Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. Another regional electronic communications network is the PALMA project (Police, Aachen, Liege and Maastricht), which facilities direct police-to-police communications in the Limburg Euroregion which includes southern Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and northwest Germany. This latter system has been designed with the same data protocols as Linguanet system so that, in future, they can be integrated. At present there are discussions to integrate the Linguanet and EMMI systems. Should these local area networks achieve full integration, they will provide an electronic environment for police and emergency services communication which operates as a dispersed network rather than on the centralized model of, for example, the Interpol ASF or the Schengen Information System. 5 The pre-eminence of knowledge work for institutions marshalling coercive force was succinctly put by General Gordon Sullivan, Chief of Staff, US Army, in 1995 when he stated: ‘The central and essential feature of the American Army of the twenty-first century will be its ability to exploit information.’

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they are connected by humans that operate them … humans are the lubricant that allows the information to flow, and that flow is the key to its efficient exploitation. (From field notes, April, 1994)

Police researchers who apply ethnographic methods have produced a library of works, much of which tends to an action-oriented perspective, with a stress on police–citizen encounters and, especially, arrests (e.g. Holdaway 1983). However, more recent analyses of public policing institutions have focused on police as ‘knowledge workers’ (Chatterton 1989; Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Manning 1992). Field researchers on the lookout for ‘real police work’ have been tempted to switch over to someone else who is remaining out on patrol when a police officer under observation announces an intention to spend time in the police station writing reports. This unnecessarily skews understanding of police work since it neglects the vast resources devoted to information accumulation, analysis and dissemination. However, given the great emphasis, in both the academic and popular literature, on police as the legitimate repositories of the state’s capacity to muster legitimate force in the maintenance of social order (Bittner 1970; Reiner 1985, 1992), a study that focuses on police knowledge workers can seem to miss out on crucial details. Again from field notes: The officers in the ELU are pure knowledge workers, the specialism is called ‘criminal intelligence’. Two of the officers in this unit … did CID intelligence work prior to attachment to the ELU in 1991 … [two others] were in Special Branch … but [in examining the files that are the result of their work] something really bothers me. There is often no resolution. The files contain information about a case, for example a recovered stolen vehicle found abandoned on a road side; an officer in the unit will get an enquiry, say from France, which will list the details of the car (vehicle registration mark, chassis number, etc.). The ELU will, turn, make enquiries with the DVLC [Driver Vehicle Licensing Centre, in Swansea] and the PNC [Police National Computer] in order to ascertain the RO [Registered Owner], they might also enquire at NCIS or even Interpol … If they get a name they will typically phone directory enquiries to get a telephone number. Any relevant information will then be relayed back to the original enquiring officer. That is it … very often the files do not show what happened as a result. Indeed, the ELU officers themselves do not always know the result of their own work. (From field notes, May, 1994)

Given the volume of cases and the remit of the unit, this is not surprising; it is a structural feature of this type of work. However, given the supposed ‘action orientation’ of the police occupational subculture, there are questions about the degree of centrality of knowledge work in the police world-view. I enquired with one of the ELU officers: did he experience any frustration at this apparent lack of closure? His answer indicated that he had been doing intelligence work for many years and that he was used to it. He drew an important distinction between information and intelligence – the latter required background knowledge and experience and could transform the former. Being able to get the appropriate information, transform it into useful intelligence, and see that it reached the attention of an operational officer who could make use of it was an essential part of contemporary police work. Without such knowledge work few collars would ever be felt. This seemed to confirm that knowledge

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work was indeed a central feature of the occupational subculture of police in the contemporary period (Sheptycki 1998a). However, very shortly after this entry was made, this particular officer was involved in a case that revealed a residual and high regard for a ‘good arrest’. From field notes: [Two of the officers in the ELU] stumbled onto something today. A series of vehicle and person checks on someone going through Dover port led to a suspicion of drugs smuggling. He was caught in their port. On their side of the Channel. And it was their intelligence that helped do it. They were off out of the office, men on a mission … When they came back to the office they were evidently greatly pleased. Usually their job does not provide them with a sense of closure … in this case it ended with a Nigerian fellow having the front console of his Mercedes bored into in several places. Apparently it is possible to mould cocaine into anything from bowling balls to surf boards. Dashboards too. The only way to tell if it is cocaine is to take samples by drilling. (From field notes, April, 1994)

Even in the world-view of the most sanguine intelligence officer the centrality of the danger and authority nexus adheres. The desire to ‘feel a collar’ remains. While this clearly shows that vestiges of a preoccupation with ‘good arrests’ are retained by intelligence officers, the main focus of the ELU officers, as with their confrères across the continent, was dataveillance: trawling for information on any one of a large number of databases operated by both civilian and police agencies for information that would substantiate suspicions of criminality. A corollary of this knowledge gathering is the transference of relevant information to parties who can make use of the intelligence thus produced. Four Cases of Transnational Policing The above discussion gives some sense of the process of knowledge work in this informational network. However, more concrete examples offer the best illustration of these processes. Therefore, this section will present four cases handled by the unit. The intention is to show how a multi-level communications infrastructure, which links local police stations, regional headquarters, national headquarters and international police-type agencies, is experienced by the operators within the system as a unidimensional network of data sources, albeit with secret spaces and hidden pathways as well as open sources and well-used communications channels. The cases presented here illustrate two facets of this type of police work. On the one hand, there is the vertical dimension of information exchange. Cases may be dealt with directly on a local basis between two or more police forces in the region – this can be thought of as the ‘basic level’. Work of a slightly higher level of complexity can be dealt with by a temporary task force comprising a number of agencies; such task forces can be in place for an indeterminate length of time and constitute a ‘mid-range’ police organizational response. Lastly, cases may be channelled through formally designated national central offices; these are ‘high-level’ police communications and/or operations. On the other hand, there are, broadly speaking, two types of work that are the main bread and butter that sociologists of the police have traditionally fed off: those are the ‘social service role’ and ‘ordinary crime suppression’.

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It is worth using examples of these basic types of work so as to keep our understanding of policing in its correct proportions.6 It should be pointed out at the outset that there is no fixed correlation between the type of police work and the level at which a particular case is dealt with. That is, it is not the case that the three levels of organizational integration correspond to the types of service performed. Old Wine in New Bottles One of issues for police co-operation prior to World War Two was counterfeit currency and the smuggling associated with it (Bresler 1992). It would come as no surprise, therefore, to find that police in the Channel region come across this type of crime from time to time. Indeed, quantification of the types of work engaged in by the ELU indicated that between 6 and 7 per cent of the enquiries undertaken pertain to this type of crime (ESRC 1998). One such example concerns two men who were subject to a routine stop by French customs officers at Dunkerque. One of the individuals was found to be in possession of a small amount of cannabis which prompted a more thorough examination of their luggage. This uncovered a number of travellers cheques and cash in various denominations in Swiss, Dutch and British currencies. The total value of the financial instruments recovered was in excess of £25,000. The ELU was requested by the French authorities to undertake initial enquiries pertaining to the passports of the detained persons, specifically to see if these documents had been reported lost or stolen (they had not). One passport was American (the bearer was a UK resident who claimed US nationality through parentage) – this enquiry was slow as the liaison officer at the US Embassy proved somewhat difficult to track down. Enquiries were also undertaken with the NCIS and on the PNC in order to ascertain if either person had a previous criminal conviction in the UK (they did not). The following day French authorities faxed details of the confiscated Bank of England notes to the ELU and this information was relayed to the NCIS. At this point the Swiss travellers cheques were identified as having been part of a shipment which had gone missing from a Royal Mail sorting office in London. The value of that shipment was said to be £950,000. Also on that day the ELU was contacted by a private investigator from an international agency that had been retained by the Swiss Bank to investigate the missing shipment, presumably to facilitate the recovery of their property. There was some initial difficulty establishing this person’s bona fides, but this was eventually done, both through the Swiss Bank and through an officer in the London Metropolitan Police who was working on the investigation of the theft from the Royal Mail depot. The ELU continued to be a relay point for information between the prosecutor in France, UK authorities and the private investigator for two more days. At that time the evidence that could be gathered that pertained to these persons’ travel documents

6

There are two other types of police work which should be considered in order to make the analysis complete. The first is what Jean-Paul Brodeur (1983) has referred to as ‘high policing’. Due to the strictures of the Official Secrets Act (1989), this essay does not consider this category of police work. The second type of police work which is not illuminated in these case studies is the function of emergency service provision. This function is only alluded to here but will be the subject of a future analysis.

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and other aspects of their movements had been collated by the French prosecutor and there was no need for further ELU involvement. This case reveals how a variety of agencies are co-ordinated through the dispersed communications network that the ELU is part of. What is especially interesting is to see how this communications net was extended to include private police. Very little of the literature on police co-operation in Europe has considered this, and yet the ‘marketization’ (Sheptycki, 1998b) of policing or ‘rebirth of private policing’ (Johnston, 1992) is ongoing and apparently gathering speed. This case demonstrates that there is no a priori point in the net which can function as the centre which directs the police reaction to the discovery of a criminal or the recovery of stolen property. The action is dispersed and requires each relay point to play a part, co-ordination emerges as an artefact of information sharing and is, to a degree, determined by who has made the arrest – in this case, it was French authorities. This is a case of direct police-to-police communications. But there is a ‘value added’ dimension to the ELU service which is worth stressing and this is to do with language proficiency and the ability to interpret information. Information moving between police agencies requires translation, clarification, interpretation and understanding. Operational Decisions and Tactical Dilemmas The second example to be discussed here emerged from observations of a team meeting during the ELU in the Spring of 1996. The meeting deliberated on a choice of tactics that could be employed in a case of ‘facilitation’: a police euphemism indicating the ‘ordinary law crime’ of smuggling illegal immigrants across international borders. The intelligence in the possession of police and immigration authorities in Belgium and the UK indicated that sixteen Sikhs were in Belgium awaiting transportation to England and then on to Scotland (Glasgow to be precise). The discussion amongst the multi-agency team that had been assembled to investigate this case was how best to go about dealing with this situation in order that the organizers and financial backers of the smuggling operation could be apprehended. The participating immigration officials advocated a ‘controlled delivery’, which several police officers discounted on the basis of a duty of care to the trafficking victims. The worst-case scenario for this team was that only the illegal immigrants and those in charge of their physical transportation would be caught, in which case they would have in custody a few minor criminals (the lorry drivers) and the ‘illegals’, who would simply be deported. The more optimal outcome was considered to be identifying, arresting and bringing to successful prosecution the financial backers of this criminal enterprise. This multi-agency team was deliberating on how best to capitalize on criminal intelligence which was in possession of a number of different agencies. An important concern was the welfare of the persons being smuggled; hence there was a perceived need for quick and decisive action. It is evident that any one agency could have affected arrests. Belgian police could have detained the Sikhs while they were in Belgium. UK immigration authorities could have apprehended them at the border, and British police officers could have done so at any point en route to Glasgow. By pooling their information and acting in concert the agents could maximize their results. This case raises three issues. The first is the degree to which police work is being reconfigured as a result of the rise of clandestine markets. Human smuggling is just one example of illicit

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trade that has developed in the emergent transnational world order (Sheptycki 1998a). A discussion of the broader factors that have given rise to these markets is beyond the scope of this essay, but the principal commodities are well known: people, drugs and weapons. However, any commodity can find its way on to the black market. Secondly, market-type crimes give rise to dilemmas of control for police (Fijnaut and Marx 1995; Sheptycki 1999a), and the tactics contemplated by this multi-agency task force were a matter of the discretionary power of a senior police officer. Thus the second issue exemplified by this case is the absence of a clear and directive legal frame for police operations. The lack of law does not impede agency action, however, as the case also makes clear. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the principle cleavage in the multi-agency group was not cross-national (i.e. between Belgium and the UK), but inter-agency (between police and immigration authorities), which reveals that differences in occupational culture are at least as important an issue as national cultural differences in orchestrating the variety of agencies employed in the policing and surveillance of suspect populations across the terrain of Western Europe. Rolling Crime and Fast-track Responses Occasionally transnational crime requires a swift response, and one case which required ELU assistance amply demonstrates this. This began as a notification to a member of the UK immigration service (HMI) at the port of Dunkerque by a member of the public and eventually turned out to concern a very serious ‘ordinary law crime’. The person making the initial report was travelling by coach from London to Warsaw, Poland, and noticed, en route, a man travelling with a young child. This person had an intuition that something was not quite right and brought this to the attention of the only authorities with whom he had a chance to communicate. By the time this information had been relayed to Longport police station, the coach had already resumed its journey. This was late in the evening and the message was relayed to the inspector in charge of the ELU at his home, since the ELU is not operational outside of normal office hours except in emergency situations. This officer contacted the Belgian Gendarmerie with a request to stop the bus and verify if there was any problem with the travel documents of the man and the young boy. This was carried out. It became apparent to the authorities that the boy was without shoes and neither he nor the man he was travelling with had luggage, which added to the suspicions. The man was identified as a Russian national, and the only identification document in his possession was a driver’s licence issued in Germany. This was, as far as Belgian authorities were concerned, sufficient documentation to allow the individual to continue with his journey, but there was real concern that this was a potential case of abduction. The request to the ELU was to verify if this was so. Initial checks carried out through Interpol and the NCIS turned up no information and this was relayed back to the Belgians, who had escorted the coach to the nearest police station. However, the officer in charge of detaining the bus and its passengers communicated that he was unwilling to hold the vehicle for very much longer. After a further series of enquiries with the London Metropolitan Police, making use of the Police National Computer (PNC), it was discovered that approximately twelve hours previously a Russian woman who had political asylum status in the UK had reported a burglary and the abduction of her young boy. It is important to stress that these

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enquiries took some time – time during which the Belgian Gendarmerie were seriously considering allowing the coach to continue its journey without detaining the individuals concerned. The positive report from London, which was the product of a tenacious hard work by the ELU officer handling the case regarding the missing boy, allowed the Belgian police to hand the case over to a prosecutor. Prior to that point it remained a possibility that the man and boy would have been allowed to continue their journey. Needless to say, extradition in this case would have been very problematic indeed. This case illustrates three points. Firstly, it is apparent that policing, even transnational policing, is greatly dependent on help from members of the public. Other researchers (Anderson et al. 1995) have pointed out the need for the emergent transnational policing apparatus of the European Union to foster its own legitimacy or risk losing this basis of support. Secondly, it is evident that border controls are not so tight as to prevent individuals from crossing them without adequate identity documents. The Russian man was travelling on a German driver’s licence, which is all that is required within the Schengen territory, but not enough for entry into the UK. It is not clear from the case notes how this individual gained entry to the UK or managed to leave, but had the return passage gone unnoticed, nothing would have prevented him from travelling all the way to Warsaw and beyond. Thirdly, it is clear that there is, at times, a need for swift action. It does not seem likely that long lines of communication – from local police stations to national authorities to supra-national ones – can always deliver this speed when it is necessary. The problem of long lines of communication is exemplified in the following case. Institutional Friction and a Sense of Vertigo The third example to be considered here also comes from my sample of case files from the ELU and is an example of the social service role of the police. It concerns the recovery of a dead body from the waters of the English Channel by UK authorities. The body was that of a woman of middle-years. She was found to have extensive injuries to her face and was thought to have been in the water for at least 24 hours. The body was originally sighted by a Norwegian vessel, but was recovered by the UK Coastguard and, three days after the original sighting (which was recorded by the ELU), came under the authority of the relevant Kent County coroner. Because the clothing was predominantly French in origin, an officer from the ELU immediately informed the maritime police at Calais so that missing-person enquiries could be initiated there. Two weeks later the coroner’s office was able to affirm that the body was, most probably, that of a French person (among other things, the inscription on her wedding ring suggested this) and was also able to suggest that the body had entered the Channel in the vicinity of Dunkerque. At this point the Interpol office in London was contacted and the relevant information was relayed to them. Some two months later the Interpol office in Paris contacted the ELU with a probable identification of the body. A similar message was received from the French consulate whose source of information was the services régionaux de police judiciaire (SRPJ) – roughly translated as ‘regional crime squad’.7 Because the original investigation had to consider the 7

Given that the original communication to France from the ELU was to the Maritime Police, a branch of the Gendarmerie, some explanation as to why the SRPJ, a branch of the other national police

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possibility that the body was that of a murder victim, communications about this particular case were routed through the national central authorities. The homicide theory was quickly ruled out by the coroner. The next problem was to positively identify the body and this was to be done by reference to dental records. However, the exchange of such evidence must be done through formal channels – that is, through central offices at the national level – in practice usually making use of Interpol channels. Thus, in this instance, Interpol was further involved in a case which was essentially a social service response. Ten days after the French authorities had matched the report of the recovered body with information on their missing persons index, dental x-rays arrived at the ELU by regular post. The following day a call from the coroner’s office was received, asking for a formal statement identifying the body (a family member was required to identify the person by reference to a photograph). This was initiated through the official channels but, at the suggestion of officials at the French consulate, the deceased’s family were also contacted by the ELU directly. Four days later the dental records were certified by the coroner. At this point all that was necessary was some additional documentation from the French authorities (a background report on the disappearance) in order for the coroner to complete her report and arrangements made to repatriate the body. Two weeks later this documentation had still not arrived. In the interim the ELU had answered several enquiries from the deceased’s family and their appointed funeral director, putting a ‘friendly face’ on the police response to what must have been experienced as a great personal tragedy. However, the ELU also attempted to hasten the exchange of official documents and there was an exchange of communications with the Interpol NCB in Paris. Finally, three months after the recovery of the body and three weeks after it had been positively identified, the necessary paperwork had been completed and the body was repatriated to France. What is clear from this example is that, while the power of the dense network of police communications is enormous, there are institutional and organizational facets of these practices that operate to limit efficiency and perhaps effectiveness. This network has fructified as a result of the evolution of information and communications technology and their practical pragmatic implementation within police organizations. The capacity for the great variety of police agencies operating across the territory of Western Europe to share information has had the largely unplanned effect of stitching together agencies which historically have been quite separate. The net has not developed uniformly and old institutional cleavages remain. Supra-national institutions overlaying this patchwork have added another dimension to the institutional complexity. The result is long lines of communication and potential institutional friction. Although this friction is not manifest in every case, it seems quite likely that the best way to offset this tendency to administrative lag is to supplement centralized data exchange by direct point-to-point communication at the local or regional level. service in France (La Police Nationale) is in order. The answer is simple. The SRPJ is a regionallybased infrastructure for the co-ordination of serious criminal investigations and is answerable to the Central Directorate of Criminal Investigation in Paris (an office of the Police Nationale). The head of the Central Directorate is also the designated head of the French Interpol National Central Bureau. Hence, this communication to the ELU essentially had one source, even though it arrived from two apparently different sources (see Stead 1983: 119–120 for an explanation of the place of the SRPJ in the organization of the French police).

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Some General Lessons The advent of the fax machine, electronic mail, and computerized information processing have done more to change structures for transnational (and national) policing than formally planned structural change. Police co-operative efforts in the contemporary period have been enhanced by the ‘information revolution’ and this has been the major, although largely unacknowledged, motor of organizational change within the police complex. Policing agencies are all being revolutionized as they adopt new methods of handling and exchanging knowledge, and the convergence of police systems that comes in the wake of this is ongoing, irrespective of efforts to create transnational policing structures or to restructure national systems. The changes in the technological infrastructure of policing institutions reconfigures these organisations. In many instances, local and regional police networks quickly seized the potential of these new technologies (Sheptycki 1997c, 1998b, 1998c).8 More cumbersome national and supra-national police entities have developed more slowly. The enhancement of supra-national police entities has been pursued on the basis that they are the single most important key to enhancing policing effectiveness across the European ‘internal security field’ (Bigo 1994, 1996). This seems unlikely. While it is no doubt possible for such agencies to pursue successful investigations of criminal networks and thereby demonstrate a need for their services (from time to time in a notably spectacular fashion), this is not the best measure of the efficacy of the transnational policing enterprise. There is no prima facie reason to suppose that macro-level police institutions by themselves would be notably more efficacious than a facilitative information sharing regime. On the contrary, since these macro-level institutions add another layer on top of the already existing policing structures, they add to the administrative burden. Further, macro-level police organization aimed to centralize data storage and handling, whether it be Interpol’s Automated Search Facility, the Schengen Information System or national systems like the UK’s National Criminal Intelligence Service. There are three reasons why such centralization of information management is likely to be less optimal from a policing point of view. The first is that these large (and expensive) systems tend to take a long time to install and are technically obsolete before personnel have even completed the basic training in how to use them. In contrast, a variety of smaller, networked data systems can be built up incrementally and upgraded over time, which mitigates against the tendency towards complete systemic obsolescence or breakdown. The second is that the reliability, validity and veracity of data becomes clouded when it is removed from the locally situated expertise that makes information relevant. In order for information to become useful intelligence the interpretative expertise of those most familiar with the circumstances that produced it is useful, but this is militated against when it held on a central database. Centralization raises the potential for erroneous information to be taken at face value, which can have negative consequences for both police operations and human rights. The third point to stress is merely a corollary of this. Over the recent past, computer design has moved away 8

For example, Interpol did not abandon Morse code as a method of message switching until the late 1980s. The technical difficulties of installing the Schengen Information System, which held up online access for a substantial period of time, is another such example (Sheptycki 1995b). When these examples are contrasted with the development of regional systems – Linguanet and the PALMA projects, for example - the general lesson would seem to be: the smaller the beast the fleeter of foot.

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from central mainframe model in favour of networks that break a problem into parts that are solved simultaneously. Dispersed information handling allows for the emergence of a collective intelligence that is greater than the sum of its parts. Networked databases managed by local intelligence officers (and others who manage information) enhances the collective efficacy of knowledge work. This process is already happening. In order to optimize the potential of the information revolution, policy makers concerned with transnational policing structures will need to remain cognizant of the need to qualify the centralization of the communications infrastructure so that control of information traffic reflects both proportionality and subsidiarity. Not to do so risks a severe traffic jam on the police information superhighway. At the same time, the surveillance capacity of the police complex has increased the possibility that police power could be misused or misapplied, thereby producing miscarriages of justice. To a certain extent these worries might be offset by the development of a suitable legal frame. However, in the transnational realm this is not so easy to do. A characteristic feature of codified law is that it exhibits major lacunae. In the context of transnational police operations this has created an enormous space for police discretion. My own observations indicate that discretion has been applied within the spirit of human rights, even where the letter of the law is lacking or imprecise, but how generalisable this is remains an open question. Even the Schengen Convention, to which the UK is not a signatory, is open to multiple, and therefore confusing, interpretations – not least because the document exists in more than one language, which compounds the inevitable questions that arise from the interpretation of the abstract analytical categories of the law (Joubert and Bevers 1996: 518). Moreover, Europeanization has, over the recent past, led to ‘impressive reconstructions and recalibrations’ of the law, so much so that, in some countries, laws have changed with such frequency that it has become impossible to stay up-to-date (ibid.: 520). Moreover, since international criminal law enforcement, by definition, takes place in multiple jurisdictions, it creates the potential for ‘jurisdiction shopping’ (Sheptycki 1996), further adding to the discretionary power of police agents. In short, the existing legal frame for international criminal law enforcement exhibits all of the traits of postmodern fragmentation. The observable historical development is not proceeding along a straight line. We have an apparent and impressive increase in the technical capacity of police agencies to carry out their mission. However, administrative fragmentation, historically bequeathed and enhanced by contemporary developments, does not necessarily facilitate these technical advances. The emergence of supra-national police agencies and other centralized structures has added more layers to the institutional mélange. For experts in information technology, it is not clear that the overall achievements of the complex system will match the potential of the enhanced technical capabilities. Having said that, a fragmented and kaleidoscopic legal frame creates the scope for great discretion, which may (or may not) overcome this administrative friction. As many jurists have observed, this does not bode well for the maintenance of a democratic police tradition. Re-routing Transnational Policing Travelling across the frontiers of Europe awakens the realization that the strength of the nation-state system can be traced to its borders, which can be controlled. Such acts of control,

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James Clifford reminds us, are always tactical (Clifford 1997: 7). And yet, we have, in the late twentieth century, grown accustomed to travel along the intercultural frontiers of nations, people and locales. To be an active citizen of the transnational world means to be permanently on the move through what Clifford and others, call ‘contact spaces’, ‘the space(s) in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict’ (ibid.: 192). Given that life in the ‘contact zones’ is so potentially fraught, it is surprising that we so often remain oblivious of the policing activities that we hope help to maintain them as civil society. Travelling to Oostend from the port of Ramsgate by jetfoil in the spring of 1995 I was surprised to look up from my writing to find a Sea King helicopter, emblazoned with Belgian Rijkswacht markings, hovering over our speeding craft. Slowly, one man was winched onto the vessel, while the captain announced to the passengers (in three languages) that this was merely an emergency drill. No sooner had the gendarme touched down, then he was lifted off again. Coincidentally, I happened to be working on field notes pertaining to conversations with police about the joint Franco-English mock exercises in the Channel Tunnel where they had been rehearsing a variety of emergency situations: hostage-takings, fires, and medical emergencies. This gave me pause for reflection: if policing is about the maintenance of the health of the social body (Pasquino 1991), how difficult is it to orchestrate when the social body is not a body at all, but millions of corpuscles en route in a vast system of capillaries? That day was full of surprises, and the most illuminating were not always the product of my interviews. Again, from field notes: A funny thing happened today. I went with [an interviewee – an officer of the Gendarmerie] to a Chocolate Shop to buy some gifts to take back. Because the shop did not take credit cards I had to go to a bank to exchange some British currency. At the bank they made something of a production of testing my £20 note with the ultra-violet counterfeit detector. [Name] joked, as we left the bank, that I should have insisted that they check the Belgian francs given to me. Sure enough, when we got back to the Chocolate Shop one of my 100 franc notes turned out to be bogus. Back at the Bank [name] produced his police identification and asked that they take back the counterfeit. At first the teller objected – you might have got that note at any shop on the street. [Name] asserted that he was an officer of the Rijkswacht with 28 years’ service and reiterated the request to exchange the note. The teller persisted in her efforts to refrain from doing so. She said that the UV detector could be fallible, but that the water mark on the note looked genuine. [Name] persisted with his request for a new note and the teller relented after a short conversation with her supervisor. (Field notes, 6 April 1995)

As we move through Clifford’s ‘contact zones’ – the transit lounges and corridors that facilitate the transnational culture of consumerism – all the while clutching our machine-readable passports and unavoidably leaving footprints in cyberspace every time we use our bank cards to make a purchase or obtain money, it is possible to forget the vast system of surveillance that watches from behind the unblinking eyes of the CCTV. The system surveillance made possible by these technologies constitute the partitions of our age. Europe does not erect a concrete wall to enforce its territoriality – the Schengen Information System and similar

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techno-fixes provide the new prophylactics. But these new partitions are being built on the foundation of pre-existing institutional boundaries. Those old foundations shape new boundaries and are reshaped by them. Policing in the present, transnational, age is both a new beginning and an historical reoccurrence. Despite the hard lessons that history has to offer us, this essay has leaned towards an optimistic reading of contemporary developments, but the darker potentialities cannot be suppressed or denied. Police work is a unique expression of governmentality since it entails the possibility of marshalling coercive force with the aim of maintaining the social order. In the transnational era, governmentality becomes intergovernmentality. The principles of democracy and the rule of law, by no means essential characteristics of governance, can easily slip away as the spaces between those historically achieved and essentially contestable sovereign spaces open up. Transnationality creates a new terrain on which the ideals of human freedom are fought for. Hegel reputedly defined freedom as the right to obey the police, or something not very different from that. That is one possible future. We cannot predict with certainty what the history of our present will bring. We can, however, try to understand by imitating Simmel’s ‘marginal man’: if insight is to come, it comes at the margins of the academic disciplines. In order to metaphorically map the routes of transnational policing this essay has assumed a vantage point standing at the crossroads of anthropology, criminology, the sociology of information and communications technology and international relations. If, in doing so, there is a consequent failure to produce a clear prediction of the future or a programme of policy, it is only from the conviction that we can best mitigate against the worst excesses of the normative order of Leviathan through open-minded enquiry.

[8] Police Co-operation the English Channel Region 1968–19961 Introduction It could be said that Britain was first incorporated into the political economy of Europe when the Emperor Claudius successfully invaded England in AD 43, after two earlier attempts undertaken by Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC. It is even possible to say that the displacement of the Belgae and other Celts into England, subsequent to the successful expansion of the Roman Empire throughout Gaul, began the processes of incorporation much earlier. Historical beginnings are always difficult. When examining the nature of the frontier between the present-day United Kingdom and her immediate neighbours it is tempting to assume that the Channel provides an impregnable geographical boundary, but a glance back through history is sufficient to show that this boundary is no prophylactic – it is permeable. This point became very evident to me in 1994 during the beginning phases of my study of the working practices of transnational police officers in the English Channel region. An evening walk along the Leas in Folkstone, enjoying the view out over the water towards the not too distant coast of France, brought me to the Parish Church of Saint Mary and Saint Ennswythe where the keystone above the entrance records that Christian worship had been practised continuously on that site since 630 AD. Those two saints were, apparently, part of the contingent of missionaries led by Augustine (later first archbishop of Canterbury) sent from Rome by Pope Gregory in 597 AD. Those missionaries were kindly received by King Ethelbert of Kent who, through a pagan himself, had married a Christian: the Frankish Princess Bertha. For more than 1,500 years, family ties transgressed natural and cultural boundaries that, nevertheless, were of clear significance. Reflecting on the subsequent history of the region I recorded that: …. successive waves of invaders came to this island and landed at this place. Great ships have been launched from this coast to take English adventurers to Europe and beyond. It is here, on England’s south coast, that the myth of borders – that a barrier, natural or man-made, exists that can staunch the flow of humanity upon the globe – is claimed in its most concrete, English, manifestation. This is a symbolic location. (Field notes, November 1994)

Originally published in the European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 6(3), pp. 216–35 (1998). 1

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The importance of this symbolic location was amplified during the early 1990s in the immediate build-up to the opening of the Channel Tunnel, an engineering feat that had been a fantasy since Napoleonic times. The year 1992, especially, is fixed in public discourse as a pivotal date, when transnational policing in the English Channel region, and Europe more generally, was established. This essay will show that, in this region, 1992 was but another moment in an ongoing process of cross-border police development. Although this date is a prominent fixture in the literature on police co-operation in Europe, records have recently been made available which show that, in fact, the process of consolidating such links had been underway for at least 25 years. This essay draws on data gathered between 1994 and 1996 in Kent, Belgium, France and the Netherlands concerning transnational police work in north-western Europe. These data consists of four hundred and seventy one operational police case files obtained from the European Liaison Unit (ELU) based at Folkstone, interviews with relevant police personnel and observational field notes, as well as internal police documents obtained from a number of units operating in the region. One key set of documents are the complete records of the CrossChannel Intelligence Conference (CCIC) an organization established in 1968 to foster regional cross-border policing.2 These annual meetings (in some years biannual) established personal connections between key officers operating in this region, who built the infrastructure for cross-border policing that exists today. The following analysis draws upon these data in order to shed light on the development of transnational policing in this region from the mid-1960s until the present. This is a very particular history, an important one for our understanding of the changing police mandate in Europe at the end of the twentieth century, but its particularity needs to be connected to broader issues. Only some of the more salient features of this broader history are brought into the analytical frame here. Anderson et al. (1995) offer a more complete overview of the broader background to these processes. Four Phases of Development in Transborder Policing For the purposes of this analysis we can break down the history of policing in the English Channel into four periods. The first of these runs from 1968 to 1970. During this period the foundation of the transnational police network was laid and its working practices established. The second phase is the longest in the history of police co-operation in this region thus far and it runs from 1971 until 1985. During this period the CCIC, together with the often diffuse and informal networks among police officers who attended these meetings, were the principal vehicle in the region for the exchange of criminal intelligence and cross-border policing generally. Interpol was occasionally of some importance but, as we shall see, it was this local 2 I am grateful to D.F. Gallagher of the Kent County Constabulary and doctoral candidate at the University of Southampton as well as Commissaris J. Denolf of the Police Judiciaire, Bruges, for facilitating my access to the records of the CCIC. The complete archive of the CICC (in three languages: French, English and Flemish) is currently housed in the headquarters of the Police Judiciaire in Bruges. The men who established this organization were excellent record keepers; their inheritors no less so. I have obtained over 1,000 pages of documentation from this source; it is by reference to these documents that the development of cross-Channel police co-operation can be traced.

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network that was the more efficacious. The third period is rather shorter, extending from 1986 until 1991. This phase was an interregnum of sorts, during which the planning for the Channel Tunnel ‘fixed-link’ project was underway. It was during this time that the local network came under the considerable scrutiny of various national governments and became increasingly formalized and institutionalized. Consequently, the CCIC became less concerned with the exchange of criminal intelligence and more caught up in discussions about policy directions. Questions about problems of the legal and organizational framework for transnational policing had always featured on the agenda of these meetings, but after 1986 this became a matter of increasing, perhaps even primary, concern. From 1991 cross-channel policing entered the current phase. In this period, the exchange of criminal intelligence became firmly embedded in the technology of the ‘information age’. As a consequence, the primacy of the CCIC for fostering the exchange of criminal intelligence became even less of a feature. In the recent phase, the formation of the European Liaison Unit based at the Channel Tunnel site in Folkstone, together with the establishment of the PoliceSpeak/Linguanet Project, has routinized the exchange of criminal intelligence and information. Transnational policing in the current period is no longer a matter of exceptional circumstance – it is a feature of day-today policing over the whole of the region. Phase One – Laying the Foundations The Issues One of the prime movers of the CCIC initiative in the early years was the then Chief Constable of Kent, Sir Dawney Lemon. The minutes of the first meeting record his comments: ‘The Kent coastline stretches for a distance of 120 miles. It is not possible to stand guard over such a length of seashore, but it is possible to learn of persons engaged in criminal activities between South East England and the Continent and take action against them. This, however, can only be achieved if the police and law enforcement agencies, on both sides of the Channel work together and pool their information in an endeavour to beat the enemy common to all law officers – the criminal’ (Minutes of the Conference to Discuss Cross Channel Intelligence at Police Headquarters, Maidstone. (15 May 1968).

He went on to say that he wished to develop ways to encourage closer personal relationships between officers of the Kent County Constabulary and Belgian and French police officers stationed adjacent to the English Channel. He argued that there was a need to foster a better understanding of the laws and procedures in place in each country in order to ‘better understand each other’s problems’ and in the hope that ‘if this is achieved, closer co-operation will follow’. As a consequence of this, much of the discussion at the conference, and the subsequent conference held in Bruges six months later, was given over to explanations of the legal and organizational principles of the various participating police forces. There was much to learn about each other.

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Placing this in the context of broader European politics, it would be appropriate to point out that this initiative for an intra-regional police alliance pre-dates the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community. The initial application for British entry into the EEC had been vetoed by Charles de Gaulle on 14 January 1963. It is also interesting to note that de Gaulle also took France out of the NATO framework in 1966. The mere fact that the CCIC initiative was put on the table not long after is testimony to the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of decoupling the states of Europe from each other. The UK became a formal member of the European community in 1973, by which time institutionalized transnational policing in the Channel region had been ongoing for half a decade. This police work was, by and large, not an issue of interest to politicians until much later. Though transnational policing itself was not much of a concern to politicians, some of the problems that police were dealing with were of utmost importance. One has only to recall Enoch Powell’s lurid ‘Rivers of Blood speech’ of 20 April 1968 to guess what that was. A glance at the minutes of the first two CCIC meetings is sufficient to tell what particular issue sparked the establishment of this institution since great attention was given over to one specific topic: illegal immigrants. The minutes for the first CCIC meeting at Maidstone contain details of 22 cases of immigrant smuggling. These cases are sufficiently revealing for a general characterization of the modus operandi for this type of crime. In general, at this time most of the illegal immigrants that British police were aware of came from Pakistan, India, and Iran. There were records of seamen from elsewhere in the Commonwealth deserting ship while in British ports, but such deserters formed the smaller portion of illegal entrants to the UK. Those actively smuggled in were typically housed in cheap bed and breakfast hotels in Belgium and France before making the final stage of their journey to Britain. A typical overland route from Pakistan took in Iran, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, and West Germany and ended up at a staging-post in Belgium or France before commencing the final passage to the UK. According to the cases presented in these files, the cost to each individual for the overland journey was approximately 12,000 rupees or £600. At this time illegal passage across national boundaries was a profitable business. One group, which was the subject of a successful police operation resulting in three arrests, was thought to average 20 illegal entries to the UK per week. The networks of people who facilitated this passage were typically multinational, and the files reveal that many nationalities took part in, and sought to profit from, the transport chain, including South African, Mauritian, Belgian, French, Dutch and British nationals. Immigrant smuggling seemed to require an international response by the police. While it is quite clear from the records of the CCIC that illegal immigration was perceived to be the most pressing issue for police in the border region, it would be a mistake to conclude that this was the only one. Police in Belgium and France were exercised by other worries, especially the transport of stolen goods across the Channel. Of particular concern were the activities of antique dealers thought to be involved in smuggling stolen works of art and antiques, but there was no direct evidence that could lead to criminal charges at that time. A list of antique dealers known to make frequent crossings was made available to the Regional Police Judiciaire (in Flemish: Gerechtlijke Politie) in Bruges in early 1969 and there was a tacit understanding to keep their movements under surveillance. Another issue was stolen automobiles; it was noted that 680,000 vehicles travelled through the port of Dover in 1968

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and that cross-border transportation was likely to account for a proportion of the 1,119 vehicles stolen in Kent County over the previous five years. While remarks were made in meetings of the CCIC about the incompatibility of British right-hand drive vehicles on continental roads, it was also pointed out that cars can easily be broken up and sold for spare parts, and this was thought to be a lucrative business. Other officers pointed out that left-hand drive vehicles were in use much further afield, and the port of Antwerp was thought to be an important stagingpost for transporting cars to destinations as far away as Africa, South East Asia and Australia. The minutes of the CCIC for April 1969 contain the details of an interesting case which amply illustrates the function of police co-operation in this region. The case concerns the theft of a sloop from the Pas-de-Calais. As it turned out, the vessel was stolen from the French port on 9 October 1968, by two German nationals who were wanted in their home country for armed robbery and who had deserted from a Dutch-registered ship. The abandoned sailing vessel was recovered in Folkstone harbour on 10 October. Between that date and 25 October the two individuals concerned engaged in a series of burglaries and thefts in the Kent County area. They were arrested in England where they were charged with burglary and theft, but arrangements to return them to Germany were undertaken so that they could stand trial there, not only for crimes committed on German soil, but also for crimes committed in France. This case is interesting for the variety of crimes committed and for the range of territory they were committed over. What is also interesting is that the Interpol communication channels were, in part, bypassed. While the extradition back to Germany was accomplished through formal channels and some of the initial cross-Channel communications were routed through the Paris and London Interpol offices, much of the communication was direct between the Pas-de-Calais and Folkstone. The files make clear that ‘direct liaison [was] made with the British because of the urgency of the matter’. There are other cases of ‘ordinary law crimes’ contained in these files which illustrate much the same point. Police work could be done efficiently and effectively in the Channel region provided good communication links were in place.3 The minutes of the CCIC in the years 1968 to 1970 also show some interest shown in the smuggling of drugs, characterized as: ‘hashish, marihuana [sic], Indian hemp and opium’. This traffic was said to be carried out by North Africans, Turks and ‘London beatniks’ in co-operation with their ‘colleagues of East Flanders’. What little evidence there is of this type of traffic indicates it to be small-scale and of low profitability. While there was some mention of this issue in the early years, its marginality is reflective of the fact that drug use had not yet become a major area of policy concern for police. Indeed, at this time there were only seven specialist drug squads established in the entire United Kingdom with a total complement of about 15 officers. Some of these specialist squads had dual functions, such as drugs and immigration (South 1994b). While international concern about drug use can be dated from the Hague Convention of 1912, concerted pressure for control, prohibition and 3

Under the heading of ‘Matters Arising’ the minutes of this meeting record that: ‘In appropriate cases, information, in particular that the relating enquiries received from or sent to places in France and Belgium outside the jurisdiction of the Judicial Police at Lille or Bruges, is passed through the Interpol Office at C.1 Department at New Scotland Yard. Copies of all relevant messages forwarded direct to Lille and Bruges are sent to the Interpol Office at New Scotland Yard for information.’ This shows an interesting mixture of formality and informality in these communications.

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criminalization in Europe is much more recent. The United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control was created in 1971, the same year the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances came into effect and the same year that the Pompidou Group was established to exchange information on drug problems in Europe. The major piece of British legislation regarding the criminalization of drug supply, the Misuse of Drugs Act, also came into effect that year. Of course there were precursors to all these developments but, as others have argued, 1971 represents the culmination of a long evolution towards an international hegemony of the prohibitionist model for controlling drug use (Nadelmann, 1993b). It seems plausible to argue that drugs were rather low on the agenda of transnational police officers when the CCIC was in its formative stages in 1968–1970; police action prior to that time was merely a rehearsal for what was to come, and this is largely so both transnationally and internationally.4 In the formative years a paucity of cases in the CCIC documents pertaining to this type of crime is testimony to the fact that drug criminalization had yet to establish itself.5 That was set to change, and the issue certainly came to exercise police in the Channel region. However, set in the context of contemporary developments, these records show quite conclusively that it was immigration and the exigencies posed by intermittent, transnational, ordinary law crimes which initially provoked the establishment of an infrastructure for transnational policing in the region. The international drug war was a matter for future development.

4 Significantly, it was then that the US Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs entered into formal arrangements with French police and the ‘French Connection’ was broken. It was at this time that Richard Nixon declared the ‘war on drugs’ in the United States and, further, empowered US law enforcement agencies to take that war into the international arena (Nadelmann, 1993b: 143–144). It is clear, however, that the prohibition strategy was firmly established as a foreign policy concern much earlier, at least in the backstage of the international scene. In 1943 the League of Nations, with a grant from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published a study and set of proposals for international control of drugs (Renborg 1943). The author of the report, the Chief of Section in Charge of the Drug Control Service of the League of Nations, argued that ‘inevitably drugs must be controlled in all countries and territories [since a] single weak spot constitutes a grave danger …. the danger of drug addiction’ (p. 3). The report also claimed that ‘the campaign against illicit traffic and drug addiction was hampered by lack of knowledge as to the magnitude of the problem … it is obvious that sufficient study has not yet been given to the problem of drug addiction which is at the root of the whole question’ (Renborg 1943: 254). Despite these limitations George Finch, Director of the International Law Division of the League of Nations, noted in the preface that the document ‘ furnishes an outstanding example of the necessary coordination in control across [international] boundaries’ and, further, that procedures ‘for the limitation in production and control of manufacture, distribution and use of drugs is, indeed, suggestive of a more effective approach to other international problems and of methods that might well be adapted … to international regulations in other fields’ (ibid.: iii). 5 The Minutes of the CCIC for 29 April 1970 held in Bruges are somewhat illuminating of the drug situation in Belgium at this time. They reveal ‘substantial increases’ in this sort of activity over the course of 1969. Thus, 10.5 kilos of raw opium were seized in the largest drug seizure of that year. Small quantities of cocaine had also been recovered, but no heroin at all. The Judicial Police of Bruges seized ten kilos of hashish and marijuana during the year and 50 LSD capsules had been confiscated at a ‘hippie festival’.

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Police Agencies in the Cross-Border Enterprise There were two meetings of the CCIC held in 1970, but they were less than one week apart. The first was held in Brighton and, with the exception of the Commissaire Principal of the Bruges Police Judiciaire, all the officers present were from British police forces. In all, eight UK police forces were represented, including the Metropolitan Police (Special Branch), Devon and Cornwall, Dorset and Bournemouth, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Kent and Essex. The purpose of this meeting was to consolidate the process of networking amongst the officers on the UK side. According to the minutes, formally designated liaison officers from the various forces were meeting together in order to establish ‘whether the domestic arrangements in the constituent forces were adequate and workable so far as the passing of information was concerned’ (CCIC, Brighton, 23 April 1970). The minutes for the meeting one week later in Bruges show that the last neighbour had been brought into the transnational partnership. Mr J. Matthys, the Chief Commissioner of the Bruges Police Judiciaire, another important instigator of the CCIC initiative, noted in his opening address that ‘there was still one flaw in our circle and today, I presume, we have filled the gap. Indeed, we have the great pleasure to welcome … representatives of the Kingdom of the Netherlands’ (CCIC, Bruges, 29 April 1970). Thus all four countries bordering the Channel had been formally linked up in a crossborder police initiative. We should pause to consider the multiplicity of police agencies that were potentially implicated in this endeavour. In the UK, policing is organized by territory, thus by and large it is police forces which have proximity to the Channel which have regular interests in police co-operation in the region. In this, as in all other areas of policing at the time, chief constables had considerable autonomy in decision making through the doctrine of ‘Constabulary Independence’ and the distinction between ‘operational’ and ‘policy’ decisions (see Reiner (1991) for an explanation of these terms). Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise (HMCE) and Her Majesty’s Immigration Service (HMIS) also have overlapping responsibilities in specific areas of cross-border crime and there is some administrative friction between these difference institutions.6 Representatives of the latter two services were only seldom in attendance at meetings of the CCIC. In later years representatives of NCIS were occasionally present and UK police officers seconded to the Interpol NCB in London have always been in sporadic attendance.7 6 An example of this can be found in illegal immigration cases. The main aim of the HMIS is controlling the immigrants themselves, whereas police focus on the crime of immigrant smuggling. There are potential problems when immigration officials repatriate illegal immigrants without due consideration to the evidentiary requirements of the police for prosecuting the individuals involved in smuggling. This problem was partly addressed by the formation of a special team in the HMIS in 1993–1994 to co-ordinate with their police colleagues. 7 ‘The police officers employed on Special Branch duties are concerned mainly with criminal offences against the security of the State, with terrorist or subversive organizations, with certain protection duties, with keeping watch on seaports and airports, and with making enquiries about aliens’ (Kettle 1980: 52; see also Benyon 1993: 107). This organization thus has something of a national purview, although each force’s SB officers are responsible to their respective chief constables. The National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) was preceded by a number of other nation-wide intelligence units, most notably the National Drugs Intelligence Unit and the Football Intelligence Unit, but these

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The situation was even more complicated in the Netherlands which, in this early period, had 148 police agencies, many of which could conceivably have had interests in crime in the Channel region. Partly in response to problems of national co-ordination and partly in response to the needs of international co-operation, this structure was simplified by the Police Act of 1993 which integrated the police system into a nationally co-ordinated organization divided up by territory – 25 regional forces and one national centre providing support services, including the National Criminal Intelligence Service (CRI) (Wintle 1994; Jones 1995). The minutes of the CCIC show that, in the early years, the Netherlands was represented most often by the Rotterdam Police, with occasional input from the Dutch Interpol National Central Bureau (NCB) in The Hague. While there is little in the literature about institutional rivalry between the various Dutch police agencies, there is some suggestion that administration fragmentation was a drag on co-ordination of police work nationally. Organization of policing in Belgium was, and continues to be, much more complicated than either the UK or Dutch system. An audit of the police function in Belgium carried out in 1987 listed 612 police organizations in total (Team Consult, Ministry of the Interior, 1987, cited in de Cock, 1992). It has been noted that ‘the organizational structure for the police in Belgium appears to result in some conflict over jurisdiction and competence’ Benyon et al. 1993). This friction is clearly evident in some of the minutes of the CCIC. Historically the Police Judiciaire/Gerechtlijke Politie has been the only force in Belgium with a national competence in crime investigation and the Interpol NCB for Belgium is located within that institution.8 This might have limited Belgian police representation on the CCIC to one agency, but the minutes show that members of various municipal police forces (Police Communale) occasionally attended, as did representatives of the Belgian State Security Police, the Aliens Police, Customs, Palace of Justice officials and other judicial-type officials. Representatives of the prosecutor’s office (Provincial Attorney General) have attended every meeting. Notable by its absence is the Belgian gendarmerie.9 The minutes of the CCIC also show that the French gendarmerie were not particularly active in cross-border police co-operation. However, departments within the Police Nationale precursors were, themselves, relatively late arrivals into UK policing. All of them, regardless of form, have been limited to the function of intelligence gathering and dissemination. 8 Following ‘civilianization’ of the Gendarmerie/Rijkswacht in 1992 this changed somewhat with the Gendarmerie talking on a national role in crime investigation. 9 A representative of the Belgian Gendarmerie attended the CCIC held at Winchester on 6–7 May 1975 for the special session on drug trafficking. A Belgian representative for the Police Judiciaire argued that his organization alone was the qualified authority in Belgium for international action and that the Gendarmerie should be excluded from general participation on that basis. The Chairman put forward a motion to the extent that ‘it should be the responsibility of the present delegates of a country to decide whether an observer from another Police organisation should attend when appropriate items were to be discussed and that he would make this point clear to the Gendarmerie Nationale in writing.’ This resolution was unanimously accepted (Minutes of the CCIC held at Winchester, May 1975). Eleven years later this matter resurfaced, and representatives of the Police Judiciaire (the same persons who had made the original representations in 1975) again argued against the extension of the CCIC to include the Gendarmerie. One of these officers stated that ‘relations between Forces and Services in Belgium could be described as too sensitive to change former conclusions’ (Minutes of the CCIC held at Rotterdam, 14–15 May 1986). Membership was not extended and has not been extended to date.

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were. In particular, the Police Judiciaire and the Police de l’Air et des Frontières were frequent participants. The former is an investigative police which works under the direction of judicial officials; the latter has responsibility for policing the borders, including air and sea ports. It is evident that administrative control of French policing is achieved within the police system itself; thus the Services Régionaux de Police Judiciaire (SRPJ) and central police authorities were frequently in attendance at the CCIC meetings as were the Renseignements Généraux.10 The minutes of the CCIC also show that representatives of the Interpol Central Bureau at St Cloud were in frequent attendance at these meetings.11 It is appropriate to include these officials amongst the French delegation since Interpol was, in essence, an extension of the French Ministry of Interior which bore the major portion of the financial burden and, prior to the early 1980s, provided the vast majority of its workforce, including four successive general secretaries between 1946 and 1986 (Anderson 1989). 12 The Police Nationale is highly segmented, both vertically and horizontally, which leads to administrative friction. Similar to the Belgian case, this has given rise to difficulties colloquially known as the guerre des polices which can also be taken to include friction between the two national police agencies generally (Stead 1983). However, from the point of view of the operations of the CCIC, institutional infighting appears to be less of an issue than the insistence on communications being routed through central administration in Paris. This is clearly evident in the minutes of the CCIC. For example, during the meeting held on 16 April 1969 in Lille, the local chief of the regional Police Judiciaire noted that while relations between ports were good enough to allow direct cross-border contact between police officers in the case of urgent matters, he recommended that ‘information for all ports on the French side of the Channel be sent in the form of a message to the French Bureau Central Nationale’. One year later a request was made by the Assistant Chief Constable of Sussex for specification of designated contact men in each of the participating agencies of the CCIC ‘so that direct intervention of the leading officers can be avoided’ (CCIC, Bruges, 29 April 1970). The response from the Belgians was the prompt listing of four individuals to undertake such liaison specified by crime type (‘general inquiries’, ‘robbery’, ‘drugs’ and ‘forgery and immigration’). The response from the Commissaire de Police chargé du BCN Interpol Paris was that ‘for France it would be impossible to specify any contact man’ According to Benyon et al. (1993: 77), ‘The Renseignements Généraux (RG) is essentially a political police, of approximately 4,000 officers. Their duty is to collect and collate information on individuals or groups who are regarded as constituting a danger to the state, as well as conducting undercover investigations on persons in public life. Its plain clothes officers are empowered to infiltrate organisations, collect information, tap telephones and open mail, subject to warrants. It has rather wide powers and the officers seem to be largely free to act as they wish. In some respects it is similar to the UK Special Branch. It operates throughout France and passes information to the central directorate in Paris.’ Prior to 1972, the RG did frontier policing which was then taken over by the Police de l’Air et des Frontières, which was itself reorganized in 1995 and re-christened, more aptly, the Direction Centrale du Contrôle de l’ Immigration et de la Lutte Contre l’ Emploi des Clandestines. 11 The Interpol Headquarters moved to Lyon in 1989. 12 The men who became Interpol general secretaries during this period all had experience as officers in the Sûreté or its successor, the unified Police Nationale. In 1986, French domination of the organization was replaced by Anglo-American hegemony. This appears to have had little effect on the preoccupations of Interpol within the context of the CCIC. 10

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(ibid.). At the CCIC meeting the following year problems regarding direct communications between police officers at the operational level again surfaced in the context of discussions about controlling pleasure sailing in coastal waters and in the context of importation of stolen vehicles (CCIC, Chelmsford 7 April 1971). It emerged in these discussions that a great deal of information sent to France was not being disseminated to the relevant services there and, further, that both Belgium and the Netherlands were not receiving relevant information from France. The point was reiterated that, while it was thought appropriate that routine or minor information was passed directly between interested parties, Interpol was regarded as the essential communications link between forces for information of an official nature. It was thought that more work needed to be done to create firm contact points with French police officials, but this continued to be a matter of difficulty. Although only a local regional police network, the CCIC was nevertheless a highly complex institutional mélange. This organizational accomplishment was by no means easy to orchestrate. However, research has shown that police subculture, regardless of national peculiarities, is infused with a strong sense of mission. Added to this were perceptions of pressing transborder crime problems and a somewhat laisser-faire approach to regional transborder policing by (at least some) central authorities. This created a climate in which police efforts at transnational networking could progress. This raises a question. Given the organizational complexity of this initiative, how did transnational policing actually work? That can be shown most easily by looking at long-running cases of transnational police work. Transnational Policing in the Age of the Telex Machine Transnational Policing as Communications Policing It is apparent from the above discussion that representatives of various police agencies met on a regular basis forming the nucleus for transnational policing in the Channel region. Peter Manning (1992) has suggested that: … a central question in organizational analysis is the role of communication in creating and maintaining organization structure. This question has been answered in the past almost entirely within the rhetoric of rational and formal organizational communication. The role of the informal communication has been eschewed or seen as an obstruction to achieving the ends of the organization. This is clearly false, since informal aspects of organizations can facilitate or not the ends of the organization, and formal communication can either serve these ends or obscure and confound them. (Manning, 1992: 73)

In this section we will consider the modes of communication that emanated from, and organized, the CCIC. Both formal and informal communication is at issue here. Communication in the context of the CCIC meetings was considered in the previous section. For the full potential of this transnational police initiative to work, more elaborated communications streams, incorporating both formal and informal methods, needed to be developed and enhanced.

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As this process moved forward a range of practical problems began to emerge. One central question was the degree to which Interpol could, or would, deal with ‘low-level intelligence’. For example, what would be an appropriate action in cases where known criminals were identified when passing through frontier controls; or what to do with names, addresses or telephone numbers found in the possession of offenders when arrested on foreign soil; or, indeed, how to notify the home country when a foreign national was arrested in a country not his own? In all these instances it was not immediately clear who would be the relevant police authority to use as a conduit for information. It was also evident that the Interpol channels were not ideal, in part because such a large potential volume of information traffic had the capacity to overwhelm its system. This potential partly emanates from the centralized nature of the Interpol system which makes for long lines of communication and slow reaction times.13 Matters were settled somewhat in 1973 when three guiding principles were set down (CCIC, Rotterdam, 20–21 September 1973). The first of these was that urgent operational intelligence could be passed directly between forces participating in the CCIC, but that information to forces outside the organization would travel through established international contacts, that is: Interpol. In instances where there was direct force-to-force communication, it remained the responsibility of each individual police agency to notify its respective Interpol NCB. It was also recognized that, on occasion, criminal intelligence would illuminate the need for a transborder police investigation over a protracted period of time. In such circumstances it was deemed appropriate for multi-jurisdictional meetings to take place at appropriate levels for both strategy and operations. Lastly, Interpol channels were held to be the only appropriate means for circulating information such as photographs, fingerprints, criminal records or any other criminal intelligence required in investigations pertaining to travelling criminals. This was reiterated five years later (CCIC, Pas-de-Calais, 23–24 May 1978): During the discussions which have taken place since 1969 at the various meetings of the CrossChannel Intelligence conference, certain points of view have been expressed with regard to the aim of these meetings in the context of international co-operation and particularly in relation to Interpol’s role in this field … the Interpol Secretary General considered that the basic aims of the conference had been clearly defined. Interpol fully accepted the principle of border contacts which should, however, fit I harmoniously with the general framework of co-operation organised by Interpol … it appears that the participation of representatives from the Interpol General Secretariat and from the National Central Bureaux of the countries concerned … can only be advantageous to all parties.

At this time most police-to-police communication in the Channel region took place in person. There was a telex-link between the police in Bruges and Kent and the telephone was always 13 Morse code remained the principal method of communication between NCBs until the 1980s. This remained the case even after Interpol obtained telex machines – as André Bossard, the General Secretary at the time, explained it, ‘Morse messages cost nothing’ although he also acknowledged that this mode of communication was far from dependable (Bresler 1992). Interpol London only replaced telex communication with electronic mail in the early 1990s (PRSU 1992). In short, Interpol was technologically backward during the first three phases of the development of transnational policing in the Channel region.

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available, both of which offered convenient ways to convey relatively short messages and to arrange meetings. But it is apparent that most of the detailed communication took place in face-to-face meetings. To illustrate this it is useful to examine a successful transnational police operation. A Case of Transnational Policing A group of drug traffickers were identified at the meeting of the CCIC in 1977 (CCIC, Maidstone, 10–11 May 1997). This as the beginning of a transnational police investigation that was to take nine years to bring to its full conclusion and was to span half the globe.14 At the time, however, appearances pointed to something very much less grandiose. Dossiers containing full names, and details of organizers and persons known to act as couriers and ‘front men’ for the organization were circulated at this meeting. It was revealed that one of the couriers associated with this group had been arrested at the port of Dover in July 1976 in possession of 40 kilos of Lebanese cannabis. As a result of information gleaned from interrogation of those arrested, it was known that this trafficking operation extended to southern Holland, and that a staging-post in Brussels had also been used. It was thought that individuals in Amsterdam were involved. Police officials from the Kent, London, and Essex drug squads, together with UK customs officials, had been responsible for what was characterized as a limited success. It was determined that a concerted effort using members of different national police forces was necessary to fully investigate the activities of this group. One year later further success was reported, with some 70 persons being arrested in Belgium, mostly in possession of small quantities of amphetamine obtained in the Netherlands (CCIC, Pas-de-Calais, 23–24 May 1978). These arrests brought to light an amphetamine laboratory located near the Belgium–Holland frontier. In the summer of 1977 a police search in one of the larger towns in Kent uncovered a tablet press machine used in the manufacture of illegal amphetamine pills. The CCIC minutes of 1978 reported that a large quantity of amphetamine powder had been brought over from the Netherlands and turned into pills using this machine. Further, intelligence linked the drugs to the laboratory identified by the Belgians. The occupants of the house in question were also connected with the importation of over 100 kilos of cannabis resin. Thus it was established that the case involved the supply of both cannabis and amphetamine through a network that spanned three countries. Arrest warrants for conspiracy to supply drugs and other connected offences were circulated for four individuals one year later (CCIC, Chelmsford, 15–16 May 1979). The minutes for this meeting are revealing of the conduct of this transnational police investigation. It was during the previous year that the investigation had been formalized enough to warrant an operational name. For the purposes of this narrative it will be referred to as ‘Operation Enterprise’. From the 1979 minutes it is apparent that long periods of observation at a number of locations and focusing on a number of persons were undertaken in all three countries. It seems that the police observation relied on a variety of technical means, including, but not limited to, 14 The CCIC undertook hundreds of cases concerning a variety of crime types over the period discussed here. This particular case was chosen because it illustrates a wide range of issues pertinent to cross-border policing generally. It is accurate in its broad outline, but it has been expurgated in order to preserve the integrity of police operations and to protect the innocent.

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24-hour surveillance teams, video surveillance, and the monitoring of border crossing and other international travel. Minutes from later conferences (CCIC, Chantilly, 28–30 May 1984; CCIC, Rotterdam, 14–15 May 1986) reveal that intensive surveillance was ongoing. Further, in the context of arrests undertaken in Belgium and England, written correspondence and other material were seized in evidence. It seems that Belgian police only arrested their own nationals who were operating on home territory and the same applies for the arrests made by UK police (who reportedly arrested and charged over 100 English persons). However, police in the Netherlands made a number of arrests of British nationals connected with this network. For example, in 1978 two Englishmen in charge of an articulated lorry with over 200 kilos of cannabis secreted on-board were taken into custody. Later analysis of various documentation by police revealed that a total of 20 such trips had been made with this vehicle. Operation Enterprise was wound up in 1981. At that time several individuals who had been identified as central to the network of supply had eluded police custody but, with no further information to proceed with, the case was closed. The police operation was unexpectedly brought back to life in 1982 when one of these individuals was arrested in Amsterdam on an unrelated matter. Difficulties in arranging extradition of this person to the UK for prosecution in connection with the drug smuggling offences revealed the extent of legal barriers between the UK and the Netherlands. UK police originally thought to extradite this person on a charge of conspiracy to import drugs. However, it was later recognized that such a charge could not be used as the basis for extradition since conspiracy was not recognized in Dutch law. British police consequently had to prepare the entire file to show and prove individual offences of importation and supply of drugs, which was both difficult and time-consuming. Nor did the need for police co-operation end there because, after successful extradition was achieved, Dutch police had to be called upon to locate witnesses and convey them to the UK to give evidence. In late February 1984 a letter from the Interpol NCB in New Delhi was received in London. Thus began the final chapter in Operation Enterprise. This letter was to inform Interpol (London) of the arrest in India of two British nationals who were in possession of more than one tonne of cannabis which was being prepared for export. One of the people identified in this letter was recognized by UK police to be a principal organizer in the network targeted by Operation Enterprise. Because of this arrest and the seizure of a number of passports, investigators in Europe were able to retrospectively trace the activities of this group across Africa, southern Europe and India. The individual of interest in the CCIC investigation apparently escaped police custody in India and fled the country using a false passport. Fortuitously, this individual was apprehended in Amsterdam in the following year when he was identified during the course of a surveillance operation into an unrelated case involving stolen art. In the end it was clear that the police in the CCIC network had been investigating a transnational criminal network which, over the course of time, had grown to have a sizeable annual turnover and an impressive geographical reach. From the details of this series of investigations, it is clear that there was a free circulation of relevant information about this chain of drug supply amongst the various police officers involved. However, once Operation Enterprise spread outside of the UK, success depended in part upon being able to co-ordinate transnational action in a legal manner. Several conferences with the Director of Public Prosecutions and senior legal counsel were held in London, resulting

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in the drawing up of a number of Commission Rogatoire15 During the course of these inquiries many British police officers travelled to the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Spain (up to eight at any one time) armed with these authorizations. Additionally, several conferences held in Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK, included not only supervisory police officials, but also representatives of Justice Departments and other judicial-type officials. These meetings served two functions. One was the circulation of relevant information and the second was the negotiation of legal barriers to evidence sharing in order to facilitate arrests and successful prosecutions. Although this formed the core of the investigation, it is also clear that information from peripheral investigations and from peripheral agencies had to be incorporated into the body of knowledge that carried the operation forward. Operation Enterprise brought to light a number of barriers to transnational police operations associated with the doctrine of legal sovereignty. For example, several Dutch nationals were thought to have links with drug distribution networks in southern France but, despite what was regarded as sufficient evidence and close co-operation between police, a successful conclusion to inquiries was hampered by the lack of an extradition treaty for drugs offences between the two countries (CCIC, 15–16 May 1979). The lack of an extradition agreement has since been addressed, but at the time the relevant individuals could only be brought into custody in the Netherlands, Belgium, or the UK (the latter two did have extradition treaties with France). The records of the CCIC do not reveal whether arrests were ever made and it is apparent that these problems with the legal framework preoccupied police decision-making. It appears that legal sovereignty hampered other aspects of the investigation: for example, it was also reported that inquiries in Spain ‘were the most complicated due to their legal view points’ (CCIC, Chantilly, 28–30 May 1984). The fact that no arrests were made in that country and no evidence obtained in that jurisdiction was used as evidence for prosecution (although it reportedly helped with the conduct of the investigation itself) suggests that these legal barriers were not overcome during the life of this inquiry. Inquiries eventually ranged as far afield as southern France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, the Bahamas, both the west and east coasts of Africa, and India (CCIC, Chantilly, 28–30 May 1984; CCIC, Rotterdam, 14­–15 May 1986). These documents reveal that co-operation between police officials was forthcoming, but it is also apparent that legal barriers hampered investigations. Officers involved in this operation concluded that: A greater understanding of daily problems facing the various Police forces has been achieved [as a result of Operation Enterprise]. It is quite clear that without the personal visits to various countries and reciprocal visits here by foreign officers an international investigation is beyond us … The successful investigation of Drugs Trafficking can only be accommodated with 15 Commission Rogatoire are legal documents that request that investigations take place on the bearer’s behalf. These ‘letters of request’ typically contain a summary of the case and purpose of the request to the foreign country, including details of alleged offences under investigation (and citing ‘reasonable grounds’) as well as details of the persons named in the request and any evidence required. They may also ask that representatives of the requesting authority are present when evidence is gathered, arrests are undertaken or interviews take place. Actual ‘hands-on’ police work is, however, left to locally competent authorities.

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the fullest co-operation of all agencies charged with this responsibility. This is imperative at local level, national level and international level … The officers engaged in Operation Enterprise received the fullest co-operation from the various agencies in all the countries in which enquiries were dealt with. It is important to state, however, that the most important and effective form of liaison was that conducted at a working level which permitted the exchange of information whilst necessary legal requirements were being resolved in appropriate cases. (CCIC, Chantilly 28–30 May 1984)

This case of transnational police work illustrates a number of points. Firstly, partially effective police investigations can be orchestrated across international boundaries on the basis of the exchange of criminal intelligence alone. As the arrests undertaken in several countries show, proceeding against crimes committed in a particular enforcement jurisdiction poses few problems for police, even if an aspect of the crime is transnational. Secondly, effective police work can be done on an international scale through direct police-to-police communication, without a permanent overarching bureaucratic institutional framework, by networks of relevant officers wherein communication is largely informal. As these records show, this investigation proceeded informally and, at least partly, on the basis of serendipity. Formal lines of communication only became necessary at specific junctures during investigations in order to facilitate the exchange of the evidence, salient materials and documents pertinent to criminal proceedings. Thirdly, it is evident that the fragmented legal frame is problematic and, while police do their utmost to overcome such legal barriers, this raises thorny questions of jurisprudence. For example, who decides in which enforcement jurisdiction arrests and prosecution should be undertaken when standards of evidence and severity of punishment vary across national territories? Fourthly, transnational police investigations are an incremental enterprise; marginal successes are continuously built upon and new communications linkages are constantly being made. In this regard, it is interesting to note that, as a result of Operation Enterprise, a British police liaison officer was appointed to work in The Hague on a permanent basis from April 1984. This officer was to create a permanent link between British and Dutch police institutions as well as liaise with customs officials in the Netherlands. Thus, informal communication can lead to formalisation. These developments are instructive. Democratic police practice is most often understood in the academic literature as circumscribed by national territory; its communications practices are largely limited to highly formalized internal and external communications in pursuit of ‘crime control through due process’ (McBarnet 1981). Even where informal communications are stressed (Manning 1992), the possibility of police action that transgresses state boundaries has not been addressed in the literature. And yet, developments in the English Channel region between 1968 and 1986 clearly show evidence of transnational police relations that were unthinkable only a short time before (Anderson 1993a: 26). Phase Three – Transnational Policing and the Politics of Europe In the years after 1986 the nature of the CCIC meetings began to change. Discussion about legal barriers, and explanations about various police systems and liaison arrangements

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between them, had always been a feature of the meetings; in no year was the exchange of intelligence or debriefing about successful operations the exclusive concern of the conference, but in the lead-up to the European single market the balance of preoccupations at the conference began to change. What police wished for, in the words of one member of the Belgian Police Judiciaire, was a police institution with operational powers across the whole of Western Europe and a unified legal frame for police work therein, but ‘if wishes were horses beggars would ride’ (CCIC, Westcliffe-on-Sea, 16–18 May 1989). This officer noted that while, in the recent past, merely imagining ‘extending European interests to such matters as the struggle against terrorism, drug trafficking and organised crime was more often than not considered a back striking calumny against national sovereignty’, Europe-wide policing was clearly on the agenda. According to his analysis, the general concern was the arrival of the European Single Market and the consequent erosion of borders. A particular concern for the region was the completion of the Channel Tunnel project which created the need for new, and unique, policing arrangements. True, the arrival of the TREVI system in 1975 (in response to European-wide terrorist activity which Interpol had been reluctant to handle) began the process that would turn policing into a political issue at the European level. But it was the development of the European Union in the latter half of the 1980s which consolidated that process and made it relevant for ordinary law crimes. At this time, French police delegates outlined the state of liaison arrangements and made proposals for future development (CCIC, Rouen, 15–17 May 1990). What they described was, by this time, a well entrenched local transnational police network. The Director of the PAF at the Pas-de-Calais noted that his organization had developed a liaison officer position and that French police paid regular weekly visits to the UK. He also pointed to the good relations his liaison officers enjoyed in the Netherlands and Belgium. However, there was a case for extending these contacts. In connection with the planned Channel Tunnel, there would most likely be a permanent presence of French and British police on each other’s side of the Channel. This officer reported that numerous meetings had already been held ‘to best organise the future co-operations and interpenetration of our services when the Channel Tunnel becomes operational’ (ibid.). During these meetings, and for the first time, representatives of the French Gendarmerie Nationale were brought into the transnational police structure. But there was a greater need, and it was argued that ‘pending the harmonisation of present legislations in the EEC countries on the major problems faced by the various police services … the development of international co-operation is necessary’ (ibid.). The designation of a French liaison officer in London by the General Director of the Police Nationale and the Ministry of the Interior was a signal of things to come. It was suggested that foreign liaison officers from the various forces should be reciprocally stationed at the office of either the Director-General of the Police Nationale in Paris or the headquarters of the Police de l’Air et des Frontières, also in Paris. Fears were expressed by other delegates that too many such officers operating at too many different levels might foster confusion. A Belgian delegate noted that Interpol had designated 17 European liaison officers of its own. A Dutch police officer representing the Interpol NCB in The Hague also noted the existence of both TREVI and the Schengen Treaty as vehicles for police co-operation. This officer felt that, because of the complexity of arrangements that existed in Europe for transnational policing, ‘the CCIC should remain a meeting between

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colleagues and could not go over certain limits without committing errors or losing its prime goal’. One of the British delegates argued that it would be impossible to multiply the number of liaison officers according to the number of crime specializations and jurisdictions; he maintained that ‘direct contact between officers who know one another is more profitable’ (ibid.). These issues emerged again the following year. The head of the UK Interpol NCB noted: There is a very grey area with regard to who can do what in relation to overseas enquiries and whilst both Interpol as an organisation and the office of Interpol London fully recognises that good work carried out under the auspices of cross channel liaison, it must also be recognised that there is a need for a central point through which all major crime enquiries concerning that country should pass or at least be supervised from. In fact the United Kingdom will shortly ratify the European Convention on Mutual [Legal] Assistance of 1937 [sic] and all such enquiries must pass through the nominated central authority for the United Kingdom. This is the Home Office or in urgent cases the Interpol bureau. This will not of course prevent purely local co-operation matters to continue on a cross-border basis. (CCIC, Sussex, 14–16 May 1991)

Discussion about conduits for information between differing police forces in different countries showed that institutional barriers remained. For example, French delegates from the Police Judiciaire reported, somewhat opaquely, that ‘problems have been experienced when the Gendarmerie has taken control of international enquiries and subsequent difficulties have taken place’ (ibid.). These quotidian problems of communication between the two national police services in France meant that communication at the regional level was deemed inappropriate; all enquiries were to be routed through the National Central Bureaux. In Belgium there were difficulties since international enquiries were formally supposed to be routed through local magistrates offices, then to the national level, and then on to foreign authorities. Incoming enquiries were expected to follow the reverse procedure. This had created problems on one occasion when enquiries had been made by UK Customs direct to local police in Belgium. Police in the UK revealed that they had difficulties in co-ordinating police–customs liaison at local or regional level, although co-ordination at the highest levels was thought to be quite good. At this time both the establishment of NCIS in the UK and police reorganization in the Netherlands were still some two years in the future. Thus, in spite of a decade and a half of successful co-operation, it was clear that the administrative fragmentation, upon which the co-operative enterprise was built, continued. These fault-lines were not erased as national governments moved to reassert sovereign control over police operations, either by multiplying transnational police infrastructures at the intergovernmental level (TREVI, or later Europol), or reasserting the place of central police authorities, and/or the role of Interpol. Delegates from the various Interpol NCBs put much importance on technical developments for police communications, especially the expected installation of the Automated Search Facility. This was the latest in a series of technological upgrades achieved by Interpol since the mid-1980s when a new president (a former head of the US Secret Service), ushered in the era of Anglo-American predominance. With American money Interpol went ‘from Morse code to

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e-mail almost overnight’ (PRSU 1992).But Interpol was not the only information broker in north-western Europe; there was also the projected Schengen Information System, although the UK was not a signatory to this treaty. The idea of Europol was also being floated at this time. This gave rise to discussions about how information circulation could be controlled in these large data handling systems. The major worries were how to ensure accuracy of data and how to ensure that its circulation was only on a ‘need to know basis’ (Robertson 1994). However, these technological advances were years in the future and advances in data storage and communications in the Channel region itself proved to be in place much sooner. While the technical developments in communications, data storage and information retrieval seemed to hold out the promise of further enhancement of the transnational police enterprise, the organizational infrastructure within which the police ‘information revolution’ was taking place was predictive of a less certain outcome. Transnational policing in Europe has been built on the foundations of fragmented national police systems. When the policing enterprise becomes elevated above the level of the nation-state, that fragmentation is extended and the existence of the various macro-level transnational police bodies (Europol, for example) only contributes to further segmentation. The European Monetary Union structure provides something of an analogy here. Policy co-operation within the EMU is complex. The European Central Bank controls overall monetary policy; EMU’s finance ministers have a say on exchange-rate policy; and fiscal policy is (within limits) in the hands of individual governments. This is indeed a complex arrangement and there has been considerable scepticism about its long-term viability. The analogous structure is even more complex in the case of police co-operation. This is partly because, while each country has but one central bank and a legal framework for it, they do not have one central police agency. Further, the legal frame for transnational policing is more kaleidoscopic than that for fiscal policy due to the complex interrelationship between various national legal traditions and supra-national legal instruments in the criminal law. Still, the sense of police mission drives further innovation forward. This is evident in the final phase of development of the transnational policing in the English Channel region to be discussed here. Phase Four – Local Transnational Policing In early 1991 the Kent County Constabulary re-evaluated its liaison capabilities in the English Channel region. It was noted that relations with its counterparts in Calais were very good, especially with the PAF and the Police Judiciaire. Police liaison between the two areas had been put on a formal basis in 1989 when the first in a series of meetings between the Chief Constable of Kent and the Prefet du Pas-de-Calais went ahead. This consolidated police relations at the highest regional levels, and reaffirmed the existing cross-border liaison arrangements. Planning for the Channel Tunnel, (enabled by legislation in both the UK and France) with respect to rescue, public safety and emergency operations, as well as frontier controls, security, crime control, telecommunications and operational procedures were advanced at these meetings. These discussions were duplicated at a series of meetings between operational level police personnel where the actual details of day-to-day operations

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were thought through. At the same time, developments for police co-operation between national governments at the macro level were recognized as having important implications for transnational policing regionally. CCIC participants concurred with the suggestion that the advance to the European Single Market would amplify the long-standing problems of cross-border crime. An upturn in the amount of transnational police work was foreseen by all. It was concluded that some organizational adaptations by the Kent County Constabulary (KCC) needed to be made in order to keep pace with the rapidly changing situation. Accordingly, the European Liaison Unit (ELU) was created. This was an amalgamation of already existing police functions. In particular, the work of liaison officers in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) and the Special Branch Ports Unit was brought under one roof. The functions of the cross-Channel liaison officer were housed in this unit alongside the combined European/Interpol liaison officer. The ELU created a database pertaining to all cross-border police enquiries and, in co-operation with the KCC Central Intelligence Bureau (CIB), a separate database pertaining to known offenders with cross-border crime connections in the region was created. Thus, KCC simplified its arrangements for cross-border policing in the region, bringing all functions that could conceivably bear relation to the task under one roof, forming a node for criminal intelligence exchange. The ELU, housed at Folkstone on the site of the Channel Tunnel terminal, became a communications hub for policing in the entire Channel region. This unit was to facilitate enquiries relating to the whole range of police work including: the location of lost or stolen property, aspects of emergency service, translation service, acting as a conduit for criminal intelligence in protracted transnational criminal investigations and much more. It facilitated the dissemination abroad of information pertaining to criminal records and other relevant information contained on a wide variety of databases, from local intelligence offices anywhere in the UK, to the national records held on the Police National Computer (PNC) and the Driver Vehicle Licensing Centre (DVLC). In exceptional circumstances the officers of the ELU would also obtain phone numbers for foreign officers through directory enquiries and access a host of other sources of information. It was to act as a conduit for information from abroad to relevant police contacts within the UK, including the NCIS. This information exchange was accomplished over a phone/fax network whereby enquiries from as far away as Switzerland, Greece, Spain and Gibraltar could be handled as easily as those from near neighbours. The main bulk of the work, however, continued to emanate from the English Channel region itself.16 Many police agencies in the region that have a part to play in the police mission, including some that did not participate in the CCIC – the gendarmerie in both Belgium and France – were incorporated into this communications network. At the time police communications were moving beyond the telephone into electronic communication. In 1990 the ELU began co-operating in the development of the Linguanet, an e-mail system which, by 1996, blanketed the entire region from Rotterdam in the west as far north as Felixstowe in

16

An interesting issue emanates from this service delivery, since the consumers of the service are not necessarily residents of Kent County or even of the United Kingdom. This raises questions about charging arrangements for information brokerage. It is technically possible that this service could be on a pay-per-message basis; heavy users of the system would then bear costs proportionate with the use value they extract.

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Essex, down to Lille and Bruges in the south and as far east as Folkstone on the English side and Boulogne in France (PoliceSpeak 1993).17 The information revolution has routinized the exchange of criminal information which raised questions about the continuing role of the CCIC. By the 1990s it was no longer the forum for the exchange of criminal intelligence it once was. Whereas in the early 1970s the CCIC minutes very often contained details of dozens of criminal inquiries, the minutes for 1996 contained only one case (pertaining to a serial sex offender who, it was believed, had fled England for Belgium). The remainder of the discussion was given over to matters relating to technical innovations such as an automated number plate recognition system for use at the ferry terminals, or descriptions of various and seemingly innumerable organizational changes in participating police agencies, as well as considerable debate over the constitution and terms of reference of the CCIC itself. In a way the CCIC had been a victim of its own success. Conclusion This essay has partly been about historical beginnings. It is an attempt to chart the development of police co-operation in the English Channel region over a period of almost 30 years. Fragmentation has been a prominent feature of the literature on transnational policing in Europe, and the analysis presented here has confirmed this. At the same time, this has not prevented the establishment of a genuine transnational police enterprise in the Channel region enabled by, and enacted through, technological innovation in the field. Communications between police agencies is here seen as the very essence of transnational police co-operation. This raises questions of a jurisprudential nature regarding ‘a possible future, a distant vision, where a clear system of European criminal justice will be established’ (Harding et al. 1995: xvi). Overcoming the segmentation imposed by differing systems of national law is a practical problem of day-to-day policing, but efforts at criminal law harmonization (such as the Schengen Treaty – to which the UK is not a signatory anyway) offer no guarantee of homogeneity since harmonization leaves the responsibility of interpretation in the hands of national judicial authorities who bring to bear their own, parochial, legal paradigms (Joubert and Bevers 1996). Hence, fragmentation remains the abiding characteristic of the transnational policing system and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. Some practitioners argue that the coming of Europol will contribute to the homogenization of police communications and knowledge transfer (Bruggeman 1997), and therefore of the system of European policing, in advance of legal harmonization. This seems unlikely, since any practical transnational policing infrastructure will be formed as a nexus of already existing institutions – macrolevel structures (for example, Europol) merely add another administrative level to an already complicated system. The likely outcome is an increasingly complex patchwork quilt of 17

There is a comparable development in the Limburg region referred to as the PALMA Project, which stands for: Police, Aachen, Liege and Maastricht. This electronic mail system networked police agencies in those cities and at the time looked certain to expand. Both the PALMA Project and the Linguanet system were deliberately designed with the same data transfer protocols, so that would be technically possible for them to be interconnected at some future date.

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agencies intended to provide a blanket of security. Any such patchwork is likely to be stitched together by the efforts of police officers at the most basic level of their respective organizations. It is at this level that the need for a unified legal frame is most pressing. When operating over a range of enforcement jurisdictions there is an absence of a legal ‘metanarrative’. In effect, operational officers conducting transnational investigations are coping with policing problems under postmodern conditions. Thus, the developments described in this essay offer a strong incentive to articulate a postmodern jurisprudence.

[9] Patrolling the New European (In)Security Field: Organizational Dilemmas and Operational Solutions for Policing the Internal Borders of Europe1 Introduction There is often an inherent and unspoken assumption in academic criminology that official national borders mark the boundaries for crime. This assumption has been pushed to the side in recent years by the new discourse of ‘transnational organized crime’ and consequently some academic criminologists have come alive to questions about forms of transnational social control. Observational research conducted over the past ten years of a number of new ‘transborder police units’ in Europe has revealed the somewhat surprising finding that routine, high-volume, but very often petty, cross-border crime has long been a feature of frontier regions on the territory of the European peninsula. This has given rise to an empirical research agenda to uncover the transnational practices of police agencies. This essay looks at some of the salient organizational features of these cross-border policing ventures, paying special attention to the technological tools in use, some of the issues surrounding enforcement jurisdiction and the management issues that arise from co-ordinating a multiagency transborder policing institution. It concludes with a discussion of the governance of transnational policing generally. Before venturing to explain the organizational dilemmas and operational solutions that arise in the context of policing the internal borders of the European Union, it is useful to say a bit more about the nature of the police mission in these contexts. It is necessary to proceed with some caution because an over-magnification, or even distortion, of concern is a consistent feature of media accounts of cross-border crime. Much of the public perception about the need for cross-border police co-operation has been focused on the activities of socalled ‘transnational organized crime’ (TOC). Organized crime has indeed become the major policy concern in transnational criminal justice circles across Europe (Fijnaut et al. 1995; den and Doelle 2000; den Boer 1999). The threat of TOC represents a ‘condensation’ of insecurity problems in a few key concerns, most notably illegal immigrants and drugs. The tenor of Originally published in the European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 9(2), pp. 144–60 (2001). 1

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these discussions is usually very emotive and the direction of policy development is worrying (Albrecht 2000). However, exclusive concern with ‘headline’ public issues subtracts attention from the more prosaic reality of day-to-day policing activity along the frontiers of Europe’s ‘internal security field’ (Bigo 2000). Looking at the routine practices of policing agents is revealing of the everyday occurrences of transborder policing and it pays dividends because the conduct of those practices is the basis of the habits of formal social control. Focusing attention on these activities is the equivalent of saying ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’. Talking to policing agents who patrol the internal frontiers of the European Union, it is interesting to note how much of their attention is devoted not to big-time TOC, but to small-time crime and the business of ensuring public safety (Sheptycki 1999a). For example, petty criminals may venture forth on a foreign holiday in a stolen vehicle and finance it with a handful of stolen credit cards. Theft of a vehicle is itself a relatively insignificant crime – although not to the owners – but the volume of these absorbs considerable transnational police attention since the recovery of the abandoned vehicle is, all too often, in a different jurisdiction from that from which it is stolen (Sheptycki 1994b: 33; 1998d). Additionally, the fraudulent use of stolen credit cards abroad may produce perceived difficulties of enforcement jurisdiction on the part of patrol officers, at least in the event that such use is actually apprehended! A public safety example might be the thousands of German tourists who flock to enjoy a day at the seaside in Denmark or the Netherlands. Large numbers of tourists produce large numbers of insurance claims: for lost or stolen property or for vehicular accidents, and the sheer volume of these has led to special cross-border policing arrangements in this region (Sheptycki 1999a). Day-trippers also create issues for customs authorities, given the different attitudes to the retailing of ‘soft drugs’ in European countries. Moreover, the mobility of populations across national borders creates not only the possibility of mobile crime (be it petty or major), but also the need to be able to co-ordinate cross-border disaster response. Seen from the point of view of formal agents of social control working directly with the public, the operational and tactical dilemmas of everyday policing labour appear very different than they do to policy makers and policy commentators operating at the apex of control bureaucracies. As Marc Alain graphically describes it, the disjuncture is that which exists between ‘the trapeze artists and the ground crew’ (Alain 2001). The pragmatic solution to the everyday problems of co-ordinating transborder cooperation in the policing enterprise has been the establishment of specialist multi-agency units. One of the first of these was the European Liaison Unit (ELU) based on the English side of the Channel Tunnel in Kent. Another example of cross-border police co-ordination is the International Contact Centre (ICC) based at Maastricht in Limburg, the southernmost province of the Netherlands. The most comprehensive of these institutional adaptations to date has been the Police Co-operation Centre (PCC) based in Offenburg near the Franco-German border in Baden-Württemberg. These units present interesting commonalities. Firstly, the use of technology, particularly various types of surveillance technology, has greatly empowered these agencies. Secondly, there are the problems and possibilities created by multi-agency co-ordination that require attention. Thirdly, the multi-jurisdictional functioning of these co-operative ventures is an extremely important feature. These common characteristics are

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developing in the context of debates about the imperative of responding to the perceived threat of TOC. The pragmatic policing arrangements that arise on the ground therefore raise urgent questions about the governance of transnational policing. Transnational Policing and Technological Advance Information technology is the motor of organizational change in contemporary policing. To organizational sociologists this may seem an uncontentious truism. However, in criminal justice policy-making circles in the European Union, where concerns about balancing sovereignty interests with Community interests is finessed in the context of the clarion call to battle against transnational organized crime, it is not. To many in the field of European politics, the play of national and European political interests is clouding the functional imperative to do something about transborder crime, and these factors are understood as the most prominent transnational aspects of organizational change in policing agencies (den Boer and Doelle 2000; de Ruyver and Flaveau 1999). Yet the so-called ‘information revolution’ brings with it profound organizational implications and these underwrite institutional change in more fundamental ways (Castells 2000; Zuboff 1988). The rise of surveillance systems and ‘information technology’ generally has wrought the move to ‘intelligence-led policing’ (Lyon 1994; Maguire 2000). Observing this trend as it has come about within specialist units for orchestrating transnational police cooperation offers a window into more general processes underway in police agencies across the territory of the Union and beyond. As Michael McCahill (1998) has argued, the new technologies of surveillance have disembedded panoptic power from relatively closed institutional sites and have turned wide swathes of territory into ‘electronic grids of watchfulness’. Not only has the power of surveillance been extended beyond controlled institutional settings such as the prison, now the direct supervision of the subject population writ large does not require the immediate copresence of the observer in order to reinforce the control aspects of supervision. Electronic surveillance means that images can be ‘lifted out’ of the immediate nexus of social control and authoritative interventions made on the basis of them at some future, unspecified, time and place. The watchful eyes of CCTV and other techniques of population surveillance are wedded to a range of other powerful information technologies which permit long-term data storage, sifting and matching. Frontier regions and other boundaries offer useful territorial pretexts for the heightened application of all of these technologies. For example, the ‘square mile’ of the City of London has, since 1996, been observed by CCTV cameras attached to powerful computers with machine licence-plate recognition capabilities. That territory has automated vehicle identification, monitoring and tracking for all vehicles in real time on a 24-hour basis in order to aid in the prevention of terrorist attacks (Neville 2000). Similar technologies are also in situ at a number of boundary crossings in the EU and North America. These technological devices, together with devices for the identification of persons, have greatly transformed policing labour. Following Bittner, most definitions of modern policing tend to vest its ‘core’ meaning in the capacity to muster coercive force; but in the contemporary period the threat of sanction which policing bears is so much predicated on the technologies of surveillance that most of the labour time has come to be absorbed by information management

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(Bittner 1980a). Social scientists have observed that the possibilities for risk-managing large populations have changed the balance of policing labour in significant ways, turning most police agents into almost pure knowledge workers (Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Manning 1988; Sheptycki 1998a). In cross-border police units such as the ELU, ICC and the PCC, much of the work carried out by police agents is concerned with obtaining, classifying, and analysing a wide variety of data produced in the context of nearly ubiquitous control system surveillance relating to traffic in the border region. Some of the time police agents will intervene in order to control immediate situational exigencies, but these instances are relatively rare (Sheptycki 1998c). More common are delayed tactical interventions based on analysis of these data or, slightly less common, strategic interventions. A tactical intervention might include the surreptitious use of a seemingly ‘random’ traffic-patrol stop as a pretext for searching a vehicle already known (suspected) to be transporting illegal drugs. A strategic intervention might involve a simultaneous search of a number of premises in order to disrupt a network of contraband cigarette dealers. The latter type of intervention, if it takes place across a wide enough network or territory, counts as a strategic attempt to disrupt an illegal market and thereby alter the financial risk associated with the clandestine trade in smuggled cigarettes. Whether the operation be tactical or strategic, what is not readily apparent is the hours of surveillance and knowledge work – checking and cross-checking border crossings, verifying vehicle ownership details, analysing patterns of telephone calls, banking transactions and the like – that spur the interventions. The new routines of knowledge work are applicable to every facet of policing, but they attain special salience in the cross-border context where the pretext for identity and vehicle checks is without challenge. Border crossings, such as that over the Rhine on the road between Strasbourg and Kehl or, even more so, across the English Channel, offer perfect ‘choke points’ for the more or less unobtrusive application of surveillance technology. Surveillance technology creates the potential for social control as remote control. Meanwhile the appearance of the free movement of people and goods is largely guaranteed. These techniques are not entirely new. What is new are the greatly enhanced capacities of knowledge work that are created by the new technologies of surveillance and information management. The growth in the criminal intelligence analysis specialism is testimony to this. It is never easy to pinpoint with exactitude the historical beginnings of any social phenomenon, but we might take 1980 and the founding of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts (IALEIA) as a germinal date. The modus operandi of criminal intelligence analysts is well defined in IALEIA publications: The intelligence-led policing environment requires the analyst to be capable of viewing multiple data and finding both small and large patterns to guide police efforts. So too, the basic facts of current violations may not provide a true picture of a particular crime phenomenon. The analysts must be prepared to examine crime in the historical sense and to consider how similar crimes have manifested themselves in other jurisdictions. In this way, other motives may appear, larger groups and conspiracies may reveal themselves. Crime and criminal behaviour is multi-faceted and complex. Its true nature only becomes apparent when it is examined through a broad and powerful lens. (Peterson 1994: 3)

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The prose is somewhat hyperbolic and the utility of the analytical approach for policing labour is nonetheless seductive. Faced with the promise that patrolling the data may reap far greater rewards than merely patrolling the territory, the rise of the intelligence analyst in the surveillance-led police organization is almost predestined. The international process of ‘technology transfer’ (Sheptycki 1998e) virtually guarantees that policing agencies and their allies (customs agencies, immigration authorities, border patrols, etc.) are all being overwritten by new routines. That is why the information revolution is the motor of change in the contemporary policing complex. But neither the European policing system nor the national policing systems that help to comprise it are monolithic entities. This means that technological refitting is very uneven. Information technologies are not standardized across the policing complex. Because the rate of technological obsolescence is steady and differential acquisitions policies persist, seamless IT co-ordination, either nationally or transnationally, remains a (probably very distant) future development. Individual agencies are themselves complex amalgams and the costs of keeping pace with technological change, not least the associated training costs, seems to be the most significant brake on the development of a harmonized police information environment. The application of surveillance technology is undertaken within a complex multi-agency system. This is another reason for paying particular attention to policing knowledge work in the context of transborder policing, because in these locations the complexity is clearly exemplified. Managing Multi-agency Police Activity Before looking specifically at how multi-agency co-ordination is enacted in the context of cross-border policing, let us consider the variety of policing agencies that are implicated. The list of policing-type agencies that can potentially become involved in transborder policing is extensive. Formally designated ‘border police’ is an obvious inclusion, but not every country in the European Union has such a police specialism. Such agencies as the Federal German Bundesgrenzschutz or the French Police aux Frontières both perform this function, but, even so, there is not a strict equivalence between them.2 However, it is notable that the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK do not have ‘border police’ as such. Subsequent to the fundamental reorganization of the police structure in the Netherlands in 1993, the Koninklijke Marechaussee (Royal Military Police) continue to have responsibility for border policing (including policing major airports), but the majority of the work is devolved to the regional police forces because that is where most of the available police labour is (Benyon et al. 1993; Jones 1995). Historically, Belgium has one of the most complex policing systems in Europe. Up until the late 1990s it had over 600 agencies holding police powers in a country of about 30,000 square kilometres (Fijnaut 1999; Sheptycki 1999b). At the close of the decade the system Currently the PAF refers to the Police aux Frontières which replaced the Direction Centrale Contre l’Immigration Illégale et l’Emploi des Clandestines (DICCILEC) in the late 1990s. Confusingly, the DICCILEC replaced an earlier version of the same agency in the mid-1990s also known as the PAF (Police de l’Air et des Frontières). Observing this degree of institutional flux serves to reinforce the point that it is extremely difficult for police agents to carry out systematic transnational work in a complex multi-agency context. 2

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was reformed in a characteristically Belgian way, both integrating and decentralizing the structure. According to Cyrille Fijnaut, ‘in the future [Belgium’s police service] will consist of a complicated centralised/decentralised system comprising one federal police force and 200 local police departments’ (Fijnaut 1999: 132). There is no specially designated border police for Belgium and transborder police work may devolve to a variety of agencies, depending on the circumstances. In Belgium especially, the various Police Municipale (in Flemish: Gemeentepolitie), may even become involved in transborder police issues since most municipalities are in relative proximity to the borders. In the UK, the Special Branch have some responsibilities at points of national entry, but they share crime-related aspects of this work with CID officers. In all of these countries, agencies designated as ‘police’ share responsibility for social control at international boundaries with customs and immigration authorities. These agencies are an important part of the policing complex operating at the internal borders of the EU because they have historically been concerned with the passage of people and commodities across boundaries and remain so up to this time. Lastly, it must also be recognized that both private policing institutions and the institutions of ‘high-policing’ (that is the security services) are also implicated in cross-border police activity from time to time (Nogala 1999; Sheptycki 2000a). The variety of agencies in the policing complex raises questions about organizational structure and ‘institutional culture’. There is a tendency in the English-language literature on comparative police systems to typify the French police system as ‘centralized’ in comparison with the British system and to impute the characteristics of a ‘national police culture’ on the basis of this (Hebenton and Thomas 1995). On this point, it cannot go without mentioning that the UK police system underwent significant transformations over the course of the 1990s. Notable among these was the formation of the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) and the consolidation of the regional crime squad structure into a National Crime Squad (NCS). By the end of the 1990s a degree of centralized control over policing in the UK had been achieved through the imposition of the ‘national intelligence model’ (Reiner 2000: 192). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the British system had achieved a greater degree of centralization relative to the French system, thus reversing an historic trend (Lawday 2000). In the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands there are again different structures and institutional traditions and these, too, are in a state of flux, not least because of the ‘information revolution’ mentioned in the previous section. The different police division of labour in each country and the different lines of accountability between policing agents and the central and local state lend a different character to the organizations concerned and on these grounds it is possible to speak in terms of different ‘national police traditions’. However, closer inspection of the inner workings of the great variety of police agencies reveals that each exhibits an ‘institutional subculture’ of its own.3 The (in)capacity to work within and around this ‘policing complex’ is an important feature of the ‘occupational subculture of policing’, a feature which is quite evident in the context of cross-border policing. It has been said that the policing system of the USA is one of the most complicated in the world with thousands of local and state police overlaid by a welter of federal law enforcement agencies. Clearly the European situation exhibits at least 3

For a more detailed analysis of policing subculture see: Chan (1996); and Reiner (2000); For a discussion of police subculture with specific reference to transnationalization see Sheptycki (1998a).

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the same degree of variation; indeed, linguistic and legal differences add yet more complexity (Verbruggen 1995). The great number of policing agencies that are active across the European territory represents particular issues for cross-border police units. Such units must co-ordinate the work of these agencies, but since each of these separate institutions pursue particular missions it is not a simple matter to ensure that multi-agency work is conducted in harmony. One very simple example that can be used to illustrate this point is the difference in the missions of Her Majesty’s Immigration Service (HMIS) and the police services in the UK. With respect to illegal immigration, the HMIS is primarily interested in controlling the immigrants themselves, whereas the police are often more interested in controlling those who would seek to profit from their illegal entry. This subtle difference creates the potential for operating at cross-purposes; the HMIS may seek the immediate deportation of illegal immigrants while the police may view those same persons as potential witnesses crucial in building a case against a group of ‘human smugglers’. The difficulty of co-ordinating inter-agency policing of clandestine immigration can lead to explosive situations. For example, in February 2001 action by French undercover police involving a ‘human smuggler’ contributed to an already volatile situation among Afghan and Kurdish refugees who were under surveillance (if not direct supervision) by the PAF while waiting in a Red Cross hostel for the opportunity to cross the Channel (illegally) into the UK. The result was that the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité (CRS) had to be called in to restore order, resulting in a number of injuries (‘Immigrants Riot in Calais’ 2001). Throughout the year 2000, uncounted numbers of refugees and asylum seekers repeatedly sought to cross the English Channel from France into the UK. An impasse of priorities for co-ordination between the French and UK authorities meant many were caught and sent back to France, only to try and try again (Burkeman 2000). Another routine example of the difficulty of inter-agency coordination is that which exists between the customs services and police agencies. Customs officers maintain surveillance of the numerous ports of entry to the European territory, including the vast container ports in places such as Felixstowe docks in England and Antwerp in Belgium. Even with recent technological advances and risk-based prioritization, the surveillance of these transit points is extremely resource intensive. Customs surveillance is aimed at the shipment of goods particularly, in the contemporary period, illegal commodities such as drugs and weapons, and legal commodities (such as tobacco, alcohol, diamonds and prescription drugs) which are being smuggled in order to avoid paying duties and taxes. Smuggling fuels is also a thriving illegal market. In conducting surveillance it is possible that customs officers may become aware of intelligence pertaining to other types of crime, such as the transportation of stolen vehicles abroad. However, the avenue for the exchange of this intelligence is very often ad hoc and much information that could be of value to crime analysts in police agencies is lost. These examples are symptomatic of ‘linkage blindness’. Linkage blindness is acutely felt both within jurisdictions and across jurisdictions (Egger 1990b; Sheptycki 1998e). It can be understood as a blocked flow of relevant information between policing agencies which need to co-ordinate their actions and their information sharing in order to be effective. The managerial regime surrounding units such as the ELU, the ICC and the PCC has been established to ensure the efficient and effective policing of borders, by facilitating the smooth flow of information

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between the different agencies that are potentially involved in this enterprise. Such units are increasingly becoming important nodes in the dispersed police communications network. Multilingual and multi-agency in capability, they specialize in obtaining relevant knowledge, formatting it in a usable way and transferring it to a relevant party who can make use of it. The PCC offers a particularly well developed version of this complex managerial regime. In the office of the PCC at Offenburg, police agents from France and Germany work bilingually and side-by-side under a system of joint command. Significantly, officers of the French gendarmerie and the Police Nationale are both involved.4 On the German side, officers of the BKA, the Bundesgrenzschutz, and the state police of Baden-Württemberg (Landespolizei Baden-Württemberg) also participate. This is also significant since – although the German constitution provides for police co-operation between the various Länder, and between the Länder and the federal authorities police of the Länder – the Landespolizeien are under the jurisdiction of their respective states’ Ministers of the Interior, who tend to try to protect their autonomy in policing matters. The customs services of both countries also contribute and thus, given the palpable complexity in cross-border control, the resulting managerial regime is indeed complicated. A few empirical studies have emerged that describe the workings of these types of units (Alain 2000; Gallagher 1998; Klinckhamers 1994: esp. ch. 3; Sheptycki 1994b). These provide an understanding of the modus vivendi of multi-agency policing in the cross-border context, but do not provide a clear view of the efficiency or effectiveness criteria that might be invoked, much less try to measure it. Perhaps future research will try to develop answers to this question. What is evident is that the complexities of police co-operation in trans-frontier settings that arise from linguistic differences pale in insignificance beside those that stem from the fragmented legal terrain on which the transnational practices of police agencies are built. Enforcement Jurisdiction, Transnational Policing and the Evolution of Police Practice The border zone raises issues of its own concerning ‘enforcement jurisdiction’ and this has led to observations of the ‘patchwork quilt’ of the legal fabric that covers transnational policing (Harding et al. 1995; Sheptycki 1997a). The concept of enforcement jurisdiction is fundamental to the notion of sovereignty; integral to both is the ‘territorial principle’. Under this principle the state has the authority to act as the sovereign power within its territory. In international law this is considered to be the very foundation for the application of legal rights a state possesses. It is an article of faith for criminal justice practitioners that a state should be able to prosecute offences committed, or allegedly committed, on its soil. The assumption of territoriality is a logical manifestation of the international state system which vests power in the authorities representing the individual state’s sovereign power, and criminologists need scarcely give this a thought. Since most of the crime that preoccupies traditional criminology is intensely local, not to say parochial, the invisibility of this operating assumption is understandable, but 4 The deep-seated rivalry between these two centrally controlled police institutions is well known. Such propinquity can be recognized as an all the more stunning achievement when it is recalled that the traditional relationship between these agencies is colloquially characterized as le guerre des polices (the war of the police); see Stead (1983); and Monjardet and Lévy (1995).

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in the frontier regions where a wide variety of police work may potentially transgress national boundaries this issue is quite important. This is because the logical corollary of the territorial principle is that states do not have the right to exercise law enforcement powers within the territory of another sovereign state; to do so is to undertake ‘extraterritorial law enforcement’. Issues arising out of territoriality, sovereignty and enforcement jurisdiction are relevant when considering the transnational capacity of police agencies. Unless states affected by extraterritorial law enforcement consent to such it may be considered a violation of state sovereignty. Provisions of the Schengen Treaty that facilitate police practices such as crossborder ‘hot pursuit’, extraterritorial use of surveillance, data and intelligence sharing, the use of coercive powers, and even of arrest powers, are intended to massage this set of tensions (Joubert and Bevers 1996). The ongoing development of legal rules that underwrite transnational police co-operation aim to lower the barriers to effective co-operation. This process was given further impetus in the European sphere at a special EU summit in late 1999 (held at Tampere, Finland) which was notable for the establishment of EUROJUST. This unit has the task of enhancing the co-ordination of national prosecution authorities (den Boer and Doelle 2000). It is too early to say how this will affect the pattern of the patchwork quilt of police-related law. The expectation is that it will eventually be a quite profound change. The European Convention on Human Rights notwithstanding, efforts at addressing the fragmented legal terrain for law enforcement across the territory of the European Union have tended to focus on elements of the criminal process on behalf of the prosecution (from the sharing of ‘soft intelligence’ to the formal exchange of evidence and transfer of witnesses). As Harding et al. remarked, ‘increased international cooperation between authorities tends to disturb the fragile balance between prosecution and defence in a criminal case’ (Harding et al. 1995: 103). While the transnational legal framework for facilitating law enforcement action, particularly in cases involving organized crime and corruption, develop apace, there has been less attention to the defence side of the equation. Since 1992 there has been some convergence in criminal law enforcement discourse in the European territory. However, as of this writing, the UK, Switzerland and several other European countries remain outside of ‘Schengenland’, and this shows that sovereignty issues remain. Police trade journals and the police literature continue to devote attention to the barriers against effective transborder police co-operation posed by the lingering doctrine of enforcement jurisdiction. While undoubtedly creating operational difficulties it would be wrong to remark on this feature of trans-frontier policing without also considering its corollary, colloquially christened ‘jurisdiction shopping’ (Sheptycki 1996). Standards of proof, evidentiary requirements, and rules about the admissibility of evidence vary between jurisdictions, as do punishment thresholds. When an (alleged) criminal act, series of acts, or conspiracy takes place in more than one jurisdiction, law enforcement agents may construct the case in order that it is heard in the jurisdiction most conducive to the case for the prosecution. Moreover, when a case for the prosecution can be presented in more than one jurisdiction there is little to prevent law enforcement officials from doing so on the basis of their ideas about where a successful prosecution is most likely to obtain the ‘result’ congruent with their expectations of ‘just deserts’. This may well be an affront to notions of rule of law, but we actually know little about the prevalence of this type of practice. It is easy to exaggerate worries about developing

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trans-frontier policing, and the mere mention of ‘jurisdiction shopping’ may be seen as such. Without further research into the transnational practices of police agencies this will remain an open question. Nevertheless, the sociological point needs to be made that the legal patchwork created by the doctrine of enforcement jurisdiction may be used to empower, as well as impede, law enforcement goals. The evolution of law enforcement practices brought about as a result of the rise in transfrontier police co-operation is unpredictable and difficult to weigh. One comprehensive study of organizational change in law enforcement and prosecution practices in the European Union noted that ‘the criminal law environment in the European Union is … undergoing a process of limited “Europeanization”’ Anderson et al. 1995: 181 and 216). The focus of this analysis was primarily the supranational effects of European institutions. Other analyses also tried to uncover examples of mimesis (copying) and the ‘pooling of knowledge’ by actors in the criminal enforcement process (den Boer and Doelle 2000). These additional spurs to change provide yet further insights into the evolution of the legal environment for policing. The results are not clear-cut, but there is an emerging consensus that, even while the jurisdictional principle remains a conspicuous feature of the legal landscape the law presents an opportunity structure for police. To Europeanization, mimesis, and knowledge pooling, we might add a further type of evolutionary process, viz: hybridized mutation. These are cases where existing legal rules are adapted to the new transnational environment. One example of this is how the rules pertaining to police powers of stop and search are changing in Germany in the contemporary period, particularly as a result of fear of transnational organized crime and of illegal immigration. For the past 50 years, police powers to stop, search and conduct identity checks of persons on German territory (at least, until 1989, the western part) has been quite circumscribed, at least compared with the UK. The exception to this limitation of police stop and search powers has been with regard to traffic controls and airport security laws. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Bundesgrenzschutz (‘border police’) have historically had very wide powers of stop and search at the borders and at airports. In adapting to the postSchengen conditions this force was given the possibility of exercising these powers within 30 kilometres of Germany’s external borders by extending the so-called Schleierfahndung (Search Veil). During this same period the Bundesgrenzschutz absorbed the railways police, giving it jurisdiction throughout the country. Consequently, by using their powers the Bundesgrenzschutz may search persons travelling by train or walking into a station anywhere in Germany. This is a significant extension of police stop and search power in Germany, but ongoing development is uncertain. As of this writing, some of the Länder have taken steps to extend these powers to their own police forces (Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg); however, this move has been challenged on constitutional grounds, and the high court for the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has already struck the attempt down. The PCC in Offenburg and, one assumes, other police units which co-ordinate multiagency policing operations, can draw on the powers of the BGS in concert with the actions of other agencies of social control. Thus, what was once a fairly limited power of stop and search, largely confined to Germany’s external borders and a few other special circumstances, is now much more general. In this way, police powers in Germany have come to resemble those of, for example, a British police constable (who has powers to stop and search on

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‘reasonable suspicion’). It should not go without mentioning that in the UK, police powers to search on ‘reasonable suspicion’ may be so widely construed as to nearly constitute free licence (McConville, Saunders and Leng 1991: 28). Socio-legal theory understands the rule of law to be, at minimum, the predominance of regular law so that no citizen can be subjected to the arbitrary authority of government or its officials. This is not without its paradoxes and much of legal theory has been built around simply trying to understand the conditions under which this is even possible. Legal realists see rules as tools in the hands of competent social actors; the facts of law are what social agents make of them. The tension between the prescriptive analysis of legal idealism and the empirical observations of legal realists provide the basic parameters of the politics of law. Consideration of transnational policing does not significantly alter this debate; there is a sense in which there is nothing new here.5 However, the circumstances in which the politics of law are now mooted, particularly the interactional effects set up by the coincidence of the old doctrine of enforcement jurisdiction under the conditions of transnationalization, provides the possibility that practices might veer away from rule of law ideals. Given the changing times, it might do to recall the words of a former justice of the US Supreme Court, William O. Douglas, who noted that ‘as nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness’ (cited in Sheptycki 2000b: 313). Conclusion In a wide-ranging and adept discussion of the integration of the surveillance systems in Europe, Thomas Mathiesen observed that the enhancement of transnational policing capacities is not primarily about crime control. According to him, ‘while governments and other authorities emphasise the struggle against traditional, serious, international crime … all of the empirical and documentary material available clearly shows that the goal is to be found at the cross point between the shutting out of aliens and the protection of vaguely defined public order and State security’ (Mathiesen 2000: 175). His analysis focused attention on the dataveillance carried out using the Schengen Information System, Europol, and other macro-level systems for the collection, collation and analysis of data by and on behalf of the formal institutions of social control that patrol Europe’s internal security field. We might say, invoking Alain’s (2001) parlance, that Mathiesen’s analysis focused on the trapeze artists. Looking at the process of the transnationalization of policing from the point of view of ground crews operating at the basic level of the ‘surveillant assemblage’ (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) – units such as the ELU, the ICC and the PCC – shows that, although this view is not incorrect, it requires elaboration. It is clear that the new information technologies have the potential to greatly enhance the power of governmental surveillance, but that this potential is not always realized, not 5

The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of Hans-Jörg Albrecht, Chrisje Brants, Detlef Nogala and Lode van Outrive on this point.

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least due to the incompatibility of IT systems across the policing complex and the rapidity of obsolescence. From the base of the ‘intelligence pyramid’, systems of data exchange and analysis do not work as smoothly as it appears when viewed from the apex of the structure (Gill 2000). Initiatives such as multi-agency task groups or units, and other kinds of coordinating agencies, quickly develop their own organizational interests within the policing ‘archipelago’ (Bigo 2000) and systemic totality cannot be assumed. The complex managerial regime that emerges from attempts to co-ordinate multi-agency police activity requires active human agencies to overcome systemic barriers such as linkage blindness, institutional friction, and inter-agency rivalry. Police agents must be adept ‘technocrats’, if they are to make use of the new possibilities arising from surveillance technology; they must be good ‘entrepreneurs’ if they are to sell these techno-solutions; and they must be subtle ‘diplomats’ if they are to apply these technologies efficiently and without diplomatic incident. Further, police ‘public relations experts’ must successfully present these efforts or risk the legitimacy of the entire enterprise which, in any case, rests mainly on the ability of ‘fixers’ to respond to requests for service emanating from members of the public and less on what the ‘enforcers’ may or may not do (Sheptycki 2002b). The fragmented legal framework for policing is an additional complicating factor. On the one hand, it appears that the difficulties posed by demarcation of multiple enforcement jurisdictions (together with the already discussed fragmentation of the managerial regime) might operate as a significant barrier to successful police co-operation, and there are case studies that show that this is so. On the other hand, these features can also be used by police agents to create new possibilities for the use of their discretion. Between these two extremes lies the potential for injustice – injustice borne of the inability to act and injustice borne of the ability to act unaccountably. Constitutionally there is no framework for the governance of transnational policing globally, and this is why the discourse about serious international organized crime is so important. Fear of transnational organized crime has provided the discursive canopy under which the transnational practices of police agencies have largely developed. This discourse ignores the more mundane, but nevertheless important, service aspects of police work, transnational and otherwise. Police work such as co-ordinating disaster response is a no less important aspect of public safety provision than is law enforcement. Moreover, the focus on serious crime prioritizes and amplifies a concern with crime fighting and draws a veil over the need to try to prevent crime. Crime remains an important element in the repertoire of police tasks, but it is not the only one. Serious crime and clandestine markets are part of the reason for developing transnational policing capacities, but only part. In the absence of a secure democratic framework for transnational governance, the evolution of transnational policing is too much shaped by an irrational fear of crime and a fear of the alien. The likely consequences of developing transnational policing institutions on the basis of fear are not happy ones. Over the past decade in many countries in Western Europe and North America, social scientists have sought to study and illuminate the practices of police agencies. To the extent that they have been successful, policing has become more humane, legitimate and effective. In the coming years they will have to redouble their efforts to make the transnational practices of police agencies transparent.

Part III Accountability for Transnational Policing

[10] Accountability across the Policing Field: Towards a General Cartography of Accountability for Postmodern Policing1 Introduction Public anxiety predicated on images of crime, deviance, terrorism and disorder has never been higher in democratic countries than it is at present. The degree of angst attendant on the catalogue of ‘official fears’ may or may not be commensurate with the potential or, indeed, actual social harm produced by the narco-terrorists, organized criminals and other folk-devils that threaten the social order of advanced capitalist societies. There is a degree of intellectual laziness which accords an easy functional logic to the expansion of the policing field to tackle these threats. The more difficult question has to do with the governance of the policing in the transnational era. It is difficult because the basic parameters of the policing field are very often left undefined, while the complexity of the legal–constitutional framework that underpins it and the political regime that provides its rationalities are elided by the appeal to the functional need to secure the social order. This essay proceeds by presenting three sets of conceptual bifurcations that define the policing field. These are the distinctions between public and private policing, the distinction between high and low policing, and the policing of territory and of suspect populations. Using these distinctions it will be shown that conventional accountability frameworks for policing that depend on civilian review, parliamentary oversight and other manifestations of the purview of sovereign states fall short of an adequate conception of governance for postmodern policing. Following this, some consideration will be given to the possibility of a ‘constabulary ethic’ emerging in the interstices of the policing field. The ongoing development of what Robert Reiner (1997: 1007) has referred to as ‘the new international of technocratic police experts who are responsible for the diffusion of fashions in police thinking around the globe’ is most often predicated on the Manichean vision of folk-devils and global cops. Behind that simple view lies a reality that is far more complex. The first step towards understanding how postmodern and transnational policing might be rendered governable is to map the contours of the policing field. Originally published in Policing and Society: Special Issue on Police Accountability in Europe, 12(4), pp. 323–38 (2002). 1

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The Conceptual Parameters of the Policing Field Public and Private Policing Frequently ‘common sense’ understandings of what policing consists of are dominated by the image of the police squad car. This is too narrow a view. It was during the late1970s in the USA that some researchers began to notice the prevalence of profit-oriented police services. Steven Spitzer and Andrew Scull (1977) cited statistics showing that roughly two out of every three police officers in the USA were actually on private payrolls. According to them, the ‘big four’ of the ‘rent-a-cop’ industry had revenues in excess of US $640 million at that time. Not too many years later, in Canada, Philip Stenning and Clifford Shearing noted a ‘quiet revolution’ that had undermined the centrality of state-centred policing (Stenning and Shearing 1980). In the UK, Nigel South argued that ‘the post-war expansion of the private security sector has revolutionary implications for the nature of modern social control and the policing of society … such a significant increase in resort to private arrangements for ensuring security has fundamentally changed society’s division of policing labour’ (South 1988: 150). This led some criminologists to theorize that the demand for private security actually led to an increased insecurity (Loader 1997a: 1997b) while others attended to the complex task of mapping the emerging ‘hybrid’ public–private policing economy (Jones and Newburn 1998). Observing that the commercial security market is dominated by a small number of transnational corporations – multifunctional organizations whose complex transnational security networks both transcend and penetrate the state – Les Johnston (2000a) raised theoretical questions that called into doubt the sacrosanct belief that the state governed policing. According to him, looking at the rise and rise of transnational private policing during the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, especially as it was implicated in the global ‘neo-liberal’ project, called into question the assumption that the state was the apparatus for the governance of social life. Leaving aside the question as to whether ‘corporate governance’ might possibly be marshalled to contribute to the global collective good (Shearing 1992), the central lesson that emerged from drawing the conceptual distinction between public and private policing is that the traditional democratic architecture for ensuring the accountability of policing, at best, only takes into account half of the policing field. Moreover, the actually existing policing field is not neatly sectioned off; public police and private security are intertwined in networks (Rigakos 2002). Some socio-legalists concerned with issues of policing accountability have argued that civilian review is the sine qua non of democratic policing (Goldsmith 1991; Goldsmith and Lewis 2000). Moreover, some have lamented that governments, especially, but by no means only, those so-called ‘emerging democracies’, merely pay ‘lip service’ to the principles of effective accountability (Lewis 2000). The police field extends across a conceptual divide that may be drawn between the public–private and this raises questions about its governability that have not been fully answered (Bayley and Shearing 2001). Indeed, some policing scholars are pessimistic about the potential for democratic policing on either side of this divide: At present there seems to be a danger that we may end up with the worst of all possible worlds: increasingly large and centralized police services with ever-growing powers, alongside the

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anarchic emergence of unregulated self-help and private ‘police’ or ‘security’ services in the hands of sectional local interests. (Morgan 1994; quoted in Bayley and Shearing 2001: 29)

Even if the recipes for civilian oversight of policing espoused in the conventional literature on police accountability could be faithfully followed in both the letter and spirit of the law, there are still difficult matters to resolve that concern the complex networks of security that interconnect the work of public police and private security agents (Law Commission of Canada 2002). The process of ‘reinventing government’ (Osborne and Gaebler, cited in Johnston 2000a) that goes under banner of the global neo-liberal project, means that, in the policing field, non-state entities are not simply mobilized by the state, but themselves have the capacity to mobilize and direct state resources. The incredible growth in the worldwide private policing industry paradoxically implies neither ‘state rule at a distance’ (as the neoliberals would have it), nor the subjugation of the state to transnational capital (as the antiglobalists would have it). The paradox of the postmodern transnational political regime runs deeper and implies what Johnston calls ‘a changing morphology of governance in which partly fragmented states interact with commercial, civil, and voluntary bodies both within and across national jurisdictional boundaries’ (2000a: 38). To even begin to understand this ‘changing morphology’ it is therefore also useful to draw a second distinction in describing the policing field, between ‘high’ and ‘low’ policing. High and Low Policing Jean-Paul Brodeur first drew the attention of Anglo-American police researchers to the difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ policing but this was a conceptual distinction that was already long held in the politics of French policing (Brodeur 1983). High policing is that policing which is intended to protect ‘specific interests’ (Marenin 1982), very often of the state qua state, but as we shall see, such specific interests may include those of other major social institutions. Yet, as Richard Thurlow observed, high policing ‘is a subject which government would prefer academics and others should ignore’ (1994: 1). Even when concerns are expressed about the proper forms of governance for both public and private forms of policing, discussions of police accountability invariably limit the target to the political accountability of ‘low policing’ (e.g. Jones and Newburn 1998). This limitation is becoming increasingly untenable as elements of the security apparatus are drafted in to engage with ordinary law crimes that go under the banner of ‘organized’ and ‘serious’ criminality. Bringing ‘high policing’ into the limelight is difficult because it is so often obscured by the very terminology used to describe it. It has been noted that our terms for explaining these types of policing practice (‘strategic’ versus ‘tactical intelligence’ or ‘internal’ versus ‘external security’, for example) are euphemistic and that ‘their meaning has been ravaged, reduced to disembodied buzz words’ (Donner 1980: xv). Further, the practices of such agencies, which are guarded by the cloak of ‘security clearance’ and the ‘need to know’ principle, are usually covert. The clandestine operations of the secret intelligence services are, by definition, opaque and will not submit to the demands for transparency that, at least theoretically, the democratic purview requires.

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The co-joining of policing, state security and military institutions in Europe offers an illustrative case. Observing these processes, some academics concluded that there was indeed a blurring of these organizational boundaries and a merging of internal and external security (Walker 1994; Anderson et al. 1995; Bigo 2000). A gradual transfer of internal and external security control from the nation-state to international institutions was identified, and fears were expressed that, as ‘high policing’ came to the fore in the policing field, ‘the more secretive and élitist ethos of the security services would gain ground and the ideal of a transparent, rule governed and politically neutral system would become no more than a remote possibility’ (Anderson et al. 1995: 175). In the middle years of the 1990s it seemed clear that intelligence services across Europe were ‘increasingly penetrating fields which used to belong to the realm of “ordinary policing”, such as organised crime and right-wing extremism, while the police services are also beginning to shift their priorities away from local crime and to the use of pro-active [undercover] methods’’ (ibid.: 179). Anderson and his colleagues concluded that a complex mixture of forces impinging on the transnationalization of policing in Europe would determine whether ‘the balance of the common European policing effort will tip towards repression and authoritarianism or to an affirmation of democratic values’ (ibid.: 289). But questions about the accountability of high policing do not stop with political policing per se. High policing in the postmodern period, when the world has gone global, is not merely that form of policing calculated to secure the integrity of the state. Les Johnston used as examples companies such as Sandline International (which was involved in complicated affairs in Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone in the 1990s), of Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI – which has been involved in numerous operations in Africa and Latin America since its establishment in 1987) and Executive Outcomes (EO which, since 1989, has operated in support of the armed forces, law enforcement agencies and private corporations in many parts of Africa) to illustrate the point that the boundaries between state security and private security had blurred, almost without notice. These companies and others establish ‘security’ in places where state control is non-existent. They operate in a symbiotic relationship with transnational state-based policing to further the foreign policy objectives of transnational corporations and powerful Western governments and they exercise informal justice in the world of global crime. In Les Johnston’s turn of phrase, they ‘reach the parts that other agencies cannot reach’ (2000a: 35). The policing field is cross-cut by these two important distinctions, between ‘high policing’ (that is, policing in the interests of specific institutions or groups), and ‘low policing’ (that is, policing in the interests of a more general social ordering) and between ‘public policing’ (that is state-based) and ‘private policing’ (that is contract-based). Already it is not only evident that policing is a more complicated set of practices than the common sense view encapsulated by the image of the police squad car. What is also clear is that the way in which the diverse practices of policing might be rendered publicly accountable are themselves diverse. However, the thrust of the argument here is that the ongoing processes of transnationalization mean that policing is becoming an expression of new, postmodern, power arrangements. The morphology of governance no longer quite corresponds to the strictures of modernist assumptions about the nature of state power. This becomes even clearer when we look at our third set of conceptual distinctions for describing the policing field, viz: the policing of territory and of suspect populations.

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Policing Territory and Policing Suspect Populations Police are agents who work to sustain a modicum of ‘social order’ and they do so by exercising something called ‘social control’. But what does this entail? A useful distinction has been made: conceptualizing police work between ‘securing territory’ and undertaking surveillance of, and thereby controlling, ‘suspect populations’ (Ericson and Carriere 1994; Ericson 1994a). As with the conceptual lines drawn previously, this is an analytical distinction, not an inductive empirical one. Obviously in a practical sense the securing of a specified territory requires that the large majority of its population is brought under a system of formal social control. Conversely, in order for a population to be brought under a system of formal social control, it is useful if the territory where a given population resides is itself secure. The difficulties in carrying out peacekeeping (or peace enforcement) missions illustrate the point that policing practices may be successful at securing territory, but fail in the business of controlling the population. They also show that where the territory itself cannot be secured, the surveillance and control of its population is all but forfeited. On the other hand, the ongoing development of financial surveillance is a practical example of policing which is largely, if not exclusively, devoted to the surveillance of suspect populations and only tangentially related to the securing of territory (Sheptycki 2000e). The ways in which transnational financial institutions and other multinational corporations seek to police white-collar crime is another way of illustrating the analytical import of the distinction between the policing of territory and the policing of suspect populations. This conceptual distinction turns out to be crucial for our understanding of transnational policing practices in the contemporary period. Postmodern power is, in an important sense, becoming deterritorialized, even while many states and regional compacts of states struggle to maintain their territorial boundaries (Sheptycki 1997a; Andreas 2000). The problems of policing crimes perpetrated in the electronic environment (Manning 2000) and of policing immigration flows (Sheptycki 1997c; 1998c) become more analytically distinct when the conceptual difference between policing territory and population is made explicit. The issues that are brought to the fore by this terminological differentiation are particularly apropos to the central issue that animates this essay – how policing practices may be rendered transparent and democratically accountable. Traditional discussions of police accountability have always depended, albeit in a largely unacknowledged fashion, on the doctrine of enforcement jurisdiction. This is the fading keynote of the notion of state sovereignty, it is the idea that the state lays claim to the monopoly of coercive power within a defined territory (Sheptycki 2001a). However, transnational policing extends the territorial reach of these practices beyond these boundaries (Brodeur 2000; Gregory 2000). When customs agents seek to interdict vessels sailing on the high seas in search of illicit commodities, for example, the legal framework for their doing so is not the same as that which pertains to the constable on the beat exercising police powers of stop and search. Neither are avenues of redress the same in the event of any improprieties, or alleged improprieties, by the controllers. Again, it follows that conventional debates about the accountability of policing action are too narrowly framed to take in the whole scope of the policing field in a transnationalizing world. One particularly knotty example of how accountability issues are affected by the changing way in which policing relates to territory and population pertains to use of police agents in

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peacekeeping/enforcement missions (e.g. Gregory 1996) and the not unrelated issue of police ‘development aid’ (e.g. Bayley 2001) in the context of weak or failing states. In many places in the world today the state system is not the guarantor of order visualized within modernist assumptions. Thus, according to Goldsmith (2002): A vacuum of state-provided security typically generates a range of alternative security providers whose goals and methods need the closest scrutiny. Private corporate ‘armies’ offer and irregular armed groups threaten to replace national armies and local police forces as the significant security providers within national borders. Private security prospers where Third World police forces are perceived by residents and outsiders as inadequate to the challenges of crime and disorder. Citizen self-help initiatives are another response to entrenched insecurity in Third World states. However, employers or other sectional interests will often determine the degree and kind of ‘protection’ provided by these alternatives. In other words, it becomes a function of an ability to pay or a particular group’s capacity to mobilise.

Weak or failed states may also become subject to ‘humanitarian intervention’ in order to uphold internationally agreed standards of human rights (Sheptycki 2000c). While this cause is indeed a noble one, it may result in instances of brutality by the intervention force which stretches the legitimation capacity of conventional accountability mechanisms for policing (e.g. Brodeur 1997). When police or military agents use unnecessary force in the context of peacekeeping, and the judicial avenue of redress can only be in the home country of the intervention force, local communities may not be aware of the efforts to ‘take account’ and hence may perceive injustice. In much the same way, police development aid (whether financial, technological, or otherwise) collapses the boundaries between the ‘international community’ and ‘local communities’ which also raises difficult theoretical questions about the nature of governmental accountability in a global context. While policing in the context of weak or failed states raises complex questions about what democratic mechanisms for ensuring the accountability of globalized social control consists in, the transnationalization of policing practices of state-based agencies in the ‘developed world’ also gives rise to other questions. Consider the ongoing development of ‘commuter arrangements’ for travel across the US–Canadian border. Strategies for managing these flows are based on segmenting populations on the basis of pre-programmed risk factors and are empowered by biometric scanners and other technological devices for confirmation of identities. This entails broadly based information and intelligence sharing between the variety of police-type agencies that aim to secure the border between the two states. But where does responsibility reside when false information circulating in this multi-agency intelligence sharing nexus results in a refusal of entry into one or the other country, or even detention at the border? The international sharing of information on suspect individuals and populations requires detailed arrangements to ensure adequate data protection safeguards, but the civil liberties dimension of this intelligence sharing are scarcely featured in traditional frameworks for conceptualizing policing accountability. The way in which policing relates to, and seeks to secure, territory is changing. The technological capacity for policing suspect populations is increasing. The complicated interplay of issues that arises when this conceptual distinction is brought into play again raises

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many unresolved questions about the character and scope of the changing and heterodox forms of policing governance in the contemporary period. The implications of this for the sociology of policing are many. Insofar as it relates to theoretical discussions about the accountability of policing practice, the idea of sovereignty and the sanctity of ‘enforcement jurisdiction’, perhaps until now the most basic assumption of democratic governance, can no longer be simply assumed. Accountability and the Policing Field Our terms for conceptualizing the policing field are contained within three analytical distinctions: between public and private policing, between high and low policing, and between the policing of suspect populations and of territory. The latter distinction is particularly useful in helping to focus on how policing practices are affected by the processes of transnationalization. Together they cast light on the changing scope of policing power as it transcends the boundaries of the old modern nation-state system and give meaning to the idea of ‘postmodern policing’, a term that might otherwise be merely gestural. The policing field can be staked out according to the following typology. Table 1 presents the field of policing as it is encapsulated within the three sets of distinctions overviewed above. Each cell of the table represents an ideal-typification and, although they have been given definitive labels, care should be taken when applying these to empirical cases. Empirical reality seldom conforms completely to the boundaries imposed by formal analysis. The cells of this table are worthy of disquisition at length. Here the concern is to look at the principal prima facie implications that each sector of the field presents for our understanding of accountability issues. Table 1 The Field of Policing Police work aimed at securing

High policing

Low policing

Territory Private forms Public forms Corporate Guardians security of the state guards apparatus

Populations Private forms Public forms Corporate State security security and the specialist Secret Service

Private security guards

Private eyes

Uniformed patrol officers

Police detectives

1. Corporate security guards: This form of policing practice is not well understood; however, it is ripe for scholarly attention. In the office environment of multinational corporations there are heightened perceptions about ‘industrial espionage’ and, as

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corporate cultures seek to more thoroughly inculcate their values into employees, the way the perimeters of such institutions are maintained will become increasingly evident. Access to secure sites in the corporate milieu is frequently controlled by a variety of technical devices which are familiar enough. CCTV systems, ‘smart card’ access control systems, and surveillance to control corporate ‘cyberspace’ provide some of the tools by which the guardians of corporate ‘territory’ perform their roles. Accountability of these controllers is to the corporation, but this may intersect with the liberties of employees and/or members of the citizenry. For example, corporate security guards working for multinational companies in some Third World countries attempt to ‘risk manage’ the zones where employees live, the routes that they travel to work and even their mode of transport. While employees may perceive benefits from this, the resultant ghettoization of people living an expatriate lifestyle arguably compromises the liberties of the local citizenry. On the other hand, corporate security guards may do more than secure the ‘territory’ of the parent company. One obvious tangential benefit of monitoring an employee’s whereabouts could be in terms of checking up on ‘easing behaviour’. It becomes difficult to avoid work by taking overly long lunch breaks in the staff canteen or hanging around the photocopy machine exchanging gossip with the enhanced capacity to monitor the whereabouts of employees that comes with these new surveillance technologies. Regardless of the perceived rights and wrongs surrounding the political–economic relationships between multinational corporations and Third World countries or the monitoring of employee productivity, it is obvious that the way these policing agents are made accountable is not easily assimilated under the doctrinal standards usually taken to constitute policing accountability. 2. Guardians of the state apparatus: This is, perhaps, more familiar ground. Here we are concerned with the infrastructure of the state (its buildings, communications infrastructure, and the like), as well as other aspects of the territorial integrity of the state. A number of terrorist attacks in the USA in recent times have awakened interest in these kinds of activity. The interplay between the public and private spheres in this context is not easily described and has been scarcely studied. There are some instances where private companies have won contracts to secure buildings housing elements of the state bureaucracy. What does it mean, in accountability terms, when a multinational security company wins a contract to provide security guards for state ministries in a foreign jurisdiction? On the other hand, what are the accountability issues at stake when a state extends its reach by, for example, redefining the security personnel in privately owned and operated airports as state employees? 3. Corporate security specialists: These agents extend the surveillance of corporate employees and others beyond the ‘territory’ of the corporation per se. Corporate security specialists may extend surveillance over employees after office hours and well away from the place of work. Nor is industrial espionage the only pretext for doing so. Consider, for example, urinalysis programmes which some companies impose upon their employees in order to curb illicit drug use both on and off the job. There have been cases where employees’ jobs have been threatened because companies desire to extend their no-smoking policies into the off-work hours. This is policing the ‘specific interests’ of the corporation (because it affects corporately provided healthcare plans

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and associated insurance costs), and might arguably even also be in the ‘general interests’ of employees. However the balance of interests is described and judged, the conventional vocabulary socio-legalists have for discussing policing accountability is stretched considerably when these relations are brought into the analysis. As already mentioned, high policing in this context might also extend to surveillance of business competitors undertaken by private investigators; it certainly concerns efforts to defend against industrial espionage. The activities that go on under this rubric have received virtually nothing in the way of scholarly attention, and consequently standard discussions about police accountability reveal a paucity of imagination regarding this sector of the policing field. 4. State security and the Secret Service: High policing on behalf of the state has been traditionally concerned with subversion – that is, activity thought to compromise the security of the state. This is a reasonably well researched area (e.g., Lustgarten and Leigh 1994; Whitaker and Marcuse 1994). The activity of these agencies presents well known difficulties for theorists of democratic accountability: who will guard the guards? It has been a perennial paradox of the modern democratic state that it may undertake to uphold the institutions of democracy using non-democratic means.2 However, in the contemporary period new problems arise. For example, the so-called Echelon Scandal, in which the surveillance capacities of certain high policing agencies from the United States were implicated in instances of industrial espionage against European companies, raises questions about the blurred boundaries between state and private interests in the world of global capitalism (Sheptycki 2000d: 12–13). When espionage on behalf of a state so merges into espionage on behalf of private corporate interests it is difficult to see where the lines of accountability lie. Another contemporary example might concern the activities of so-called ‘eco-terrorists’. The targets of selfnamed eco-warriors are more often private corporate interests – for example, cosmetics or pharmaceutical companies that test their products on live animals, or lumber companies that undertake logging operations in ‘old growth’ forests, or chemical companies that seek to illegally and surreptitiously dump toxins into lakes, rivers and seas. Arguably, in designating these activists as ‘terrorist’, the surveillance and control capacities of state agencies have been harnessed in the interests of protecting private corporate interests. The boundaries between ‘general’ and specific’ interests are hopelessly blurred in such circumstances. Whatever the moral and ethical issues that this type of activism present, it is clear that our conventional disputations about policing accountability do not firmly grasp this particular nettle.

2 In common with many Western democracies, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the UK drafted in its security services in the fight against ‘organized crime’. One legislative result was the Security Service Act (1996), which was partly concerned to make these activities more accountable. The accountability mechanisms thus established are weak and, given the extension of the powers of the security service and secret intelligence service beyond their traditional domain to include ordinary law crime, this might eventually result in a challenge under Article 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights (see Leach 1996).

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5. Private security guards: The ‘Pinkerton Man’ strolling the shopping mall and preserving an atmosphere conducive to the social order of consumption, or the security providers associated with the ‘gated community’ have a well established place in the research literature on policing. Private security guards secure territory for their contractors and so, in a sense, they are accountable to those who pay them. But they are also very often employees of multinational companies, some of which are publicly owned, and so they are also accountable to the shareholders. In advanced capitalist societies of the West, these activities may be closely regulated by the state. However, as this form of policing extends into many more countries, guarding not just housing compounds but many types of facility, in destabilized regions as various as Colombia, Indonesia, Russia or Namibia, the contradictions inherent in these crossed lines of accountability may become increasingly evident. Nor are these contradictions only manifest in places comfortably far away from the heartlands of the OECD. It has become common practice in a number of these countries to employ private security guards to contain undocumented immigrants in secure zones while they await processing of their asylum and immigration applications. The established framework of international law that pertains may be in some considerable tension with the contractual relationship that such firms agree with states parties. The lines of accountability, to international human rights and to the letter of the contract, may conflict, raising accountability issues, not least when there are allegations of the improper use of force or when such containment facilities erupt in protest. Although this is a type of ‘low policing’ and, as such, is concerned with a relatively generalized sense of social order, it is evident that there is also a particularity to this order. The tension involved in this set of contradictions is not an easy one to resolve. What is certain is that, in seeking to do so, our vocabulary for talking about the accountability of policing practices will be much elaborated beyond the conventional recipes espoused by constitutional lawyers and regulators. 6. Uniformed patrol officers: The police officer on ‘skid row’ is a dominant image in the sociology of policing and much (if not all) of the energy of those concerned with police accountability has been focused here. In this sector of the policing field there have been successes and in many regions there has been a perceptible drift towards greater democratic accountability for the actions of these policing agents. However, the activities of uniformed patrol have been affected in important ways by the diverse processes of transnationalization, and this has had implications for these debates. For example, the activities of border police and immigration authorities, who aim to protect the territorial integrity of states from the incursions of ‘illegal’ or ‘unregulated’ immigrants, have come under increasing scrutiny in the wake of allegations of brutality and other instances of possible wrongdoing. In terms of policing accountability, the issue is that such migrants are defined as ‘non-nationals’ and ‘non-citizens’, so that avenues of redress are not the same (or as robust) as those afforded actual citizens and this is despite international standards predicated on notions of human rights. Again, because much of the police accountability literature has fixated on the idea of ‘citizen review’, important, and probably growing, areas of policing activity involving the control of mobile populations have not been adequately answered.

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7. Private eyes: The fictional image of Philip Marlowe looms large here, but private detectives are busy with much less glamorous work. Investigating insurance fraud or surveillance undertaken in the context of divorce proceedings are some of the more prosaic types of work that these agents undertake. Here the lines of accountability are contractual, but there are ethical issues which might suggest that there ought to be more to it than that. Then, too, corporate entities encounter risks of many sorts and some of them are amenable to the arts of private detectives. Kidnappings of multinational executives working overseas, product contamination, extortion and asset recovery are just a few examples of the roles that private security experts have assumed in policing on behalf of the corporate order. This type of police work has a very low profile in the academic literature and, again, there has been no attention to the issues of accountability that are at stake. It may only be when one or other of these agents is exposed as something like the transnational equivalent of Jonathan Wild that such questions will be asked in earnest. 8. Police detectives: The ‘undercover cop’, long the province of crime fiction, came to some prominence in the policing literature only relatively recently (Fijnaut and Marx 1995; Marx 1988). Intelligence-led policing has become the new paradigm for state-based policing agencies (Sheptycki 2000b). Relatively little attention has been paid to the accountability issues that arise when local constabularies are reengineered to be ‘intelligence-led’ (but see Maguire 2000). There are real ironies in making covert policing accountable to law, even within the boundaries of a single national jurisdiction. Dominique Monjardet and René Lévy (1995) have, for example, explained the complex histories of a number of undercover tactics (the use of ‘realfake passports’, ‘controlled deliveries’ of drugs and ‘wiretapping’) in France to show a strange cycle of regulation whereby clandestine methods move from a status of being purely illegal, through a status of being (secretly) regulated, but still illegal, to a status of formal legality. Citing ‘Brodeur’s law’ (whenever a contradiction arises between police practice and legality, it is usually the law that is modified and not the practice) they note that ‘once a practice has been both legalized and codified, it becomes surrounded with so many restrictions that there is a great temptation once again to look for more flexible practices’ (ibid.: 49). Attempts to make undercover policing practices accountable in law are but one phase of a continuous cycle of illegality, legalization and new illegalities. In the transnational context there are other, perhaps even more awkward, questions about lines of accountability. For example, when a scandal broke out in the Netherlands as the result of undercover police operations there, a number of American DEA officers escaped having to provide evidence to the parliamentary inquiry by claiming diplomatic immunity (den Boer 1997). When the activities of undercover officers extend extraterritorially there is ample room for diplomatic incident precisely because the doctrine of enforcement jurisdiction may itself be a perceived barrier to the law enforcement mission. For example, in cases which involve allegations or suspicions of corruption of government officials, policing agents operating undercover and extraterritorially, may deceive government agents in their own and foreign jurisdictions. One such example is the case of ‘Operation Casablanca’ which involved US customs agents operating clandestinely in Mexico

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without the knowledge of Mexican or US officials (Sheptycki 2000e). Because there is no such thing as universal enforcement jurisdiction, the lines of accountability for many undercover police operations are far from clear. The transnationalization of policing is co-valent with its postmodernization and raises serious questions about how we are to conceive of a theory of democratic accountability pertinent to the entire policing field. In the preceding discussion the aim has been to highlight some of the more salient implications that a broad conception of the policing field has for our understanding of policing and its lines of accountability. The results are suggestive and illustrative rather than encyclopaedic. As presented here, the eightfold typology that describes the sectors of the policing field gives some indication of how the processes of transnationalization have impacted on the various categories of policing and, further, what kinds of issues are involved for our understanding of accountability issues. Although consideration of the conceptual grid that these analytic distinctions establish has been only partial, enough has been said to show that socio-legal analysis that relates to the accountability of policing must move along a broad front. A word of caution should be injected here. A formal typology of this sort might create misunderstandings, one being that each cell somehow carries equal ‘weight’. It must be emphasized that each of these types is formally separate and distinct even while they are empirically intertwined in complex ways. It is not the case, for example, that we can say that the work of corporate private security is more or less central to social ordering than is the work of the public police. Neither is recourse to tabulating the number of personnel in these two spheres, or the financial implications of such, or the number of crimes cleared up, or losses prevented, or the amount of assets recovered, or criminal assets seized, or criminal groups detected or disrupted likely to provide a complete answer. These are complex empirical questions. The reason for undertaking this type of formal analysis is to show that the policing field is much bigger than most scholars suppose most of the time. Socio-legalists and others who concern themselves with accountability issues are, broadly speaking, concerned with the governance of governance. By staking out the various sectors of the policing field we can at least judge the immensity of the task. Deus Ex Machina? The notion of the ‘rule of law’ seems problematic under conditions of legal pluralism and the increasing transnationalization of policing. Further, questions about the ‘accountability of policing’ in the context of globalizing neo-liberalism may seem almost impossible to answer, at least in the conventional terms of democracy. Constitutionalists, regulators, and other would-be guardians of the principle of legality may well struggle to adapt and build legal frameworks capable of circumscribing a policing field cross-cut by distinctions that can be made between public and private policing, high and low policing, and the policing of territory and of suspect populations. Given the rapid and continuing transformations in the policing field, this is a daunting task. However, there is a difference between cynicism, which denies hope, and pessimism, which does not. One hopeful sign is that in some sectors of the policing

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field there is evidence of a ‘constabulary ethic’. Such an ethic might well provide a moral compass to some policing agents in crucial sectors of the field, an internalized set of norms which could provide direction when and where the letter of the law does not. The idea of a constabulary ethic is not new. Indeed, although they do not seem to have used the term, the architects of the modern British police, Robert Peel, Colonel Charles Rowan and Sir Richard Mayne, consciously fostered just this sort of ethos for policing in England and Wales. The distinctive character of public policing in Britain – its strategy of minimal force, attention to crime prevention, service provision and the needs of victims – gives practical substance to the notion of a constabulary ethic. Further, the notion of policing by consent, the tradition of political non-partisanship, and, historically, the conscious effort to reconcile the contradictions inherent in the doctrine of constabulary independence and discretion while remaining true to the spirit of the law offer some good precedents for undertaking the great variety of policing tasks necessary in the new transnational world order. But these traditions did not arise because of some peculiar affinity of English ‘character’ to higher ethical standards. Peel, Rowan, and Mayne fostered a specific kind of tradition because of the political context in which they were working, a context where the politics of policing, indeed the very notion of ‘the police’, was hotly contested (Reiner 2000: 50–59). Extrapolating from the work of David Held (1995), it seems possible to say that the extent to which a transnational constabulary ethic may or may not emerge is contingent on the fate of democratic sensibilities under conditions of globalization (Held, 1995). In other words, any internalized moral compass for the global policing character that the term ‘constabulary ethic’ signals will be the product of global political conditions. Vestiges of the constabulary ethic are present in British policing today, even as it has become partly overwritten with the rhetoric of ‘zero tolerance’ or ‘intelligence-led’ law enforcement. There is also evidence of the constabulary ethic in the actions of some civilian police agents and military personnel who have participated in international peacekeeping missions. Conflict-ridden and divided societies, where political power and sovereignty are hotly contested, entail policing at the ‘bad edge of postmodernity’. In this ‘grey zone’, to adopt Vaclav Havel’s turn of phrase, policing agents may find themselves operating with a fragmented legal frame where international human rights standards, national, sub-national or customary legal concepts all vie for applicability. In such contexts, the blunt application of force may serve only to make matters worse. The aim of policing with legitimacy lies at the core of every peacekeeping mission because, when searching for practical solutions for ordering divided and conflict-ridden societies, policing is peacekeeping and vice versa (Sheptycki 2001b). The recognition of the need for a constabulary ethic in the context of international peacekeeping missions is not new either (Rikhye et al. 1974); indeed, it has been granted more than ‘theoretical status’ since Moskos (1975) was able to develop a measure of it. He showed that military officers on peacekeeping duties in Cyprus fell into two roughly equal groups; with a bare majority (51 per cent) of his sample adhering to his operational measure of ‘the constabulary ethic’. It is even possible to discern elements of this sensibility among the purveyors of private security services working in conflict-ridden regions. Although admittedly only anecdotal, I would like to cite here a conversation I had with one of these ‘risk managers’, who confided to me that one of his jobs had been to help procure a number of ex-marines to provide protection

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for workers on an oil platform operating off West African shores. The multinational petroleum company that had contracted him to do so had encountered difficulties with workers who had themselves suffered at the hands of ‘pirates’ who had boarded the facility from canoes and robbed them at knifepoint. My informant confided to me that, although six well-armed ex-marines were an effective deterrent to such marauding, he feared that this solution was merely ‘planting time-bombs of resentment set to go off in the future’. To him it seemed obvious that finding solutions to the inequities of wealth and political power offered the only viable long-term solution and that strategies based purely on coercive force were basically counterproductive. Sadly, the political and economic conditions that this policing agent is accustomed to working in are not ideal ones for fostering the constabulary ethic. Not every sector of the policing field is capable of fostering something like a constabulary ethic. Nor is it easy to imagine how every corner of the field can be regulated and made accountable to the broad spectrum of ‘the public’ implied by the term ‘democracy’. Just as the characteristically benign image of the British Bobbie that emerged at the dawn of the modern police institution in England was a product of the political context of the time, the character of postmodern policing, understood in its broadest sense, will depend on the political conditions in transnational civil society. Scholarship about policing practices and the attentions of human rights NGOs have an important role to play in shaping the terms of discourse that describe the accountability of policing. This is a difficult task in a time when the putative monolith of transnational organized crime has become central to what might be called, adapting John Urry’s turn of phrase, ‘banal globalisation talk’ (Urry 2000). The rhetoric of (in)security may ride roughshod over embryonic forms of the constabulary ethic, and this seems all too likely since the transnational system is a fragmented governmental terrain that owes its character as much to the activities of private corporate institutions as it does to the great variety of state actors who play their roles. In conditions of postmodern complexity it seems tales of good against evil provide a simple plot line that belies the evident confusion. Democratic policing in the transnational era can only rest on the ability of outsiders (academics, human rights NGOs, and other ‘citizens representatives’) to gain access to, move between and render accountable the great variety of policing-type institutions which cut across and have transformed the policing field as it has been traditionally viewed. In arguing for the accountability of policing, and not tangentially advocating the viability and appropriateness of human rights norms, such actors would do well to emphasize that the aim is to increase the effectiveness of policing in the deliverance of peace, order and good governance. The strength of such arguments remains that policing effectiveness can only be achieved with the active consent of the governed.

[11] The Accountability of Transnational Policing Institutions: The Strange Case of Interpol1 Introduction At the historical heart of the ‘standard paradigm’ of policing accountability lies the archetypal Big City Police Department. In the evolution of the standard paradigm, the emphasis has been on questions as to how such agencies might be made democratically accountable to the citizenry, and the key to this has been understood to lie in systems of public law administration based on principles of liberal democracy and the rule of law.2 Initially the focus was on those agencies that were elements of the state qua state, but a key development in the paradigm concerned the implications of the public–private divide in security provision and the consequences of the ‘marketization’ of social control for systems of accountability. Although tangential to the discussion pursued here, which concerns the accountability of Interpol, it is fair to point out that this evolutionary offshoot of the standard paradigm has thrown up some astonishing evidence regarding the increasingly centralized nature of private transnational security conglomerates such as Wakenhut, Intelligarde, and Securicor.3 The jurisdictional reductionism evident in the standard paradigm for policing accountability is understandable since, up until quite recently, it has been easy to assure that the operational reach of most important institutions of governance, criminal justice agencies in particular, has been territorially limited. It is only within the last decade or so that attention has come to focus on transnational practices.4 Academic attention given to transnational policing is symptomatic of wider developments and concerns about the changing nature of sovereignty in a globalizing world, the changing nature of legality and the rule of law under conditions of

Originally published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 19(1), pp. 107–34 (2004). The standard paradigm for the accountability of police and other criminal justice agencies is articulated in a number of excellent books. See in particular: Goldsmith (1991); Goldsmith and Lewis (2000); Newburn and Jones ( 1997); Stenning (1995). 3 See Johnston (2000b); Jones and Newburn (1998); and Rigakos (2002). For a discussion of the ‘marketization’ of security and policing see also Sheptycki (1995b). 4 Key studies here include Anderson et al, (1995); Nadelmann (1993b); Sheptycki (2000a); and Sheptycki (2002b). See also Policing Accountability in Europe (special issue) (2002) 12(4) Policing and Society p. 243. 1 2

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globalization, and even the possibilities for ‘global governance’.5 This interest has arisen out of the recognition of a rise in the prominence of transnational practices undertaken through virtually every social institution. Human action and interaction is no longer bounded by the territorial limitations of an earlier age; the world stage is no longer the exclusive preserve of heads of state and their diplomatic representatives; and many social, political, economic and cultural practices have become transnational. At the cusp of the twenty-first century questions came to be asked about future of democratic principles in an era when global forces had turned the nation-state system inside out, transforming it into the transnational state system.6 By looking at the practices of transnational policing we come to better understand the political form of the emergent transnational state system (see Sheptycki 2002b: xix). The standard paradigm for policing accountability has done much both to theoretically illuminate the nature of modern governance and to practically regulate the institutions responsible for such. This essay sets out to discuss the problematic of accountability for transnational policing, and it does so by reference to Interpol, the only existing and formally constituted global transnational policing institution funded by taxpayers’ money.7 Examining the curious nature of Interpol’s accountability framework illuminates questions about accountability of transnational institutions more generally. The essay proceeds in several stages. In the next section some terminological consideration will be given to the concepts of both ‘accountability’ and of ‘globalization’. Neither term is so simple that it can be taken as read, but the central problem – which asks how transnational institutions may be rendered democratically accountable – can be made plain. This naturally leads to a discussion of the accountability framework for Interpol, which pays particular attention to how the organization came to be treated as if it were an intergovernmental organization. It will be shown that Interpol is not without an accountability framework, but that this is complicated because of its transnational nature and the peculiarities of its history. The politics of accountability for Interpol will also be discussed. This will focus primarily on changing interpretations of Articles 2 and 3 of the organization’s constitution. Like most issues of global governance, transnational police work is a matter of hot political contestation. Concomitantly, difficulties arise regarding systems of accountability and control. Asking questions about ‘policing the world’ is to reflect in fundamental ways about the political character of the ‘global system’ (see Anderson 1989; Sklair 1991). 5 Some interesting perspectives on globalization and governance can be found in a collection of essays edited by Richard V. Ericson and Nico Stehr: Governing Modern Societies (2000). See further Held (1995); and Held and McGrew (2002). Volmar Gessner’s and Ali Cem Budak’s Emerging Legal Certainty: Empirical Studies on the Globalization of Law (1998) provides a wide-ranging collection of essays on the changing nature of legality under conditions of globalization. The report of the Commission on Global Governance entitled Our Global Neighbourhood (1995) offers considered proposals to promote the security of peoples world-wide, equitably manage the global economy and strengthen the rule of law globally. 6 Susan Marks’ The Riddle of all Constitutions (2000) provides a strong theoretical disquisition regarding constitutional democracy under conditions of globalization. The concept of the ‘transnational state system’ is discussed with regard to policing in Sheptycki (1997a). 7 Interpol’s global stature invites comparison with its regional competitor, Europol. The relationship will be touched upon at relevant points throughout the paper.

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Some Key Concepts Philip Stenning has done as much to clarify what we mean by ‘accountability’ as anyone. ‘Fundamentally’, he tells us, ‘accountability is about no more nor less than requirements to give accounts’ (Stenning 1995: 5). Accountability may be rooted in formal legal requirements and rules, or it may be rooted in custom, or power relations. In short, it may be formal or informal. In liberal democracies the ideal has been that, while working systems of accountability involve all of these elements in different measure, the requirement to give account is, at its most basic, a requirement to make matters of institutional and individual practice transparent. The key questions that arise are: transparent to whom, when, how and about what? Understanding the answers to these questions as they relate to criminal justice institutions is particularly revealing because this type of agency is so central to social ordering. Of all the institutions of governance, this is the one that most impacts on people’s safety and freedom. It is when the accountability stakes are highest that we have the best opportunity, and the strongest motive, to understand what accountability is. Richard Ericson famously coined the term ‘account-ability’ as a way of showing that relationships of accountability are not simple command relationships between the suband super-ordinate. Even in organizations such as the police, which are ostensibly rankstructured bureaucracies, accountability is not the same as control. That is because systems of accountability provide tools to those who are being held to account at the same time that they provide tools to those who require accounts. Accountability mechanisms are resources in the hands of officials who use them to construct, explain, and justify actions in ways that, perhaps ironically, often preclude effective scrutiny and control by outsiders (Stenning 1995: 6). Further, David Bayley (2001), among others, has drawn the distinction between internal and external accountability. The trend towards establishing citizen review boards to oversee the work and policy of municipal police departments (as well as other systems of external accountability for police agencies) (Goldsmith 2002; Goldsmith and Lewis 2000), prompted Bayley to observe that systems of external accountability exist alongside internal mechanisms of accountability. The contradictory effect of an over-reliance on external oversight might be to foster indifference and even resistance within the organization under scrutiny, thereby weakening internal systems of accountability. Internal mechanisms of accountability thus weakened, the degree of external control over a given police organization and its members (or any other type of institution for that matter) may actually decline. The reader will have already seen that the distinctions drawn between accountability and account-ability, between formal and informal, and between internal and external accountability have something to do with the question of control. At least in the democratic societies of the West, accountability systems create relations between different social actors who use those mechanisms as tools in a complex interplay of power relations. In considering governmental practice, the nexus of control and accountability includes many players who have recourse to these enabling devices. Moreover, as the scale of institution action increases, as the number of actors multiply, the functional ambit grows, and the division of labour complexifies, systems of accountability become more attenuated and the interplay between the various actors who interact on the basis of established accountability mechanisms becomes more complex.

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Paradoxically, therefore, although systems of accountability ostensibly aim at making institutional actions transparent, ultimately such systems tend towards opacity. This problem is further amplified in contemporary debates which emphasize the accountability not of police, but of policing. Observing the growth of private security providers, and the development of subterranean networks of policing agents that form bridges between the great variety of agencies that comprise the police sector, scholars have suggested that regulation should focus on networks of security rather than being limited to specific organizations (Rigakos 2002; see also Law Commission of Canada 2002). In Shearing’s formulation, when policing networks are made the focus of accountability what becomes requisite is a network of participatory ‘nodes’ – each with authority, capacity and knowledge that together provide for the governance of security. That being the case, the arrangements for regulation and oversight of policing networks (and, indeed, for their funding) are destined to replay all of the tensions made explicit through the conceptual distinctions made between formal and informal accountability, and internal and external accountability. Only now, the problems of control exposed through the notion of ‘account-ability’ become even more fraught because networks may be less circumscribed and less easy to pin down then formally constituted agencies. Shearing’s answer to this is that individual ‘nodes’ of governance should be founded on the basis of local knowledge and capacity (Shearing 2001). The implicit view is that public support for – as well as the legitimacy of – security provisions are dependent on the localized basis of governance. This terminology is complicated. One way of simplifying the issues at stake is by reference to the typology laid out in Table 1. Table 1 A Typology of Accountability Internal Accountability Mechanisms

External Accountability Mechanisms

Formal accountability mechanisms

Chain of command

Civilian review; parliamentary scrutiny

Informal accountability mechanisms

Subcultural ‘ways and means’

Public legitimacy and consent

In bureaucracies the internal and formal means for achieving the accountability of governmental agents rely on relationships of sub- and super-ordinacy. They depend on a ‘chain of command’ and the ability to identify ‘where the buck stops’. This seems much harder to achieve with regard to networks where command relations may be supplanted by the need for co-operation and, even more importantly, organizational boundaries and responsibilities may be difficult to define with precision. Consequently, networks seem more likely to be held to account, if at all, via informal and subcultural means. When formal accountability mechanisms imply some element of external scrutiny such as can be found in policing boards and various types of parliamentary oversight, it is considered important to ensure that external oversight works in harmony with internal accountability mechanisms – for example, policeon-police or ‘internal affairs’ forms of inquiry. It is here that the pragmatics of account-ability

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are manifestly political. Policing subculture(s) are shaped, at least partly, on the ways formal and informal accountability ties co-relate. But such subcultures also rest on the way in which the mission is defined, the difference between policing and mere law enforcement provides a conceptual clue as to how subcultural values are shaped by the definition of the mission. The way in which particular policing organizations and their agents relate to the policed population (both as individuals and as categories of population) is a microcosm of the relations between governmental practitioners and the governed population or, in an older parlance, the state and civil society. This relation may be achieved via many means, including, but not limited to, media typifications and campaigning by groups in civil society. The character of these interactions is indicative and partially determinative of the overall degree of public legitimacy and consent given to the governmental enterprise. Relations of social power in democratic societies are seldom so simple that a description of them in mechanical terms can count as an explanation as to their workings. In the democratic societies of the West our understanding of issues relating to accountability and control is bound up with normative conceptions about the legitimate exercise of social, political and economic power. Accountability is a cultural construct as much as a technique of government. It is not the simple imposition of a mechanistic set of auditing requirements, but rests rather on notions of what is right, just, fair, and proper. In short, it rests on shared cultural understandings about the legitimacy of governmental power and its mode of exercise. The literature on accountability has taught us that control over major social institutions, especially those institutions that are responsible for social ordering through the mechanisms of criminal law enforcement, involves broad culture traditions regarding the conduct of politics and the constitutional rules and conventions that apply in particular jurisdictions. For that reason Philip Stenning cautioned students of governance that ‘comparative scholarship on the accountability of such agencies [i.e. criminal justice agencies] is bound to be misleading if it does not take the variability of these more general traditions of governance and accountability into account’ (Stenning 1995: 12). On this view it is both possible and necessary to compare and contrast the political traditions of, for example, the Netherlands and Belgium, in order to understand the relative effectiveness of different strategies and mechanisms that aim to achieve higher standards of democratic accountability in different jurisdictions (see Sheptycki 1999b). Broadly speaking, that has been the aim in much of the literature on police accountability. Historically modern modes of governance – including within them systems, mechanisms and traditions of accountability – have been nested in a particular institutional form, that being the nation-state. Each such state has most often been thought of as a hermetically sealed holistic system. That assumption is what has made cross-national comparison both possible and plausible. In the contemporary period we are confronted with a host of institutions (e.g. the WTO, IMF, OECD, WIPO – the alphabet soup of transnational governmentality) that operate at a level seemingly above that of nation-states and beyond their control while the actions of both sub-state and non-state actors transgress state boundaries.8 Globalization is the term used to describe this state of affairs, but it is an ill-understood word. It is an abstract analytical category that serves a wide variety of purposes simultaneously. Partly a category of fear, it is also a social science term used to describe supposedly world-wide social, cultural, political and, above all, economic changes. Frequently it is averred that the processes of 8



See Sheptycki (2002b), especially the Introduction. See also Sheptycki (2002a).

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globalization have greatly weakened the nation-state. This is especially so in the economic sphere because global financial flows seem to have largely escaped the capacity of the states to control or direct them. However, it is inescapable that states remain significant actors on the global stage. What has changed is that formally designated representatives of states now share that stage with many other actors. Some of these actors are non-state actors, some of whom can be relatively quite powerful – for example, large multinational companies, religious organizations and a variety of non-governmental organizations. Other actors on the global stage are in fact substate agents: that is, persons formally in the employ of particular states, but who are not necessarily formally mandated to act internationally by the ministry or other governmental office responsible for foreign affairs (police agents are a good example of this). Then, too, in the contemporary period there are supernatural entities and international organizations that participate in the action taking place on the global stage. ‘The politics of global governance’, David Held and Anthony McGrew observe, ‘is thus significantly differentiated … [r]ather than a monolithic and unitary system, it is best understood as multidimensional … [i]n addition to being multilayered and multidimensional, global governance is a multi-actor complex in which diverse agencies participate in the formulation and conduct of global public policy’ (Held and McGrew 2002: 67). Importantly, in Held’s and McGrew’s account, the hegemony of ‘powerful states’ (the OECD countries, or members of the G8 and perhaps one or two others, but especially the United States) remains a key feature of the global system. However, that is not the same as saying that the dynamics of the present world order remain the same as they were 50 or even 20 years ago. The complex global system that they describe involves the transnational practices of state, sub-state and non-state actors. In other words, it is not a simple ‘balance of power system’. The ability of a multitude of sub-state and non-state actors to act transnationally has altered the conditions of global relations. So, at the same time as the state system has come to be buttressed and supported by transnational co-ordination and regulation, the divergent interests of corporate, national, technocratic and cosmopolitan elites have been sutured together at the transnational level as well. The foreign policy choices of states actors are conditioned by the transnational activities of non-state, sub-state and even supra-state agents in a way that was inconceivable in an earlier age. A fortiori, the domestic activities of sovereign state actors are profoundly affected by transnational interplay. The nation-state system has become the transnational state system. The advent of the transnational state system has many consequences, but possibly the most profound has to do with our conceptions of democratic governance and accountability. In democratic countries not so long ago it was possible to try to pursue or shift policy goals relating to the actions of governmental agencies by mobilizing the citizenry. Within the confines of demarcated jurisdictions major institutions of governance (such as criminal justice agencies) could, in theory if not wholly in practice, be held in check by demands for accountability. The Police Citizen Review Board is one example of this logic. In the contemporary period, when policing has superseded police, we may have policing boards and a ‘nodal’ conception of the relations between security providers (Shearing 2002). But when we foreground the processes of transnationalization in our thinking and consider the consequences for the governability of governance, this localized approach seems a rather too limited strategy. This has partly to do

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with the global scale of the institutional relations in question, partly to do with the complexity of relations between the various actors involved and partly to do with the complex interplay between different policy areas. Configuring a system of democratic accountability for the transnational state system across all nodes and at every level is as theoretically challenging as it is practically difficult. The project of cosmopolitan democracy advocated by Held and McGrew, among others, is an attempt to discover the possibility of rendering the transnational state system democratically accountable. Scholars of policing and criminal justice agencies have contributed greatly to both the theory and practice of democratic governance. They have done so by looking at policing in particular jurisdictions, and the lessons drawn from comparative study have had a global impact. Thinking globally and focusing attention on the accountability of Interpol (a unique transnational policing organization) is therefore a useful further contribution to the literature on both policing accountability and global governance. A Developmental Chronology of Interpol Historical context is important for understanding accountability issues. The history of Interpol is already quite long, and at certain transitional moments the story is complicated. In a short essay such as this it is very difficult to do justice to the complexities of this institutional history, so a simple chronology will have to suffice. The aim here is to give the reader a sense of the trajectory of development of Interpol up to the present in order to situate discussion of its accountability framework. In the long list of international organizations Interpol occupies a very unusual position. It lacks a treaty basis yet, ultimately, it is funded with taxpayers’ money. Over time it has come to achieve legally recognized roles in transnational police and judicial co-operation and has acquired something like customary recognition in international law as an intergovernmental organization (IGO). The idea for the organization can be traced back to just prior to World War One, but it was not until that conflagration had passed that it was actually established as a working organization. Much has been written about Interpol since then, but little is of scholarly value. The following account draws on the best of these contributions.9 Prognostications prior to the Great War about the need for an international congress of criminal police aside, the historical genesis of Interpol came in 1923. At that time the head of the Austrian state police, Dr Johan Schober, sought to reconstitute the influence and reach of the Austrian police beyond the vestigial rump of the Austro-Hungarian empire established

9 See Anderson (1989); Bresler (1992), Deflem (2000); Deflem (2002a); Deflem (2002b); and Fooner (1989)a. As good as this work is, none of it can claim to illuminate in any detail how Interpol actually functions on a day-to-day basis. Unlike most of the important democratic police agencies in the West, no researcher has ever actually studied its working methods at first hand. This is a call for the kind of field study perhaps best exemplified by the pioneering work of Michael Banton and William Westley. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the first step on the road to democratic accountability for Interpol would be just the sort of research access that Banton and Westley obtained in their studies of municipal police departments in the UK and the USA respectively See Banton (1964); and Westley (1970).

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by the Treaty of Saint Germain.10 From those early days, and to the present, the organization has essentially been a network of police officials facilitating police-to-police contact across international boundaries. One way of viewing the subsequent development of Interpol during the twentieth century is that it was a transnational organizational entity that was ‘captured’ by certain specific states’ interests and that the really significant signposts of its chronology are moments when the captive status was transferred. It seems fairly clear that in the early period the organization acted partly, if not solely, as an arm of the Austrian state police. To paraphrase Anderson, the old habits of the Habsburg police of maintaining international contact to keep track of political radicals and subversives probably constituted the ‘hidden motives’ behind Schober’s moves (Anderson 1989: 40). Upon the capture of Vienna in 1938 the organization entered its period of ‘nazification’ (Deflem 2000, 2002b). After the war, from the 1940s until 1986, Interpol was under almost total French influence (Fooner 1989: 91). In 1986 the period of ‘Anglo-American hegemony’ commenced (Bresler 1992). However, the pure simplicity of the ‘pass the baton’ history of Interpol lost some of its grounds for plausibility during the latter years of the century. Partly because of the agency’s non-operability with regard to domestic European terrorism, it was during the 1970s that a host of other transnational police networks were developed in the region. The police working group on terrorism (PWGOT), the TREVI system and, later, Schengen and Europol all sprang up on Europe’s fertile ground. Thus, when in 1986 French suzerainty over the organization was supplanted by a new Anglo-American hegemony, Europe was a field crowded with transnational policing agents. It was during the latter half of the 1980s that Interpol was given a radical overhaul of its information and communications systems, moving directly from communication by Morse code to communication by e-mail ‘almost overnight’ (Sheptycki 1995b). For most of its institutional history Interpol had been primarily a European-based police network, but by the dawn of the twenty-first century its centrality in that region had been displaced. The primacy it lost in Europe was partly compensated for by its expanded presence in other regions, most notably in the Caribbean. However, the fantastic growth in transnational policing, and especially the internationalization of American police power, has meant that even globally Interpol has no monopoly on the many tasks that require cross-border police co-operation.11 In the contemporary period Interpol functions as part of the complex web of global policing. It facilitates the transnational police mission by providing channels of communication 10

The Treaty of Versailles is often, but erroneously, said to be the treaty that ended the First World War, but in truth it is only the treaty that consolidated peace between Germany and the Allies. The treaty that set the peace terms between the Allies and Austro-Hungary was the lesser-known Treaty of Saint Germain. See Hobsbawm (1995: 31). 11 On the internationalization of US law enforcement see Nadelmann (1993b). As Fooner (1989: 117) explains, when it comes to international police work, agencies often have recourse to other-thanInterpol channels. Thus US federal agencies ‘have their own external networks of agents: the FBI has legal attachés resident in a number of foreign embassies, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service and other departments have agents assigned to foreign locations and reporting to their own departmental chiefs in Washington’. As it is with the USA, so it is with other countries that are active in transnational police co-operation.

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between police agencies in its 181 member countries.12 Interpol itself has no operational role. The man from Interpol never arrested anyone. Having no operational capacity, it cannot initiate investigations or undertake judicial enquiries on its own behalf. Interpol’s primary role is facilitating the exchange of messages – for example, requests for information about a given person’s criminal history or requests that enquiries are undertaken – between police and judicial authorities of the member countries. The organization uses a system of coloured ‘notices’ to facilitate police-to-police communication. Red notices amount to a worldwide diffusion of national arrest warrants and could therefore be viewed as a semi-official international arrest warrant. Blue notices request information on named persons. Green notices circulate information on suspected criminals and their activities. Yellow notices relate to missing persons, and black notices relate to unidentified dead bodies. Additionally, there is the circulation of information about stolen goods and other materials and things of interest, and about the modus operandi of criminals. From the mid-1980s onwards Interpol developed and maintained large electronic databanks based on information created by these exchanges. Interpol has begun to mine this accumulated data for the purposes of crime analysis, but there is no way of knowing with precision what this has resulted in. It cultivates a low public profile in respect of its operation, but claims to have a high impact. Occasionally, stories emerge in the press which indicate that Interpol has played a role in a police operation, but it is seldom clear from the press accounts precisely what Interpol contributed.13 Interpol is also active in the organization of conferences on a multitude of criminal matters, including the sexual exploitation of children, counterfeiting, drugs markets, money laundering and terrorism. Thus, although there are many participants in transnational policing, Interpol is in a powerful position to shape its contours, both symbolically and practically. The network of policing communications of which it is a part is productive of information (data) which practically shapes expectations of what policing consists in, from the local to the transnational level. The Interpol marque, along with the symbols of a handful of other policing-type agencies, is recognized world-wide and therefore the image of the policing mission it projects has important consequences for the nature of policing globally. Interpol’s communications nodes are an important part of the global policing network. As such it plays an important role, not only in helping to orchestrate 12

This number is always subject to change. Both Afghanistan and East Timor, for example, joined the roster at roughly the same time this paper was going to press. 13 For example, in 2002 a member of the Greek terrorist group November 17 was apprehended after an accidental explosion. This turned out to be the first step in bringing to an end an almost 30-yearlong history of terrorism which claimed the lives of many people, including the CIA station chief in Athens (in 1975) and a British Brigadier General who was a military attaché there (in 2002). Following interrogation of the detainee, Interpol became involved in the international traffic in intelligence about the group. Because officials from both countries had been assassinated, British and American police were already involved in the search for other members of the group. On 7 July 2002 the Daily Telegraph lead on the story announced that ‘Greece has credited Scotland Yard with the success of an operation against November 17, a terrorist group that has [had] the attention of agencies such as Interpol and the FBI for 30 years’. A spokesperson for the Greek government explained that their police strategy had been directed by British detectives: ‘We sealed off the area and conducted the search according to Scotland Yard methods ... we have worked with the FBI but Scotland Yard are better because of their experience with the IRA.’

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policing operations, but also in the symbolic representation of policing (both globally and locally). The Legal Accountability of Interpol To whom or what is Interpol externally accountable? It has been often assumed that Interpol is an intergovernmental organization (IGO), but this is not fully accurate.14 IGO status is achieved in respect of the United Nations. Thus, according to the UN Economic and Social Council: ‘[e]very international organization which is not created by means of inter-governmental agreements shall be considered as a non-governmental organization’.15 One view of the system of global governance would place the UN at its centre with three concentric rings wrapped around it.16 At the centre of this model are the core bodies of the UN, including the Security Council, ECOSOC, the International Court of Justice, the office of the Secretary General, and the General Assembly. In the first concentric ring are the UN programmes themselves. Examples of these that would be of more that tangential interest to scholars of criminal justice agencies would include the UN Drug Control Programme (UNDCP), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). There are, of course, many others in different policy domains, but obviously Interpol does not belong among this class of agencies. In the second concentric ring are specialized agencies as defined by Article 57 of the United Nations Charter. According to the Charter, such agencies are ‘established by intergovernmental agreement, and having wide international responsibilities, as defined in their basic instruments … [they] shall be brought into relationship with the United Nations …’ (Held and McGrew 2002: 61). It is this unequivocal status as an intergovernmental organization (IGO) that has been erroneously attributed to Interpol.17 Interpol was not initially constituted by treaty or any other similar legal agreement. On this point it is interesting to note that in 1977 the MP for Southampton (Brian Gould, Labour) 14

See, for example, the following: Anderson (1989: 71); Bresler (1992: 131); and Fooner (1989: 45). All of these observers make this claim. 15 Economic and Social Council, Resolution 288 (X) of 27 February 1950. 16 The UN-centric view of global governance is only one model of the global system; see Held and McGrew (2002: 60–61). 17 So-called ‘specialized agencies’ are linked to the UN by a special accord de liaison, which is rather different to the co-operation agreement between the two organizations. An accord de liaison confers powers of co-ordination, whereas a co-operation agreement merely consolidates co-operation. A new co-operation agreement between Interpol and the UN was signed on 8 July,1997 and came into force following its approval by the Interpol General Assembly by virtue of Resolution AGN/66/RES/5 adopted at the 66th session (held in New Delhi in 1997). This replaced the previously existing Special Arrangement concluded with ECOSOC in May 1971. The current co-operation agreement follows the adoption by the UN General Assembly on 22 October 1996 of Resolution A/RES/51/1 which granted Interpol Observer status in the UN General Assembly. It defines the areas in which the two organizations should co-operate and the conditions for the exchange of information and documents. It opens the way for technical co-operation and joint action, and provides for reciprocal representation at meetings held by each organization.

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asked the UK Home Office by way of a written question ‘whether there is any formal signed agreement under which the United Kingdom is a member of Interpol’ (House of Commons, 1977). The reply was: ‘Membership of the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) is not obtained by an intergovernmental treaty or agreement. The question of a formal signed agreement by the United Kingdom does not therefore arise’ (ibid.). In point of fact, precisely who or what is a member of the organization is a somewhat ambiguous matter. The precise wording of Article 4 of the Interpol constitution states that ‘[a]ny country may delegate as a Member to the Organisation any official police body whose functions come within the framework of activities of the Organization’ (Interpol n.d.). Further, ‘[t] he request for membership shall be submitted to the Secretary General by the appropriate governmental authority’ (ibid.). The use of the word ‘country’ and not ‘state’ should give pause for consideration, and the clear implication that it is police agencies and not ‘countries’ that constitute the membership can be interpreted as an attempt to divorce the organization from national and international politics. Ultimately, then, it is the RCMP that is a member of Interpol and not the government of Canada. This fact seems to place Interpol in the third ring, the zone inhabited by organizations described as non-profit citizen’s voluntary organizations, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs).18 Examples of other agencies that inhabit this space include Greenpeace and the International Olympic Committee, neither of which are formally externally accountable to any other institution. The matter might be deemed to rest there. However, during the second half of the twentieth century, Interpol gradually acquired customary status as an IGO. The first step on this path took place in 1947 when the agency applied to ECOSOC for recognition as an NGO. This was turned down initially because UN officials could not understand how an organization of police officials (who are usually thought of as an essential arm of the state and firmly integrated into states’ administrations) could be considered non-governmental. Later that year, status as an NGO was granted. However, this was always awkward not only because the agents of the organization were police officials, but also because the organization very quickly gained consultancy status as part of the UN drug control strategy (Anderson 1989: 69–70). The position of Interpol as an NGO was reviewed in 1954 and again in 1969, but it was not until 1971 that any change was made. It was at this time, and after what Fenton Bresler (1992: 131) described as some ‘de Gaulle-like posturing’ by the then Interpol Secretary General Jean Nepote, that a new ‘special relationship’ was constituted between the UN and Interpol. This was done by means of a Special Arrangement in which Interpol would, under certain circumstances, be treated as if it were an intergovernmental organization.19 This resolution approved cooperation between the two organizations for the purposes of the prevention and repression of commonly recognized crimes. It allowed for the exchange of information, documentation, observers at meetings and some collaboration. In a legal opinion, written on behalf of the organization and concerning the legal problems of Interpol’s constitution, the distinguished international lawyer Paul Reuter regarded this resolution as, in effect, a treaty between the two organizations (Reuter n.d.).20 Andre Bossard, who followed Nepote in the office of Interpol 18

That is precisely where Held and McGrew place them (Held and McGrew 2002: 60). Economic and Social Council, Resolution 1579 (L) 288 of 3 June 1971. 20 Professor Reuter’s legal opinion states, in part, that Interpol could ‘apparently be rightly called an international intergovernmental organisation, and indeed has been recognised as such by the United 19

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Secretary General, was later to say that ‘[i]t is true that this arrangement did not officially modify Interpol’s status, but it did constitute recognition of the fact that Interpol differed from the other non-governmental organizations having consultative status with ECOSOC’ (quoted in Valleix 1984: 90). Since Interpol had, over this period, attained recognition from other organizations active in the transnational sphere (for example, the Customs Co-operation Council and the International Civil Aviation Organization) any ambivalence due to its lack of a treaty basis was gradually disregarded. Interpol accrued customary status as an IGO. Because it lacks an unambiguous and formal treaty basis, the historically somewhat awkward position of Interpol vis-à-vis the UN was also manifest in its relation to individual sovereign states. Indeed, until Interpol signed its first Headquarters Agreement with the government of France in 1972, the organization had not been officially recognized by the government of the country in which its headquarters had been based for the previous 25 years. The 1972 agreement endowed the organization with a recognized legal status in France, which was later enhanced by the second Headquarters Agreement in 1982. In many ways the 1982 Headquarters Agreement consolidated the organization (or at least its headquarters) as one that was largely free from external accountability to interested states or, by way of private court action, to private individuals. The legal immunities granted in the 1982 Agreement are extensive. Personnel working for the organization have effective full diplomatic immunity – even after they have ceased to work for the organization, as does the organization itself (Anderson 1989: 64; Fooner 1989: 61). Historically, financial accounts were kept secret, and it was not until 1990 that Interpol changed its practice in this regard.21 During this same period, equally important developments were taking place in the United States. There, between 1978 and 1981, four federal court cases mounted by private parties Nations Secretary General after some degree of understandable hesitation’ (Reuter n.d.: 1–2). He states further that, while it is true that nearly all IGOs have been set up thorough formal treaties, under the principles of international law ‘it is even possible to conceive of an intergovernmental organisation being set up without a single written instrument, merely as the result of a series of precedents created by governments’ (ibid.: 3–4). Professor Reuter conceded that this was not a complete answer to the question of Interpol’s status because it did not consider the terms of constitutional law in all of the (very numerous) participating countries. However, his view was that, because the various parties to the Interpol organization had ‘been applying its provisions for many years without ever having claimed that their commitment there under was unconstitutional’ and because Interpol was ‘a centre of voluntary cooperation, exercising no powers which would conflict with national sovereignty’ it would therefore ‘ill become a State to claim after so many years of successful activity that its commitment was unconstitutional and therefore invalid’ (ibid.: 5–6). Were such questions to be raised, it ‘would be more legal and more seemly for it [the objecting state] to withdraw from the agreement’ (ibid.: 6). Professor Reuter drew his legal opinion to a close by asking if there would be any benefit in raising Interpol’s status to that of a fully-fledged and bona fide UN Specialized Agency. His answer was that, although the organization might accrue a greater measure of prestige as a result, this had to be weighed against the loss of independence that this would bring since any such agreement would require full co-ordination with the administrative practices of the United Nations. He averred that participating states ‘would probably not adopt a unanimous position on such a transformation’ (ibid.: 19). 21 Under the terms of Article 26 of the constitution, which were adopted in 1990, external auditors are appointed on a three-yearly basis to conduct an external audit of the organization’s accounts and finances. Final drafts of the audit are presented to the Secretary General and the General Assembly.

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fundamentally challenged Interpol’s working relationship with US law enforcement agencies. The basis of these legal challenges was that Interpol was a kind of world police agency and that US co-operation with it, insofar as it involved law enforcement actions with respect to US citizens, was an infringement of the sovereign status of the US constitution. As Anderson put it, ‘this is mythology which appeals to imaginations prone to conspiracy theories’, but the court cases nevertheless represented a serious threat to US participation in Interpol (1989: 63). On 16 June 1983, US President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12425 designating Interpol ‘a public international organization entitled to enjoy the privileges, exemptions and immunities of the International Organizations Immunities Act’ (Fooner 1989: 184). Of course such immunity can be withdrawn. However, the immunities conferred by Executive Order 12425 were one more way in which the formal ties of external accountability were loosened. Regarding the organization’s external accountability, the real acid test concerned data protection and criminal intelligence exchange. In most contemporary police organizations information flow is the lifeblood, and so it is with Interpol. However, ‘it was not until 1982 that information dissemination became subject to rules and supervision originating outside of the organization’ (Fooner 1989: 77). The impetus for this came after the passage of new data protection legislation in France in 1978 – legislation that was intended to protect individuals from abuse of privacy and civil rights and to prohibit unwarranted disclosure of personal information. This law would have imposed the scrutiny of the French government on Interpol’s use and exchange of information and was viewed by many inside the organization as antithetical to its operations. Eventually, a compromise was devised and a supervisory board was constituted by an exchange of letters included in an appendix to the 1982 Headquarters Agreement. The board thus created comprises five members, three of whom are selected because of expertise in data protection issues. Of these three, one is appointed by the French government and one by Interpol, and these two choose the third who serves as the chair of the Supervisory Board. The fourth member is from Interpol’s Executive Committee and the fifth is selected by the chair from a list of five data protection/computer security experts submitted by Interpol. Initially, the French government chose the then head of the French data protection agency the Comité nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL). What cannot escape notice is that only one member of the board is not directly appointed by Interpol or chosen from a list pre-selected by that organization. Malcolm Anderson observed that ‘both in the composition of the Board and its terms of reference, the compromise seemed to lean towards the Interpol rather than the French government’s position’ (Anderson 1989: 66). In other words, supervision of Interpol’s use and transfer of criminal intelligence remains largely a matter for its own officials and the supervisory board is only superficially a mechanism of external accountability. Some European states continue to find the data protection measures adopted by Interpol to be wanting and scholars generally recognize that ‘the issue of data protection is likely to be a continuing problem which can only be definitively settled by formal treaty provisions’ (Anderson et al. 1995: 52).22 22

It might do to note that the efficiency and effectiveness of the CNIL in securing privacy and civil liberties interests of French citizens has also been criticized. See Raab (1994). As the time of writing there is an internal debate within Interpol regarding the rules relating to the processing of policing information and it is expected that new common security rules for Interpol’s information system will be adopted in 2003.

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In terms of external accountability, then, the legal position of Interpol is one which seems to grant it a considerable degree of latitude, and hence little incentive to adopt the techniques of account-ability in any routinized sense. Interpol’s 1956 constitution, supplemented by some subsequent resolutions of the annual General Assembly, sets out the organization’s internal lines of accountability. The General Assembly is the organization’s controlling body. It admits new members and may sanction existing members if they fail to comply with the rules set out in the organization’s statutes, although this is extremely rare. The General Assembly elects the Executive Committee which consists of 13 members: a president, three vice-presidents and nine delegates. This committee draws up the agenda for the General Assembly, plans Interpol’s activities and oversees the work of the Secretariat-General. The latter is responsible for daily management and is not formally held to account by any government of any member state. This suggests that the Secretary General of Interpol is independent, ‘rather like the UN Secretary General’ (Anderson et al. 1995: 51).23 Constitutionally, then, Interpol functions as an autonomous transnational organization, subject to its own internal accountability regime. The Practical Accountability of Interpol There is a long-standing debate in socio-legal scholarship regarding the relationship between legal frameworks, rules and prescriptive norms for accountability systems on the one hand and the practical working relationships of accountability on the other. Legal scholars tend to assume that clarification of legal prescriptions, or the imposition of rules, will have the effect of tightening accountability structures. Social scientists tend to focus on practical working relationships as the embodiment of real accountability (Stenning 1995: 5). In the previous section the formal legal framework for the accountability of Interpol was discussed. It was shown that, by virtue of its curious international status Interpol seems largely insulated from external accountability requirements. Because of its peculiar transnational character it is certainly not externally accountable in any sense to the global civil society whose interests it putatively aims to serve. This section examines the way in which the Interpol system functions. It will be seen that, in spite of the loose accountability framework that Interpol is wrapped in transnationally, its day-to-day working remains subject to national sovereignty claims. While Interpol’s General Assembly and General Secretariat operate in ways that seem virtually unfettered by external accountability requirements, National Central Bureaux (NCBs) cannot be obliged to 23

Except, of course that the UN Secretary General is almost entirely beholden to the Security Council. As Kofi Annan explained it, the office of UN Secretary General is ‘invested only with the power that a united Security Council may wish to bestow’ (quoted in Shawcross 2000: 19). Further to this point, Anderson notes that Articles 29 and 30 of the Interpol constitution establish the independence of the Secretary General (at 61). In general, the Secretary General should represent the organization, not a particular country. The Secretary General should neither solicit nor accept instructions from any government or authority outside the organization and should abstain from any action which might be prejudicial to its international role. Also, under Article 30, each member country is expected to undertake to respect the exclusively international character of the duties of the Secretary General and the staff, and abstain from influencing them in the discharge of their duties.

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comply with any directive issued centrally by the organization and remain effectively bound by the operational context of the policing establishment in the host country. That is to say, although the General Assembly and the General Secretariat are quite independent in matters affecting the organization’s opearations, a basic reality of Interpol’s workings is that national sovereignty prevails (Fooner 1989: 80). The practical day-to-day functioning of Interpol takes place through the system of National Central Bureaux (NCBs). It is the bureaux that are the workhorses of Interpol. Each participating country establishes its own NCB, which is supposed to facilitate communications between police agents in the host country and police agencies elsewhere. It is expected that the NCB in each country should receive formal appointment by its respective government and that this will usually be made by either the executive or legislative authority (Fooner 1989: 72). NCBs facilitate enquiries on behalf of requesting member police agencies. Each Interpol NCB operates as an independent unit within the structure of Interpol. No NCB is bound by treaty or international convention to send information to other NCBs, or to act on their behalf. Neither are they required to communicate with Interpol headquarters in Lyon or to act on its behalf. The workings of individual NCBs, and the interactions between them, ultimately define the operations of the Interpol system. These relationships are essentially about the international trade in ‘police information’, which is broadly defined in Interpol’s Rules on International Police Co-operation (the currently operating version of which came into force in 1984) as pertaining to ‘ordinary law crimes’. Under these operating rules all information in the Interpol network is declared to be subject to the internal controls of the organization and is not subject to the legislation of any nation. However, individual member police agencies do retain nominal control over the usage of information put into the Interpol system and can withdraw information from the Interpol archives (Bresler 1992: 190–91).24 There are wide differences in the functional capacity of different NCBs. Although the organization itself is de jure mandated by its charter instruments to facilitate co-operation between member police agencies, any country’s de facto co-operation is dependent on the way its own police authority is constituted, distributed and directed. Few countries have unified police structures. The policing division of labour in any given country – and the rivalries that this may foster – has important consequences for how individual NCBs fit into the transnational police mission. The configuration of the police sector within a specific jurisdiction and the priorities set thereby affect the operability of Interpol within a specific jurisdiction and its interoperability with partner police agencies abroad. Moreover, co-operation between Interpol members is also conditioned by the general level of cordiality between governments. To illustrate, Michael Fooner explained in 1989 how the American NCB developed from something close to an institutional non-entity in the early 1970s to the largest and most financially well endowed in the Interpol network by the end of the 1980s. This came during a 24 It is not inappropriate to say that member police organizations retain nominal control over information in the Interpol databanks because the security of that information is moot. Some professional police agents have been critical of the inability of Interpol to maintain the integrity and secrecy of information. Thus, regardless of principles of proprietary control, questions have been raised about actual control. There is currently an internal debate within Interpol regarding these operating rules and there are plans to try to tighten them up, but it is too early to say if changes to the operating rules will significantly alter perceptions.

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period when the US government was amplifying its own international policing capacity.25 It also came during the same period that the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS) – facilitating information exchange between the roughly 20,000 law enforcement agencies operating within the USA – had its greatest growth spurt.26 In the United States, state and local law enforcement agencies can contact each other and the Washington NCB through the NLETS. It is through the NLETS that local US police agencies request investigative assistance from Interpol members. Thus in 1990 an interface between the NLETS system and the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) went fully operational, thereby enabling police patrol officers in either country access to their respective national criminal databases on a 24-hour basis (see Sheptycki 1998b: 497). Enquiry response times using this interface were said at the time to range between three and five minutes. Information exchanged includes: driver vehicle licence details, criminal records, sex offenders registers and much else. The need to enhance the ‘interoperability’ of policing intelligence and information systems on a world-wide basis was a key theme in a speech given by then RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli to the 71st Interpol General Assembly in October 2002.27 But the speech also acknowledged, albeit in an oblique manner, that the public was not well informed about the steps being taken: ‘in our culture that is traditionally secretive, public involvement is a major challenge for all of us’.28 While Zaccardelli suggested that such secrecy was not optimal in terms of police legitimacy, he had no answer for his own question: ‘how do we keep citizens informed without compromising national security or the rights of our citizens?’29 Zaccardelli’s rhetorical question is symptomatic of the lack of transparency that has characterized the transnationalization of policing intelligence and information systems. Further, according to Fooner, by the last decade of the twentieth century not only was the Washington NCB especially well manned and financially supported, it had significantly enlarged its transnational capacity by establishing and maintaining a sub-bureau in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Fooner reported that ‘upon creation of the San Juan sub-bureau, the United Nations agreed to finance an Interpol telecommunications system in the Caribbean/Central American region, through the fund provided for drug abuse control’ (Fooner 1989: 123–24). This project was used to create a police communications network that spanned the Caribbean basin. It was, moreover, an important element of the substantially expanded international presence of US law enforcement in the region. In the NAFTA region and the Caribbean, then, transnational policing activity may be undertaken under the auspices of Interpol, but it is substantially underwritten by the political will of participating states, and in the contemporary period especially that of the United States.30

25

See Nadelmann (1993b) for a full account of the internationalization of US law enforcement. For an overview of the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications system, see http:// www.nlets.org/ (accessed on 3 January 2003). 27 The text of this speech is available at: http://www.interpol.int/Public/ICPO/ speeches/ Zaccardelli.asp. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 It is also worth noting that the UK maintains two sub-bureaux in the Caribbean region, one in Bermuda and the other in Grand Cayman. Also the Kingdom of the Netherlands maintains liaison 26

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Interpol NCBs in the countries of Western Europe are similarly technically sophisticated. These sometimes operate in close proximity to other transnational police communications nodes (specifically those of the Schengen Information System). Then, too, Interpol operates alongside Europol and within the context of complex formal and informal liaison officer networks (which include police agents and personnel from other policing-type agencies including customs, immigration and counter-terrorism). It is not always easy to empirically disentangle the different routes of bilateral and multilateral transnational police communications.31 Long-standing doubts regarding the security of Interpol communications channels and remarks about its inefficiency have tended to ensure that transnational police work within the European sphere has been undertaken via these other networks. This is especially so with regard to counter-terrorism. According to the London Metropolitan Police Special Branch, ‘Interpol staff are not experienced in affording the proper protection to classified material, do not possess the requisite security clearances, and the politics and motives are, to say the least, questionable in this context’ (House of Commons 1989–90, vol. 2: 43).32 Interpol channels are notoriously slow, and, consequently, transnational policing in the European region is more likely to make use of the other communications routes (Benyon et al. 1993; Sheptycki 2002b). The sheer complexity of transnational policing networks in Europe means that the accountability of pan-European policing is by no means clear (den Boer 2002).33 The sub-text to the establishment of Europol in the early 1990s is partly about the lack of accountability and control that various European governments had over police co-operation in the Euro-region. Thus, observing that no international oversight mechanism exists over Interpol, that it is accountable to no one and that there is no representative structure for governance of the management and operations of Interpol, Cyrille Fijnaut explained that Interpol was not – and could not be – given a European mandate in response to organized crime or terrorism (Fijnaut 1993: 10–12). Then, too, problems of administrative inefficiency have historically been widely expressed by practitioners. Thus in the European context Interpol suffered from (and continues to suffer from) lack of support from both its paymasters and its customers. Looking further afield, it is reasonably clear that the NCBs operating in most of Africa, the Middle East and many other parts of the developing world operate at a level far below the technical sophistication of those in Europe and North America. Thus, although the organization officially has 181 members, only about 50 per cent of those have access to Internet-based communications.34 The functional capacity of individual NCBs is dependent on officers in its dependencies, and Interpol offices maintained in Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles are technically subordinate to Dutch sovereignty. 31 See Joubert and Bevers (1996: 29–31,489–92). They are especially concerned to examine the extent to which such transnational police communications can be adequately governed by legal principles. See also Bigo (2000). Bigo argues that transnational liaison officers are substantially unaffected by frameworks of legal accountability. 32 Elsewhere in this report it is remarked that Interpol’s working methods are ‘bureaucratic and laborious’ (House of Commons 1989–90,vol. 1: xx v). 33 See Policing and Society: Special Issue on Policing Accountability in Europe 12/4: 243 for a wide-ranging debate on these issues. 34 See Interpol Annual Reports for 2000 and 2001: http://www.interpol.inf/.

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several interrelated factors: financial resources, their placement within the national structure of a specific country’s policing system, the cordiality of relations between specific countries and the nature of proximate allied communications nodes within the national and transnational network of police communications. As the history of the NCB system up to the present well illustrates, when the political will is lacking for an NCB to function within a specific national context (or with respect of specific issues) it can be institutionally sidelined, financially underfunded or otherwise derogated, so that its practical workings are stunted. Conversely, it is by well situating their NCBs within both the national and transnational policing architecture that participating countries gain influence over the workings of the organization. The practical accountability of the Interpol network is grounded in the technicalities and functioning of its communications infrastructure. The extent to which particular members develop their own international presence and maintain their own national central bureaux for linking into the transnational network that is Interpol determines in large measure their practical ability both to participate in the organization and to hold it to account. In certain practical respects then, Interpol is beholden to states’ interests. It is therefore unsurprising to find that there remain clear political differences regarding at least some of the work carried out through Interpol channels. The Politics of Accountability in Interpol The current constitution of Interpol was laid down and adopted in 1956. Subsequently there were concerted efforts to revise the document, beginning in 1986, but these were abandoned in 1993 because of significant differences of opinion among the members. The original 1956 constitution was drafted in both English and French, which has created some problems of interpretation.35 In terms of the politics of accountability for Interpol, perhaps the most important of the articles are those which stipulate the parameters of its mission. Article 2 states the aims of the organization: A. to ensure and promote the widest possible mutual assistance between all criminal police authorities within the limits of the laws existing in the different countries and in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; B. to establish and develop all institutions likely to contribute effectively to the prevention and suppression of ordinary law crimes. The concept of ‘ordinary law crime’ is important, but its meaning is by no means clear-cut. In French the term is criminalité de droit commun, but the term is not particularly common parlance in either language. The focus on ‘ordinary law crime’ is intended to bracket off those sorts of illegalities that are ‘political’ in nature. This point is further emphasized in Article 3 which stipulates that ‘it is strictly forbidden for the Organisation to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character’. 35

Anderson (1989: 61) states that the ambiguity of the constitution was a deliberate ploy to ensure the informality of the organization, and hence insulate it from international politics.

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Again, there are differences between the French and English versions. The French version of Article 3 states: ‘Toute activité ou intervention dans des questions ou affaires presentant un caractère politique, militaire, religieux ou racial est rigoureusement interdite a 1’Organisation.’ The difference between the English and French versions is significant, because the political and otherwise nature does not relate to the same thing. In the English version it relates to activities of the organization itself, which are forbidden if and when they acquire these characteristics. In the French version, it is the matters which the organization might be called on to intervene in which are the object. The difference of meaning is a source of uncertainty that is unhelpful in enunciating the mission of Interpol. In practice it is the French version which seems to be operative. Debates over the meaning of ‘political crime’ and what can be loaded into the meaning of ‘ordinary law crime’ have shaped the politics of accountability within Interpol in important ways during the last half of the twentieth century. The former term is evocative of concerns about infringement of states’ sovereignty. The latter is reflective of a subculturally defined law enforcement mission. There are many chapters in the history of the debates surrounding the ‘political crime’ concept. Three instances have been selected for brief mention here because they well illustrate what has been considered to be at stake. The first of these examples concerns the simultaneous hijacking of three Czechoslovak planes in March 1950. The Czechoslovak government, then under communist rule, requested that the hijackers be repatriated from whence they had sought refuge, which happened to be an American airbase in West Germany. The Czechoslovakian NCB issued red notices and, in so doing, argued that the offences of kidnapping and hijacking were ‘ordinary law crimes’. Indignant that the organization should be used to further the ends of a communist government, J. Edgar Hoover opined that the offence was ‘political’ in the sense laid down in the Interpol constitution. Hoover’s view was not shared by the Interpol General Secretariat, and the red notices were issued. The red notices proved to be a dead letter and extradition never happened. Nevertheless, Hoover severed FBI relations with Interpol, citing this incident as one of the principal reasons for doing so.36 The second example concerns the refusal of a request made by the Cuban NCB to the General Secretariat in 1959 to issue a red notice pertaining to senior police officers of the Batista regime that formerly ruled Cuba. In arguing the case, the head of the Cuban NCB stated that Batista’s police, who had been notorious for their violence and corruption, were ‘really thieves and criminals pretending to be police’ and that they were ‘offenders against ordinary criminal law’ (Bresler 1992: 127). Various members of the Secretariat spoke out in a General Assembly, arguing that the request had ‘a political motive’, and a red notice was never issued. The third example concerns the attack by Black September at the Munich Olympics on 5 September 1972. To most observers at the time this was clearly a terrorist attack, but the Interpol Secretariat refused to involve the organization in the matter on the grounds that terrorism is politically motivated and therefore under Article 3 could not properly be considered part of the organization’s mission.37 36

Interpol continued to liaise with US authorities through the offices of the US Treasury, despite the fact that at the time US law designated the FBI as the only official conduit for international police transactions. 37 For more details on these incidents consult Bresler (1992). On the case of the Czech hijacking, see ibid. at 110–12 and 120–21; on the case of the request of the Cuban NCB for a red notice against former members of the Cuban police establishment, see ibid. at 127–28; and on the Black September

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It can be seen from the above examples that the distinction between what might be considered an ‘ordinary law crime’ and a ‘political crime’ has been contested when the circumstances impinge on matters of perceived national interest, when the political stakes seem especially high, or when the political rhetoric is especially heated. In the context of the politics of Interpol’s accountability framework, attempts to smooth over any contradictions or tensions that arise rest on the assumption that limiting the scope of Interpol’s mission to ‘ordinary law crimes’ is an essential aspect of its political neutrality. Subsequent jurisprudence pertaining to the ‘political crime’ category turned on the notion of ‘preponderance’ (initially formulated in 1951) and the ‘doctrine of the conflict area’ (formulated in the mid-1980s). It has also been informed by international developments in extradition law, which has also taken account of the concept of ‘political offence’. To take the latter point first. The concept of ‘political offence’ had a stubborn presence in extradition law from the late eighteenth century onwards. Early on in the development of liberal democracy it became the practice to exclude offences of a political nature when considering the extradition of fugitive offenders. Thus, with regard to ‘common crimes’, such as murder or arson, extradition could be refused if it was established that the offence was of a ‘political character’. This exception was thought necessary for a number of reasons, but two stand out. The first was that it removed from adjudication by the courts matters which concern diplomatic relations and foreign policy – thus eliminating, or at least limiting, the possibility of warfare by judicial means. The second was that the political offence exception created the possibility of providing sanctuary to the victims of oppressive laws. It has been explained that liberal democratic theory contains within it ‘the notion that individuals have the right to engage in revolutionary political activity in pursuit of liberty’.38 Given this, democracies have been loath to surrender to foreign despots persons exercising the right to resistance and protest. This position was expressed in paragraph 1 of the 1957 European Convention on Extradition which states that ‘extradition shall not be granted if the offence in respect of which it is requested is regarded by the requested party as a political offence or as an offence connected with a political offence’ (quoted in Anderson et al. 1995: 227–28). But the term ‘political offence’ was not defined in the text; instead, this determination was left to the requested party to decide on a case-by-case basis, a reflection of near universal practice. Moreover, Article 3(2) of the Convention provided that extradition ‘shall be refused if the requested party has substantial grounds for believing that a request for extradition for an ordinary criminal offence has been made for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing a person on account of his race, religion, nationality or political opinion, or that that person’s position may be prejudiced for any of these reasons’. Chapter I of the Second Additional Protocol (1978) restricted the political offence exception, so that crimes against humanity and war crimes were not considered under it, but this did not immediately gain wide acceptance. The attacks at Munich, see ibid. at 149–55. Incidentally, the Cuban instance throws up another possible deficiency of the Interpol constitution, since there is no provision within it to withdraw membership. This is why Cuba remains a member of the organization despite the fact that it has not paid any membership dues since 1959. 38 Abraham Soafer, Legal Advisor to the US Department of State. Quoted in Anderson et al. (1995: 227).

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European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism seemed initially to augur a significant change to the political offence exception since it defined as non-political a list of specified offences ‘of the type used by violent terrorists’. However, Article 13 of the Convention provided a series of exceptions, including the political offence exception – which continued to feature in extradition law in Europe – even in cases of terrorism (Anderson et al. 1995: 231–33). As the end of the millennium approached, it seemed that this state of play would be maintained. But all of this was swept aside in the aftermath of 9/11, with the advent of the European Arrest Warrant which effectively abolished the political offence exception in the territory of the European Union and, quite possibly, globally.39 The stunning events of 11 September 2001 changed the nature of extradition law forever, but it is still too early to say precisely how that will affect the politics of accountability in Interpol. It may therefore be instructive to look to the changing interpretative understanding of Articles 2 and 3 of Interpol’s constitution over this period. Following the triple hijacking of the Czech airliners the Interpol General Assembly adopted Resolution AGN/20/RES/11. This established the principle of predominance and stated that no request should be made in connection with offences of a predominantly political, racial or religious character even if the facts amount to an offence against ordinary criminal law in the requesting country. The adoption of the predominance theory seemed to confirm the principle of total non-intervention in political cases, as evidenced by Interpol’s non-action in the wake of the Munich attacks. The significant change came in 1984. By this time the second Headquarters Agreement with the government of France had been signed and the customary status of Interpol as an independent IGO was sufficiently well established such that the organization could successfully rearticulate its position with regard to the numerous international conventions on terrorism. The re-articulation came in the form of Resolutions AGN/53/RES/6 and AGN 53/RES/7, the raison d’être of which was to provide the possibility of intervening in matters previously barred under Article 3. Interpol Resolution AGN/53/RES/6 used the term ‘terrorism’ for the first time and Resolution AGN/53/RES/7 confirmed the principle of predominance set out in the 1951 resolution; indeed, it went even further by giving a list of offences which were political in nature. Where the 1984 Resolutions really broke new ground was with the ‘doctrine of the conflict area’. Henceforth, in determining the ordinary-law predominance of a case, the existence or otherwise of links between the offenders’ aims and their victims would be taken into account. This was to be done with reference to the location of the crime, the status of the victims and the seriousness of the offence. The location of a terrorist act became the dominant consideration among these three criteria. This meant that the ban on co-operation could be lifted when the acts were committed outside the ‘conflict area’. Offences committed by 39

See the StateWatch Observatory at http://www.statewatch.org/observatory2.htm for comprehensive analysis of these issues post 9/11. It is worth noting that the European Arrest Warrant also abolished the concepts of ‘dual criminality’ and ‘double jeopardy’. Indeed, the Eurowarrant does not even include a habeas corpus safeguard, prompting Sir Neil MacCormick, a Scottish Nationalist Member of the European Parliament and Professor of Public Law at Edinburgh University, to observe that policy makers in the EU had muddied the waters by equating allegations with hard proof: ‘They seem to think that prosecutors never make mistakes. Well they do. It’s most urgent that we have remedies to prevent abuses of power’ (Evans-Pritchard 2002). The European Arrest Warrant will come into full force in 2004, without the mechanism of the writ of habeas corpus.

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persons with definite political motives but outside the territory where the conflict pertains, or when the offences committed had no direct connection with the political life of the offender’s country, could not be brought under the scope of Article 3. With the doctrine of the conflict area the issue of national sovereignty was sidestepped. As Raymond Kendal, Interpol Secretary General from 1985 to 1999, explained it: … what goes on in a particular conflict area would not be of interest to us for international police co-operation while it remains in that conflict area. On the other hand, if a Jordanian comes to Paris and shoots the Israeli Ambassador, then it does become our concern because it is outside of the strict conflict area. (Bresler 1992: 184)

In a globalizing world, where crime and terrorism had gone transnational, Interpol seemed ready to intervene in political crimes defined as terrorism. Astute observers might well have asked questions about how the changing doctrine might affect other forms of transnational crime, such as crimes against the environment – the dumping of hazardous or toxic waste on the high seas, for example – which also transcend the boundaries of particular jurisdictions. And yet, the issue of national sovereignty remained. Among the principles articulated in AGN/53/RES/7 and AGN/53/RES7 it was stated that: Although Member states have the inherent right as sovereign nations to determine the political character of an offence, their rights do not impede the Organization from ensuring that the provisions of its constitution are respected. Similarly, the Organization’s right to interpret its constitution is not to be construed as limiting the Member’s ability to reach a contrary decision with respect to the political character of an offence.

The continuing and underlying presence of the doctrine of national sovereignty meant that member countries retained the right to decide whether and how they would make use of Interpol’s infrastructure when acts of terrorism (or other crimes defined as ‘political’) were concerned. It also meant that they were free to use any other channels available to them in the event that political considerations led the organization to refuse to process their requests. The coincidence of the doctrine of the conflict area alongside the principle of national sovereignty was an attempt to create a legal balance by which the organization could maintain the appearance of political neutrality. This balance, and the appearance of neutrality it projects, obscures a paradox. In principle, political power (i.e. policing power) should only be exercised within the limits of the law – including international law – but ultimately it has to be admitted that there are contingencies when the exercise of such power has escaped legal purview. Discussion and Conclusion This essay has set out to extend the standard paradigm regarding the accountability of police and policing by giving consideration to the accountability of Interpol. It was argued that this very special case could hold general lessons for understanding the character of the ‘global system’. Understanding the curious nature of Interpol’s accountability framework offers general lessons about a world where transnational actors and forces cut across the boundaries

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of national communities in diverse ways and where questions about who is accountable to whom, and on what basis, are not easy to answer. Regional and global interaction networks of policing agents are developing and strengthening, and they have variable and multiple impacts across different countries. This is not to say that national sovereignty has been subverted. Rather, sovereignty has been transformed. It has been displaced as an illimitable, indivisible and exclusive form of public power – as, for example, exhibited by the traditional image and capacities of the ‘public police’ – and embedded in a system of multiple, overlapping networks of policing that extend from the parochial domain to the transnational. What the discrete history of Interpol reveals is a story of sub-state actors being elevated to the level of transnational actors. Manned by self-styled ‘international civil servants’ (Bresler 1992: 189–90). who, in accountability terms, are routinely only loosely bound by the particular interests of the major players in the transnational state system, and cloaked by the stereotypifications of the subculturally defined nature of the law enforcement mission, Interpol is a policing brand-name with world-wide recognition, even if its day-to-day operations remain a mystery to most people. Although admittedly it is difficult to measure precisely, the image of the transnational policing mission that has been constructed around the Interpol marque has consequences for policing everywhere. For this reason, if for no other, we would want to ensure that Interpol is accountable to the global commonwealth. The Interpol network exists within a broader web of policing communications. Transnational policing is played out in conditions that resemble a global ‘state of nature’ where the G8 Leviathans walk amidst stout competition. Such a state of affairs can, all too easily, give rise to a sense of fatalism. If the more powerful geo-political forces are not to settle these pressing matters with reference to their own objectives and by virtue of their own power, then existing structures of accountability for transnational policing need to be reconsidered. The developing ‘nodal conception of governance’ can be stretched to consider how transnational policing agents may be brought to account via democratic means. But we are still a long way off cosmopolitan democracy. What ever else an examination of accountability for Interpol teaches us, it is that multi-level nodal governance can be exceedingly undemocratic. Contemporary transformations in policing and security are partly underwritten by the development of new, transnational, developments in insecurity. Policing is becoming transnationalized and so we need to think about transnational accountability. In the absence of a court with universal jurisdiction over all transnational policing work, and in the absence of an executive power with global responsibility for this kind of security function, there remains much work, both theoretical and practical, to be done. As with transnational governance generally, calling for the development of a democratic framework of accountability for Interpol can hardly be expected to provide an instant solution. However, to label this call as Utopian is to cleave to a cynical obsession with brute power. Democratic accountability for transnational policing sounds naive, but the alternative is simply depressing. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Olivier Foures, Legal Reports Officer to the Office of the Secretary General of Interpol, for his input on this essay. Although he does not agree with

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every aspect of the analysis pursued here, he has read earlier drafts and corrected my more egregious howlers. I am grateful to him for the supply of relevant documents as well as his time, effort and patience in discussing them with me. This essay was originally presented at a conference put on by the Law Commission of Canada in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in February 2003, entitled ‘In Search of Security: An International Conference on Policing and Security’. I would like also to thank the anonymous reviewers for the Canadian Journal of Law and Society for their engaging feedback.

[12] Global Law Enforcement as a Protection Racket: Some Sceptical Notes on Transnational Organized Crime as an Object of Global Governance1 Introduction: The Threat of TOC In the 1990s the concept of transnational organized crime (TOC) emerged as a relatively new one in academic criminology and popular discourse and it remains something of a contested term. As Adam Edwards and Pete Gill (2003a) explain, the terminology of TOC emerged at a specific historical conjuncture when a confluence of salient factors, foremost among which was the end of the Cold War and its replacement by a seemingly more fragile and tentative ‘new world order’, gave rise to a new security discourse predicated on combating TOC. The insecurity that TOC describes has its roots in two phenomena, the global movement of peoples and of commodities, which are interrelated in complex ways. Those interrelationships can be related back to contradictions in the neo-liberal underpinnings of the new world order itself, for that order has established two realms of trade and movement. In brief, there are both illicit and licit trades in the globalizing economy and, while both may engender human misery even while they offer up opportunities, only some illicit market practices attract concerted efforts at control via the attentions of law enforcement. It is the practices so targeted that define the real official parameters of TOC. This essay will not attempt to comprehend broad questions about transnational policing and TOC (see Sheptycki 1998b, 2002b). The aim here is narrower. I want to explore an idea suggested by the American political scientist Charles Tilley (1985) that state-making is analogous to a protection racket, although I must caution at the outset that I have somewhat different ends in mind. In his contribution, Tilley aimed to cast light on the processes associated with state-building and war-making that attended the historical emergence of the state system in Europe and, latterly, more globally. Here I am concerned to look at the emergence of transnational crime control on the agenda for ‘global governance’ in the contemporary period. I reason that, just as the analogy between state-making and organized crime could be used to cast light on the historical conditions of modern governance, it can be pressed into use Originally published in A. Edwards and P. Gill (eds), Transnational Organised Crime: Perspectives on Global Security, London: Routledge, pp. 42–59 (2003). 1

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to illuminate some of the contradictions of global governmental institution-building in the contemporary period. Governance is the development and implementation of policy for the management of populations and territory. Democratic governance implies that this is undertaken with regard to the general interests of society, wherever the boundaries of such can be said to lie. Global governance suggests that policy development and implementation for the management of populations and territory is undertaken with regard to world-wide issues, and there are real questions about the extent to which such is undertaken within a democratic framework and under the rule of law (Marks 2000). Issues of governance are often linked in fundamental ways to questions about the (in)stability of the social and political order generally, and in the contemporary period this has given rise to criminological theorization about the crisis of insecurity in high-crime societies (Garland 2000). It seems obvious that a world enthralled by globalization-crisis-talk will produce a globalized version of the ‘crisis of crime control’. What we are concerned to understand here is TOC as an object for global governance. In order to do so we need to look at the institutions that seek to govern TOC, their practices and how they are legitimated. The basic task then is to provide a short descriptive overview of changes in the architecture of policing common to a number of OECD countries and to describe the emergent architecture of transnational policing. This institution-building needs to be viewed in a more sceptical light than the engineers of the transnational policing complex would normally entertain. These institutional developments can be understood as both a product of, and productive of, a wide and continuously emergent assortment of identified TOC ‘threats’. This reciprocal relationship between controller and controlled raises questions about how much latitude law enforcement ‘experts’ should be given in defining the transnational agenda for crime control and how it might be rendered accountable to the global community. In other words, TOC discourse is related to more general questions about the political complexion of the global system. A sceptical view will serve to show that political ideals about transparency of government, human and civil rights, and a host of others principles are all affected by changes in social control practice, changes which are increasingly being led from a transnational domain that lies above the strictures of democratic accountability and the rule of law as it has been traditionally understood. In the world after 9/11 (when the United States suffered a catastrophic terrorist attack and subsequently set about creating a transnational alliance which, however frail, declared a world-wide war on terrorism), such questions might seem academic. However, it should be made plain that many of the developmental trends in transnational policing that became headline news after 9/11 were already well underway prior to that time. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 were horrific and consequently lent a seemingly unassailable aura of legitimacy to an already established project of institution-building. Despite the present circumstances, it is well to be vigilant and ask some critical questions. This is so because the awesome power of law enforcement institutions lies in their capacity to orchestrate surveillance and muster coercive force in the maintenance of a social order. In a world that has gone global we must ask: whose order and how is it sustained?

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The Protection Analogy Let us examine Tilley’s analogy in a little more detail. It is well to recall that his contribution to political theory was not made in an expressly criminological vein. Rather, Tilley’s essay was part of a long-running dialogue about state formation in Western Europe (Evans et al. 1985; Tilley 1975). At the risk of great oversimplification, that problematic might be reduced to four core questions: how states establish themselves against other states (the military question); how states establish an administrative monopoly of coercive force over their territory (the police question); how states maintain a system of resource extraction in order to pay for it all (the tax question); and how they did so with at least a minimal degree of legitimacy (the political question). The essay, ‘War making and state making as organised crime’ (1985) brings all of these concerns together. Therein Tilley examines the way in which European states incrementally built up their capacities of resource extraction in order to fund war abroad and how this process required a system of domestic police. Political sociologists broadly concurred with his outline (Mann 1993) as did historians of the police (Bayley 1975; Liang 1992; Mazower 1997). In sketching the parameters of this paradigm, we might begin by noting that there is uniqueness to each state’s institutional development and, hence, each enclave of governance has its own policing history (Bayley 1975). Further, each state has had different political traditions, and hence different ways of legitimating its governance of the social body defined as ‘the nation’. Policing was a set of practices intended to assure domestic tranquillity and boost resource extraction so as to be able to amass the resources to engage in military ventures abroad in defence of ‘the nation’s interests’. At a high level of abstraction, we could say that the nation-state system that grew up in Europe was, mutatis mutandis, akin to the competitive interplay of neighbourhood protection rackets found in some large cities. What makes this analogy so interesting in the contemporary period is that it can be applied in the context of global governmental institution-building. Robert Keohane (1989) explained this institution-building with reference to what he termed ‘neo-liberal institutionalism’, wherein inter-state relations are governed, albeit only partially and imperfectly, by established transnational rules, norms and conventions. According to Keohane, in order to understand state behaviour in the contemporary period ‘we must not only take account of the relative physical power capabilities of states and recognise the absence of hierarchical authority [between them], we must also comprehend world political institutions – regardless of whether they are formally organised and explicitly codified’ (1989: 2). According to this perspective, foreign policy personnel who pursue a given state’s interests are constrained by transnational regimes of which they are only part authors. Some time in the recent past the United Nations and a host of other supranational bodies including, but not limited to, the OECD, the IMF, the GATT (the forerunner of the WTO), NATO, the WEU, the EU and the Commonwealth Secretariat, became important global institutions in their own right. The sometimes explicitly codified, but more often informal, network of transnational policing that is part of this complex of ‘world political institutions’ should not escape the criminologist’s attention. The protection analogy that Tilley used to cast light on nation-state-building in an earlier period of modernity must be modified in order to take account of these transnational institutions of governance. The

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protection racket is being extended up to the transnational level where global institutions also lay claim to the responsibility to ‘govern’ crime. Policing with Global Intelligence There have been many fads and fashions in policing since ‘Police Studies’ was established as an area of academic inquiry. Problem-oriented policing, community policing, police ‘management by objectives’: all have had their moments. Towards the end of the 1990s, the policing idea that gained world-wide currency was ‘intelligence-led policing’ (Sheptycki 2000b). Intelligence-led policing (ILP) rests on a technological revolution aimed directly at controlling crime and criminals. It has thus manifested itself around the world on the back of transnational police technology transfer (Sheptycki 1998e). It is in keeping with the police occupation’s self-perception of ‘real police work’ (Reiner 2000). Intelligence-led policing is strategic, future-oriented and targeted. It focuses on the identification, analysis and management of criminal threats. At the organizational level it requires policing institutions to allocate more resources to the computer-aided collection, collation and analysis of ‘criminal intelligence’. It is information-dependent and the (inter)connectivity of its information environment holds the key to its success. Following Mike Maguire (2000: 333), the ILP revolution brought about a shift in the language of policing, introducing new terms such as ‘strategic’ and ‘proactive’, ‘risk-based’ policing. The approaches implied by these terms aim to target suspect populations and individuals in a highly systematic way. Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson (2000) coined the term ‘surveillant assemblage’ to describe the repertoire of techniques, including electronic surveillance, participating informants, database matching and CCTV surveillance which so changed the performance of policing. In the contemporary period the state apparatus is highly complexified, with a multiplicity of state institutions (Departments for Health, Work, Environment, Revenue, etc.), sharing responsibility for different aspects of the maintenance of the health of the social body. Public police institutions (the ‘state’ police) are loosely coupled to these other institutions via an apparatus of information exchange for the management of suspect populations and territory (Broder 2000; Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Johnston 2000b). In Pete Gill’s (2000) estimation, the ILP project is merely the technologically enhanced ‘rounding up of the usual suspects’. As will be shown, this process is extending transnationally. The ILP approach took root in the United Kingdom following the Audit Commission’s report Helping with Enquiries (1993), but it was developed first in the United States. Early work there laid down the precedent for prioritizing the intelligence function in policing (Godfrey and Harris 1971; Dintino and Martens 1983). Subsequently the United States invested heavily in building a cross-agency intelligence sharing capacity. At the turn of the twenty-first century, knowledge gained from electronic surveillance by the FBI could be combined with information from undercover DEA agents, financial intelligence held by the Internal Revenue Service as well as knowledge held by customs, the coastguard and other agencies on a routine basis. The United States had created a nationwide surveillant assemblage that was almost inconceivable only a short time before (Sheptycki 2002b). These changes were evident further afield. Another instance is the pattern of development that took place in South Africa in the

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post-apartheid years. According to Elrena van der Spuy (2000), overseas assistance to the South African Police Service (SAPS) moved through three distinct phases during this time. At first the focus was on integrating the police service there and reorienting it around the philosophy of ‘community policing’. In the second phase, the emphasis was on developing basic policing capacities ‘on the ground’. Previously policing in South Africa had been bent to the task of enforcing racial segregation and thus the practical task was to develop the ability to deliver basic policing services (see also Brogden and Shearing 1993). This development project remained incomplete when the emphasis of overseas aid to the SAPS shifted towards controlling organized crime. Integral to this, and in common with developments elsewhere, was an increased emphasis on orchestrating regional criminal intelligence capacity. The aim was to network the communications function across the entire region of southern Africa. No small task. Similar developments can be seen in a variety of regions (Sheptycki 1995b, 1998e). There was no escaping the fact that in the early years of the twenty-first century, the techno-cops were in global pursuit of organized crime. Perhaps the 1997 annual report of the Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada (CISC) put it best. The report noted that while ‘transnational crime’ had become part of the police lexicon, policing had been undergoing its own evolution. The CISC applauded the move from old-style reactive policing to future-oriented, multi-agency law enforcement as a necessary response to the challenges of organized crime. Intelligence-led policing and the image of (transnational) organized crime went hand-in-hand. A similar set of observations was put forward by Jurgen Storbeck, Director of Europol, in his 1999 Police Foundation Lecture in London. He welcomed the furtherance of police intelligence capabilities in the member countries of the European Union because clandestine trade and associated money laundering activities were ‘undermining the security and well-being of our citizens at every level and in every community’ (1999: 5). In his view, this necessitated some transference of resources from the local level up to the national and transnational level. He argued that, by doing so, ‘we might stand a real chance to challenge the continuing growth of international crime and help preserve the security, not just of nations, but of local communities and of every citizen’ (ibid.: 13). In many places around the world, albeit to greater or lesser extents, policing agencies changed in fundamental ways towards the end of the twentieth century. The ILP approach, propelled by transnational police technology transfer, heralded a renewed emphasis on controlling crime, especially ‘serious and organised crime’. This dovetailed well with rising concerns to police transnational clandestine markets and, when it came to it, could be pressed into service against terrorism as well. As a result, the variety of styles exhibited by different national policing systems began to blur into one another. Such blurring makes possible the orchestration of transnational policing under the rubric of ‘risk forecasting’. International ‘liaison officers’ (Bigo 2000) may be tasked according to risk-based logic, but it should not escape our attention that the strategic analysis produced by these transnational agents affects the framing of police priorities in local communities. It is thus that the transnational capacities of police agencies grow and are fused into a transnational police ‘intelligence pyramid’ (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, 1997: 7). Policies for the governance of TOC are set at the apex of this pyramid, in the transnational domain (see Stelfox 2003).

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Strategies of ‘Police Protection’ in the Contemporary Period Along with the rise in intelligence-led-policing approaches to these forms of crime, we can note a significant shift in enforcement strategy away from the criminals towards going after the proceeds of crime (Sheptycki 2000e). This strategy is justified on five counts (OCDETF 1984). The first is an argument that seizing the proceeds of crime will disrupt criminal enterprises. It is reasoned that the removal of criminal assets will deprive criminal groups of some of the necessary resources to carry out criminal activity. The second is that it will deter crime. Since the crimes of the illicit market are undertaken on the basis of cost/benefit calculations made by reasoning criminals, threat of asset seizure is in accord with traditional deterrence theories. The third is closely allied to the first and suggests that taking away criminal assets undermines the criminal opportunity structure. Since the proceeds of crime can be used to finance future crime, it makes sense to confiscate it when possible on the grounds that it will avert future ills. The fourth is that, with enough attention to detail, the extra administrative costs to the criminal justice system for the management of asset freezing and forfeiture could be offset by monies seized. The fifth is that ‘dirty money’ is a threat to the well-being of the financial system and, as such, any police action to weed it out is of utmost necessity. Of course, subsequent to 9/11, the idea that ‘suspicious transactions’ ought to be policed in order to protect society from the clear and present danger of ‘narcoterrorism’ made this project virtually unassailable politically. Actually this was a crucial transformation in the global antimoney-laundering movement. Up to that point, money laundering was understood to be about taking ‘dirty money’ and making it clean; hence the metaphor of ‘laundering’ (Sheptycki 2000e). Suspicions that the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 had been financed by monies coming from legitimate sources, that ‘clean money’ had been made ‘dirty’, meant that logic of financial surveillance was no longer restricted to that of ‘anti-money laundering’. All transactions could be considered suspicious. Narcoterrorism, the practices of financing political violence through the clandestine trade in drugs, gave a legitimacy basis for total global financial surveillance that transcended all but the staunchest libertarian objections (Rahn 2001). We shall return to the issue of terrorism in the conclusion, but it should not escape our attention at this point that the trend towards ever greater law enforcement watchfulness over the money-movers was already well established prior to 11 September 2001, and that it had a logic of its own. The new enforcement strategy of going after the proceeds of crime accompanied the shift to ILP, and indeed in some instances it helped to finance it. This prompted some critical reflection about the perverse effects of civil asset forfeiture as a budgetary supplement to law enforcement (see, for example, Blumenson and Nilsen 1997; Hawkins and Payne 1999; Jensen and Gerber 1996). The shift towards going after the proceeds of crime makes policing into a system of resource extraction. That system of extraction may be rationalized and legitimated on the basis of the above-mentioned criteria, but any such system of evaluation would be fatally flawed. First, the suggestion that seizing the proceeds of crime disrupts criminal enterprises may be correct but, from a strictly criminological point of view, this is not necessarily a good thing. Cash and illicit commodities are linked in a complex chain of exchange lubricated by debt and credit. When law enforcement operations take money out of a debt–credit chain, indebted

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criminal entrepreneurs may feel forced to adopt alternative ways of raising funds (such as armed robbery) or risk the wrath of their debtors. The unintended and therefore unpredictable consequences of law enforcement action on criminal networks may outweigh the benefits. Tallying criminal assets seized has all of the same problems that traditional measures of police performance, such as arrest or clear-up rates, do. They do not signal a change in the underlying conditions that produced the crime in the first place. Announcing in press releases quantities of illegal commodities or cash seized is no more a measure of police success than arrest statistics or other police-recorded crime measures. Second, the idea that asset forfeiture will act as a significant deterrent to enterprise criminals who operate on the basis of a profit and loss balance sheet is contradictory. Apart from the rather obvious point that general deterrence has long been attempted, using a range of disciplinary techniques from capital punishment to the fine, without measurable success, the idea falls down on its own terms. Rational, calculating criminals trading in the illicit market, if indeed they are rational and calculating, will seek to predict their percentage loss due to these administrative efforts. Seeing that their enterprise risks the threat of asset confiscation, such rationally calculating criminals would obviously seek to ensure that the profits from successful transactions will compensate for the losses incurred. The cost of such losses can be passed on to the customer, or squeezed out of the primary producer, thereby compounding the miseries symptomatic of illicit markets. It is not certain that there are actually rationally calculating criminals totting up a balance sheet in strict accountancy terms, but it seems undeniable that threats to confiscate or freeze assets are merely another cost of doing business. Opportunity reduction theory may be viewed as an extension of the deterrent argument. This suggests, among other things, that criminal assets are an essential part of the criminal opportunity structure. Removal of these assets therefore does not so much deter as it reduces the opportunities to commit crime. This gives rise to insuperable measurement difficulties, since the stated goal is to reduce potential future offending. While criminologists have produced a raft of research showing the utility of crime prevention in a host of contexts (see Pease 1997 for an overview), it has not been demonstrated that this way of thinking can be applied to the illicit market. This is because market offences are committed with the aim to supply an illegal service or product to willing buyers and there is no accurate means of measuring the extent of either. While it may be plausible that confiscating criminal assets to some extent denies the tools necessary to trade in the criminal market, there is no way to measure the effect of this with confidence. Further, what little evidence criminologists have accumulated about the functioning of criminal markets does not indicate that they are particularly vulnerable to this tactic of disablement (Hobbs 1995, 1998; van Duyne 1998; Ruggiero 1997). Periodically, the level of asset confiscation maybe truly catastrophic for a particular criminal enterprise, but for the market as a whole it is merely part of the cost of ‘doing business’. Asset confiscation tactics against illicit markets generally amount to a form of taxation. Fourth, it is often suggested that, by going after the proceeds of crime, the mission against transnational organized crime can be achieved in a cost-effective manner. This might be restated as a hope that asset forfeiture will impact on criminal enterprise as excessive taxation does on legitimate business. If levels of resource extraction from the criminal market are sufficient, so this line of reasoning goes, it cuts into profits, reduces the availability of working capital for existing ventures, and dries up reserves which might otherwise be used to start

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up new ones. This assumption fails to recognize that, just as legitimate capital is displaced offshore when it is threatened by ‘excessive taxation’, so too may ‘dirty money’ be displaced. It is possible to expand the enforcement regime transnationally in order to compensate for this displacement, but that may only serve to further spread the circulation of ‘dirty money’ within the circuits of global capital. It has been documented how anti-money-laundering initiatives that began in the banking sector later moved on to other parts of the financial system, including insurance companies and credit card companies, because the ‘dirty money’ had moved (Gilmore 1995, 1999; Sheptycki 2000e). This somewhat undermines the logic of the fifth reason for going after the proceeds of crime, since the ironic and unintended consequence of anti-money laundering has been to spread the ‘contamination’ around the financial system. If ‘dirty money’ is a systemic risk to the financial system, displacing it across the institutional field is not a good thing. These issues beg questions about the size of the global illicit market. This is a difficult matter and estimates of the amount of global illicit capital circulating in the late 1990s ranged from between US$100 billion and US$500 billion (Sheptycki 2000e), paltry beside the estimated US$175 billion a day of financial transactions and money movements taking place in the legitimate circuits of capital (Nelken 1997). The proceeds of crime which are also flowing through the veins of the transnational financial system are difficult to distinguish, isolate and fix on. As a result, successful confiscation can be no more than a random occurrence, a far off probability which potentially poses great inconvenience (akin to bankruptcy) to particular participants in illicit trade. However, systemically it accomplishes little more than modest resource extraction from the market as a whole. A Global Protection Racket? We have seen how many different national policing systems have begun to harmonize as a result of several transnational trends. In particular we have observed that policing resources are being redeployed at the local, national and transnational levels as a result of concerns about TOC, and that policing is increasingly ‘intelligence-led’. We have also observed that these structural changes have been accompanied by the rise of a new enforcement strategy that is being pursued globally, a strategy predicated ongoing after the proceeds of crime. Valsamis Mitsilegas (2003) has shown that the adoption of anti-money-laundering tactics has differed in important respects between jurisdictions. However, as was observed in an earlier part of this essay, the apex of the police intelligence pyramid lies in the transnational domain. It is here that we encounter what Robert Reiner has described as ‘the new International of technocratic police experts’ (1997: 1007). It is policies and practices established at a level above national states that are shaping the outcomes of transnational policing. The flagship of the ‘Police International’ is Interpol. The historical development of this institution is a story well told (Anderson 1989) but the details of that history need not detain us here. What is important to note is that Interpol is one small but important ‘piece of the machinery’ comprising the transnational policing complex (Sheptycki 1995b, 1997a). Like transnational policing generally, Interpol was never constituted by any formal treaty. In the words of Fenton Bresler (1992), it is more of a ‘policeman’s club’. It is often said that Interpol

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is an ‘inter-governmental organization’ (IGO). If this is taken in its formal sense, as defined by Article 57 of the United Nations Charter, this is erroneous. This is evidenced by the answer to a written question put by MP Brian Gould to the UK Home Office in 1977. Mr Gould asked ‘whether there is any formal signed agreement under which the United Kingdom is a member of Interpol’. The reply was that since ‘membership of the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) is not obtained by an intergovernmental treaty or agreement … the question of a formal signed agreement by the United Kingdom does not therefore arise’ (House of Commons 1977). In 1949, the organization was granted category ‘B’ status as a non-governmental organization with consultative status at the UN. NGOs are non-profit citizens’ organizations which may be national or international. These are in contrast to IGO s which are a variety of specialized agencies established by intergovernmental agreement. Interpol cannot be described as a non-profit citizens’ voluntary organization, neither is it an IGO properly speaking; it is merely treated as if it were an IGO. Its ambiguous status vis-à-vis the United Nations is reinforced by its own constitution which has long served to guard the organization from outside political control (Swallow 1999). Here we have an actually existing transnational policing platform which, like the transnational police enterprise generally, is only loosely coupled to the transnational state system. The nature of Interpol’s autonomy is difficult to grasp since its personnel are police officers (sub-state actors) on temporary secondment from member police forces and its budget has historically been limited to what member police forces have been willing and able to supply. Therein lies the significance of the developments analysed here. Interpol is ideally situated to participate in the transnational orchestration of intelligence-led policing operations that draw on the resources of national states. At the same time, the organization might expect to benefit financially from the sharing of assets confiscated, thereby fuelling itself for the next ILP initiative against global clandestine trade. Such a pattern might be repeated endlessly, accompanied by performance indicators that relate the assets frozen and seized, the number of criminal enterprises broken up through arrest and ever darker prognostications about transnational organized crime and the need to take stronger enforcement action. Protection racket indeed. Interpol enthusiasts might protest that this unfairly labels the organization and it is perhaps too easy to target this one particular institution. This does nothing to alter the fact that the transnational policing enterprise generally lacks any framework for political accountability. Prior to the ILP revolution this was less consequential, because transnational policing was only sporadic and ad hoc. The advent of techno-policing capacities at the same historical moment when a new enforcement strategy (going after the proceeds of crime) was advanced contributed to propitious conditions for the emergence of transnational policing as a selfreplicating and self-guided enterprise. This raises urgent questions about the nature and character of policing as an aspect of global governance in the contemporary period. Holding Transnational Policing to Account It is possible to ask sceptical questions about the character of global governance with regard to a whole range of policy areas. When it comes to transnational policing, it is especially

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important to do so because the awesome power of police institutions lies in their surveillance capacity and the ability to muster coercive force in the maintenance of social order. This is not an attempt to side-step the issue of the social harms caused by TOC or terrorism, but if global governance is to be undertaken with regard to the general interests of the global commons, it is well to enquire as to who and what is being policed against and with what results. In the decade prior to 2001, transnational policing was almost exclusively deployed against ‘transnational organized crime’. But a close look at what was defined as TOC revealed that it was not all that TOC could be. Transnational organized crime consists of illicit trade. A range of commodities can be brought to the transnational illicit market place. Drugs, nuclear and radioactive substances, human body parts and human beings, endangered species and products distilled from them, stolen goods or ‘counterfeit goods’ (i.e. intellectual property theft), weapons, precious gems and other high-value commodities, pornography and toxic waste have all been bought and sold illegally. Further, the illegal dumping of toxic waste, insider dealing, tax evasion, fraudulent business practices and the corruption of state-based kleptocrats might also be described as crimes of the illicit market, or at least as economic crimes. The concept of transnational organized crime as it has been deployed by the transnational police has never stretched to all of these commodities and practices, although the UN Convention Against Transnational Crime is general enough in scope that most of these may come under its purview.2 From the point of view of transnational governance, the issue is how priorities are set for the policing of this diverse range of issues so that selective law enforcement is in the best interests of the global commonwealth. Seen from the perspective of global governance, what is required is an agreed calculus by which to allocate policing resources in order for them to be efficiently and effectively targeted on criminal activities that cause social harm. It is not contentious to suggest that scarce policing resources should be targeted where they can be expected to do the most good, and cause least harm. And yet it is not an easy matter to decide if the illegal dumping of toxic waste on the high seas is more or less harmful than any other type of economic crime, or if law enforcement against drugs markets does more good than bad, or if the exploitation associated with human smuggling or trafficking might be better answered by more concerted efforts at peacekeeping and development aid rather than border maintenance and the restriction of asylum policies. These are not technical questions; they are political ones. What is required, therefore, is an open platform where the questions of global justice and legitimacy can be 2

This convention is essentially an instrument of international co-operation. Its purpose is to promote inter-state co-operation in order to combat TOC. Five offences, whether committed by individuals or corporate entities, are covered: participation in an organized crime group; corruption; money laundering; obstruction of justice; and ‘serious crime’. There are two essential prerequisites for application: the relevant offence must have a transnational aspect and the offence must be committed by an organized criminal group. These terms are defined very broadly; ‘serious crime’ in particular is defined in such a way as to include all significant criminal offences ‘punishable by a maximum deprivation of liberty of at least four years or a more serious penalty’. The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, opened for signature on 12 December 2000, UN GAOR, 55th Sess. Annex 1 Agenda Item 105, at 25 UN Doc. A55/383 (2000). A vast range of activity is encompassed by this legal frame, far beyond the capacities of all the national and transnational police-type agencies combined. It is therefore inevitable that some sort of selection in law enforcement will take place, whether by random probability, ideological bias, or a mixture of the two.

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discussed and debated so that the transnational police enterprise does not become insensitive in its partiality and selectivity. A precondition for such dialogue is to sweep away the police-centred criteria for judging the success of the transnational policing mission. It is not impossible in principle to develop methods for measuring social harm using a diverse range of indicators and, on that basis, develop a set of systematic competences for formally established and accountable transnational policing. Sadly, at present, that is not how things go. Instead, transnational policing is a more, rather than less, self-directed set of surveillance and enforcement practices that randomly impact on some sectors of the transnational illicit market. These impacts are justified and legitimated on the basis of process indicators – the number of arrests, assets seized, criminal groups disrupted – not on the basis of concrete outcomes, such as the detriments averted, or the enhanced quality of life and justice. More worrying still, in recent years, as police surveillance capacity has grown, legal innovations making it possible for ‘asset confiscation’ have potentially created an inexhaustible source of revenue for this capricious enterprise. It does not stretch credulity to suggest that, financed by the confiscated proceeds of crime, transnational ILP may indeed become something akin to a protection racket. In the wake of the 9/11 catastrophe there is a danger that our ability to sceptically analyse the contradictions in transnational policing will be undermined. It has been possible, up until now, to mount criminological criticisms about this venture. Criticism regarding the selfreinforcing criteria of agency success (arrest figures, illicit goods seized, monies confiscated) and demands that some external criteria of success based on minimizing the social harms due to clandestine trade could be articulated, perhaps with some success. The observation that ‘going after the proceeds of crime’ amounted to nothing more than a tax on criminal markets and nothing less than a perpetual source of funding for a politically unaccountable transnational policing enterprise might have been expected to hold some force when the putative target was TOC. But the rhetorical stakes have been raised. The target for the transnational police over the coming years will shift to ‘narcoterrorism’ and other similar categories. Although it may be difficult to do so, it is well to remember that the transnational organized crime discourse that unfolded during the 1990s helped to disembed policing from national states and local communities with negative effects for democratic police accountability and, in many places, community safety. In such circumstances the sceptical power of the ‘protection analogy’ had the potential to expose some of the contradictions inherent in transnational policing and might have contributed pressure towards democratizing this central feature of global governance. There is, as yet, no clue as to how the success of the transnational police effort against transnational terrorism will be evaluated nor how its practices will be legitimated. All the indications are that it will be a long campaign. If it is not to be a permanent condition, it is well to remain sceptical in order that we may stand a chance of tipping the balance in global governance towards democracy and freedom and away from the tyranny of self-replicating and self-financing ‘global-cops’.

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Conclusion Not all that is policing lies with the police. The only possible alternative to a global protection racket is a transnational policing enterprise predicated not on fear of crime and gross feelings of insecurity, but rather on global justice and legitimacy. What is required is a commitment not to a war on crime, or a war on terror, but rather a commitment to the rule of law and upholding standards of human rights. Transnational terrorists and criminals should be pursued and brought before an International Criminal Court so that such action can be seen to be not merely a robust form of policing, but above all one that aims to protect people of all faiths and nationalities, in every region, as well as the global commons generally. This will require a massive effort to create a new form of global political legitimacy, one which does not credit the self-interested, partial, selective and insensitive practices of institutions that have long since parted company with the general interests of global civil society. Above all, the project of global governance will require an acknowledgement that the ethical and justice issues posed by the global polarization of wealth and power need to be resolved. Those who are poor and vulnerable because they are locked into geo-political situations which have neglected their economic, social and political claims for generations will always provide fertile grounds for the recruitment of criminals and terrorists. In order that transnational policing does not become a mere protection racket, the project of global governance must open up to include the principles of social justice, which must also include an awareness of new welfare and environmental rules and conditions. Echoing Robert Reiner (2000: xi), and updating him for the transnational age, it is possible to say that, to the extent that the underlying global culture and political economy provides meaningful and rewarding lives, social conflict and crime are diminished. Only then can police agents, transnational and otherwise, realize their highest ideals and appear as ‘knights errant’. At the heart of the project of global governance, including perhaps especially the governance of crime, must lie a concern with justice and legitimacy predicated on the values of multiculturalism, human rights, the rule of law and respect for the environment. Everyone, in every country has a role to play in policing the transnational world order. It cannot be left to the experts alone. A new global project aimed at justice and peace has to displace the practices of the protection racketeers who promise security, but merely compound collective insecurity in order that they may better profit from it.

[13] Transnational Crime and Transnational Policing1 As long as we cannot up-level our ‘thinking’ beyond Us and Them, the goodies and baddies, it will go on and on. The only possible end will be when all the goodies have killed all the baddies, and all the baddies all the goodies, which does not seem so difficult or unlikely since to Us, we are the goodies and They are the baddies, while to Them, we are the baddies and they are the goodies. (R.D. Laing, The Politics of The Family, 1971)

Introduction In popular language, as well as a good deal of the more studied discourses of academic criminologists, there is a commonly held idea that our ‘globalizing world’ has produced transnational criminals of various stripes and that there is therefore an established need to develop transnational policing (Sheptycki 2002b). It will be argued here that, under conditions of transnationalization, there are indeed criminal opportunities and some people do profit from other people’s misery. However, it will also be argued (on the basis of Mary Douglas’s analysis of How Institutions Think, 1986) that transnational police institutions and their object (transnational crime) have been constructed on the basis of a simplistic world-view that depicts existence as a perpetual battle of ‘good’ against ‘evil’. The argument will be that this black-and-white world-view results in a double failure. It is a positive failure insofar as the ramping up of policing power has come at the expense of civil liberties and human rights. It is a negative failure insofar as the transnational policing capacity that has been developed is unable to respond to the very real criminological consequences that are part of the downside of globalization. All institutions establish themselves through definitional processes that make them appear to be natural. Institutions, perhaps especially policing and governmental ones, systematically direct and channel people’s perceptions into forms compatible with institutionally authorized relations. Institutionalized discourse – such as that which has fomented around the concepts of transnational crime and terrorism – fix meanings regarding phenomena that are essentially dynamic. Fixed meanings hide their influence and rouse emotions to a standardized pitch around standardized conceptual categories. Once the terms of discourse are naturalized, the 1



Originally published in Sociology Compass, 1(2), pp. 485–98 (2007).

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institutions they express are endowed with rightness and the implications of the language choices made then cascade through all other levels of our thinking. Any problems we try to think about are translated into authorized thought patterns and we join into the institution’s narcissistic self-contemplation. Solutions we come up with arise from a limited conceptual vocabulary, the logic of which is fixed by the thought style of the institution. With policing institutions the thought style revolves around the orchestration of surveillance, security, and the mustering of coercive force, so any solution put forward in the terms of its’ official discourse can only be articulated in terms of more surveillance, tighter security, and better calibrated coercion. Any subsequent shortcoming in human security that arises from these practices will only be answered with yet more surveillance, security, and coercion in a potentially endless amplification spiral. Sociologists who study transnationalization have rightly noted that the most important problem of globalization is how to make it democratically responsive to the needs, hopes, and dreams of the global commonwealth (Held 1995; Held and McGrew 2002; Sklair 2001). However, the dominance of this black-and-white world-view is facilitating the emergence of a transnational policing infrastructure that is unaccountable, opaque and displays the foundational assumptions of authoritarianism (cf. Giroux 2005). A necessary first step in democratizing transnational policing is to understand, and reject, the intellectual grip of the international language of good guys and bad guys that has been laid upon our consciousness. Transnational Crime The transnational condition is inherently criminogenic: that is, it systematically causes crime. This is so for a host of reasons, but perhaps the most fundamental is the enormous gap in life chances and standard of living between categories of people (Castells 1998; Young 1999). This gap is evident at different geographic scales: at the level of local municipalities, up to the interregional and on to the global. This basic background condition is practically manifest in wide differences in political and economic power and those differences are played out in a world system predicated on capitalist consumption and competition. These structural conditions were held in place for half a century under the terms of Cold War discourse. Under Cold War conditions, every aspect of international affairs was overshadowed by a geo-political language predicated on balance-of-power rivalry. The psychological price paid for the dominance of this discourse was the acceptance of the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD) – a notion that held that world peace was best assured by the strategic deterrence achieved through the terrorizing prospect of nuclear annihilation. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet system, academic criminologists had a long field day as awareness of the criminal opportunities fostered by globalization blossomed. Without the structural tension generated by the previously existing competition between rival ‘blocs’, the language of the Cold War ‘balance of terror’ simply faded out of existence. In the heat of the moment, Fukuyama (1989) famously declared that the world was witnessing the ‘end of history’ and thereby suggested that the Western idea of liberal democracy had emerged as the final form of human government. He has since backed away from this claim, but at the time more than a few were persuaded that capitalism had triumphed and that a

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liberal democratic peace was the future. Not, however, the many academic criminologists who observed the changing historical circumstances and named state crime, financial and economic crime, environmental crime, corporate crime, and a variety of crimes against human rights (Beare 2003; Edwards and Gill 2003b; Pearce and Woodiwiss 1993; Sheptycki and Wardak 2005; South and Beirne 2006; Woodiwiss 2005). Without the rhetorical smokescreen that maintained the earlier superpower rivalry, it became possible to see these forms of crime as the natural social facts of global capitalism. Hobsbawm (1994) explained that changing structural conditions allowed for precisely this. At the end of the millennium, the posture of governance within the global system had changed. An important characteristic of the newly emergent ‘transnational state system’ (Sheptycki 1997a) was that ‘the State’ was increasingly confronted with ‘its real incapacity to maintain what, by its own criteria, was its major function: the maintenance of law and order’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 576). Observing the changing scene, some criminologists talked of ‘gangster capitalism’ (Woodiwiss 2005). It was quite apparent to criminologists that both states and corporations were increasingly becoming part of a global criminal opportunity structure and that seemingly respectable businessmen and revered statesmen alike were engaging in ‘an orgy of fraud and illegal violence that would leave the most hardened Mafioso speechless’ (Woodiwiss 2005, from the back cover). These relatively powerful global actors helped to constitute a grey zone between licit and illicit markets – a space which was also a zone of engagement for the economically, socially, and politically excluded, forced there because of a shortage of legitimate economic opportunities (Ruggiero 2000). The evidence concerning the breadth, depth, and variety of criminal opportunities spawned within the world system indicated that the phase of history marked by the beginning of the twenty-first century was a dangerous one. And yet, while academic discourse about transnational crime flourished, commonly held assumptions about the topic were very limited. The array of ‘usual suspects’ (Gill 2000) were largely restricted to drug runners, human smugglers, online paedophiles, and terrorists (cf. Berdall and Serrano 2002; Galeotti 2005; Shelley 2005; Sterling 1994; Williams and Savona 1996). Conspicuously absent from mainstream discourses about transnational crime were gun running and state crime (Cuckier and Didel 2006; Naylor 1999); crimes against the environment (South and Beirne 1998); corporate crime, white-collar crime and corruption (Taylor 1998); and other systemic crimes of the powerful endemic in the global system (Pearce and Woodiwiss 1993; Sheptycki and Wardak 2005). Instead of a fully elaborated language about global criminality, the discourse of ‘transnational organized crime’ (TOC) presented a one-dimensional caricature based on a set of stereotypical folk-devils (Sheptycki 1998b, 2003a) and the mainstream media – as part of the ‘deviance-defining elite’ (Ericson, Baranek and Chan 1987: 3) – largely colluded in this process. TOC Talk: The Language of Global Crime Mystification The academic criminological literature on transnational crime – including those forms of political crime at least partially denoted by the term ‘terrorism’ – is rich and varied. However, more refined terms of discourse surfaced among transnational politicians and policy makers.

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In the transnational platforms of governance, a special language developed for talking about TOC and security. By transnational platforms of governance is meant institutions like the United Nations, the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU) and the Group of Eight ‘rich’ nations (the G8: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK, and the USA), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and others. The language of the ‘new international of technocratic police experts’ (Reiner 1997: 1007) crystallizes what are essentially fluid and amorphous manifestations of transnational crime in order to identify a range of ‘suitable enemies’ (Christie 1986). Among such experts, there is a superficially precise vocabulary pertaining to criminal networks and a corresponding formulae of ‘intelligence-led policing’ (Ratcliffe 2004). However, this seemingly technical language is infused with a rich set of connotative meanings. These connotative meanings are encapsulated in the reports of international policing and security agencies, which give pride of place to an exotic collection of ethnically-based criminal organizations: Jamaican Yardies, Chinese Triads, Japanese Yakuza, the Russian Mafiya, Albanians, Iranians, Nigerians, Syrians, and Colombians. Such stereotypes represent the globally criminalized ‘other’ that threatens a just and true world order (Beare 2003). Having thus identified the ‘other’ in official discourse, martial metaphors can then be applied. There has been a war on crime, a war on drugs and a war on terror and in each case the object of warfare has been vividly coloured. Warfare conditions call for the use of lethal force on a routine basis and the ‘verminization’ of the enemy (cf. Szasz 1975). Occasionally, the language of transnational organized crime and terrorism will be figuratively linked with infection and disease and these phenomena have been variously characterized as an epidemic, scourge or plague, a cancer to be cut from the social body (Sheptycki 2003a: 127). The disease metaphor fits well with the theme of foreign and contagious disease – as it is not of the social body, it can be cut out of the social body. The language of the criminal and terroristic ‘other’ has even been infused with religious connotations and global crime, terror, and corruption have been designated as an ‘unholy trinity’ (Shelley 2005), presumably ripe for exorcism. The prominent terms of public discourse about transnational crime and insecurity are loaded dice. Recognizing the politics of language surrounding transnational crime and insecurity recalls George Orwell’s observations in Politics and the English Language, watching ‘some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy’. By accepting such a limited and emotive discourse, ‘we go’ – again Orwell’s words – ‘some distance towards turning ourselves into machines’. Implicit in this view is the possibility of rejecting an official discourse ‘that makes lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and gives an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. However, recognizing that certain terms have become dominant in public discourse is merely recognizing a symptom. Behind a language that impoverishes public discussion about transnational crime and insecurity is a complex set of interests that would prefer it if most people remained in a state of mystification. Perhaps that explains the blank incomprehension that so often flattens transnational criminologists’ attempts to show that officially defined crime is not the only crime problem or that criminals are not only those officially defined (cf. Box 1983).

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Transnational Policing In the early years of the new millennium, the literature concerning the sociology of policing was consumed by one central problem. Up to then the sociology of the police was underpinned by the Weberian assumption that the state held a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force in the maintenance of social order within its own territory. At the end of the Cold War, and with the apparent rise to global prominence of neo-liberalism, studies of policing and security organization revealed a fragmented and fragmenting institutional terrain, giving rise to a variety of attempts to describe it (e.g. Bayley and Shearing 1996, 2001; Johnston and Shearing 2003). Policing institutions were being transformed from above, as a result of policies established at the transnational level, at the same time as they were being transformed from within by the effects of the information technology revolution, and from below by globalizing neo-liberalism (Sheptycki 2000a). As the sociology of the police gave way to the sociology of policing, the policing sector was revealed as fragmented and chaotic (Ericson and Carriere 1994). One attempt to analyse the transformations drew attention to and systematized three conceptual distinctions that had already been made in the literature between high (political) policing and low (basic) policing (Brodeur 1983); between private policing and public policing (South 1988); and between policing aimed at securing territories and that which aims at securing populations (Ericson 1994a). The result of this analysis is a sixfold typology describing the field of policing (Sheptycki 2000a: 11). This typology was introduced in order to give some conceptual order to a global policing archipelago that otherwise had emerged unplanned and unaccountable (Sheptycki 2002a, 2004a). We shall return to it presently; first, it needs to be emphasized that the empirical reality that this typology aimed to describe was in fact vastly complex (Rigakos 2002). Under the rubric of ‘nodal governance’, some scholars struggled to map the policing field (Burris et al. 2005; Shearing and Wood 2003; Wood and Font 2007; Wood and Kempa 2005). Here the term ‘nodes’ refers to specific institutional sites (police agencies, customs agencies, private security companies, community action groups, etc.), where governmental resources and knowledge are concentrated. Those working with the concept tried to understand how the various nodes link together in a ‘network of nodes’, rather like a spider’s web. According to this picture, the web or network would provide the structure of ‘security governance’. The starting point for nodal theory was precisely that the Weberian assumption was no longer applicable. Furthermore, nodal theory typically stretched concerns about policing to the maximum, aiming to comprehend ‘governance’ understood as ‘all the structures and processes necessary to maintain a modicum of public order’ (Burris et al. 2005: 31, ff. 1). Nodal theory widened the study of ‘policing’ in an effort to encompass virtually all forms of regulation coming under a variety of auspices including some ‘beyond the state’. Key to this conception is that social control is the result of the activities of a variety of different actors, including, among other things, not only conventional state police, but also corporations and even criminal and terrorist gangs (Burris et al. 2005: 31). Indeed, the definition was so broad that it led to certain seeming contradictions and ironies. For example, in the analysis undertaken by Burris et al. (2005), two case studies were presented: one considering the genesis of the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights

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(TRIPS) and the other concerning a South African initiative to create institutions of ‘local capacity governance’ to govern security and justice. The latter represented an only partially successful attempt to empower exceptionally poor communities in the informal housing sector in order that they better govern their own local insecurity. The former was a successful attempt to police international intellectual property rights on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. One obvious effect of the TRIPS operation was that poor South Africans, and poor people throughout the underdeveloped world generally, had their access to cheap generic pharmaceuticals greatly restricted. TRIPS created and policed a new property right. This is very different than a community-based restorative justice scheme. Indeed, observing the contrast, critical sociologists might well invoke Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous pronouncement: ‘La propriété, c’est le vol!’ (‘Property is theft!’). The terms of nodal theory found it particularly difficult to provide normative reference points in the governance of policing. Indeed, with so many autonomous nodes spread out, as it were, over a horizontal policing and security field, how conceivably could policing resources be mobilized and co-ordinated at all? Some scholars argued that the state retained authority ‘in-the-final-instance’ to decide on, supervise or license (i.e. decide who decides) the other spheres of regulation and provision (Loader and Walker 2007). Other scholars (Sheptycki 2007a) argued that policing should be governed by a ‘constabulary ethic’ – what might be thought of as a ‘moral compass’, a compass that would work properly only if less powerful actors were equally mobilized and active in the governance of security (Wood and Font 2007). Among the many points in the network of nodal governance were identified ‘super-structural nodes’ said to be the ‘command centers of networked governance’ (Burris et al. 2005). According to this formulation, superstructural nodes bring together actors who represent their own networks and the activity in these nodes concentrates resources and technologies for the purpose of achieving a common goal. Table 1 A Typology of the Policing Field Police work aimed at securing territory

Police work aimed at securing populations

Private forms

Public forms

Private forms

Public forms

High policing

Corporate security guards

Guardians of the state apparatus

Corporate security specialists

State security and the secret service

Low policing

Private security guards

Uniformed patrol officers

Private eyes and private spies

Police detectives and undercover cops

Source: Sheptycki (2000a).

The analysis pursued here suggests that, in general, agreements on common goals authorize meanings. The official discourse established by these superstructural nodes cascades over the policing field laid out in Table 1, rewriting the language of security in even the remotest corners of the police sector. This theory suggests, furthermore, that the discourse of organized

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crime and terrorism described previously has helped to crystallize the superstructural nodes of transnational policing that were its original authors. Evidence exists to support this line of thinking. From the early 1990s, studies of policing began to focus on a variety of new policing institutions such as the UK National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) and similar European counterparts, as well as Europol and Interpol (Anderson et al. 1995; den Boer 2002; Dorn et al. 1992). Thus, when the UK moved to establish the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) in 2004, it was, in effect, reconstituting a superstructural node within the policing apparatus under the auspices of the limiting terms of the official discourse of transnational crime and insecurity. This was part of a transnational trend evident in many countries (Bigo 2001; Henry and Smith 2007). Sociologists of policing observed that the official discourse implicated specific practices (e.g. intensive electronic surveillance of the general population and undercover policing), as well as providing linguistic cover for building new institutions and refurbishing old ones (Sheptycki 2003a, 2003b). With reference to the typology in Table 1, the folk-devils of official discourse are articulated as threats to national security, which valorize the categories of state security and the secret service. The consequences of this are obviously rather immediate for subordinates – low policing – especially those in the so-called public sphere and, as a result, the generalist discourses of uniformed police patrol and crime detectives are rewritten in important ways. But TOC talk washes over the whole of global society and ultimately affects all sectors of the policing field. At this point, theory outpaces the empirical knowledge base. However, it has been established that, simultaneous with the crystallization of the limited language of transnational organized crime was the disappearance of alternative discourses. Among the most conspicuously absent were those that privileged human rights, social crime prevention, and the maintenance of civil liberties (Sheptycki 2003a: 132–4; 2003b: 52–4). Here the term ‘social crime prevention’ refers to programmes aimed at the social causes of crime rather than those concerned with the technical reduction of criminal opportunities (situational crime prevention) or with deterrence through ‘law enforcement’. Foregrounding issues of human rights, civil liberty, and the social causes of crime would mean overcoming political, economic, cultural, and social exclusion (Young 2003). In practice, police working under the rubric of intelligence-led policing found it very difficult to mobilize on the basis of such concepts and remained stuck in a crime fighting discourse (Sheptycki 2004a: 20–2, 31). In other words, the technical language of policing insecurity drowns out alternative concepts. Where theoretically subtle terms could be used, folk-devils are projected; where harm could be minimized and human rights upheld, the terminology summons forth the dogs of war; and where the social basis of criminal opportunity – and, one might emphasize, the political basis for crimes of terror – might be reduced, the enforcers are summoned in a vain attempt to repress, deter, and disrupt. This enabling language of transnational crime and insecurity holds forth the prospect of a simple (if often bloody) solution to a complex set of problems, but the intervention strategies that the official discourse prescribes cannot change the circumstance that produced the crime and insecurity in the first instance. Indeed, they make matters worse.

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The Global Policing Surveillance Assemblage Perhaps the most visible aspect of transnational policing today is the ubiquitous surveillance camera, a device that will probably look quaint to coming generations of humans who will likely be implanted with computer chips. In important respects, policing is bound up with surveillance, for it is through surveillance that policing binds populations to territory. Human beings are now watched constantly and the distinction between panopticon and synopticon and terms such as ‘surveillant assemblage’ has been developed in order to describe a surveillance capacity that falls somewhere short of omniscience (Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Mathieson 1997). The distinction between panopticon and synopticon is that between a situation where the few may view the many and its reverse, where the many may view the few. It is the difference between Orwell’s Big Brother and the Big Brother of so-called reality television. The concept of surveillant assemblage refers to the sum total of surveillance capacity, a capacity that is itself continuously expanding and changing. There is an air of almost despair and inevitability regarding the arrival of new varieties of ‘total information awareness’, at least in some of the literature: … to the extent that the surveillant assemblage exists, it does so as a potentiality, one that resides at the intersections of various media that can be connected for diverse purposes. Such linkages can themselves be differentiated according to the degree to which they are ad hoc or institutionalized. By accentuating the emergent and unstable characteristic of the surveillant assemblage we also draw attention to the limitations of traditional political strategies that seek to confront the quantitative increase in surveillance. As it is multiple, unstable and lacks discernible boundaries or responsible governmental departments, the surveillant assemblage cannot be dismantled by prohibiting a particularly unpalatable technology. Nor can it be attacked by focusing criticism on a single bureaucracy or institution. In the face of multiple connections across myriad technologies and practices, struggles against particular manifestations of surveillance, as important as they might be, are akin to efforts to keep the ocean’s tide back with a broom – a frantic focus on a particular unpalatable technology or practice while the general tide of surveillance washes over us all. (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 609)

Other studies have focused on the organizational pathologies of policing and security intelligence (Sheptycki 2004b, 2004c). Among professionals directly concerned with policing intelligence, one of the most often mentioned organizational pathologies is that of ‘information silos’ – a concept that reflects the significance of the tension between traditional hierarchical models of policing and new models of networked organization. In information silos there is only one direction for information to flow and that is up (when it probably needs to move sideways). This contributes to another organizational pathology that professionals recognize: ‘linkage blindness’. Loosely speaking, because information is constrained to flow in bureaucratically defined pyramids – each with different governmental objects (e.g. drugs, illegal immigrants, illegal firearms, stolen property, etc.) – policing agents frequently fail to link bytes of information coursing in the veins of their intelligence systems and turn them in to meaningful intelligence, sometimes with terrible results. Recognizing that these organizational

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pathologies lead to mission failure and wishing to avoid accusations of incompetence, police agencies frequently form ad hoc task forces and intelligence centres. However, despite any well-advertised tactical successes that may be scored, the multiplication of these special centres undermines attempts to develop a reliable and valid strategic intelligence picture. The result is an overall failure of the intelligence process, but one which remains hidden behind public announcements regarding the successes of the special task forces. There are several more organizational pathologies that could be mentioned, but two are especially important, these are the continuing problem of ‘intelligence gaps’ and the difficulties that arise from ‘compulsive data demand’. Intelligence gaps exist for any number of reasons, the simplest of which are failures to report or record information, the failure to record information properly, or the failure to disseminate information to people who can interpret it properly. Such gaps exist at the same time that organizations are becoming equipped with new technologies which allow for the massing and storage of inconceivably huge amounts of data, some of it held by private sector operators and sold to police and security intelligence organizations on a contractual, for profit, basis. So equipped, policing organizations compulsively demand ever more data in wanton pursuit of the chimera of ‘total information awareness’. Because compulsive data demand and intelligence gaps continue to exist side-by-side, intelligence systems are awash in low-grade ‘noise’ – information with little practical value – and intelligence officers find themselves struggling to overcome problems of ‘information overload’. The volume of data is so great that trying to analyse it has been likened to ‘drinking from a fire hose’ (Sheptycki 2004b,:17). In much of the theoretical literature on policing and surveillance, the above-mentioned organizational pathologies are often unremarked. The vocabulary of intelligence professionals points to the fact that policing and security intelligence processes are not strategic, but rather are both prejudiced and capricious, as evidenced by the many ‘false positives’ and other intelligence failures that plague the intelligence system (Wood 2007). Faced with these problems and locked within institutionalized thought patterns, the solutions offered by technocratic police experts amount to more of the same: more surveillance, tighter security, and better calibrated coercion. And the captains of transnational governance in the G8, the OECD, the IMF, the EU, and other institutions agree. How could it be otherwise? The functional assumption that lies at the foundation of transnational policing – which rests upon the designation of suitable enemies who play the ‘bad-guy’ counterpart to the ‘good-guy’ technocratic police experts who occupy the superstructural communications nodes of transnational policing – is assumed by all concerned. It is the influence of hidden fixed meanings, naturalized terms of discourse that appear all the more natural due to their great simplicity, that give rise to an endless parade of déjà vu. The meanings conveyed in our common language about transnational crime and policing sustain expectations and beliefs and by accepting those meanings unexamined, we condemn ourselves to missing the obvious that is that the global surveillance assemblage is itself a massive criminal opportunity structure.

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Conclusion The present failure of transnational policing is a double blow for the global commonwealth. It is a positive failure insofar as the ramping up of policing power has come at the expense of civil liberties and human rights. It is a negative failure insofar as the transnational policing capacity that has been developed is unable to respond to the very real criminological consequences that are part of the downside of neo-liberal globalization. Not only does transnational policing fail to provide an overall level of human security, in many places policing practice is the author of human insecurity (Goldsmith and Sheptycki 2007). For all of these reasons and more, it is necessary to resist the international language of good guys and bad guys that permeates security discourse. We end where we began, with R.D. Laing who suggested that if we could not ‘up-level our “thinking” beyond Us and Them, the goodies and baddies, it will go on and on’. He went on to observe that ‘millions of people have died this century and millions more are going to, including, we have every reason to expect, many of Us and our children, because we cannot break this knot. It seems a comparatively simple knot, but it is tied very, very tight – round the throat, as it were, of the whole human species. But don’t believe me because I say so, look in the mirror and see for yourself.’ Acknowledgements I would like to thank my colleagues Kevin Haggerty, Belal Khallad, and Mike Larson for their input into this essay and to specially thank Kathy J. Fox for her help and encouragement in turning my garbled prose into clearer English.

[14] Criminology and the Transnational Condition: A Contribution to International Political Sociology1 Understanding contemporary world affairs is not easy. This is partly because the field is so complex and partly because the inherited linguistic and theoretical habits of international relations (IR) theory, which all too often tends to dominate thoughts on the matter, do not allow for an adequate analysis of the complexity. Much of the theoretical debate in IR theory concerns the centrality of the state qua State as the linchpin of world society. The assertions of traditional IR theory about the primacy of the state and national security discourse in the contemporary world system play out alongside other discussions concerning the location of sovereignty; the construction of social or collective identities; the nature of communities in relation to regional localities and transnational mobility; contested definitions about threats to security; and the stark alternatives of a world system based on cosmopolitan democracy and the rule of law, or of national insecurity in international anarchy (Held 1995; Krause and Williams 1996, 1997; Krause 1998; Held et al. 1999). The aim of this essay is to contribute to international political sociology, and the further enhancement of the interdisciplinary study of the global system, by introducing some of the perspective and lexicon of critical criminology into the mix. This is useful because crime definition and control have been central aspects of governance since the early modern period and this is no less true now that governance has become transnational or global. The essay suggests that the contemporary global system is ripe with existential anxieties that are symptoms of momentous historical change and it will argue that, for good or for ill, crime definition and control has become crucial to the transnational condition. As a consequence, criminological theories can be introduced into theoretical discussions about the nature of the contemporary global scene with fruitful results. Indeed, such interdisciplinary cross-fertilization is vital, given the centrality of the language of criminal threats in the language of global governance and the language of governance globally (cf. Andreas and Nadelmann 2006).

1



Originally published in International Political Sociology, 1(3), pp. 391–406 (2007).

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Theoretical Antecedents Historically speaking, the discipline of international relations has rested on the assumption that the interplay of nation-states is what really counts in world affairs. The discipline of IR put down its roots during the period after the First World War, a war that provided the impetus for a discourse about the international system which emphasized the power of reason and the rule of law in the enhancement of prospects for peace. Early IR theory focused attention on the conduct of states in a system of politics devoid of central authority. Given the scale of destruction associated with total war – where mass society and industrial production came together with the principles of balance-of-power politics in a frenzy of destruction and fratricide – newly established departments of international politics aimed to study how the system of states could be made to work more effectively so as to enhance the power of law, the peaceful management of interstate affairs, the preservation of order and especially the minimization of warfare. This reformist impulse rather quickly gave way to a theoretical emphasis on political power. This point of view was termed ‘realism’ and it was reflective of so-called Realpolitik in practical international affairs. This theory held that the underlying structure of the nationstate system, established at the dawn of modernity within the ‘Westphalian peace’ of 1648, created an essential contradiction whereby diplomats continued to see war both as a symptom of disorder and a means to achieve (their individually preferred versions of) order at one and the same time. Thus was established the basic thesis and antithesis of IR theory. On the one hand there were the ‘realists’ (who stressed the inescapable nature of political power and its means: organized violence and the threat of organized violence) and on the other were the ‘idealists’ who sought ways of enhancing the power of international law (law between states) and thereby of ensuring the peaceful management of interstate affairs and the preservation of international peace. While war between states remains a potent source of insecurity in the world system, it is not the only one. Arguably in the present period a number of other threats to security – environmental degradation, poverty, and the weaponization of civil society that has accompanied the very nearly unfettered global market in small arms – are among those issues that constitute equally important challenges. Such issues are not easily incorporated into the traditional paradigms of IR, but by the time they were recognized as pressing, the theories had already come under challenge from a variety of quarters. Beginning in the early 1970s, or perhaps somewhat earlier, scholars began to recognize the limitations of traditional IR theory. For example, in the United States Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argued for a shift in emphasis away from international relations – which privileged the study of relations between sovereign nation-states – and towards transnational relations: that is, ‘contacts, coalitions and interactions across state boundaries that are not controlled by the central foreign policy organs of governments’ (Keohane and Nye, 1972: xi). In the United Kingdom, John Burton was critical of the ‘billiard ball model’ of international relations which only recognized interstate relations. The object of study, he argued, should be ‘world society’ as a whole (Burton 1972). Immanuel Wallerstein produced a transhistorical analysis which located the origins and growth of the ‘world system’ not so much in states, but rather in the dynamic transnational relations of capitalism – an historical trajectory which, according to this view, was already well established by the time of the Treaty of Westphalia (Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989). These

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theoretical developments, and others, were much debated and contested; what could not be in doubt was that world politics was not static and unchanging, nor could theories about them remain so. In the final decade of the twentieth century, theories of globalization were in abundance and hotly debated (e.g. Castells 1996, 1998a, 1998b; Giroux 2004; Hirst and Thompson 2001; Mann 1993, 2003; Rozenberg 2000; Sklair 1995). It had become obvious that there had been a proliferation of new actors taking part in the dramas on the world stage and that the old way of scripting global relations in IR terms, which gave all the best lines to sovereign state actors, was no longer able to tell the full story. For one thing, the downsizing of the welfare state and the privatization of other state functions, concomitant with the transnational rise to prominence of neo-liberal ideology, considerably weakened states’ capacities, indeed so much so that some theorists talked about the ‘hollowing out of the state’ (Rhodes 1994). Globalization theory made states seemed weaker, just as it recognized new players in world affairs. Some of these new actors had formal legal status (for example, transnational corporations) others not (for example, transnational diasporic communities). Some were seen to act out of purely self-interest (for example, the mega-rich nurturing their wealth in offshore banking havens), some out of a conception of global well-being (for example, human rights and environmental non-governmental organizations – NGOs). Theories aiming to describe and analyse a world system of transnational social relations, rather than merely international relations, raised questions about the nature, significance, authority, and autonomy of the state qua State in the global system. The ‘state’ was theorized as a fragmented institutional terrain, as evidenced by politicians’ promises of ‘joined up government’. Transboundary relations were, by definition, transgressive and the myriad processes of transnationalization meant that states could no longer be conceptualized as the ‘containers’ of cultural, economic, political, and social relations. The institutions that comprise states stood among many other kinds of institution that collectively make up what, at best, could be a polycentric transnational world governance system under the rule of law or, at worst, a competitive, chaotic and conflictridden world-wide struggle for power. The historical flux of theoretical ideas about the Global Village – to use Marshall McLuhan’s famously contentious turn of phrase – mapped on to a fast-changing world productive of a catalogue of anxieties. The spread of pandemic disease, natural disasters, human-made ones, environmental degradation of the air, land and sea, climate change, civil war, poverty, displaced populations, economic collapse, authoritarianism, terrorism, and crime formed a partial list of the major fears, but theories about these risk phenomena and their relation to the global system remained as inchoate and contested as the ‘liquid modernity’ from which they sprang (Bauman 2000). In the somewhat confused ‘politics of fear’ (Furedi 2005) that emerged in the early twenty-first century, states – or at least the captains of states – were often understood to be the predominant legitimated and responsiblized actors, and many statesmen and stateswomen acted as if this was, indeed, the case. Anxiously faced with a fast-changing present and an apparently dangerous future, the temptation is to give in to the will to power, bolster the state and seek refuge in the static, predictable existence promised by ‘national security’. However, and echoing Keith Krause (1998: 323), trying to escape the theoretical reification of state sovereignty and actorhood and its endless repetitions of the discourse of national insecurity-in-international-anarchy means engaging with critical interdisciplinary

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scholarship in order to think seriously, creatively and beyond what are clearly very complex global problems. Criminology Theory Counts Criminological theory is not a well-trodden road for the majority of social scientists and its relevance to the previous discussion should not be assumed. It might therefore do to remark at the outset of this section that the three classical sociological thinkers – Weber, Marx and Durkheim – all provided ideas which connect criminology with important aspects of the transnational condition. With Weber it is the assertion that the state holds a monopoly of the legitimate use of coercive force in the maintenance of social order. For some time now, criminological theory has been attempting to come to terms with the privatization of penal and policing power and its consequences for the governance of social order beyond the state (Spitzer and Scull 1977; South 1988; Johnston 2000a; Johnston and Shearing 2003; Wood and Dupont 2006). Marxian thought connects criminology to the transnational condition via the criminogenic consequences of class society and there have been theories attempting to understand the criminological consequences of growing global social, political, and economic exclusion (Taylor 1999; Young 1999, 2003). Durkheim’s main intellectual concern was to analyse the possibilities of securing social cohesion in the face of rapid social and economic change, a theoretical concern as relevant to his time as it is to the present (Garland 2001). Central to Durkheim’s sociology was the proposition that crime is a ‘normal social fact’ and that all societies manifest crime. Social ordering is symbolically and functionally achieved by processes of crime definition and enforcement and these processes are causally linked to other aspects of social integration. This theoretical understanding probes into why feudal Europe had the crimes of witchcraft and heresy and the United States during the McCarthy era had communism and blacklists and, by extension, asks questions about crime definition and control in ‘world society’. Transnational and comparative criminologists have recently begun to grapple with these theoretical issues and associated empirical questions in earnest (Reichel 2005; Sheptycki and Wardak 2005) and a host of points of contact between the two disciplines can been staked out. The co-ordinates of Weber, Marx and Durkheim will surface again in this essay, however, not before mentioning that perhaps the most compellingly interesting reason to pursue questions regarding criminology and the transnational condition is because both traditional IR theory and criminological theory exhibit varieties of ‘realism’. IR realism has its philosophical roots in Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ analogies and in social contract theories which come from Lockean-inspired thinkers. From this starting point there can be no society in the absence of authority and the state becomes the primary locus of security, authority and obligation whereby the well-being of the citizen is guaranteed by the state which secures a monopoly on violence (cf. Tilly 1985). Needless to say, those who stand outside the state represent potential or actual threats and relations between states are those of strategic manoeuvring in the pursuit of states’ interests – a world-view which provides the basis for international anarchy (Krause 1998: 309). IR realism encompasses a number of different approaches with slightly different emphases, but a common assumption is that of rational choice theory which depicts human behaviour as guided by instrumental

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reason. For IR realists, states remain the principal actors, but frequently attention is given to forces above and below individual states thus bridging the structure–agency relation in the international system through a differentiation of ‘levels of analysis’. The international system is seen as a structure acting on the state with individuals below the level of the state acting as agency on the state as a whole. ‘Rational choice’ binds the structure together and sets it in process, it depicts humans acting at the various levels as conscious decision makers who realistically weigh up incentives and constraints and act in ways that they believe will produce the most desirable outcomes, but the logic is overdetermined by the supposed ‘will to power’, Hobbesian or Machiavellian assumptions about the nature of humanity and resultant expectations of violence and deception. Importantly in the context of this essay, the many variants of IR realism have a critical theoretical antithesis (Krause 1998: 316–317). There is variety here too, but these theories tend to argue inter alia that the actors in world politics, whether states’ actors or not, and along with the discourses they deploy, are the products of complex historical processes that include social, political, and ideational dimensions. That is, they are social constructs constituted through political practices (see also Booth 1997). Criminological realism has its roots in similar philosophical soil, but its target elements render it superficially very different than its IR counterpart. The historical roots of criminological realism lie in the early 1970s, when the Harvardbased political scientist James Q. Wilson situated his theories between so-called liberals who sought to alleviate the causes of crime found in poverty and racism and conservatives who had an overly simplistic faith summed up by the bumper sticker which read: ‘support your local police’ (Wilson 1985: 3). Wilson’s work was immensely influential throughout the Englishspeaking world and, interestingly, he was an advisor on crime to the Reagan administration. Rational choice in criminological theory is premised on a vision of a hedonistic calculus where the actor weighs up the potential rewards of crime and balances that against the probability of being caught and the severity of punishment. The two signal ideas of Wilsonian realist criminology are ‘broken windows’ and ‘zero tolerance policing’. The broken windows idea suggested that, if a window is smashed in a building and it is not repaired, the indication to the surrounding community is that no one cares about the property. Consequently, it will only be a matter of time until other windows are smashed and the building falls prey to squatters and criminals (Wilson and Kelling 1982). Wilson and Kelling strongly argued that this developmental sequence of crime and disorder needs to be recognized by governments and appropriate policy initiatives undertaken. Significantly, criminological realists, following in Wilson’s footsteps, viewed tackling the social causes of crime (e.g. poverty and racism) as unrealistic (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985). Realistic criminological practice focused on deterrence and its first recourse was ‘zero tolerance policing’. The allegory of broken windows required that on-the-street law enforcement focus on sweeping the streets of undesirables – beggars, drunks, prostitutes, vandals, and other anti-social misfits – because the assumption was that by making inroads against lesser crimes, then eventually more serious criminality would cave in, leaving neighbourhoods free of endemic criminality. This version of criminological realism is highly tendentious, but perhaps no more so than traditional IR with its deterrence doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Interestingly, criminological realism, like its IR counterpart, had its own theoretical antithesis which had an efflorescence

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about a decade after Wilson’s initial impact (Mathews and Young 1986, 1992). To be sure, strict parallels between ‘critical’ or ‘left realist’ criminology and ‘critical security studies’ are not easy to draw. The scholarly communities that sustain these realisms so seldom meet but, as is the contention here, this is less the case now than in an earlier time when global flows were not so strong. The above discussions hardly scratch the surface of potential connections between criminological interests and theories about international affairs. Clearly, however, there are a number of interdisciplinary overlaps. Surely it is interesting to note that, despite the huge differences in detail, a sentinel point for realism in both its criminological and IR guises is deterrence through threat or use of force. This suggests that an essential route of future inquiry in international political sociology will be to further interrogate the epistemological and ontological similarities and differences across the disciplinary divide. In the context of this essay, it is particularly useful to establish that both brands of realism have produced critical antitheses. Critical cross-fertilization between criminological theories and theories about world affairs is vital. Interdisciplinary theorizing is a contribution to processes by which critical approaches percolate through the growing number of topics concerning security and anxiety listed previously. The argument that criminology theory counts in world affairs is part of the further evolution of critical views on approaches to security studies (CASE Collective 2006). Lastly, criminology counts especially because, morally speaking, its field of concern is based on justifications about the use of coercive power. Classic Critical Criminology Starting in the 1950s, criminology started to move away from an exclusive emphasis on pathogenic explanations of crime to a sociology of deviance which sought to locate the study of crime and delinquency in a much broader and more complex perspective. What emerged could be characterized as second-order reflection, focusing on how different forms of deviance are selectively defined, imputed, acted out and subjected to social control (Downes and Rock 1971). Building on the symbolic interaction or social constructionist perspective (Berger and Luckman 1966), the new criminology evolved through a series of stages. The first move was to recognize that criminal or deviant behaviour was simply ‘behavior people so label’ (Becker 1963: 9). The second was to highlight the amplificatory potential of social control: to show that criminalization, the process whereby phenomena become defined as crime and reacted to on that basis, may contribute to the reproduction of the phenomenon. Lesley Wilkins (1964) first introduced the notion of ‘deviance amplification’ into the criminological lexicon. The insight was that societies may be more or less tolerant of deviant behaviour and that some tend to define more acts as criminal than do others. In so doing, more of social life falls under the purview of criminal law enforcement institutions. The paradox is that the social reaction to social practices defined as crime has the tendency to alienate those individuals and groups thus defined, thereby actually increasing the perceptions of their criminality by all concerned, affirming the initial intolerance. Thus proceeds a delinquency amplification spiral (Cohen 1972).

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The initial iteration of constructionism in criminological thinking took its primary cue from Durkheimian sociology. The criminological Other was a normal social fact and social solidarity was shaped in important ways by the manufacture of deviance. Importantly, the manufacture of the criminological Other was the key to the construction and maintenance of major social institutions of control, but it is not the case that this was an entirely smoothly functional relationship, which could create difficulties for the critical appreciation of this interactive phenomenon. As Becker put it: For a great variety of reasons, well-known to sociologists, institutions are refractory. They do not perform as society would like them to … officials develop ways both of denying the failure of the institution to perform as it should and explaining those failures which cannot be hidden. An account of an institution’s operation from the point of view of subordinates therefore casts doubt on the official line and may possibly expose it as a lie. (Becker 1967: 128)

This initial phase in the development of the critical outlook in criminological theory developed without much allusion to power, politics and social exclusion. However, following very closely on the heels of this initial breakthrough was a more radical perspective (for example, Box 1971, 1983, 1987; Cohen 1985, 1988; Taylor, Walton and Young 1973, 1975). It is not possible to summarize this literature here, but it is possible to describe the central points made in what remains the cardinal contribution to the perspective: Stuart Hall’s (1978) book Policing the Crisis (written with Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts). The study opens with a painstaking analysis of the manufacture of an apparent crime wave which was termed colloquially at the time a ‘mugging crisis’. The term was not a category in English law, and was not previously a common term of expression in London or elsewhere in the British Isles. It was, in fact, a term borrowed from the United States – no doubt inserted into common English parlance via the medium of imported American police action-dramas. The authors trace the construction of this term and its insertion into common parlance. In considerable detail they show how statistics were manufactured in order to give substance to the claim that there had been a huge increase in ‘muggings’, which were a coded reference to predacious crime by ethnic minorities, especially Afro-Caribbean youth. Different crimes were conflated in news representations of official statistics in order to give the impression of an unprecedented rise in street crimes of violence. Other scholars admitted that ‘the much quoted rise of 129 percent in “muggings” in London over the 1968–72 period was derived from figures clouded in ambiguity’ (Downes and Rock 1988: 249). This unpacking of the statistical picture of a seemingly mortal threat to social order – the Black Mugger – laid the foundation for a considered analysis of the power effects of this crime panic. As scholars of international politics know, the period was one of considerable political and economic crisis in Great Britain. The period was characterized by numerous strikes coupled with rapid inflation – much aggravated by the ‘oil crisis’ of 1973–74. The circumstances culminated in a spate of strikes so numerous that the winter of 1978–79 was christened in the popular press as the ‘winter of discontent’ (a phrase taken from Shakespeare’s Richard III) (Sked and Cook 1984). According to the analysis pursued in Policing the Crisis, the British state was undergoing a ‘crisis of legitimation’. Hall and his colleagues argued, in effect, that the ‘Black Mugger’ was a perfect folk-devil, a scapegoat for all the social anxieties experienced

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by a society in the midst of rapid transformation and destabilization. In an increasingly divided and embittered class society where the traditional armoury of political consensus (power, deference, fatalism, external enemies) was exhausted, diminishing or absent, it followed that ‘the State’ was faced with a ‘crisis of hegemony’. As crime is such a strong source of symbolic unity, war on crime-type rhetoric can provide a useful tool for relegitimation. Hall and his colleagues observed how class struggle had brought the government to its knees during strike action that coalesced around the coke and coal depot at Saltley Gate in 1972 and that the period was marred by a series of increasingly violent confrontations between racist far-right groups and anti-fascists. All four themes (political and economic crisis, ideological struggle and the politics of race) were to be understood as a potentially explosive historical conjuncture during which ‘the State’s’ main aim was to set the terms by which the crisis would be perceived, all in order to reproduce state hegemony and the interests of the dominant groups it represented. In the end the crisis was redefined as a crisis of legitimate authority which had been prevented from doing its proper job, thus laying the foundations for an ‘exceptional State’ with strong police powers (Hall 1980). The ‘politics of mugging’ was understood to provide ideological cover for the exceptional emergence of a strong state and the continued enforcement of iniquitous power relations; thereby the crime panic surrounding the policing of ‘blacks’, the poor and the unemployed amounted to ‘policing the crisis’. Criminology Theory and Globalization For more than a quarter of a century, criminology has been honed in an attempt to theorize the social, economic, cultural, and institutional embeddedness of the dialectics of crime and social control. In C. S. Lewis’s famous literary metaphor, classic critical criminology aimed at seeing through the details of crime ‘waves’ or ‘epidemics’ and the froth of ‘moral panics’ created by the campaigning of ‘moral crusaders’. In its most robust forms, critical academic criminology was not mere literary deconstruction and its most illuminating practitioners made good use of many of the same social scientific research techniques and findings as the ‘administrative criminology’ of governmental programmers (Young 1994). Critical criminologists were wont to undertake detailed analyses of a variety of official crime statistics, contrasting these with representations of crime and disorder in the popular media, in order to show how the underlying phenomenon had been institutionally constructed more as a reflection of the predilections of the institutions of social order than of the phenomenon itself (Box 1971, 1983, 1987). Some critical criminologists undertook empirical work of their own, using the standard research instruments of administrative criminology such as crime and victimization surveys as well as detailed analyses of official statistics, their production and dissemination (Bowling 1998; Jones, MacLean and Young 1985; Kinsey, Lea and Young 1986; Lea and Young 1984; Mooney 2000). As previously explained, realist criminology of the kind propounded by J.Q. Wilson explicitly rejected the attempt to fathom the social causes of crime – a symptom of what Jock Young referred to as the ‘etiological crisis’ (Young 1994). This abandonment of interest in the social causes of crime was partly, one suspects, because the control responses advocated by Wilsonian realist criminologists might themselves be thought of as criminogenic. Iatrogenesis, the notion that the administered ‘cure’ was itself a link in the chain of crime

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causation, had become an important feature of critical criminological thinking (Gladstone, Ericson and Shearing 1991). Critical criminology has long attempted to look through the fogged window of perception created by apparently realistic administrative criminology in order to expose underlying power relationships based on institutional positioning, age, class, ethnicity, and gender; and further, to show how those relationships folded into crime control strategies all in the maintenance of an exclusive social order (Young 1999). How do these insights from criminological theory look when focused through the lens of globalization theories and how will criminological theory be adapted to take account of the transnational condition? The easiest way to answer to the latter question is, perhaps, to take up John Urry’s (2000) arguments for a ‘sociology beyond societies’. Urry argues for a sociological view that does not remain fixated upon a static nation-state⁄society couplet but rather one that analyses global flows and transnational complexity. Criminology, like sociology of this ilk, seeks to problematize the fixed, given and static notions of social order (Urry 2003: 59). The transnational perspective requires transcendence of boundaries and the expansion of the thematic scope of criminology. Although criminology has often been rather bound up with the parochial order of territorial jurisdictions, many criminologists now clearly recognize limitations in the ‘belief that national political communities can be relatively autonomous because they have the capacity to control their own destinies’ (Ericson and Stehr 2000: 32). Faced with this recognition, one contradiction of globalization crisis talk strikes a particularly strong chord: while politicians profess a limited capacity to influence the economy, and in some places appear to have given up trying to do so, very nearly everywhere politicians are vouchsafing their determination to ‘fight crime’ by various measures (Christie 2004). Under conditions of transnationalization, the role of the state in the social response to crime is contradictory. On one hand, as global neo-liberalism develops apace, there is evidence that even while modern states increasingly ‘govern through crime’ (Simon 1997), they are increasingly unable to govern crime, and in the prosperous countries of the West there is a tendency to simply manage crime fear. Over the past three decades criminologists have charted the exponential growth of privatized forms of security, as well as the growth of private prisons and numerous other institutional aspects of the penal apparatus (Johnston 2000a). Nils Christie conceptualized ‘crime control as industry’, and observed that many Western states, albeit to greater or lesser extents, increasingly leave the provision of security to market forces (Christie 2000). Does this amount to a withering away of the state? The answer seems ambiguous, since, in parallel with this outsourcing, there has been a striking growth in the size of prison populations and penal apparatus in many countries (Stern and Niehaus 1998; Stern 2006) and, although measurement is difficult, a general growth in the policing apparatus as well (Henry and Smith 2007). Moreover, in the aftermath of the world-wide declaration of a ‘war on terror’ there is a palpable enhancement of state capacities, especially evident in the intensification of border controls and the enhancement of state-sponsored surveillance and bureaucracy. Far from withering away, under transnational conditions the heavy muscle power of the state – that is, the coercive capacities of states – is growing. Decoupled from the traditional emphasis on studying crime in national societies, and aware of the advent of ‘global cities’ where, for the first time in human history, the urban masses – and especially the urban poor – outnumber the rural ones, criminological theory has incorporated important aspects of globalization theory into the corpus (Davis 1998).

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The ‘city of walls’ (Caldeira 2000), which divides the locally grounded urban poor from the transnationally cosmopolitan upper classes, has required new techniques of social ordering: witness the massive installation of CCTV and the other technological paraphernalia of surveillance society (Lyon 2003); the militarization of state-backed crime control strategies and the growth of private security (Johnston 2000a; Johnston and Shearing 2003), and the mushrooming of ghettos side-by-side with ‘gated communities’. The overriding characteristic of the global city is an ‘ecology of fear’ (Davis 1999), partly, one suspects, because, as the sociologist Richard Sennett (1998) has observed, the new global elite wants to operate in the city, but not rule it. Thus is composed a regime of power without responsibility, which, of course, makes necessary the brute repression of ‘deviants’ – that is, the economically surplus population – so as to lock down their mobility and preserve the collective sameness and relative ease of mobility of those included in the transnational market society (Hayward 2004). Ethnographic criminology has been particularly effective in describing the consequences of these processes. For example Philippe Bourgois’s study of El Barrio is a powerful account of the lives of young drug dealers in a marginalized neighbourhood sitting amidst the wealth of Manhattan (2003). For these people, the possibility even of casual labour, which occupied earlier generations of the urban lower class (Liebow 1967), is non-existent. In the ‘postFordist city’, factory employment has been slashed, and in its place has risen a feminized labour force in the service sector (Hobbs et al. 2003). The cultural identity of young men, macho and tough, which could function effectively on the factory shop floor, is dysfunctional in the white-collar office environment of the service sector which demands subservient modes of interaction. Instead of passively accepting such structural marginalization, Bourgois’s informants are enlivened in the violent inner-city street culture which is dominated by the illicit drug economy, the choice employer. The street culture he describes does indeed offer its participants the possibility of achieving wealth, status and alternative forms of dignity through conspicuous consumption – just as the economically better off who surround them do – but, only at a cost because this alternative lifestyle ‘ultimately becomes an active agent in personal degradation and community ruin’ (Bourgois, 2003: 9). Contemporary criminological ethnography generally shows that the illicit drug economy is not so much the cause of innercity decline, but rather a symptom of deeper structural problems (see also Wright and Decker 1997). The problem is so deep-seated that illicit drug markets could never be suppressed and ‘knocked out’ by repressive policing and penal interventionism, and that is why such strategies tend only to compound the problem – iatrogenesis. The marginalized dangerous classes are a category of fear, but, as Bourgois points out, their ‘self-destructive addiction is merely the medium for desperate people to internalize their frustration, resistance and powerlessness’ (2003: 319). Fear and Control The fear of crime has become an object of governance distinct from the governance of crime itself (Lee 2007). The present has been described in terms of a ‘politics of fear’ (Furedi 2005) and criminologists now argue that fear, anxiety and insecurity have been a potent factor behind a variety of innovations in crime control (Hope and Sparks 2000; Zedner 2003). According

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to Jock Young (2003) conditions of more or less permanent and all pervasive insecurity have emerged globally and serve as the perfect seedbed for many forms of crime, not to mention the wellspring for the intensely punitive response of the ‘discontented majority’. Taking a cue from the sociologist Anthony Giddens, Young and other criminologists have attempted to come to grips with a standard feature of global neo-liberalism, namely the anxiety provoked by flux and change and especially the anxiety brought about by the ‘casualization’ and ‘flexiblization’ of labour. In Giddens’s turn of phrase, ‘ontological insecurity’ stems from the lack of ‘confidence that most human beings have in their self-identity and the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action’ (Giddens 1990: 92). As a result, ‘anxiety, fear and self-interest become the new emotional responses to life in advanced capitalism’ (Hall and Winlow 2005: 32). Small wonder, then, that the middle-middle classes of the West ‘are unsure about their good fortune, unclear about their identity, uncertain about their position on the [socially] included side of the line’ (Young 2003: 399). The contradictory effects of globalization on states’ capacities – on the one hand, eroding the ability to produce welfare, and on the other enhancing the ‘power to punish’ (Garland and Young 1985) – lends itself to nostalgia for a bygone age: For whereas the Golden Age [of the Keynsian welfare State] granted social embeddedness, strong certainty of personal and social narrative, a desire to assimilate the deviant, the immigrant, the stranger, late modernity generated both economic and ontological insecurity, a discontinuity of personal and social narrative and an exclusionary tendency towards the deviant. (Young 2003: 390)

In the present, Gabe Mythen and Sandra Walklate (2006: 388) suggest that ‘far from a global politics of risk which emphasizes responsibility and equality, what is emerging instead, it seems, is a politics of fear and vengeance’. This is recognized in the more general sociology of risk; for example, Beck (1992: 75) observes that ‘the risk society contains an inherent tendency to become a scapegoat society’ (italics in the original). These intensifying fears need to be situated in the context of globally exacerbating divisions between the winners and losers of the new world order. Zygmunt Bauman (2000: 205) describes ‘the wasteful, rejecting logic or globalization’ and sees globalization essentially as the production of ‘human waste’. Ethnographic confirmation of this perspective can be found, for example, in Beatrix Campbell’s (1993) Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places, which describes the local council estates for lower-class families and people more as a human dumping ground rather than housing for capitalism’s reserve army of labour. World-wide, about one-third of the population presently lives on less than one US dollar per day, while the richest 1 per cent of adults own 40 per cent of planetary ‘wealth’ and the richest 10 per cent own more than 85 per cent of global ‘assets’ (Randerson 2006). The relationship between crime and inequalities of wealth and power has been long studied in criminology, and the view that has emerged about it is complex. Observing how contemporary consumer capitalism both absorbs massive populations into the order of consumption and simultaneously ‘vomits up’ – that is, structurally excludes – those same populations, Jock Young settled on the colourful metaphor of bulimia in order to describe this strange contradiction. A striking fixture of flavellas, slums, banlieue, and ghettos around the world is the protrusion of TV satellite

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dishes, because through global mass media the planetary masses have intimate connection with the lifestyles of the rich. Already pervasive social inequalities are amplified through the constant display of wealth and consumer products in the media, ensuring that the indignity of relative deprivation is kept burning in the living quarters of the world’s working poor. It is against this backdrop that a variety of ‘suitable enemies’ (Christie 1986) are paraded – Outsiders, in the same sense that Howard Becker (1963) used the term more than 40 years ago – a normal social fact both constituted by and constitutive of the social order more generally. Only now the drama is global and, because the levels of fear and anxiety that surround deviance are a degree beyond anything imaginable in that earlier time, the control responses are themselves more punitive. This type of theorization, which obviously echoes Durkheimian sociological ideas from the nineteenth century, has considerable purchase in the present and has been picked up by a number of criminological scholars precisely because ‘punitive populism’ – and the spirit of vindictiveness it represents – has so displaced the instrumental rationality the discipline was intended to foster (Garland 2001a, 2001b; Pratt 2007). Two folk-devils in particular stand out against this backdrop: the illegal immigrant and the terrorist (Bigo 2002). Xenophobia and renewed debates about the viability of multiculturalism surround discussions about the unscrupulousness of human traffickers, and cultural practices such as honour killings and the circumcision of female genitalia. Under transnational conditions the cultural outsider is always ‘over here’ and the anxiety prompted by the general ontological insecurity of the times calls for heightened control responses. One barometer of this social effect is police use of stop-and-search powers. For example, in London in mid-2005, it was reported that the use of such powers in the context of counterterrorism had increased sevenfold in the month following the 7 July bombings on the London Underground. According to figures released at the time, between 7 July and 10 August, the British Transport Police had carried out 6,747 stop-and searches under anti-terrorism laws, mostly in London. Of those 2,390 stops were of Asian people, 35 per cent of the total, and 2,168 of white people, who were 32 per cent of the total. In London, Asian people comprise 12 per cent of the population, while white people represent 63 per cent. One month previously, in June, the force stopped 408 people nationwide, with less of a focus on Asian people: of that month’s stops, 51 per cent were white, 8.6 per cent were Afro-Caribbean, and 16.2 per cent were Asian (Dodd 2005). Reportedly, the stop-and-searches during the surge led to 25 arrests, mainly for drugs and possession of weapons (mostly knives) offences. The bombings on the London transport system created fear and alarm, and the reaction of authorities signalled something: the folkdevils would be put in their place and the social order preserved. On 22 July, in the midst of the heightened police dragnet on the underground transport system, Metropolitan undercover police shot and killed a Brazilian national named Jean Charles de Menezes in the mistaken belief that he was a lone Middle Easterner intent on a suicide bombing mission. These are all symptoms of a broader global malaise. Fear and anxiety, and the racial and religious intolerance that accompanies them, have transnational effects: • A 2004 Newsweek report concerning the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands was banned in Pakistan because one of the illustrations in the article included an image taken from Van Gogh’s film (dramatizing the ill-treatment of women under Sharia law)

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which showed verses from the Qur’an written on the body of a semi-naked woman (Associated Press 2004). • In 2005, the annual pilgrimage to Bondi Beach was upset after several weeks of largescale public order disturbances – termed ‘riots’ in the local newspapers – by gangs of fighting white-Australian and Lebanese- Australian youths, and debates raged about the extent to which the violence was some strange echo of the Bali bombings in 2002 (which killed 202 people – many of them Australian holidaymakers) or merely ‘home grown’ racism (O’Riordan 2005). • In 2006, the publication of satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper led to the burning of the Danish embassy in Beirut, while in Damascus the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish embassies were attacked, and in Istanbul Turkish ultra-nationalists marched to the Danish consulate hurling eggs and burning the Danish flag. In a number of European capitals the cartoons were republished. In Paris the front page of the France-Soir tabloid carried the headline ‘Yes, We Have the Right to Caricature God’ with a cartoon of Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian divinities floating on a cloud (Short and Barnwell 2006). These are symptomatic ‘reaction formations’ which have their basis in the pluralistic ignorance of the transnational condition. They cannot be countered by the threat or use of force, nor can they be deterred by recourse to the control orders of realism; indeed, such responses only make the symptoms worse. But perhaps that is precisely the point with global governance through crime. As Giorgio Agamben (2005) points out in State of Exception, when Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon pioneered judicial photography for anthropometric identification – the historical precursors to DNA profiling and retina scanning – the procedure was reserved for some few specified criminals. In the present there is a tendency to generalize these types of procedure to all people, placing the population as a whole under a permanent condition of surveillance and suspicion. In a manner reminiscent of ‘policing the crisis’ in 1970s Britain, the contemporary politics of crime, insecurity and fear provide ideological cover for the global emergence of a ‘state of exception’ and the global body politic becomes the criminal body. Synthesis and a Conclusion As an interdisciplinary scholarly pursuit, international political sociology can be usefully positioned between theories about international affairs and criminological ones. This essay has merely suggested a number of different ways in which the intersection of these ideas can provide fruitful lines of enquiry. Theories about international crime control and the changing nature of state sovereignty as articulated by political scientists have a tendency to reify and naturalize the nation-state as the primary locus of international crime control agendas (eg. Andreas and Nadelmann 2006), but as the literature reviewed here shows, this is an inadequate explanation. Realism in foreign affairs has its domestic counterpart in criminological realism and it has been argued here that neither work well, either as explanations or as recipes for good governance. In the present period, Weberian assumptions regarding states’ monopoly of coercion within specified territorial limits are simply passé. Moreover,

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states’ capacities are brought into question by the existence of what Lesley Sklair (2001) has named the ‘transnational capitalist class’, a venal class whose interests do not coincide with any territorially-based form of power, but rather exist in the circuits of the transnational financial system. It is an alarming contemporary truth that seigneurial states’ capacities to muster coercive force (in the form of the military, security services, police, and penological apparatus) have, in many instances, grown considerably. It is also a sad contemporary truth that many of those same states’ capacities to look after the health, education and welfare of the populations on which they draw sustenance have notably withered. How to account for these apparently contradictory developments is an intriguing question. They have dire criminological consequences, of course. It is therefore vital to observe the symbolic aspects of crime control discourse. The manufacture of suitable enemies provides a potent impetus to social control. Mystified by the folk-devilry projected by globalized media, attention is drawn away from the social causes of crime and insecurity, and the underlying structural conditions remain largely unchallenged. Animated by apparently realistic policies, the control response turns out to be iatrogenic and an amplification spiral sets in, which triggers yet more anxiety and ontological insecurity in a vicious cycle. Critical insight is crucial if we are to break out of the current cycle of fear and insecurity, which means seeing through the fog of globalization crisis talk. Theories from criminology are a useful addition to international political sociology and there seems little doubt that such insights will be called upon again and again as crime and insecurity are repeatedly muscled on to the agenda of global governance. The situation is one of great complexity and it is not the case that there are but two choices – idealistic politics or Realpolitik (cf. Cohen 1988: 233) – rather there is a choice to couple critical thinking with a sense of determination to turn away from the global governance through crime and do the future differently.

Part IV Future Trajectories

[15] From Detection to Disruption: Intelligence and the Changing Logic of Police Crime Control in the United Kingdom1 In the Anglo-American system, police responses to criminal behaviour have traditionally been organized around a reactive mode of investigation, where the primary objective is to identify offenders and subject them to legal censure in respect of past criminal acts. Studies of this dimension of police work have repeatedly found that the most significant determinant of investigative success is the quality and quantity of information provided to the police by members of the public (Ericson 1993; Greenwood, Chaiken, and Petersilia 1977; Innes 2003). If the police have sufficient information to allow them to easily identify a prime suspect, the case is more likely to be cleared. In the absence of such information, the potential for the police to identify and construct a case against a suspect is highly constrained, although the routinized use of such administrative techniques as ‘taking offences into consideration’ and ‘prison write-offs’ may partially mask the overall impact of any such inhibitors (Ericson 1993; Fielding 1995; Hobbs 1998; Skolnick 1966). In this essay, we label this the ‘prosecutiondirected mode’ of police crime control. In Britain particularly, but also to a lesser extent in several other European countries, there has been increasing interest in configuring a more ‘proactive’ and ‘intelligence-led’ style of policing, especially, but not exclusively, with regard to serious and organized criminality. In the UK this can be dated with reference to the publication of the Audit Commission’s report Helping with Enquiries: Tackling Crime Effectively (1993; see also Maguire and John 1995). Oriented to the logic of the ‘New Public Management’, which foregrounds efficiency, effectiveness, and economy in public service delivery, the Audit Commission report identified a number of inefficiencies in the police’s reliance upon a fundamentally reactive approach to crime control. Purportedly, the aim of the report was to maximize the efficiency, effectiveness, and economy (the ‘three Es’) of publicly provided policing in the UK by encouraging greater use of intelligence. Stimulated by general criticisms about the ‘three Es’ of police performance, in tandem with recent debates concerning the practical utility of probabilistic risk prediction, a number of European policing organizations have developed new and innovative ways of responding to crime (Maguire 2000), including a focus on developing intelligence to direct and target interventions with enhanced precision. This is part of a trend that Ericson and Shearing (1986) labelled ‘the scientification of policing’ and it has become well known in UK policing quarters under the rubric of ‘intelligence-led policing’. Broadly, these terms signify Originally published with Martin Innes in the International Criminal Justice Review, 40, pp. 1–24 (2004). 1

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how the technological and social organization of policing increasingly gravitates around a future-oriented mode of social control. As part of these movements toward a more ‘intelligence-led’ style of working, there is an emergent, and as yet little remarked upon, shift in the governing logic of policing. Instead of aiming at the detection of crimes that have already occurred, police strategies and tactics increasingly aim to disrupt criminality in such a way as to prevent crime from occurring or to reduce its gravity if it does occur. Disruption has joined the list of quantitative performance indicators of agency success, alongside more traditional indicators such as arrest figures and other, new indicators, such as assets seized.2 The emerging emphasis on disrupting criminal enterprises can be contrasted with the older prosecutorial focus, and we label this new approach the ‘disruption-directed mode’.3 In this essay we focus upon the increasing deployment of the disruption mode in contemporary police crime control strategies, arguing that these changes are connected to, and are at least partly explainable by, police attempts to make their activities more intelligence-led. Changes in police organization under the rubric of being ‘intelligence-led’ have produced a situation where police crime control strategy no longer pivots on the identification of a suspect and the subsequent construction of a prosecution case. Police objectives are increasingly more pragmatic, aiming to disrupt and disorganize criminal networks and markets. It should be emphasized that we do not suggest that the prosecutorial mode has been completely replaced, or even overtaken, by the disruption mode. Rather, disruption supplements, and to an (as yet) unmeasured extent partially eclipses, the traditional prosecution-directed mode.4 This essay begins with an extended discussion of the concept of intelligence and its application to policing. This provides a framework for thinking about the turn to disruption in police practice, which is the essay’s main focus. We conclude by considering some of the limitations of the ongoing changes, together with their wider theoretical and ethical ramifications.

2 The New Public Management (NPM) drive has affected policing in the UK in general ways that are outside the interests of this essay. For a discussion of the impact of NPM on policing see Hough (2005). 3 The National Service Plan for the National Crime Squad for 1999/2000 listed ‘disruptions’ as a ‘key performance indicator’ and called for a 5 per cent increase in the number of criminal organizations disrupted (NCS n.d.). Subsequently, disruption has become a primary method of tackling drug markets in the UK, but it has also been aimed at a variety of other types of illicit market, especially markets in stolen goods and bootleg tobacco and liquor. 4 The Service Plan for the UK National Crime Squad 1999/2000 included two key performance indicators with respect to the agency’s crime control objectives. The first was to ‘improve the quality of arrests by increasing the number of arrests of criminals of core nominal and current nominal status’ (i.e. in the vernacular, criminals listed as ‘most wanted’). The second was to ‘increase the number of criminal enterprises which are dismantled or disrupted’ (NCS, n.d.).

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Data and Method The data reported in this essay are the product of two separate research projects, both funded by the UK Home Office. Study One was an examination of strategic criminal intelligence processes across the police sector in the UK (Ratcliffe and Sheptycki 2004; Sheptycki 2004b, 2004c). Study Two (Innes, Fielding and Cope 2005) was a more focused exploration of intelligence-led policing in two UK police forces. Both studies were conducted using multiple-method approaches, including observational fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and analysis of key documents. The projects were carried out independently of each other; indeed, the research teams involved in the two projects were each unaware of the activities of the other. The present essay was written on the basis of common themes that emerged from both studies, particularly having to do with the nature and definition of policing intelligence, the consequences of the new rubric of intelligence-led policing for the division of labour within the UK police sector, and, most importantly, our shared understandings about the implications of the use of disruption as a tactic and key strategic performance indicator. By pooling our understanding in the process of analysis, a form of convergent and non-convergent triangulation was facilitated that serves to increase confidence in the reliability of the findings and improves their generalizability. Study One was designed as a national overview of the information processes that underlie strategic criminal intelligence analysis. The aim was to examine the production of strategic intelligence analysis in the context of the UK National Intelligence Model (henceforth, NIM), ‘from the ground up’. The research team that undertook this project conducted interviews with a variety of professionals who contribute to the criminal intelligence process. The majority of these interviews were conducted in situ in the operational environment, which helped interviewees to talk in greater detail about their work routines. Field observation was conducted over five continuous working days in each of two constabularies and over three working days in a third constabulary. Eight working days were spent with intelligence personnel at Customs House5 during the lifetime of the project, which, although it did not constitute sustained field observation, did allow for observation of the intelligence division of labour and its relationship to the work routines of that agency. Researchers attended several tasking and co-ordinating meetings at regional, county, and divisional levels, and a number of ad hoc focus group interviews were conducted. These group interviews were particularly revealing of the interplay between different forms of professional expertise and sharpened appreciation of different perspectives on the criminal intelligence process. Subsequently, a variety of personnel in different sections at the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), the National Crime Squad (NCS), Her Majesty’s Immigration Service (HMIS), Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise (HMCE), as well as the Environment Agency and the Security Service, were interviewed. Personnel from the following constabularies participated in the research, either in interview or as part of the field observation: Kent, Merseyside, The Metropolitan Police, Lothian and Borders, Warwickshire, West Mercia, West Midlands, and Staffordshire. A variety of documents were also collected in the field. These included materials that ranged from the tailored end products of the criminal intelligence process to raw criminal intelligence 5

During the research period this was the headquarters of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise (HMCE).

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reports (with nominal data and other highly sensitive information, suitably censored) and various points in between, as well as a variety of operations manuals and other documents. These materials came from disparate sources during the conduct of the fieldwork and were invaluable in the further elucidation of the interview and observational data. Study Two was based on observational fieldwork in four police intelligence units in two police forces (referred to anonymously as ‘County Force’ and ‘Urban Force’) and semistructured interviews with 30 police officers and civilian crime analysts. In total, two weeks of observational fieldwork were undertaken in each of the four intelligence units. In ‘County Force’, observations pertained to an intelligence unit at basic command unit level and in the Force Intelligence Bureau. This produced an account of tactical and strategic intelligence production, analysis, and use for the force as a whole. In ‘Urban Force’, the units observed were somewhat different. Observational fieldwork was also conducted in an intelligence unit at the basic command level. However, the second intelligence group studied constituted a special task force targeting specific crime problems. Data collection for Study Two took place between autumn 2000 and spring 2001. Data were analysed using the basic principles of analytic induction. Studies of police intelligence processes are rare, and researchers are well aware that care has to be taken so that reported findings are not detrimental to the operational interests of participating organizations. However, these limitations do not preclude full disclosure of data relevant to the questions being asked here. We are not so much concerned here with the modus operandi of specialist police units conducting sensitive operations (for example, undercover operations) as we are with explaining the ways in which the organizational logic of policing has been reinvented as a consequence of intelligence-led, future-oriented policing aimed at producing quantitative measures of criminal groups disrupted. To this end, the data presented here draw fully and exclusively on the results of the two UK studies described above. Thinking about Intelligence As Gary Marx (1988; see also Fijnaut and Marx 1995) has noted, police practice has always made use of strategies involving deceptive and undercover methods to uncover ‘intelligence’. But Marx emphasized that, whereas such strategies were formerly often glossed over and seen as a necessary part of ‘the dirty work’ of policing liberal democratic societies, contemporary discourses of policing place such methods at centre stage. Intelligence is increasingly identified as pivotal to the conduct of effective and efficient policing. The emphasis placed on the importance and significance of intelligence in contemporary conceptions of policing belies the conceptual complexity that attends a well rounded understanding of the term. In general, intelligence is an informational construct. It can be defined as information that is organizationally encoded in such a way as to make evident the need for, or to enable the conduct of, acts of social control at some point in the future. This generic definition, though, can be further subdivided. Following Marx (1988), there is a sense in which police have always used intelligence, although it may not have been discursively constructed in such terms. Indeed, Willmer’s (1970) classic application of information theory to the problems of police patrol recognized

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the importance of intelligence in the age of unit beat policing. Willmer noted the great variety of information that comes to the attention of police officers and observed that, as the territory being policed becomes more densely populated, or the geographical remit more widely spread, it becomes increasingly difficult to translate it into intelligence (1970: 24–34). As Willmer described it, the intelligence function essentially consists in the acquisition of knowledge and its processing into meaningful ‘bits’ that lead to action. A product of his time, he focused on the role of the ‘collators’ (a precursor to today’s crime analysts) and their function in interpreting and communicating information within the police organization so that non-optimum performance would be avoided and the full potential of information in police hands would be realized. He noted that several countries were experimenting with various computer applications to criminal records, modus operandi searches, personal description searches, and vehicle registration searches, as well as routine administrative tasks, but that ‘Great Britain appears to be alone in considering the application of computers to intelligence information’ (1970: 33). Thirty years later, British studies revealed ‘the use of a growing armoury of informationgathering, analytical and investigative tools and techniques, including undercover officers, tasked criminal informants, “bugging” and visual surveillance devices, closed circuit television, financial tracking capabilities, and of course a vast range of computer facilities, packages, and databases, most of them rare or non-existent 20 years ago’ (Maguire 2000: 316; see also Maguire and John 1995). What is more, by the year 2000 information-based policing and the manufacture of intelligence were increasingly well established internationally. Thus the report of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, entitled Policing With Intelligence, noted that ‘the ideal intelligence configuration has often been likened to a pyramid structure, extending from a broad based local policing tier through a force and inter-force level to upper echelons composed of national and international work’ (HMIC 1997: 7). The HMIC report also pointed out that government forms a strategic view of serious crime problems on the basis of information flowing upward in a number of agencies. (Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise was mentioned specifically in this regard.) In general, the report of the HMIC emphasized that ‘for this model to work effectively, intelligence has to flow freely on and between all the levels and interchange smoothly between agencies’ (1997: 7). The distinction between information and intelligence is well established, but it can be difficult to grasp. Information consists of bits of data that, when combined and viewed together with relevant background knowledge, may be used to produce intelligence, which informs the actions and decisions of policing organizations. According to Whitaker, intelligence is ‘the systematic and purposeful acquisition, sorting, retrieval, analysis interpretation and protection of information’ (1999: 5). Regarding the information/intelligence distinction, another permutation is prevalent in the context of undercover policing. As the work of Marx has amply demonstrated (Fijnaut and Marx 1995; Marx 1988), it is not uncommon to refer to any information that comes into police hands by covert means as intelligence. In this context, there is a distinction made between covert intelligence (information obtained by covert means) and intelligence product, which is intelligence in the classic sense that Willmer described. This elasticity of terminology should serve as a warning. As the practices of intelligence-led policing have spread internationally and across a variety of policing-type institutions, the

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terms associated with it have become subject to some looseness of definition. This is evident with regard to distinctions drawn between different levels of intelligence. For example, in the UK circa 2002, agents working for Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise made a three-tier distinction between operational, tactical, and strategic intelligence (cf. Ratcliffe 2004: esp. 4-5). The first type is defined as intelligence product supporting front line units in taking case-specific action to achieve compliance or enforcement objectives. An example is information suggesting that a specific aircraft is at high risk for drug mules (i.e. likely to have persons on board who are in possession of quantities of drugs). Tactical intelligence is understood to be intelligence product that supports national and local managers of front-line units in planning activities and deploying resources to achieve operational objectives. An example is intelligence analysis indicating that a specific airport, airline, or route is being systematically used for importing drugs. Strategic intelligence is broader still and entails looking at the national picture – at an industry, or at problems presented by illicit trafficking from a particular country, or at national problems caused by a particular piece of legislation or other new development. As an example of the latter, we can cite references to a strategic assessment on tax compliance problems arising in the context of Internet-based business (e-commerce) during early 2001. In contrast, during this same period the UK National Crime Squad (NCS) was operating a basic two-tier distinction. Tactical intelligence was directed toward case-specific criminal activity and targets, directly contributing to the enforcement objectives of the NCS. Strategic intelligence, however, aimed to provide a predictive assessment of current and emerging trends (Ratcliffe and Sheptycki,2004), delivering an overview of criminal capabilities, threats, trends, and intentions, in accordance with the organization’s strategic aims and principles. Like the NCS, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) also viewed tactical intelligence as being directed towards specific criminal activity and targets. To this end the NCIS aimed to produce tactical products for use by law enforcement teams to mount operations against major criminals operating at the national and international levels. Tactical intelligence was set against strategic intelligence, which involved assessing the scale and nature of the threats from serious and organized crime, identifying potential areas for new legislation, recommending prevention techniques, and forecasting future threats. In common with undercover police, the Security Service views intelligence as any information that has been covertly obtained. From the perspective of this organization, all intelligence is intrinsically secret. Strategic intelligence is seen as a tool that aids in decision making and the formulation of policy. Tactical intelligence is any information that aids an area of serious crime in which the Security Service has been tasked.6 In the UK it is also possible to track the development of this kind of vocabulary in the Benefits Agency, Her Majesty’s Immigration Service, and the Financial Services Authority. However, because the spread of 6 During the period in which these studies were undertaken, the Security Services did not have any formal power to initiate criminal operations. In accordance with Home Office Circular 46/1996 and Scottish Office Circular 13/1996, Chief Officers of Police and the NCS could submit tasking proposals through the Director General of the NCIS. The NCIS might itself initiate tasking of the Security Service, and a separate memorandum of understanding was in place to facilitate tasking from HMCE. See Sheptycki (2004b) for more detailed discussion of these circulars.

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this terminology to the further reaches of the police sector is relatively recent, it is difficult currently to locate practitioners who use the concepts with the kind of assurance that attests to the organizational entrenchment of intelligence routines. Each of these agencies employs a slightly different intelligence nomenclature. Although it is certainly not impossible for agents to think outside their own institutional terminology, such differences are symptomatic of different ways of doing business. Further, because different terminology implies different expectations of intelligence analysis, these differences may also be symptomatic of inter-agency tension. For instance, HMCE operational intelligence aimed at the compliance and enforcement objectives of HMCE is not wholly commensurate with the objectives inherent in police tactical intelligence requirements. In interviews undertaken in Study One, one example of this disjunction that was often cited pertained to firearms, which featured prominently in police strategic thinking but were much less prominent in the frame of reference for HMCE. Differences in nomenclature could also be located by reference to positioning in the hierarchy of intelligence processing: The intelligence that we pass to a patrol officer is intended to task him so that his work is directed, efficient and effective. To a sergeant in charge of a particular area, that looks like tactical intelligence, and the knowledge that he uses to organize all of the officers on the shift so that the whole area is properly covered is strategic. But to me, in charge of a whole division, what the sergeant is working with looks more like tactical intelligence, since I am in overall strategic charge of the division. And on it goes up to the top at NCIS where what I am doing is down to basic tactical decisions. (Quoted in Sheptycki 2004b, Study One)

In addition to reflecting the structured hierarchy of institutions in the policing sector, the distinction between tactical and strategic intelligence may also be a temporal one. On this view tactical intelligence is intended to assist in the conduct of operations in the here and now, whereas strategic intelligence is predictive and future-oriented. Although there are differences in the terminology employed across the police sector, there is some general agreement that tactical intelligence refers to the use of data to inform specific, bounded, and targeted interventions against a nominated problem, whereas strategic intelligence consists of data providing a longer-term vision of the contexts and problems relevant to police practice. In the NIM definition, the distinction between tactical and strategic modes of intelligence is portrayed in an unproblematic manner. The different forms of intelligence are understood as being quite separate. Based upon the observational work conducted across the two studies, it would seem that this unproblematic and dichotomized portrayal fails to capture the important interdependencies and overlapping connections that routinely exist between strategic and tactical forms of intelligence. In defining the context for more targeted forms of action and analysis, strategic intelligence ‘frames’ the production of more tactical modes. Thus strategic intelligence provides a sense of what problems can be identified and how they are to be addressed. Consequently, it strongly guides the conditions of existence for the production of any tactical intelligence. In a similar fashion, though, tactical modes of intelligence, in being framed by more strategic modes, effectively serve as warrants for their credibility and produce specific evidence that indicates the validity and reliability of the strategic orientation taken.

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Thus, in practice, tactical and strategic intelligence is frequently intertwined, interleaved, and interdependent. Yet another way of defining intelligence is to distinguish between the types of source from which it is gleaned. This approach has its roots in the traditions of military intelligence, differentiating between ‘open source’ and ‘closed source’ intelligence. The latter term refers to data where there are access restrictions that have to be negotiated, in contrast to open sources where there are no such restrictions upon accessing the data. As with the tactical and strategic distinction, this dichotomous definition is also problematic. To argue that intelligence is derived from one of two alternative sources tells us nothing about how it informs practice, which is the more interesting and vital question in terms of understanding the role of intelligence in contemporary policing systems. A further problem with the approaches taken to defining intelligence reviewed above is their neglect of one of the most important qualities of intelligence – its potential to be reconfigured and re-used in respect of a range of different situations. Theorists of information have long explained that one of the most important properties of information, compared with more material forms of resource, is that information can be used without being used up. This is a property shared with intelligence, and indeed it is central to the way intelligence is increasingly being used in policing systems, where it is repeatedly recycled, refigured, and reworked in an effort to address current problems. Thus the same piece of intelligence can be used to support the arrest of a suspected criminal and then, on a different occasion, to inform an intervention designed to disrupt the activities of a criminal network. This is analogous to a quality captured in Manning’s and Hawkins’ (1989) conceptualization of the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary forms of information in policing. As a reflection of this system-level dynamic, increasing attention is being directed to the capacity of police organizations to extend their ‘organizational memory’ across time and through space (Marx 1988). That is, they seek to routinely collect, analyse, store, and disseminate large amounts of information, through the use of increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies (Ericson and Haggerty 1997). Consequently, instead of seeking to define different modes of intelligence according to differences in content, it may be more analytically insightful to establish classifications according to how intelligence is used. Such an approach adopts and adapts Goffman’s notion of framing (1974) to describe how people organize experience. In a similar manner, we refer to the concept of ‘encoding frames’ in order to capture the ways in which police organizations organize intelligence in respect of a particular problem. The important point is that, just because a unit of information is encoded in a particular way at one point in time, this does not inhibit it being reframed (or, in Goffman’s terms, ‘re-keyed’) so as to be relevant and useful in respect of a different problem. Our empirical data suggest that there are four key encoding frames pertaining to policing intelligence systems. Criminal intelligence is data that provide some understanding about the identity and activities of a particular nominated individual or group of individuals. This can be contrasted with crime intelligence, which provides insight in relation to particular types of crime, crime hot spots, or crime series. Typically, criminal intelligence is derived from police informants who are themselves involved in some way in the criminal milieux (although it can be provided by ‘ordinary’ members of the public as well). This can be counterposed with

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the crime intelligence encoding frame, which is most often based upon analysis of police and partner agency data. Third, the community intelligence encoding frame is derived from information provided by ‘ordinary’ members of the public and tends to refer to the ‘local’ problems that they view as significant. Finally, there is contextual intelligence, which is concerned with the meso- and macro-structures of social organization and with predicting how changes at this level shape the environment for policing. This intelligence is derived from encoding data that are in turn derived from large-scale local and central government data sets. It is evident that the concept of intelligence is fluid, and different definitions prevail in different parts of the police sector. For our purposes here, we will define intelligence as information that has been subjected to some form of analysis and evaluation with the intention of informing future acts of social control. In the process of constructing intelligence, the data are rendered meaningful for policing organizations through the use of encoding frames. It is emphasized that the same piece of intelligence can be encoded through more than one frame at the same time. Thus, bits of intelligence can concurrently function as crime and criminal intelligence or as community and contextual intelligence. The point is that the meaning of intelligence does not inhere in the information itself but is dependent upon how it is interpreted and defined by its users, who are themselves situated in an organizational context. Having discussed the theoretical vocabulary relating to intelligence-led policing, it is now useful to move to the level of practical detail in order to understand how the notion of intelligence gains coherence within the division of policing labour. Intelligence Work The somewhat arcane and technical concern with defining the meanings of intelligence is necessary because, without it, it becomes harder to understand how the move to intelligenceled policing has been translated into practice. Indeed, it is the contested organizational meanings associated with it that prefigure the construction of disruption as a legitimate objective of police interventions. The key feature of intelligence-oriented forms of policing in the UK has been the ways in which intelligence work has been increasingly positioned at the centre of the police division of labour. In terms of the social organization of policing, it has induced the establishment of a number of specialist roles for the performance of different aspects of intelligence work. Embedded within traditional police organizational systems, autonomous and largely independent police constables would manage their own work, taking responsibility for collecting information from complainants, witnesses, and suspects, developing this information, analysing its credibility and usefulness, and acting upon it (Reiner 2000; Skolnick 1966). In contrast, intelligence-led approaches create a system-level division of labour, wherein each of these tasks is assigned to a specialist unit. In this sense, then, the emergence of a set of discourses and strategies of intelligence-led policing is coherent with the more general trend towards the rationalization of policing, remarked upon by Manning (2001). This notion of rationalizing the police function captures a broader set of changes. There are in fact a number of co-occurring influences, including the New Public Management ethos and developments

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in information and communication technologies, by which the various ‘means’ and ‘ends’ of policing, and the connections between them, are becoming increasingly clearly delineated – the overall impact being to exhibit a transformational capacity in terms of how policing is conceived, practised, and evaluated. Although these broader transformational processes are important, what is emphasized here is how intelligence-led policing systems tend to disaggregate the police role and to establish units that specialize in the performance of particular functions for the organization. Our analyses suggest that four key functional specialisms can be identified within this division of intelligence labour: acquisition, analysis, assay, and acting (Innes et al. 2005). The acquisition role is concerned with collecting data that can potentially be encoded as intelligence. The following quotation from a research and development officer in County Force gives a sense of this work: Your job is to collect the intelligence … that could be tied altogether and given as a problem that’s backed up by the intelligence ….Then you have to try to sell that product to an investigative body to take that product and run with it and finish it. The actions are that this person’s going to be arrested …. and property is going to be seized. But that’s outside our intelligence remit. (Taped interview, County Force, Study Two)

Broadly speaking, information acquisition takes place both internally and externally to the organization. The latter activity involves sourcing information either from informants or from more open sources, or indeed from other, non-police agencies and organizations. Particularly with reference to the use of informants, there has been a move within many organizations to make informant management a more specialized and professionalized role, subject to systemic and interactional controls and oversight (lnnes 2000). In addition, crime analysts are routinely tasked to source information from within the organization itself (and increasingly from across the policing sector writ large), researching the increasing number of databases that store information and intelligence resulting from the activities of other officers (Sheptycki 2003c, 2004b).7 Once the information is acquired, in order for it to be encoded as intelligence it has to be subjected to some form of analysis. A range of analytic methods are currently utilized by police organizations (see, for example, National Criminal Intelligence Service 2000; Ratcliffe 2004; Ratcliffe and Sheptycki 2004), which are involved in the framing of information as intelligence and in demonstrating its potential for operationalization. One particular example of the manufacturing of crime intelligence that was observed during the fieldwork illustrates the ways in which it can feed into disruption: One ‘analyst said that there appeared to be some specialization in crime, especially with more organized crimes such as car “ringing” … She was conducting some form of criminal business analysis in order to highlight the effective points of intervention to achieve disruption’ (field note, Urban Force, Study Two).

7 At its broadest, the UK ‘policing sector’ can be taken to include not only the police constabularies, the NCIS, the NCS, and the Security Services, but also other government agencies that include the Immigration Service, the Benefits Agency, Customs, the Inland Revenue, the Financial Services Authority, and the Environment Agency.

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The application of intelligence encoding frames to information through analysis can occur either pre- or post-assay. By assay we mean the evaluation of the relative seriousness of a problem vis-à-vis the quality of intelligence that the organization has in relation to it. Thus, if a problem is assayed and the decision is taken that it is of sufficient gravity that action needs to be taken, but there is an insufficient quality or quantity of intelligence to impact on an operation, then work will be conducted to improve the intelligence base in respect of the problem concerned. In contrast, post-analysis assays reveal the nature and scope of a problem through the manufacture of intelligence, as a consequence of which it is decided to mount an operation against the problem concerned. The fourth component of the rationalized organizational system is acting. Two basic kinds of acting are identifiable in an intelligence-led framework. Collecting actions are performed to increase the intelligence base of the organization, either generally or in respect of a targeted problem, individual, or issue. ‘Enforcement actions’ involve an operation against a nominated target as a result of the performance of the other three functions. Our data indicate that an important form of action in intelligence-led policing systems is in fact no action. It was observed in both studies that the number of nominated targets frequently outstripped the resources that were available to take action against them. In an intelligence-led framework, these different specialist roles occur in different orders and combinations, and they can occur more or less simultaneously. Thus, the processes of work involved in conducting intelligence-led policing differ, according to the disposition of the organization, the issue being addressed, and the amount of intelligence available. In what follows, we will examine how, in certain circumstances, these stages in the manufacture of intelligence serve to direct police organizations to actions that aim to disrupt criminal activities. Being Disruptive As a strategy of intervention, disruption is essentially based upon the idea that law enforcement agencies can engage in actions that make it difficult for individuals participating in a criminal network or market to continue with their illegal activities. As Johnston (2000b: 61) defines it, ‘the rationale [of disruption] is to circumvent the formal justice system in order, more easily, to effect the speedy closure of a given problem’. This logic was explained by a research and development officer within County Force: You might have a situation where you have got a larger than life lifestyle criminal who is a major or principal criminal in a network, and your intelligence collection focus is to collect the intelligence around his criminal activities to dismantle his network and take him away from the problem, thereby getting the problem dealt with. But because we can’t sell it onto an investigator because of their workload etcetera, etcetera, you might find that that particular individual, who is the principal, could be targeted and could be successfully dealt with by a smaller matter that would take him out of the way for a year or eighteen months. Your major drug importer who you can’t get to is disqualified from driving … Then that opens up other avenues to see who takes that person’s place … It is the Al Capone situation, it is typically

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As this quotation summarizes, disruption is a way of overcoming some of the problems encountered by police organizations in coping with heavy workloads. It is therefore not surprising to find that, as both field studies observed, as the supply of information encoded as criminal or crime intelligence frequently outstrips the organizational capacity to act upon it, advocates of intelligence-led policing exhibit a marked preference for disruption. Disrupting criminal activities was often justified on the basis that it was thought to require less police time and to create more inconvenience to criminal entrepreneurs. Looked at this way, aiming to disrupt crime networks, markets, and organizations becomes a pragmatic alternative to doing nothing. Moreover, official recourse to disruption (and its acceptability within police culture) may, at least in part, be attributable to the high volumes of crime that are routinely being reported and that cannot be investigated properly because of resource limitations. This is further intimated in the comments of another research and development officer in the same force: They have to look at what is their capability? How much manpower they’ve got to deal with that new problem that you’ve given, [that] you’ve identified as well as dealing with the stuff you’ve already given them … To some extent people [are] working off conveyor belts … The packages go round and round and round. We get it to an investigative stage and if nobody’s got the capability to take that on and deal with that as an evidential investigation, then consequently what is today’s news, tomorrow is history. (Taped interview, County Force, Study Two)

The concluding sentence of this quotation is important because it indicates the extent to which police officers understand that information encoded as tactical intelligence has a ‘limited shelf-life’ in terms of its usefulness. This frequently establishes an imperative to act quickly in respect of the use of tactical intelligence products. This belief in the need for rapid reaction can have system-level ramifications, as was observed in some of the fieldwork where information was being organized through the application of a crime intelligence encoding frame: a crime analyst ‘was asked to put together a time chart for racial incidents over the year. The time frame was short meaning she was not really able to explore lots of the areas in any detail – she explained this was frustrating as she knew there were other questions to ask’ (field note, Urban Force, Study Two). Drawing upon the data, two principal kinds of disruption can be identified. The first involves the entrepreneurial use of legal powers to affect criminal networks and markets. The importance of entrepreneurialism in crime control work has previously been identified by Hobbs (1989, 1998) and Ericson (1993). In the context of intelligence-led modes of operating, the police’s powers of arrest are used to extract key players from the market or network. Individuals are targeted by police in order to effect a legal censure against them, but also because of the predicted impact that this will have on the network or market. An example of this was described to the researchers in Study Two:

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There was a certain person who was a predominant person within a network, but there was no way that an investigation could get close enough for him to be arrested on the criminality he was involved in. But the research of the intelligence unit found that actually on a driving front, on a mundane driving front, he was picking up tickets for speeding, parking on double yellow lines, things like that. So obviously, he wasn’t that clean with regard to his driving situation. So it was assessed that possibly traffic could tackle him. So we had a main person involved in importations of all types of drugs, he had his own network for dealing the stuff. He was also able to provide other items, stolen items for other crime groups, involved in other crimes and none of that we could touch him on. So a week was done by the motorcycle unit, the traffic department, looking at him, stopping him, checking his documents. Unfortunately he’s got a short fuse and a temper and he lashed out. He was dealt with for assault on police and criminal damage to a motorcycle and put away for three years … That was him out of the network, a main player, a main problem for this county anyway. But he wasn’t dealt with on what his core business was. (Taped interview, Detective Inspector, County Force, Study Two)

Such an approach makes use of the discretionary potential embedded within law and the extent to which the formulation of the law allows it to be used by officers as an investigative resource (Dixon 1997; Innes 2003). The example above also illuminates how the use of a criminal intelligence encoding frame involved analysing information that was already possessed by the organization. Another description of this entrepreneurial approach was provided in Study Two: There was a car handler. We did all the usual deployment to see if we could evidence that he was dealing and we couldn’t. But through research with [another agency] we found that he wasn’t paying his business rates and he had a workshop that he hadn’t got planning permission for … and he was employing someone in his workshop that was on unemployment benefit … so it was decided that we could possibly look at getting an inter-agency warrant on him. And he was totally disrupted, he even had his workshop demolished ….They looked at his stock and Inland Revenue came in at the end of it and looked at his paperwork and he was totally disrupted. (Taped interview, Detective Sergeant, County Force, Study Two)

Occasionally disruption is combined with more traditional prosecution-based strategies and even the general police social service role (Punch and Naylor, 1973). One case encountered in Study One originally came to the attention of police as a report of young truanting boys causing disturbances in a neighbourhood. Intelligence acquisition showed that the boys were purchasing bootleg liquor and tobacco. Intelligence analysis showed that a criminal network was smuggling alcohol and cigarettes and selling the products to consumers from a number of commercial and residential addresses. The assay stage showed a number of ‘vulnerabilities’ in this network of criminal entrepreneurs. In this instance, police action included the coordination of a number of arrests, as well as actions to affect business licences (on health and safety grounds), residential addresses (for false claims for income support), and vehicle licences (for unpaid road tax and other unpaid fines). Importantly, police action was a multiagency effort that extended to include the Health and Safety Directorate, the Benefits Agency, and the Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority in order to impact on the criminal network itself.

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But it also included the local education authority in order to answer the original complaints about the activities of the truanting boys. It must be emphasized that such a well co-ordinated and comprehensive operation is rare. More often, we were told of disruption tactics as a simpler and less time-consuming way to show that ‘at least something had been done’. In addition to the entrepreneurial mode of disruption, there is a more extra-legal form of disruption used by police, where agents do not even attempt to effect an arrest or submit the suspect to due process. Instead, they design actions intended to prevent, or at least make it more difficult for, the suspected person or persons to continue to engage in unlawful activity. One simple way to achieve this is to intensify overt surveillance of a criminal target, but there are obvious limitations to the duration of this tactic. Disrupting What? An important issue in understanding the turn to disruption in police practice relates to the ways in which the problems to be addressed have been constructed. Indeed, the whole movement towards enhancing the intelligence function within policing is implicitly justified by a particular construction of the problem of criminality. Whereas the prosecution-directed mode of crime control is based upon a notion of individual offenders, who can and should be identified and have a case constructed against them, intelligence-led forms of policing tend to understand criminals as being embedded within criminal networks and markets. Disruption is therefore justified on the basis that the removal or ‘neutralization’ of a target occupying a key position is an effective way of destabilizing the social organization of the rest of the market or network. This informs a second expectation, which may or may not be warranted, that any given disruption will curtail, or at least limit, the activities of the other actors in the network. Furthermore, in comparison to the investigation of such matters with a view to enacting a prosecution, the objectives of disruption appear to provide a comparatively costeffective mode of intervention. Compared with the financial costs involved in preparing for a full criminal trial, disrupting a ‘known’ criminal seems comparatively inexpensive, and it is still measured by performance indicators. These practices are justified and legitimated by the implicit criminology maintained by crime analysts. This is perhaps best illustrated by reference to the criminal intelligence products that they aim to produce. The most common analytical products are network charts, which map relations between known offenders and market profiles (Innes et al. 2005; Ratcliffe 2004). Such charts can be very detailed: for example, showing the connections of exchange between individuals dealing in particular illicit commodities. The unstated orthodoxy underpinning such forms of analysis is a vision of criminal behaviour that is situated in a context of relatively stable (or indeed even static) social networks and markets; the criminal activities of the individual offender are supported and made possible through the offender’s social relationships, allowing illicit commodities to be acquired, distributed, and valued. However, social networks are much more fluid than the objectified vision of them constructed in analysts’ network charts (Innes et al. 2005). In view of this, it becomes less certain that any given action will disrupt a network. It may, in fact, create a vacuum in a criminal market for more dangerous offenders to step into.

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This potential for such unintended consequences was recognized by a respondent in Study One, discussing the example of a mid-level drug dealer who had had monetary assets confiscated. Dealers frequently owe money to others, and in some instances the pressure to pay off debts leads criminal entrepreneurs to engage in more violent forms of crime (the example cited was armed robbery) in order to ward off the threats of criminal creditors. As a result, what law enforcement officials classify as a group disrupted may in fact, over the longer term, function to exacerbate the criminal activities of others participating in such networks. Furthermore, network charts do not take account of the quality of the relationship between individuals in a criminal milieu. By quality we mean: are co-operating criminals enjoined through fear, debt, or trust? The answers to such questions are probably more interesting and significant than quantifications regarding the numbers of telephone calls placed to and by a given criminal actor. These points are crucial to our understanding of the limitations of the increasing turn to strategies of disruption. It is this limited, although apparently pragmatic, criminology that creates a premise for trying to disrupt and disorganize networks, rather than arresting and prosecuting individuals. Without being wholly dismissive of what can be achieved by targeting police resources to disrupt criminogenic networks and markets, it is important to recognize that the actual strength of markets and networks, as forms of social organization, is that they are fairly robust and rather fluid. Criminal markets are better understood as recursive and adaptive networks of hierarchical and horizontal relations, rather than established, reified, vertical structures of command and control. As such they display a capacity for continual change, and the persons who participate in them are capable of innovation and themselves have the ability to overcome problems to doing business. This was recognized by some of the officers encountered during the fieldwork. A research and development officer from County Force said: The markets will reform, ’cause their business is, whatever the criminality is. So if your business is stealing cars then you need someone to take those cars off you. If we take out main player A, it may take you a couple of months but you will find Mr B. Within a very short space of time there will be someone within that organization who can step into that person’s shoes. (Taped interview, Study Two)

Intelligence versus Evidence Many of the key changes taking place in modern British policing are founded on a belief that enhancing the intelligence function will result in improved performance in dealing with crime. However, as has already been signalled above, in practice, the increased use of intelligence seems to result in a form of ‘drift’ in the objectives of law enforcement interventions. The explanation for the causes of this drift towards disruption and away from prosecution centres on the distinction between intelligence and evidence. Traditionally, disruptive techniques have been used as a ‘fall-back’ position in policing when a successful prosecution was unlikely to be a viable outcome. As one officer described it:

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Such comments recognize that disruption has always been an available option in terms of how the police respond to crime, and this aspect of detective lore has been well described (Hobbs 1995). However, with the move to an enhanced role for intelligence in police work, disruption has become established as a de facto (and almost a preferred) strategy. From the interviews and fieldwork it was established that police officers perceive a clear separation between intelligence and evidence. One analyst said, ‘There’s a different standard to driving an investigation and presenting it in court. And I don’t think very many people here have realized that’ (field note, Urban Force, Study Two). Similar sentiments were expressed by an area intelligence co-ordinator in County Force: You need to be very clinical. I’m certainly aware over the last few weeks that I need to be far more clinical in saying we have done our intelligence collection, this is the intelligence, over to you as the investigator, you now take this forward, we are going to move on with the next intelligence collection package. Sometimes we have got too involved – we have got a really good feel for something we are working on, the other parts of the police station have felt that it isn’t right for them to take that forward on our behalf and we have then said we’ll push it forward and we then get into areas of policing that we shouldn’t be doing. 1 need to be more robust in saying this is no longer intelligence gathering, when you get into that area of activity you are not intelligence gathering and that is the role of the investigation and that is a difficult decision to make sometimes. (Taped interview, Study Two)

For intelligence practitioners, a particular advantage of the disruption-directed mode of crime control is that it can be used to avoid the often onerous requirement on the police to collect the substantial amounts of detailed evidence that is needed to construct a reliable case in law against a suspect. More importantly, though, this signals some of the tensions that exist in terms of the ability of police to translate intelligence into evidence. Particularly where intelligence has been gleaned from covert sources (both human and technological), police are often reluctant to reveal a source for fear that it will contaminate its future utility or its safety. Perhaps more profoundly, as Maguire and John (1995) have intimated in their study of how police officers manage informants, acquiring enough evidence of a sufficiently high standard to support a prosecution through covert techniques is often extremely difficult. The effectiveness of informants is based upon their often very close connections or involvement in the criminal milieu. Consequently, the reliability and validity of any evidence that they present is often legally tainted. There are also obvious dangers in being identified as a police informant, and,

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as a result, few of them are actually willing to appear in court. Indeed, one precondition that is usually attached to informants’ continued willingness to supply information to the police is that the police handler should zealously protect their anonymity.8 In sum, therefore, the environment of policing and the criminal justice process are structured in such a way as to subtly encourage certain forms of police practice. In certain circumstances, police may decide to forego the prosecution of an individual suspect in order to preserve the effectiveness of an informant or of surveillance technology for the future. As an alternative line of action, aiming to disrupt the conditions and forms of organization that support crime allows the police to intervene without having to reveal the source of their intelligence. The shift toward the disorganization and disruption of criminal networks is in part, then, a response to the intrinsic and inherent problems of manufacturing evidence from intelligence sources. Ashworth (1994) has argued persuasively that there have been a number of legislative changes in the UK that have been influential in shaping police practice and in encouraging the move to an increased use of intelligence. As he documents, throughout the 1980s there were a number of reforms that effectively tightened the regulation of police conduct, both through changes in the law and through more administrative forms of internally based organizational regulation (Reiner 2000). In Britain, the management and conduct of police investigative work have been subject to increasing levels of scrutiny as a result of a number of miscarriages of justice.9 As part of these changes, the use of a number of established police investigative tactics and strategies has been increasingly limited and constrained. Consequently, the increased use of disruption may be understood as a reaction to changes in the legal framing of policing. Police perceptions of an increasing number of due process controls and the development of more effective forms of oversight over some of their activities have played a part in encouraging officers to develop modes of working that effectively circumvent the due process restrictions upon their conduct. Developing a case for the prosecution is frequently an involved and costly undertaking. Compared with such requirements, operations designed to disrupt criminality have the appearance of being far more cost-effective and easier to carry out. There are, then, a number of overlapping and interconnected factors that explain why, when operating in an intelligence-led mode, policing agencies may drift toward disruption.

8

Possible future developments in witness immunity and witness protection programmes (especially where they involve the construction of new false identities) provide one possible answer to these problems. But there are moral hazards associated with the immunity and anonymity that such legal innovations imply (Fyfe and Sheptycki, 2005). 9 This is clearly evident in Ericson’s and Haggerty’s analysis of policing and risk. In particular, their analysis of the effects of the Stitchcombe decision (1997: 324–331) shows how the burden of paperwork in Canadian police agencies increased as a result of new rules of disclosure. As a result of this decision, fine-grained documentation has been increasingly required, as a way of risk-managing police knowledge and work that may, or may not, come to light as a result of disclosure rules employed prior to or during the trial process.

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The Limits of Disruption Disruption is based on an assumption that police interventions will destabilize the social organization that supports ongoing criminal enterprise. Several problems can be identified with the application of this notion to routine policing, some of which have already been noted. In addition, though, several other problems are deserving of consideration. First, the ability of police to effectively disrupt a ‘criminal organization’ (itself a problematic term in that it tends to reify criminal affiliations as strongly structured institutions) is dependent on the accuracy of their intelligence manufactured through the intelligence analysis process. Data from the fieldwork, in conjunction with the academic literature, suggest a potential for a ‘refracted image’ of the market or network to result from such work. Indeed, this was recognized by one of the analysts interviewed: ‘Because a lot of these people are being targeted, it means that you’re going to get a lot more information on them … because they’re on the chart, they’re going to stay on the chart because the information’s coming in’ (taped interview, County Force, Study Two). Inherently, this leads to the production of an inaccurate understanding of the constitution of the market or network, but of course the police do not ‘know what they don’t know’. A detective sergeant identified a similar problem: The whole intelligence-led process can be corrupted by the banter that goes on and the gut feeling that goes on and the self-fulfilling prophecy; you know that someone can become a Cat B [second-tier criminals] because everybody talks about them and then we start targeting and because we target them they become something that they are not. It is the same with informants – if we think Mr Smith is doing something and the informant keeps telling us that, unless it is actually checked out and corroborated, you know the whole department could be going in the wrong direction because we believe something rather than know something … It is the failing of the Intel unit. When I was first here there was [sic] a few incidents where, as a result of speculation in here, resources were sent here, there and everywhere in my department. (taped interview, County Force, Study Two)

Gill (2000) characterizes this disposition within intelligence-led policing as ‘rounding up the usual suspects’. There is, then, a fundamental epistemological weakness that haunts the criminal intelligence encoding frame, whereby the encoding of data functions to valorize the status of the person whose activities are the focus of the analysis, turning relatively minor criminal players into ‘Cat Bs’ (second-tier criminals) and secondary players into ‘Cat As’ (primary targets) and singling either out for disruption. In effect, the practices of intelligenceled policing may have the paradoxical impact of increasing systemic myopia by focusing police efforts on what is easily knowable at the expense of what is knowable with difficulty (and is therefore costly in terms of time and effort). The problem is that, because the targets are ‘the usual suspects’, and action taken can be easily accounted for under the key performance indicator of disruption, questions of effectiveness are sidelined. Research also suggests that crime is not as neatly organized as representations of hot spots and criminal networks might suggest. Hobbs (1998) notes that offenders are highly flexible, usually operating as individuals or with groups across local boundaries. Ruggiero (1996), in

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comparing organization theory to criminal syndicates, noted that a fundamental element of organized crime was its disorganization and that, in reality, criminal groups were far more haphazard (Sheptycki 2003b). Embedded within the tacit criminology underpinning intelligence-based policing strategies and the integral market-based models of criminal behaviour is a reconfigured discourse of the criminal as rational actor, whose participation in different forms of criminality is motivated by forces of economic supply and demand. This raises a question – hardly addressed under the rubric of intelligence-led policing – about offenders whose activities are less structured by the rationality of market systems or networks, and how intelligence can be collected on them. Finally, it is worth noting the wider implications of this shift from detection to disruption. The use of disruption as a de facto organizational strategy signals a tension within contemporary police work. These assumedly effective crime reduction strategies are not necessarily in accord with the principles of due process. In Packer’s two models of justice (1968), due process is based on the assumption of innocence, emphasizing the protection of the individual against unnecessary punishment. Arguably, disruption prioritizes the ends of police action (the curtailment of criminal behaviour), rather than the means of accomplishing this result. As one interviewee described it, ‘arrests and crime reduction don’t necessarily go hand in glove’ (field note, Urban Force, Study Two). Therefore, disruption partially aligns police practice with an ethic of crime control, where the principal objective is to repress crime, a consequence of a performance culture that now measures success partly in terms of crime disruption but never in terms of harm reduction (Ratcliffe and Sheptycki 2004). Although disruption may appear to offer a convenient solution to crime problems, a potential lack of consistency and visibility might be expected to have an eventual negative impact on public perceptions of the police as a legitimate institution of social control, at a time when such perceptions are increasingly fragile and contested. Conclusion In this essay it has been argued that the governing logic of police crime control strategy in the UK (and possibly elsewhere) is changing. Symptomatic of this shift is the move from detection to disruption. There is no singular cause of this shift, but rather it is the result of a combination of forces and factors, including the nature of intelligence work, continuing changes in the legal frame of policing and efforts to circumvent evidential requirements, and demands for policing to become based on a principle of cost-effectiveness demonstrating ‘disproportionate impacts’ upon problems. This essay has mainly been concerned to show how the new practices of intelligence-led policing have contributed to these shifts. Central to these changes has been a particular construction of the nature of criminality, wherein the activities of suspects are increasingly understood as being structured by forms of criminogenic organization. We do not want to argue that the practices of intelligence-led policing are entirely without benefit, or that the tactic of disruption is entirely without utility. On the contrary, intelligence-led policing, broadly conceived, suggests significant benefits for the organization of policing labour, and disruption can be a useful part of the police armoury. However, our empirical studies make it equally evident that the shift from detection to disruption brings problems of its own.

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In outlining a movement from detection to a more disruptive logic of crime control, it is important to be aware that there are changes both in the practices of policing and in terms of how such practice is symbolically constructed. Put simply, the tactics of disruption are pragmatic tactics that may well elide the symbolic business of doing justice. Consequently, there is a need for further research to look at the effectiveness criteria by which disruption is judged. Because the notion of disruption can be used to signify a wide range of acts, and can be applied to a variety of criminal actors, it is not at all clear how the effects of a specific disruption contribute to the overall systemic measure. Still less clear is how an annual increase in the number of criminal enterprises disrupted is a measure of the increasing effectiveness of the criminal justice system. One question that we would like to emphasize for future research is that of harm minimization: To what extent does disruption minimize the amount of social harm due to criminal activity and to what extent do the unintended consequences of such actions increase the amount of social harm? These are important issues that are likely to gather force as the result of a range of factors, including debates about the policing of risk and the recent heightening of concern about terrorist threats. For students of policing, such transformative logic presents new research challenges. Acknowledgements Martin Innes would like to thank Nigel Fielding and Nina Cope, who were involved in his study, which was funded by a grant made by the Home Office Innovative Research Challenge Fund. James Sheptycki would like to thank Dick Hobbs and Michael Santiago for their input into his study, which was also undertaken under the auspices of the UK Home Office. We are grateful also to Michael Vaughn and the four anonymous reviewers of the International Criminal Justice Review, whose insightful comments helped us to improve our understanding.

[16] The Governance of Organized Crime in Canada1 Introduction Organized crime is a notoriously difficult concept to define. As Dick Hobbs (one of Britain’s leading scholars in the field) noted some time ago, when it comes to organized crime ‘the issue of definition threatens to kill off both description and debate’ (1997: 801). Organized crime, it can be confidently asserted, is one of the most contested terms in academic criminology. This is at least partly because ‘the range of organizational and structural variations on this admittedly ambiguous theme is immense’ (ibid.: 801). And yet, despite the evident difficulties of arriving at a consensus definition of the term, it is ‘a traditional object of criminology’s attention’ and ‘one that has always been within criminology’s speculative horizon’ (Pavarini,1994: 48, emphasis added). During the decade of the 1990s rising concerns were expressed within the policy making and governmental circles of the OECD countries about the problem of organized crime, especially transnational organized crime, and there was a consequent efflorescence of criminological work on the topic (e.g. Edwards and Gill 2002, 2003b; Beare 2002) that did nothing to dispel the definitional quagmire. Definitional vicissitudes notwithstanding, there was a marked tendency whereby organized crime became an object of governance, and this trend was more or less global. The purpose pursued here is not to try to explain why organized crime and transnational organized crime became matters of governmental concern during this period. That would be a much bigger undertaking (see Sheptycki 2002b for a wider discussion of these issues). Rather, the aim is limited to describing the way in which these phenomena were made an object of governance. This essay aims to uncover the governmental technologies that have been brought to bear on the fluid, manifold and diverse range of activities that academic criminologists have long struggled to discipline under the heading of organized crime. It looks especially at the knowledge processes of the policing intelligence system and suggests that what we have become accustomed to thinking of as ‘organized crime’ is, in fact, largely an institutional construction. In simple terms, the argument is that organized crime is not so much something happening ‘out there’ in society as it is a product of the institutionalized thinking that goes on in some of the major social institutions that govern social life. As such, the analysis pursued here is of general interest to sociologists, since it casts empirical light on some specific processes of knowledge construction and governance. The essay examines the micro-processes of institutional thinking about organized crime carried out by police ‘intelligence analysts’ and, somewhat tangentially, looks at several other key institutional sites 1



Originally published in the Canadian Journal of Sociology, 28(4), pp. 489–516 (2003).

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where the agenda for the governance of organized crime in Canada was established during the middle years of the 1990s. At issue is the centrality of the role of state actors. During the decade of the 1990s, the heyday of transnational neo-liberalism, the analysis of governance tended to suggest that, under conditions of globalization, the nation-state was being ‘hollowed out’ (Jessop 1993: 1994). Turning organized crime into an object of governance was one way for sovereign state actors to reassert the importance of the state in the practice of governance. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The argument pursued here proceeds in a number of stages. First I situate the discussion within the literature on governance. I survey what is, for me at least, the key literature that has underscored the study of governance and show why a consideration of organized crime would help to further inform this literature. The second and longest part of this essay gives over to a detailed empirical description of the ‘mentalities’ evident in the technologies of Canadian police intelligence systems and their knowledge products. In the third section the concern is with the governance of public opinion regarding organized crime in Canada. Here the focus is on the media presentations of organized crime in Canada in the relevant period and the construction of public opinion via the technology of social surveys. The fourth part turns to a consideration of the way in which knowledge about the disparate phenomena that underwrite the concept of organized crime were expressed by elected politicians and thus affirmed as a governmental project. Following this, Canadian developments are contextualized in relation to transnational ones in order to show that the governance of organized crime in Canada is part of a much larger project of global governance. I end by asking if Canadians are not living in microcosm what would be best described as the transnational rise of governance through organized crime (cf. Simon 1997). Governance and Organised Crime: Some Initial Considerations In an important review of the literature on governance and crime Russell Smandych argued that ‘recent years have witnessed an apparent erosion of state power accompanied by the rise of many different and new forms of governance which are beginning to take the place of state law and state justice institutions’ (1999: 1). He pointed to ‘numerous studies … that provide data on the effect these new and changing forms of governance are having on individuals, communities and nation states’ (ibid.: 1). In his contribution to these discussions David Garland dwelt on the ‘limits of governmentality analysis’, ‘its ‘terminological confusion’ and the ‘incompleteness of its genealogy’ (1999: 27–28). According to him, in engaging with the literature on governmentality, one does ‘not find a set of ready-made analyses’ but rather ‘respond[s] to its invitation to take up specific lines of research in order to address certain problems in our present.’ (1999: 28). The governance of organized crime is just such a specific line of research. Differences aside, governmentality scholars are tied together by a common interest in Foucault’s theorization of governmental power. Governance in this literature can be defined broadly as the development and implementation of policies for surveillance, control and maintenance of populations and territory. As such it requires a range of measurement tactics employed within and outside the state in the pursuit of such aims (Deflem 1997; Foucault 1991; Haggerty 2001; Smandych 1999).

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Elsewhere, Richard Ericson and Nico Stehr (2000) raised a not unrelated issue. For them, the interesting thesis to explore did not so much concern governance, but rather the contradictions inherent in it since ‘modern society’ was, to all intents and purposes, ungovernable. If the notion of governance that arose in the modern period concerned the rational management of populations and territory, then the history of modernity could be characterized by the growing disjuncture between the ever expanding expectations of governmental purview and the capacity of agencies of governance to deliver. The analysis they pursued contained many interesting facets. It intersects with the concerns of this essay in that it encourages sceptical questions about organized crime as a category of governance. The expansiveness of the term ‘organized crime’ has contradictory implications for governance. On the one hand, it can be an awkward category to govern since, from time to time, its capacity to overflow definitional limits raises challenges based on effectiveness criteria. On the other hand, the opposite view may hold: that the very vagueness of the term is facilitative of institution building. On this view, periodic crises brought about by chronic failures of governance serve to reinvigorate governmental logic. At the beginning of the twenty first century, the themes of fear and anxiety were well expressed in the literature on governance, no more so than when crime issues were in focus. Anxieties that arose out of the conditions of globalization may be assuaged by an appeal to the efficacy of the power of the state, whether it be local or national (and even transnational). Hence populist tough-on-crime rhetoric remained a staple in the linguistic armoury of politicians of virtually every OECD country, as it was in Canada. It may perforce seem natural and easy to subsume organized crime into such a rhetorical equation. Crime is a serious issue, serious crime all the more so, and organized crime just might be the most serious of all. Organized crime represents an interesting problem of governmental objectification. It is useful and important to try to understand the governmental rationalities brought to bear on this issue area, not least because, from the 1990s onwards, organized crime assumed such importance in public debate. Police Intelligence Systems and Organized Crime The central concern in this essay is with micro-processes in the governance of ‘organized crime’. Here the most important technologies are embedded in the processes of ‘intelligenceled policing’ (Dintino and Martens 1983). Intelligence gathering is long practised within police organizations, but such activities gained added presence in the police agencies of the OECD countries during the 1990s (Sheptycki 2003a). This was partly as a result of the adoption of new information and communications technologies(ICT) that gave a new impetus to the gathering, storing, analysis and dissemination of information (Chan et al. 2001). The adoption of ICT, not only in the police sector but in virtually all large organizations, put a new premium on information and knowledge work, but in the police environment these changes were concomitant with new and evolving policing priorities centring on the control of seemingly ever expanding illicit markets in a variety of controlled commodities (Sheptycki 2002b).

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These developments had special implications in the Canadian context because of the complicated arrangements circumscribing federal policing.2 Historically, Canada has had one federal police agency (the Royal Canadian Mounted Police). However, the almost innumerable municipal police agencies and two provincial police forces in Ontario and Quebec, plus other governmental agencies with quasi-police powers (e.g. Customs) and private policing agencies meant that, overall, the Canadian police sector was highly complex. This complexity partly explains the establishment of the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC) in 1970. The CISC was established so as to function as the central hub of a police intelligence system connecting criminal intelligence units (CIUs) in all of these other agencies. According to the CISC Annual Report for 1999: Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC) is an organization that provides the facilities to unite the criminal intelligence units of Canadian law enforcement agencies in the fight against the spread of organized crime in Canada. CISC is comprised of a Central Bureau [which] functions on a national scale … Regular members of CISC … currently include the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Quebec Police Force, the Ontario Provincial Police, the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary and more than 120 municipal and regional police departments … CISC also has associate members … and affiliate members, which have investigative and enforcement personnel from the private sector and government … [which] total over 255 agencies. (CISC, 2000: x)

The flow of information within and across the policing sector raises many issues that have been analysed by sociologists of policing organizations from a variety of angles (e.g. Ericson and Haggerty, 1997; Manning 1992, 1997; Punch, 1998). Where it concerns the governance of organized crime in Canada during the 1990s, the concern is how the manufacture of ‘strategic intelligence assessments’ set priorities and established policies. This is how organized crime was made an object of governance. At the time of my field research in Ottawa the important development in this area was Project Sleipnir. Project Sleipnir – Surveying Police and Measuring Organized Crime In 1998 the RCMP took the first steps towards implementing a systematic analytical method for measuring the threat posed by organized crime. Christened ‘Project Sleipnir’ this was an attempt to canvass the views of knowledgeable criminal intelligence practitioners across the whole Canadian policing sector as to the organized crime threat.3 Sleipnir developed out of earlier work, started in 1994, when a similar methodology was used for counter-terrorist threat assessment. The aim of Sleipnir was to produce a ‘reliable consensus’ among police 2

See Mawby (1990) for a slightly dated, but thorough, overview of the development of the Canadian policing infrastructure. See Gill (2000: esp. 98–102 and 138–146, for an account of the changes in the intelligence infrastructure that took place in Canada during the 1990s. 3 Sleipnir is a creature from Norse mythology. It is the name of Odin’s horse, which was lent to Hermod on his unsuccessful journey to the underworld to recover the soul of Balder who had been slain in an act of deviousness perpetrated by the troublemaker Loki. Reportedly, this project name was generated by a random process and was not the result of deliberate choice.

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intelligence specialists as to the relative threat posed to Canadian society by different organized crime groups across all the regions of the country (from taped interview, 29 June 2000). Sleipnir employed the Delphi survey method. The objective of virtually all Delphi surveys is the collection and interpretation of information suitable for decision making where no paradigm of normal science reigns. It is perhaps worth noting that Delphi refers to the hallowed site of the most revered oracle in ancient Greece where forecasts and advice from gods could be had via the medium of an oracle. The term might therefore suggest that the method that goes under its name is an occult practice, but this would be wrong. The Delphi method aims to make the best of less than perfect knowledge. It is a structured process for collecting and distilling knowledge from a group of experts by means of a series of questionnaires interspersed with controlled opinion feedback. It is a communication device that facilitates the formation of group judgement among experts. It was first used at the RAND (short for Research and Development) Corporation in the late 1940s to study the broad subject of intercontinental warfare on behalf of the US military. In 1959 researchers at the RAND published a essay on ‘The Epistemology of the Inexact Sciences’, which provided a philosophical basis for the technique (Fowles 1978). This essay argued that, in fields that have not yet developed to the point of having scientific laws, expert opinion offers a useful guide. The problem is how to use this expert knowledge and, specifically, how to combine the testimony of a number of experts into a single useful statement or expression of commonly held knowledge. The developers of the Delphi method recognized human judgement and expertise as legitimate and useful, but also that individual experts may suffer from biases, while face-to-face group meetings may suffer from ‘follow the leader’ tendencies. Moreover, because of the social needs to ‘save face’ both individuals and groups of experts may exhibit a reluctance to abandon or modify previously stated opinions, even when presented with good reasons for doing so. The Delphi method is one way to garner such expert knowledge while controlling for these problems. Sleipnir was a textbook perfect application of the Delphi method; it was an exercise in group communication among a panel of geographically dispersed experts on organized crime groups within the Canadian police sector (Criminal Analysis Branch 2000). In general, the technique requires a series of questionnaires, sent either by mail or via computerized communications systems, to a pre-selected group of experts. Such questionnaires are designed to elicit and develop individual responses to the problems posed – in the Sleipnir application, to do with groups of active criminals – and to enable the experts to refine their views as their elaborately organized, mediated, but nevertheless collective ‘group think’ progresses. The main point behind the Delphi method is to provide anonymity and controlled feedback to respondents in the production of quantifiable knowledge about the problem area under scrutiny. In the case of Project Sleipnir, this was achieved by a two-step process which used questionnaires sent out to various experts who provided their individual judgements about a set of attributes pertaining to organized crime. The responses from the first survey were compiled and analysed by the project officer and then revised questionnaires were again sent out. The second instrument included with it a synopsis of the first set of responses. In the second survey respondents were asked to consider the initial feedback to the questionnaire and either reconsider or defend their own views. The first Sleipnir survey was conducted in 1998, the second in 1999 and analysis of the two surveys was completed in early 2000.

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Who were the people tasked with completing the survey instrument? How many people did so? What kinds of questions were asked about the threat posed by organized crime and how did they evolve through the Delphi process? These are the questions that any social scientist would be interested to ask about the application of this method. According to the project supervisor, the first national survey was sent to ‘in excess of 200 people’ across Canada in 1998. In interview he reported that the list of recipients primarily included members of the RCMP criminal intelligence programme, including both strategic intelligence analysts and criminal investigators. Also included were some criminal intelligence personnel in other Canadian police organisations and ‘selected other people well known for their expertise in dealing with organized crime’ (from taped interview 29 June 2000). Additionally, copies of the survey were sent to the Department of Justice and the Solicitor General’s Department ‘just to make sure we were not raising hackles’ (ibid.). According to the project supervisor the response rate was about 25 per cent, which yielded approximately 50 completed questionnaires. This was said to be quite a good response rate. According to the project supervisor: I asked people to cut themselves out if they didn’t have sufficient expertise I had quite a number of people call me and say ‘look I’ve only been doing this for a year and I really don’t think I know enough to be able to help you’. I was interested in getting people who were interested enough in what they were doing that they would want to participate in this. That they could see the potential value of it and would want to say their piece because those are the people who are paying attention to the problem. So there is a self-selection process happening there that seems to work out reasonably well; judging from the names of the people who came back to me and what I knew of them. (From taped interview, 29 June 2000)

Some social scientists would rightly raise eyebrows about this self-selection process. There seems little doubt that the two-step Delphi method produced a scientifically reliable method of threat assessment. That is, it seems likely that the community of experts questioned would reliably return the same sorts of answers to the same sorts of questions time after time. However, it is possible to ask questions about the criterion validity of the measure. Criterion validity relates to the extent to which the measure (in this case the ‘threat’ posed by identified crime groups) accurately portrays the entirety or the phenomenon in question. It is likely that the community of experts surveyed operated within a narrow operational ambit thereby limiting the understanding of the ‘organized crime problem.’ This is not to argue that the organized crime groups identified by Project Sleipnir cannot be said to constitute part of a problem of organized crime in Canada. It is merely to suggest that, given the (rather) narrow swathe of expertise tapped into in this Delphi survey, the measure might miss out on crucial facets of the problem and therefore lack an element of scientific validity due to sample bias. Given the circumscribed nature of my research access and the closed nature of the community of police organized crime experts it is somewhat difficult judge this matter as it relates to Project Sleipnir. What can be said is that, without a doubt, the product of the Sleipnir methodology represented the collective knowledge of a selected community of experts. What were these experts asked? Sleipnir progressed a set of ‘weighted attributes’ for the measurement of the relative threat posed to Canadian society by a variety of criminal groups. The initial national survey put forward a list of 19 ‘attributes’ of organized crime grouped in

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alphabetical order. Respondents were encouraged to think critically about these items and to recommend either their inclusion or exclusion from the second stage, and to rank them as to order of importance. Respondents were also encouraged to suggest other ‘attribute’ indicators of their own. The iterative Delphi process resulted in a rank-ordered list of attributes and their attendant operational definitions. It would be too involved to describe in detail the Delphi process relating to the Sleipnir surveys and it is simply asserted here that Project Sleipnir was an attempt to inductively develop operational definitions of terms for measuring the relative threat of organized criminal groups. The list of terms that resulted from this process is revealing: 1. corruption – the continual efforts to corrupt public figures, representatives of the justice system and business leaders through the practices of illicit influence, exploitation of weakness and blackmail; also the ability to place organized criminals in sensitive positions; 2. violence – a clear willingness to use developed expertise in the application of violence and intimidation through threats of violence to further any organizational objective; 3. infiltration – continual efforts to gain a foothold within legitimate public and private institutions, organizations, and businesses for the purposes of money laundering, and the pretence of propriety; using the facade of legitimacy to protect and conceal criminal enterprises, and for intelligence gathering; 4. expertise – the use of expertise to enhance their abilities to commit criminal activities, such as the acquisition of expertise in chemistry, money laundering, or the use of weaponry; 5. sophistication – operations display an ability to develop and employ complex methods in such areas as communications, technology, asset management, political/judicial function and penetration of enforcement agencies; 6. subversion – a clear willingness and expertise to subvert any of society’s legislated procedures and laws for their own ends through corruption, intimidation, violence or manipulation of law enforcement, government, the courts or other control bodies such as commissions and regulatory agencies; 7. strategy – the intent of organized criminals to maintain or increase their size, sphere of operations and influence, and so maintain or increase the power and influence which result from the accumulation of wealth; 8. discipline – the enforced practices of coercing obedience which hold the organization’s structure together, often characterized by fear and violence, carried out with ruthlessness and without regard for life or property; 9. insulation – the main figures protect themselves from prosecution through the use of subordinates, fronts and corruption; 10. intelligence use – the intelligence and counter-surveillance capabilities of organized criminals, which is used to defend themselves against law enforcement and rival groups, and to identify new targets; 11. multiple enterprises – illicit activities are diversified, with key components being control and profit;

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12. mobility – a willingness and ability to move and operate criminal enterprises across provincial, national and international boundaries and jurisdictions; 13. stability – the stability over time of the organizational structure and personnel of criminal organizations; 14. scope – the geographic sphere of operations and influence of the organized crime group; 15. monopoly – control over one or more specific criminal activities within a geographic area of operations, with no tolerance for competition; does not prevent partnerships of profitable convenience between or among organizations; violence or intimidation are the usual methods used to establish or maintain monopoly; 16. group cohesiveness – strong bonds are fostered at both individual to individual and individual to organization levels in order to create criminal solidarity and common protection; the bonds can be created through such factors as common backgrounds, blood relationships, financial relationships and geographic origins, often instituted through rites of initiation and ‘compelled’ criminal acts of loyalty; 17. continuity – the continuity over time of criminal activities, as well as practices which support those activities; 18. links to other organized crime groups – links to other organized crime groups within Canada and internationally; 19. links to criminal extremist groups – links to criminal extremists or terrorists. Project Sleipnir produced a threat measurement based on the above set of ‘attributes’ and the assignment of appropriate values for each. What is important to draw out is the assumption embedded in the above definitional universe. Here, organized crime is understood as something outside the social body. Organized criminals infiltrate legitimate businesses; legitimate businesses do not engage in criminal acts for themselves. Organized criminals corrupt public officials; public officials are not corrupt in themselves. Organized crime is contagion that, by use of violence and under its own discipline, works to subvert normal social life and turn it to criminal ends. But it is not organization crime and so, for example, the inadequate enforcement of health and safety legislation or the inappropriate treatment of hazardous materials is not – despite any illegality this may entail or harm it may cause – organized criminal violence. The assumption built into the Sleipnir Project was that organized crime is, in essence, Mafiatype crime. It is possible to challenge this narrow view. For example, there is a long history of academic writing which argues that the ‘crimes of the powerful’ – of business and political elites – is also part of the organized crime phenomenon, but this is nowhere in evidence in the Sleipnir Project (e.g. Carson 1982;, 1992; Pearce and Snider 1995; Pearce and Woodiwiss 1993; Rawlinson 2002; Sutherland 1983; Woodiwiss 2001). We shall return to this point in the conclusion. The results of subsequent surveys carried out using the definitions arrived at through the Delphi surveys were charted on matrixes used for systematic comparison of organized crime groups, thus producing a ‘relative measurement of threat’. Groups being compared could be listed along the horizontal axis of such a matrix and the 19 rank-ordered attributes along the vertical axis. Such a matrix could be filled with the respective values for each attribute for each group. According to RCMP documents which detail the use of the Sleipnir model: ‘[t]

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his allows the data to be presented and compared in a concise and comprehensive way, and makes it possible to sort the groups into rank order’ (Criminal Analysis Branch 2000: 4–5). The systematic application of the above terminology produced a common calculus for use in the police sector across Canada. This made possible the measurement of threat attributed to organized criminality in Canada. According to the architects of the Sleipnir matrix, this ‘is the most comprehensive and transparent method we now have to present recommendations and supporting intelligence in a concise manner, and so inform the deliberations of senior managers setting priorities in our efforts against organized crime’ (ibid.: 5). The Sleipnir methodology is an exemplar of the ‘mentality’ – in the Foucauldian sense – held by police experts who specialize in the governance of organized crime. It is difficult to fault the rigour with which the participating governmental programmers approached the task of measurement, or their attention to detail. Having said that, the measurement of something like ‘organized crime’ almost invariably provokes questions that are difficult to settle. The official answers can be got at through an examination of the authorized picture of organized crime in Canada. Confidentiality and security restrictions preclude a discussion of the portraits of particular organized crime groups and the measurement of their relative threat capacities as provided in the Sleipnir matrixes. However, by looking at the content of CISC annual reports, it is possible to say, in general terms, what priorities emerged as a result of the measurement practices described above. But, before saying something about the contents of these reports (published for public consumption), it is necessary to make one important caveat. The CISC annual reports are compiled on the basis of long-standing administrative reporting mechanisms which the Sleipnir methodology refined, extended and codified. The results of Sleipnir surveys themselves were not included in CISC publications. Regardless, both Project Sleipnir and the CICS annual reports exemplify the same rationality about organized crime in Canada since they are mutual products of the same mentality. Looking at the table of contents for the Annual Report of Organized Crime in Canada (CISC, 2000) is immediately revealing. This lists the CISC ‘national priorities’ for that year as being: Asian organized crime; east European-based organized crime; traditional organized crime; outlaw motorcycle gangs; and the sexual exploitation of children. It also lists several ‘emerging issues’: contraband smuggling (involving aboriginal-based organized crime groups, the illegal movement of firearms, and organized crime groups operating in maritime ports); illegal gambling; illegal migration; technological crime; and the criminal threat associated with Y2K. In conversation and correspondence about this document, and previous reports going back to 1990, it became evident that ‘priorities do not change all that much’, but they do ‘evolve over the years into more specific group targets and [as a result of the] addition of certain emerging issues’ (written correspondence, June 2000). Thus Asian-based organized crime groups had been a priority since 1996 and east European-based groups since 1995 (when the annual report was largely devoted to this phenomenon). As might be expected, ‘traditional’ or ‘Mafia-type’ organized crime groups featured as a priority every year during the 1990s as, indeed, were outlaw motorcycle gangs. A variety of activities were also given more or less consistent levels of interest during the course of the decade: drug trafficking, counterfeiting and illegal migration. Other issues, such as Y2K and the sexual exploitation of children, were given sporadic attention.

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It is perhaps not surprising to find that outlaw motorcycle gangs were a perennial concern within the police community during the course of the decade. This is symptomatic of the assumption that organized crime is limited to gang-type or group-type activities. Not only were outlaw motorcycle gangs a perennial concern, but they consistently retained the highest threat ratings. This consistency is probably more reflective of the amount of police resources dedicated to monitoring ‘outlaw’ motorcyclists and less the result of an accurate measure of their objective threat to Canadian society. This is not to argue that members of such groups do not participate in (sometimes very serious) criminality, or that such crime is not productive of social harm. Persistent newspaper reportage about ‘turf wars’ between rival criminal gangs in Quebec throughout the 1990s, gave such groups an undeniably high public profile. However, there are other types of crime – white collar crimes and crimes against the environment, for example – which historically have not had the same amount of police resources dedicated to them. CISC annual reports do from time to time recognize that crimes against major economic enterprises constitute a significant threat to Canadian society; witness the 1999 mention of Canada’s new diamond mining industry under the heading of ‘emerging issues’. Public sector corruption and illegal activity in private sector occupations such as the law and accountancy are also mentioned in these documents from time to time. Such documents also make occasional mention of such things as environmental crime. However, the accent is almost always on the ‘traditional underworld’ of organized crime. While attention to many types of organized crime problem sporadically appear, attention to ‘the usual suspects’ remains constant and is always highly visible (Gill 2000). It should not be at all controversial to say that the pattern of constancy in the pictures of organized crime in Canada owes as much to the preoccupations of the narrow group of governmental programmers who attempt its measurement as it does to any objective threat in the ‘real world’. The Media and Public Representations of Organized Crime Interviews with police intelligence specialists and analysis of criminal intelligence ‘strategic product’ shows that the micro-technologies of police intelligence analysis are aimed predominantly at ‘traditional’ organized crime, that is: covens of criminals known more for violence than for corruption and whose criminal conspiracies continue over time. Disorganized activities in criminal markets, or crimes by those more suave and less violent, seem a less prominent target. But the micro-circuits of police intelligence are not the only system for the production and distribution of knowledge about organized crime. In order for the product of police intelligence systems to maintain a semblance of balance and objectivity, it is necessary that police knowledge about organized crime coheres with knowledge produced by and for ‘public opinion’. Although somewhat tangential to the primary concern of this essay (which is to illuminate the micro-processes of knowledge work on organized crime that are internal to the policing institution), analysis of media representations of organized crime is undeniably an important element in the governance of organized crime. This is because the way in which organized crime phenomena are framed by and for public opinion sustains the plausibility of the knowledge products that flow out of the police intelligence system. Organized crime phenomena are

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multitudinous but, as has been demonstrated, the official picture is rather more singular. In order for the official image to not seem incredible it must exist in a wider knowledge environment that is conducive to it. So how were images of organized crime presented in the Canadian media during this period? Fortunately, the Nathanson Centre for the Study of Organized Crime and Corruption conducted an environmental scan of media representations of these issues for the relevant period (Beare and Ronderos 2001). This study provided an analysis of some 28,000 essays published between January 1995 and March 2001. These essays were selected on the basis of a word search for 21 terms that relate or correspond to organized crime. Nineteen Canadian print sources (newspapers and magazines) provided the source material for this sample. Several interconnected themes are evident in the Nathanson Centre analysis. Firstly, media coverage did not correspond to increases or decreases in the amount of organized crime activity in Canada nor did it seem to particularly correspond to the relative prevalence of particular types. Neither did the media coverage concentrate on forms of crime most harmful to Canadian society. Instead, and perhaps predictably, the media tended to concentrate on high-interest topics that sell newspapers. It is thus hardly surprising that the content analysis picked up on the media fascination with motorcycle gangs. Three events in Quebec precipitated more or less sustained media attention across Canada about this organized crime phenomenon during the period. These were: 1) the accidental car-bomb killing of 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers in 1995; 2) political contention between the provincial government in Quebec and the federal government over legislation aimed at curbing ‘biker violence’ in 1996–97; and 3) the shooting of Michel Auger, a journalist in Montréal in 2000. The report’s authors theorized that, once a particular topic has demonstrated newsworthiness (i.e. the ability to sell papers), it creates a cycle that more or less guarantees significant media exposure. When a topic has demonstrated its potential to grab headlines, it is likely to become politicized. The political and jurisdictional contestation over the biker issue in 1996–97 was at least partly fuelled by the predisposition in press reportage to editorialize about the desperate need for additional policing powers in order to combat OMGs (outlaw motorcycle gangs). According to the Nathanson Centre analysis, even with successful prosecutions under existing law, press attention tended to emphasize the need for more legislation. Loud cries for legislative innovation in the editorial pages of Canada’s newspapers meant that politicians of every hue and stripe, in every region, and at every level of government were drawn to debates about the issue. This may be because politicians and governmental personnel simply cannot avoid comment on issues that achieve such intense media exposure, whether individuals are cynically motivated to make personal political capital or not. Regardless of individual motivation, in passing comment, even when it is banal, politicians further amplify awareness of the issue. This cycle has long been recognized by academic criminologists. It has been aptly described as ‘crime-wave reportage’ which leads to ‘deviancy amplification’ and ‘moral panic’ (Cohen and Young 1973). Academics working on organized crime topics in Canada reported feelings of great frustration regarding their interface with the media which invariably reduced subtle and detailed accounts of organized crime phenomena into the dichotomous categories of good-guys and bad-guys. In some cases, when academic knowledge did not fit the guiding presuppositions of media reportage, academic criminologists laid charges of deliberate misrepresentation

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(Nathanson Centre Newsletter No. 5, Summer 2002: 21–23). The production of knowledge about organized crime that takes place across various institutions is not deliberately engineered in the manner of a conspiracy. In what Karl Popper was happy to call the ‘open society’, the differences of view held by personnel operating within major social institutions mean that conflict is a feature of governmentalization, and never more so than when the object of governance concerns phenomena such as organized crime. So, how do members of the public understand the meaning of the term ‘organized crime’? It might be supposed that the processes previously described mechanistically produce a broad consensus about organized crime. However, even media representations captured and presented elements of ambivalence in public perceptions of the issue. As Jonathan Simon well observed, ‘while media representation of crime is clearly a factor in the politics [and governance] of crime, it provides just as much of a question as an answer’ (1997: 175). Thus, for example, while police in British Columbia were interested to portray the cultivation of marijuana as a major organized crime activity, press coverage could not avoid a strong current of opinion supporting cannabis decriminalization and suspicions about the supposed dominance of organized crime groups in ‘home grown operations’.4 Even folk-devils, such as ‘outlaw’ bikers, had spokespersons and sympathizers. It is not possible to gauge public perceptions of organized crime only by looking at media accounts. That is why the results of a survey undertaken by a private polling organization on behalf of the Solicitor General’s Office in 1998 are so interesting. There are few surveys of the general public on this topic, and none specific to Canada until 1998. The telephone survey of a sample of 1,509 adults was conducted between 28 October and 5 November 1998 and the analysis of results was returned to the Solicitor General’s Office on 7 December that year. The margin of error was said to be 2.7 per cent, but since full details of the sampling were not made generally available it is not possible to confirm or challenge this.5 The results reported were not unexpected or particularly counter-intuitive. They are summarized in Table 1.

4 Law enforcement personnel and governmental programmers alike often stressed that, when it comes to drug enforcement, the main aim was against ‘hard drugs’, especially heroin and cocaine. It is interesting to note, therefore, that in the mid-1990s in Canada, 63 per cent of all drug-related arrests pertained to cannabis, while cocaine-related offences accounted for 22 per cent and heroin 2.8 per cent. Estimates of drug use among the general population at the time were that about 7.4 per cent of the population 15 years of age or older used cannabis at least once in any given year while only 1 per cent were reckoned to have used cocaine. During the 1990s, heroin was used so rarely and by such a small population, that the best estimates for usage were over the entire life course, not just the previous year. In the mid-1990s, it was estimated that a mere 0.5 per cent of the population had ever used heroin. Faced with such statistics, it seems that, if real social harm is associated with ‘hard drugs’, Canada did not have a statistically large drug problem. It is also clear that most policing activity was targeted at enforcing cannabis prohibition. 5 The discussion pursued here is based on a summary document of the results of the survey that was circulated in the policing sector. A word of caution is perhaps in order. The polling firm that undertook this survey was (and remains as of this writing) very reputable. However, in the absence of sustained independent methodological scrutiny, the reliability and validity of the survey findings remains a matter of surmise.

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Table 1 The Canadian Public’s Conception of Organized Crime Crime Type

High-level drug trafficking

Conception of Organised Crime Definitely an example of O.C.

Possibly an example of O.C.

Not an example of O.C.

88%

11%

1%

Drug importing

86%

12%

1%

Illegal gambling operations

64%

31%

5%

Selling drugs on the street

60%

33%

7%

Money laundering

58%

35%

6%

Alcohol and tobacco smuggling

51%

41%

8%

Immigrant smuggling

42%

44%

14%

Car theft

41%

49%

10%

Cheating on the stock market

26%

52%

22%

Illegal disposal of toxic waste

25%

46%

30%

This tabulation is not incongruent with the issues highlighted by the Sleipnir process. However, it may do to note that, from the point of view of the police intelligence expert, the table also betrays a degree of ignorance on the part of the general public since such intelligence officers consider money laundering to be central to what constitutes the most serious organized crime. Nevertheless, a clear hierarchy of expectations about organized crime is exhibited in this tabulation and it is broadly isomorphic with the police view. Not only do the results of this survey indicate that Canadian public opinion on the whole counts drug importation as organized crime, it also does not see the (possibly much more harmful) illegal dumping of toxic waste as such. And why is there a total absence of public official corruption in the reported survey results? Might that not count as ‘organized crime’, at least in the eyes of some citizens? Perhaps they were not even asked. The Canadians surveyed evidently placed a special emphasis on the role of the federal government in the response to organized crime problems. Reportedly more than 90 per cent of survey respondents endorsed the view that the government of Canada should spend more money on ‘combating [sic] organized crime’. Fighting organized crime was deemed to be more important than: foreign aid (85 per cent), new equipment for the military (80 per cent), improving living standards for Native Canadians (66 per cent); pay equity (64 per cent); or reducing the national debt (53 per cent). The results of this survey indicated that only one public sector issue earned higher spending priority ratings and that was health care. The degree of congruence between public opinion about what constitutes organized crime and the standard products of police intelligence systems begs questions about the relationship between these different forms of knowledge. To what extent do preconceptions about what constitutes ‘real police work’ emanate from that occupational group and to what extent are they part of a broader set of cultural expectations? Are police intelligence systems determinative of

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the cultural construction of images of organized crime, or visa versa? Might the relationship between the two be overdetermined by other unspecified factors? This is difficult to unravel. What is revealed here is that there is a widely shared common sense about what organized crime is, and that this common sense is articulated both around the kitchen table and in the police intelligence conference room. The isomorphism of these views might be enough, or nearly enough, to explain why corporate ‘scandals’ such as those surrounding contemporary economic crimes of powerful groups – the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the energy giant Enron, WorldCom and others – do not puncture the conceptual universe of organized crime discourse. These cases largely remain ‘corporate scandals,’ and hardly ever come to be seen as matters of organized criminality, but they do raise questions about the governance of organized crime. The Governance of Organized Crime in Canada Analysis of the survey results just summarized noted that ‘the two offences closest to white collar crime were the least likely to be considered as an example of organized crime’ and suggested that ‘public legal education is necessary if the public is to understand that organized criminal activities are not restricted to the importation and distribution of illegal drugs’. This admonition is all the more telling, because what really stands out is the overall degree of congruence between public expectations about what constitutes organized crime and the expressed and considered view of criminal intelligence experts. Excepting the relative obscurity of ‘money laundering’, which for many citizens seemed to appear as an esoteric category not readily recognizable as being related to organized crime, both the criminal intelligence specialist and the general citizen saw almost eye-to-eye on the problem of organized crime. In that view, the traditional image of criminal gangs, and closely analogous criminal phenomena, dominated. So, too, it was with elected politicians. A press release issued in 1998, and announcing the results of another study conducted for the federal government by an independent contract researcher, stated: A major study of the impact of organized crime confirms that the government is on the right track in its development of a national strategy to fight organized crime. (Solicitor General Canada, ‘Highlights of the Organized Crime Impact Study’, 24 August, 1998)

According to this press release, the study concluded that the drug trade had the greatest impact on Canadian society; other crimes listed as having particularly high costs to society were economic crime (specifically securities and telemarketing fraud), immigrant smuggling, and counterfeit products (i.e. intellectual property theft). This press release suggested that there was ‘a strong and growing national consensus on the overall direction for combating organized crime’ (ibid., emphasis added). Members of the public could be forgiven the belief that the governmental programmers had succeeded where generations of academic criminologists had failed. Not only was there an apparent consensus on what constituted organized crime, there also seemed to be agreement on

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what to do about it. However, on closer inspection, accordance on ‘the problem of organized crime’ was overstated. Consider the closing paragraph of the actual report summarized in the above-quoted press release from the Solicitor General: OC [organized crime] in Canada is not just something engaged in by ‘Mafia’ style groups in specific sectors. It is not just ‘drugs and thugs,’ and its impact goes far beyond the terror and casualties incurred during such high profile events as the ‘biker war.’ The organized criminal pursuit of profit needs to be recognized in all its forms along with its varied consequences. These consequences range from readily recognized violence and economic loss to the less easily quantified but no less important environmental, social health and safety implications of some OC-related activities. (Porteous 1998: 21)

The Organized Crime Impact Study itself emphasized that economic organized crime included activities such as bid rigging and price fixing and stated that: Recognizing economic or ‘white collar’ crime as a significant OC activity acknowledges that organized criminal activity is not confined to traditional ‘Mafia’ or visible and ethnic minorities. Organized crime encompasses any organized profit motivated criminal activities that have a serious impact. (Ibid.: 12)

It went on to note that ‘there has been a general decline over the past five years in the number of law enforcement investigations and charges related to economic crime’ (ibid.: 12). With regard to fraud, and economic crime more generally, the study reported that ‘[e]nforcement officials agree that the decline in investigations and charges relating to economic crime does not reflect a decline in criminal activity; rather it is a result of declining enforcement resources and capacity directed towards the problem’ (ibid.: 12). The study highlighted the relative lack of resources devoted to economic organized crime, but it placed even greater emphasis on another non-traditional organized crime-related activity, crimes against the environment: [E]nvironmental crime, particularly the improper storage or disposal of hazardous waste, is assessed as second only to illicit drugs in impact on Canada. The primary impacts of this OC-related activity are on the health of Canadians and the environment in general. Much more effort needs to be directed towards assessing the scope and impact of this OC-related activity. (Ibid.: 2)

In 1998 the Canadian federal government was committed to working towards a national action plan. In announcing the findings of the Organized Crime Impact Study, the Solicitor General remarked in a speech to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police that: Organized crime is the federal government’s Number One law enforcement priority … [because] in a recent poll, 91 percent of Canadians identified organized crime as a serious problem … that is why the government has been working in close cooperation with the police

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He went on to argue that: To combat the menace of organized crime, we need nothing short of a strategic partnership between the federal government, the provinces and the territories, and the police community, so that we can bring our combined weight to bear. If we succeed, we will have forged a partnership unprecedented in Canada, and will take the fight against organized crime to a new level. (The Hon, Andy Scott, former Solicitor General, in a statement to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, 93rd Annual Conference, 24 August 1998)

The national action plan to which he referred was described as ‘work in progress,’ aimed at creating a ‘seamless net of greater national co-ordination’. Hearkening back to the earlier discussion of the variegated nature of the police sector in Canada, it can be seen that the concern about organized crime provided a useful issue area for strengthening the policing capacities of the Canadian federal state, and indeed of the law enforcement capacities at all levels of governance in Canada. Concern about organized crime, and its sister menace transnational organized crime, allowed for the reassertion of the modernist Weberian dictum, which claims for the state a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in the governance of a specified population and defined territory. The world ‘went global’ in the 1990s and there was much talk about the relative decline in the power of the state. Looked at in terms of domestic politics, the development of the organized crime problematic provided an occasion to increase the power of one department of the state, the keystone of modern executive government: the police. The governance of organized crime in Canada that evolved during the course of the last decade of the twentieth century tended to focus on the high profile and spectacular, particularly when it involved criminal gangs and an element of violence. Crimes of the powerful, crimes against the environment and other crimes that may be ‘organized’ but which do not conform to the traditional picture of organized crime, were less in evidence as objects of governance. Given the architecture of the national police intelligence system (exemplified by the Sleipnir Project), the predilections of public opinion and perorations of politicians how could it be otherwise? International Trends in the Governance of Organized Crime The construction of organized crime as an object of governance during this period was not unique to Canada. The trend was a global one, and its date of commencement might be set on the occasion of the World Ministerial Conference on Transnational Organized Crime held in Naples in November 1994 (Sheptycki 2003a). The movement was largely consolidated by the end of the decade, on the occasion of the 10th UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime in 2000 (Sheptycki 2002b: 113). Both of these meetings provided a world tour of local crime woes, but the theme was transnational. Invited speakers talked about the ten major crime

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‘corporations,’ the profits of ‘diamond gangsters’, drug barons’, and ‘human traffickers’, and the stereotypes of organized crime were projected on to the world stage. This was an expression of globalization itself. As the Commission on Global Governance put it: The term globalization has been used primarily to describe some key aspects of the recent transformation of world economic activity. But several other, less benign [sic], activities, including the drug trade, terrorism, and traffic in nuclear materials, have also been globalized. The financial liberalization that seems to have created a borderless world is also helping international criminals … (Commission on Global Governance 1995: 10)

By the end of the 1990s transnational organized crime had been given a high priority on the agenda for global governance. As emphasized here, the range of criminal acts that can be brought under this heading are varied and multi-faceted. They include such matters as environmental crime: illegal fishing and logging; illegal trade in endangered species and the products thereof; and the illegal transportation of hazardous substances and banned industrial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) (Brack and Hayman 2002). They also include such matters as public sector corruption (Rider 1997) and the routine crimes of corporate capital (Box 1983; Pearce and Snider 1995). These are important matters, and scholars, policy analysts, members of the ‘international civil service’ and governmental programmers the world over did cultivate some awareness of them. However, the manufacture of ‘organized crime’ as an object of governance (transnational and otherwise) tended to be more focused; the images of ‘suitable enemies’ associated with the term tended towards the conventional version of what constitutes organized crime. So, as one commentator noted, ‘it is clear that most – although certainly not all – transnational crimes involve trafficking in some kind of illicit products and services, or in licit products that have been obtained by illicit means’ (Williams 1999: 241). Foremost on the list of illicit products were illegal drugs. Of the licit products traded illegally, tobacco gained the lion’s share of attention – but the law enforcement operations in this field tended to focus on the ‘small fish’, rather than any complicity by the tobacco companies themselves (Beare 2002). In comparison, far fewer resources were devoted to measuring the illicit trade in environmentally harmful substances and other crimes against the environment (http://www.eia-international. org/). Some academics in the field were highly critical of this trend. As Didier Bigo observed, ‘only some phenomena amenable to categorisation as crime are defined as such by politicians and policy-makers: terrorism, drug trafficking, organised crime (what could that mean?), and immigration’ (2000: 89). Other problems that might be reasonably have been highlighted in this governmental programme were left out of the picture altogether, or at least edged to the very margins. The consequence was that governmental awareness of some types of criminal activity was heightened (perhaps out of proportion to the social harm they entail) while awareness of other types of criminal activity was dulled. There were local and national consequences due to the rise to prominence of this issue in transnational governance. These were set in motion by calls for better information systems to cope with the problem of organized crime – calls made with no small sense of urgency:

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The overall impression from this analysis is that although governments are responding to transnational criminal organizations and transnational criminal activities, they are doing too little too late. Efforts need to be expanded especially in the area of reliable and uniform data collection. More sophisticated methodologies need to be devised and greater use made of the information available … as a matter of urgency a central clearing house needs to be established with a focus on illicit market activities of all kinds and a recognition of the cross-linkages and synergies that are being developed [between criminal groups]. (Williams 1999: 241)

Several studies that relate to the development of European police co-operation in Europe generally, and the cross-national responses to organized crime specifically, noted something of a convergence trend in the police sector (Anderson 1993b; Anderson et al. 1995; den Boer and Doelle 2000; den Boer 2002). Thus, according to den Boer, while ‘there are no indications of an integral or wholesale convergence of national law enforcement structures [in Europe] there are some convergence tendencies concerning the creation of national structures for the control of organised crime’ (2002: 41). The way different countries reconfigured their national policing systems in response to the problem of organized crime depended very much on the already existing organizational structures and control cultures (what den Boer called the ‘neo-functional contingency thesis’). In many places around the world, albeit to greater or lesser extents, policing agencies were changing as a result of the adoption of intelligence technologies, and these changes gained coherence as a set of governmental practices aimed at ‘organized’ crime problems. The call for more, better and more standardized information on the problem of organized crime resulted in changes to different national policing systems and thus, globally, they began to blur into one another. Recall the discussion in an earlier section of this essay which described the complexity of the police sector in Canada and recall also that the rise to prominence of concerns relating to organized crime led to a national action plan for the co-ordination, evaluation and measurement of ‘the problem’. It would not an exaggeration to say that the trends and processes underway in Canada during the 1990s exhibited in microcosm a set of developments occurring globally. As the information processes of the Canadian police sector were re-engineered in order to better measure and evaluate organized crime threats, so too was it in other countries. The result was a change in the architecture of the police sector across the globe as it developed the capacity to measure and thereby govern ‘organized crime’. Conclusion One question remains. In observing these processes are we witnessing the governance of organized crime, or is it more apt to describe it as governance through organized crime? Put in this simple form the question may appear to be sociologically naive; the former a lazy functionalism, the latter verging on conspiracy theory. It is useful, as well as interesting, to look at the way in which organized crime has become an object of governance over the recent past. This is so because the, inevitably disputatious, theoretical literature on governance has done so much to chart the transformations in the practices of social power. In a world that has ‘gone global’, where the relationships between populations and territory are changing, it is

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helpful to look at specific practices of governance so as to shed light on these broader shifts. The advent of organized crime (transnational and otherwise) as an object of governance ought to tell us something about the general character of these transformations. This essay examined in detail the micro-processes of policing intelligence systems in order to show precisely how organized crime was turned into an object of governance in Canada during the course of the 1990s. What was shown was that, in spite of the capacity of organized crime phenomena to overflow the boundaries of official definition (wherever those might be said to lie), the mentalité of policing intelligence tended to be focused on elements that are narrowly circumscribed. Moreover, the evidence to hand suggests that the general public was largely in accord with the vision of organized crime groups of the ‘traditional’ or ‘Mafia’ type. It is tempting to try to disentangle this isomorphism. But this is a distraction from a more important question, which asks how, specifically, organized crime was turned into an object of governance. This feat was accomplished during a period that exhibited a considerable sense of anxiety and fear, and this was not peculiar to the Canadian scene. Probably such existential angst had many sources, but it seems inescapable that part of its fundament pertained to transformations associated with ‘globalization’. People worried, during the 1990s, that society was becoming ungovernable. Whatever else, perceptions of a rising tide of serious criminality peppered globalization crisis-talk. It is thus plausible to echo Jonathan Simon and argue that ‘governing through crime, at its broadest, might be looked at as a response to this crisis’ (1997: 177) and to amplify his observation to say that the governance of organized crime in Canada is but a microcosm of more global tendencies. Organized crime provided an occasion for the re-articulation and re-establishment of the state’s capacities in an era when, globally, many signs pointed to the ‘hollowing out’ of the nation-state and a diminution of its capacities (Jessop 1993, 1994). In such a climate, crime control presented an issue area where state governmental programmers could rely on the traditional legitimacy of the state’s monopoly of coercive force in order to assert their position. Further, even when crime control became an issue of transnational governance, it still remained an issue area where the state qua state was an active, indeed leading, partner in the governmental programme. Transnational organized crime appeared as a phenomenon too large in scale for the national state to handle (Williams and Savona 1995). But organized crime is manifest locally and so needs be governed locally (cf. Hobbs, 1998). Globalization presents a bewildering proliferation of platforms of governance. Some governmental capacities have been transferred to a supranational level. Other expressions of states’ capacities have been removed to restructured local or regional levels of governance within the national state. Then, too, there are aspects of governmental capacity in emerging horizontal networks of regional transnational governance connecting across states’ boundaries. The state qua state – the Canadian federal state is but one example – emerged as one of the key brokers in the transnational governance of organized crime; its capacities for governance were reasserted in important ways through the rise to prominence of this issue area. Hence governing through organized crime. There is another reason to suggest that the governance of organized crime was, in practice, governance through organized crime. Because the construction of organized crime as an object of governance tended, in the main, to focus on ‘the underworld’ of Mafia-type organized criminal gangs, and tended to devote much less attention to the crimes of the powerful who

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inhabit ‘legitimate’ and formal institutional structures, it became plausible to assert that the emergence of the organized crime problematic amounted to an ideological smoke-screen (Chomsky 1991). This is a contentious issue, as it is whenever the issue of ideology is raised. However, this view has substantial weight in the academic literature on white collar and corporate crime. Observing the extensive calls for law and order against ‘street crime’ and the muted calls for enforcement against ‘suite crime’, Jeffery Reiman concluded that the ‘rich get richer and the poor get prison’ (1995). In Canada, Laureen Snider (1993) provided evidence to suggest that the social harm due to a variety of corporate crimes was much more significant than ‘conventional’ types of crime.6 In common with other scholars in the white collar crime field, she argued that the lack of emphasis on the economic crimes of the powerful was at least partly explicable by what was, in effect, a symbiotic relationship between corporate capital and the state. In a special issue of the Journal of Human Justice (1992) the issue editors put these pressures in a global context arguing, in part, that nationally-based states are keen to promote ‘business confidence’ and minimize pressures for capital flight. Minimal attention to corporate malfeasance thereby becomes part of a package of special incentives that lure multinationals to invest in national economies (Pearce and Snider 1992). The analysis of ‘crimes of the powerful’ indicates an increase in the power of global capital (and the social elites associated with it) and a connected diminution in the ability of local communities to influence or block hurtful changes (ibid.: 41). The concern here is not so much a ‘hollowing out of the state’ but rather a diminution in the ability of local communities to govern themselves and (in terms of the concerns that animate this essay) specifically to govern the crimogenic features of globalization: for example, that of criminal despoliation of the environment (Block 1993; Pearce and Tombs 1993; Brack and Hayman 2002). The diffuse range of anxieties indicated by the term ‘globalization’ raises many challenges for governance via states’ apparatuses generally. When the specific concern is the governance of organized crime, the observation stands that, by and large, during the last decade of the twentieth century, perceptions of what constitutes the problem (perceptions held by citizens and governmental programmers alike) focused on the ‘traditional’ image and neglected other types of organized crime. This is, mutatis mutandis, equally true of transnational organized crime. There can be little doubt that the great preponderance of effort in controlling organized crime during the 1990s was focused on ‘the usual suspects’. In such circumstances, at least some people holding political and economic power were able to criminally abuse their positions in a more or less organized fashion and remain fairly secure in the thought that police resources were not directed at them. While it is unlikely that the emergence of governance through organized crime has been the result of a strategic decision as such, the observed practices of crime control reveal something much less than the governance of organized crime.

6

Moreover, in Canada these sorts of views were amplified, in the work of the investigative journalist Paul Palango. His book Above the Law (subtitled The Crooks, the Politicans, the Mounties and Rod Stamler – the latter a former RCMP assistant commissioner and a former head of the Economic Crime Directorate) traced cases of bid rigging, fraud and influence peddling in high places as well as the marginalization of efforts to police white collar crime in Canada.

[17] Organizational Pathologies in Police Intelligence Systems: Some Contributions to the Lexicon of Intelligence-led Policing1 Introduction During the early 1990s serious and organized crime moved to the top of the international agenda. Global liberalization of economic and financial markets, together with significantly increased migratory pressures from the underdeveloped to the developed world, was said to have given a new impetus to the expansion of illicit markets (Edwards and Gill 2002, 2003a; Beare 2003; Williams and Savona 1995). Accordingly, in order to control these illicit markets, increased policing capacity was said to be a matter of functional necessity. In Europe, an Action Plan to Combat Organised Crime was elaborated at the highest levels of government and adopted by the European Council in April 1997 (den Boer and Doelle 2000; Official Journal of the European Communities 1997). This plan put forward 30 recommendations, a number of which directly addressed the organizational structures of the police sector in the member states. Of particular interest were Recommendations 1, 2 and 20. The first of these asked member states to ‘examine whether it would be appropriate … to ask member states to designate a body at national level which would have an overall responsibility for the coordination of the fight against organized crime’. The second recommended the establishment of ‘a mechanism for the collection and analysis of data … [in order to] provide a picture of the organized crime situation … which can assist law enforcement authorities in fighting organized crime’. Recommendation 20 concerned the establishment of ‘multidisciplinary integrated teams’ at the national level which ‘should have sufficient insight into national criminal investigations to be able to contribute to the development of national polices in the fight against organized crime’. These recommendations were obviously intended to harmonize intelligence processes within the policing sector across the territory of the European Union (EU) (den Boer 2002). This enhanced concern with forms of organized crime came about at the same time that government institutions were ‘re-tooling’, using new information and communications technologies (ICT) (Ericson 1994a; Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Zuboff 1988). The result of 1



Originally published in the European Journal of Criminology, 1(3), pp. 307–332 (2004).

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the ‘information revolution’ has been considerable organizational flux in all governmental institutions as they are reconfigured in order to take advantage of ICT, not least those in the police sector (Chan et al. 2001; Manning 1992). This shift has been characterized as the move to ‘intelligence-led policing’ (Maguire 2000; Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary 1997). In the United Kingdom these trends culminated in the imposition of the National Intelligence Model (NIM), while other European countries adopted their own distinctive approaches to the use of ICT systems in their efforts to improve their ability to gather, analyse and disseminate criminal intelligence. Most published work about the new intelligence-led approaches has tended to focus on formal models of intelligence systems. The accent has been on hierarchies of information flows and the use of formal rules to control the creation and exchange of intelligence. This is understandable, not least because of the strictures of data protection and human rights legislation and the fact that such formal models are reflective of the rank structured bureaucracies in which the new ICT systems have been implemented. What is often missed out in descriptions of these formally rational systems is discussion about their organizational flaws. It is not the case that instrumentally rational bureaucracies produce substantive rationality. Indeed, the opposite may be the case, as the sociologist Max Weber well observed. The purpose of this essay is to provide some terms for describing the organizational pathologies of police intelligence systems. After briefly describing the research that underpins this discussion, it overviews police intelligence systems as described by some of the people who have attempted to engineer them, with specific reference to the UK. The main part of the essay delineates and defines 11 organizational pathologies manifest in police intelligence systems. Although it may be problematic to generalize, enough is known about the state of play in the 15 member states of the European Union to suggest that these are a force to be reckoned with (den Boer 2002; den Boer and Doelle 2000). The essay ends by suggesting that the ‘pictures’ of crime problems based purely (or even principally) on police intelligence are likely to be distorted in ways that have yet to be well understood. More work is necessary if policy makers are to be fully confident in the efficacy of police intelligence systems and if criminologists are to make use of their products in the manufacture of theories about crime in the contemporary context. Method This essay draws principally from the findings of a study funded by the UK Home Office (Sheptycki 2004b). It also draws on interviews undertaken with a variety of personnel from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (on this research, see Sheptycki 2003c), with Swedish police and customs personnel, and with intelligence analysts of the Dutch National Police Service (KLPD). These provided some assurance about the degree of generalizability of the findings of the main UK-based study. The UK study on which this essay rests aimed to be a national overview of the information processes that underlie the production of strategic criminal intelligence analysis. It used interviews, focus group interviews and field observations in a variety of agencies in the UK police sector (including customs), as well as analysis of official

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documents to do this (for a fuller account of the methods used in this project, see Sheptycki 2004b). The research informing this essay looked at the UK NIM from the ground up. It provided many insights into the organizational pathologies manifest in police information systems. The police sector in each country exhibits unique characteristics and it is extremely difficult to make meaningful generalizations about them (Fijnaut 1999). The analysis pursued here does not dwell upon the particularities of organizational structures. Rather, what is being attempted are characterizations of organizational processes – specifically, information processes. Further, these can be understood to be the ‘institutional thought processes’ (Douglas 1987) that knit together the policing sector writ large. When governmental entities such as national states or supranational bodies such as the European Union pronounce a need to rationalize the information systems that animate police-type agencies, and make policies on the basis of the information thus produced, it is important to understand the organizational problems that underwrite such systems. Formal Models of Intelligence Systems There is a sense in which police have always used ‘intelligence’. Willmer’s (1970) classic application of information theory to the organization of policing recognized the importance of ‘intelligence’ in the age of ‘unit beat policing’. He described the great variety of information that may come to the attention of police officers and observed that, as the territory being policed becomes more densely populated, or the geographical remit more widely spread, it becomes increasingly difficult to translate it into intelligence (1970: 24–34). As he described it, the intelligence function essentially consists in the acquisition of knowledge and the processing of that knowledge into meaningful and digestible packages that lead to action. He focused on the role of the ‘collator’ (a precursor to today’s crime analysts) in helping to interpret information and smooth the processes of communication internal to the police organization. He noted that several countries were experimenting with various computer applications to criminal records, modus operandi searches, personal description searches and vehicle registration searches, as well as routine administrative tasks, but that ‘Great Britain appears to be alone in considering the application of computers to intelligence information’ (1970: 33). Thirty years later, studies revealed the use of a growing armoury of information-gathering and analytical and investigative tools and techniques, including undercover officers, tasked criminal informants, ‘bugging’ and visual surveillance devices, closed circuit television, financial tracking capabilities and, of course, a vast range of computer facilities, packages and databases, most of them rare or non-existent 20 years ago (Maguire 2000: 316; see also Maguire and John 1995). What is more, by the year 2000, intelligence-led policing was well established internationally. Thus the report of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) – entitled Policing with Intelligence – noted that ‘the ideal intelligence configuration has often been likened to a pyramid structure, extending from a broad-based local policing tier through a force and inter-force level to upper echelons composed of national and international work’ (1997: 7). This report also pointed out that the strategic view of serious crime problems is developed on the basis of information flowing up from many different agencies and emphasized that, ‘for this model to work effectively, intelligence has to flow freely on and

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between all the levels and inter change smoothly between agencies’ (ibid.). That is why any analysis of the utility of intelligence-led policing with regard to serious and organized crime must look at the policing sector writ large. Models of the ‘intelligence system’ are reflective of a number of institutional hierarchies that comprise the policing sector, including, but not limited to, police constabularies, intelligence services, customs services and private security agencies. Different organizations depict this somewhat differently. The dominant nomenclature in the UK context has been set down within the terms of the NIM, which stipulates a cycle in five phases. These are, firstly, direction (when the ‘customer’s intelligence needs’ are established); secondly, collection (during which information is amassed); thirdly, processing (when the information is analysed and turned into ‘intelligence packages’); fourthly, dissemination (when ‘packages’ are given to ‘customers’); and, fifthly, formal review (when customers and providers jointly assess what has been accomplished and decide on the direction to take in the next round). The NIM cycle is depicted as having three ‘levels’ that correspond to increasing expanses of terrain. According to the National Criminal Intelligence Service: Level 1 – local issues – usually the crimes, criminals and other problems affecting a basic command unit or small force area. The scope of the crimes will be wide ranging from low value thefts to great seriousness such as murder. The handling of volume crime will be a particular issue at this level. Level 2 – cross border issues – usually the actions of a criminal or other specific problems affecting more than one basic command unit. Problems may affect a group of basic command units, neighbouring forces or a group of forces. Issues will be capable of resolution by Forces, perhaps with support from the National Crime Squad, HM Customs and Excise, the National Criminal Intelligence Service, or other national resources. Key issues will be the identification of common problems, the exchange of appropriate data and the provision of resources for the common good. Level 3 – Serious Organized Crime – usually operating on a national and international scale, requiring identification by proactive means and response primarily through targeting operations by dedicated units and a preventative response on a national basis. (National Criminal Intelligence Unit 2000:8)

In this explanation of the NIM, the hierarchy of the police sector – from local ‘basic command units’, through to regional tasking and coordinating groups, to the national level – is projected on to ‘levels of criminality’ in the illicit market. This view is later expressly, if elliptically, disavowed: our position … is that criminals clearly operate at two levels, firstly crimes that directly impact upon a community as described in Level 1; secondly those operating at a serious and organized crime level where the key components are the existence of a group of individuals which persists from serious crime to serious crime, an ability to defend the groups, and survive and reform after disruption. (National Criminal Intelligence Service 2000: 8)

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What constitutes an adequate description of the nature of criminal markets and organized crime is hotly contested in the criminological literature (Block 1994; Gregory 1998; Hobbs 1998; Levi 1998; Williams and Savona 1995). What cannot be contested is that intelligence systems models are based on hierarchies of information flow. Indeed, one diagram used to illustrate the intelligence process in the Dutch police system depicts a pyramid with three ‘levels’ (read from the top: national files, regional files and investigations files). A complicating factor is that the police sector is not a unified whole, but is itself a variegated institutional field. In the UK, many institutions comprise the police sector. This includes police constabularies themselves (of which there are 43 in England and Wales, 8 in Scotland and 1 in Northern Ireland), plus the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence Police, the UK Atomic Energy Authority Police, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), the National Crime Squad (NCS), the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise (HMCE) and the Immigration and Nationality Department (IND). There are also a host of other governmental agencies such as the Benefits Agency, the Inland Revenue and the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which also contribute to and draw on information circulating in the intelligence ‘system’. The gathering, processing and dissemination of criminal intelligence are essentially a problem, or series of problems, in the multi-agency sharing of relevant data. Since each agency operates on the basis of hierarchical information flows, there is not one pyramid of intelligence, but many. This is why it is difficult to make detailed cross-national comparisons, since the precise institutional mélange found in each country differs in important ways. Two points arise as general characteristics of national (and indeed transnational) intelligence systems. One is the principle of information hierarchy, where ‘intelligence’ is supposed to flow upwards in data pyramids. The second is the multi-agency context, which calls for the movement of information between or across these information hierarchies. Specialist units established for the gathering, creation and circulation of criminal intelligence within this complex set of hierarchies are therefore faced with difficult organizational problems. Organizational Problems of Criminal Intelligence Sharing in a Multi-agency Setting Reading official documents about information flows in crime intelligence systems one is more often confronted with a version of how they ought to work than how they do work. This is understandable because most of these documents are concerned with laying out the proper procedures that practitioners need to abide by if criminal intelligence processes are to work properly and within the framework of the law. What is very often absent from these accounts, however, is a perspective that pays attention to the way information actually flows in these systems. Some academics have produced accounts of informal communications networks, what is sometimes referred to as the ‘old boys network’ (Bigo 2000; den Boer 1997; Manning 1992), but less has been said about those aspects of formal systems of information exchange that bespeak of organizational pathology. I identify 11 such pathologies here. These are: digital divide; linkage blindness; noise; intelligence overload; non-reporting; intelligence gaps; duplication; institutional friction; intelligence-hoarding and information silos; defensive data concentration; and the differences of occupational subculture. The subsections that follow

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discuss each of these in turn, illustrating the issues at hand primarily with reference to the UK context. Digital Divide The problem of the digital divide is well known. Since ICT functions to both store and communicate intelligence, the basic problem is twofold. There are many different information storage systems in use across the police sector. This is sometimes understood to be a problem of ‘legacy systems’. For example, in one UK police force visited during the summer of 2001, data pertaining to hand guns, firearms and ammunition were stored on two separate and antiquated desktop computers. Since the two databanks had been created at different times and for different purposes, each system stored slightly different information and neither was complete on its own. Additionally, firearms incidents were recorded on a newer force-wide central incident database, in effect a third information environment. Obviously this makes intelligence analysis very difficult and, given time pressure on analysts, often practically impossible. Continuous and unco-ordinated upgrading of ICT systems means that this is an ongoing issue in all agencies that comprise the police sector. The digital divide is also manifest in communications systems. A noteworthy example of the ‘communications divide’ occurred during fieldwork for the UK study. It pertained to an incident where two boys (aged 5 and 6) went missing in the Staffordshire constabulary area (Brown 2001; McIlroy 2001). Staffordshire Constabulary mustered a helicopter, police dogs and an undisclosed number of police officers, as well as assistance from members of the public, in a search for the boys that lasted 12 hours. It was not until then that Staffordshire police became aware that the boys had been discovered wandering lost in the neighbouring Cheshire Constabulary. The boys had been found and taken to a police station within an hour of being reported missing. However, because the two forces used different communications systems and because the young boys were unable to explain to police where they lived, there was considerable delay in returning them home. Although not a case involving serious or organized crime, this is symptomatic of a communications divide that affects the police sector generally. The digital divide can cause particular problems where there is a need to co-ordinate cross-border or inter-institutional information flow. One officer reported that he thought the flow of intelligence within the local constabulary was generally very good but that ‘most of the people that are a problem on my patch come from [the neighbouring constabulary] and they use a completely different system in that force area’. One implication of the digital divide is that intelligence analysis based on timely (ideally real-time) data is impossible. Linkage Blindness The concept of ‘linkage blindness’ was first associated with crime series analysis (Egger 1990a). In this context, it refers to linkages in crime series that analysts fail to spot owing to inadequate or insufficient data (Sheptycki 1998e). For example, a firearm may be ‘rented’ or shared among a group of active criminals and used in a variety of locations. Data pertaining to that weapon might be used to link these persons to each other, or to particular incidents.

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When a crime series transgresses territorial boundaries, and the horizontal connections for sharing relevant intelligence are inadequate or non-existent, linkage blindness occurs. This is not the same issue as the digital divide, although it is related. Linkage blindness is a system problem not a technical one. An illustrative example was identified by the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate (BFI 2001). Information-sharing across the police sector in the UK is codified in service level agreements (SLAs), which set down standard practice for information sharing. The BFI expressed great dissatisfaction with the adherence to these standards, stating that many personnel merely pay ‘lip service’ to the SLAs. According to the report, many personnel were unaware that information could be passed between agencies or even that there were good reasons for doing so. Linkage blindness is not reducible to the digital divide, since the personnel who make use of the information and communication technology at their disposal can overcome technical barriers in order to ensure that relevant information is placed in the correct hands. However, field observations indicated that, even where there is a rule-based framework for doing so, horizontal flow in information hierarchies is often poor because most effort is directed at ensuring vertical flow. Noise Noise pertains to the value of processed information circulating in the intelligence system. Information may be graded along a spectrum of usefulness, but this intrinsic quality is further shaped by decisions made about recording and dissemination. The probability that personnel working with ‘raw’ intelligence will come across a piece of ‘high-quality’ information is lower than the probability that they will receive something of relatively ‘low quality’, but in any case all information is subject to interpretation. For example, civilians make reports about firearms from time to time, but not all of these reports are of the same value. There are a variety of reasons and motives that people have for making voluntary reports of this kind, and reporting officers have to make decisions about what they record. Thus the concept of ‘noise’ should be introduced, since intelligence outputs are in fact a distorted form of the input, which itself may be of dubious value. In the UK, intelligence personnel described noise in a variety of ways, referring to a ‘glut of low-grade intelligence’ and ‘over-sanitized’ or ‘overly complicated’ intelligence packages. The volume of noise in an information system seems to be related to the distance between the reporting, recording and interpretation of data. The greater the gaps between information reporting, intelligence analysis and dissemination, the greater the capacity for generating noise. This is because police personnel who turn information into intelligence often know little about recording decisions. Analysts who operate at a degree removed from such decisions are less able to qualify their interpretation of specific intelligence properly. The more extended the gap between recording decisions and analytical ones, and the larger the volume of bytes gathered for interpretation, the greater the capacity to produce noise. Intelligence Overload Intelligence overload is a result of problems associated with noise, but it is also more than that. Across the policing sector there is a pronounced lack of analytical capacity and

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associated administrative support. During the course of the UK fieldwork, many instances were observed where analysts were given responsibility for data input and culling of old and out-of-date information. This frequently takes place in contexts where investigative personnel are also in short supply. It is not uncommon for analytical personnel to be given tasks more properly associated with investigation rather than analysis per se (see also the sections relating to occupational subcultures, below). In situations where intelligencereporting is particularly voluminous, and where analytical personnel are required to undertake secondary duties, overload of the intelligence systems is the result. In such circumstances, it is not uncommon for out-of-date information to clutter up the information environment, which absorbs even more labour time, since data should be periodically purged in keeping with data protection guidelines. Intelligence overload can very quickly paralyse an intelligence system. Undercapacity in relation to the volume of information throughput, because capacity is taken up in data input, periodic record screening or investigative analysis, may further contribute to the undue production of noise. Multiple recording of data on multiple systems and at multiple levels is a contributing factor (see below, defensive data concentration). Compulsive data demand The tendency to systemic overload in the intelligence system is exacerbated by its voracious appetite for data. Intelligence-led policing predicated on widespread system surveillance has a tendency to demand ‘more data’ rather than ‘better data’ or better data analysis when problems are identified. For example, in September 2001 the National Criminal Intelligence Service Economic Crime Unit (ECU) released figures on suspicious transactions reporting for the previous year (Bosworth-Davies 2001). According to Home Office officials, suspicious transactions reports (STRs) to the ECU had reached a yearly total of 18,408. Figures for the previous three years had hovered around the 14,200 mark. The rise was interpreted as a success story, but the fact that STRs made by lawyers had fallen to 248 in 2000 from 256 in 1999 was taken to be a negative sign. Overall, the fact that the majority (almost 75 per cent) of STRs were coming from high street banks and bureaux de change, leaving other types of professional money handlers contributing much smaller proportions, was taken to be a sign that not enough data were coming into the surveillance system. Correspondence between myself and the Home Office about the interpretation of the contents of the STRs revealed that no analysis of the data had been produced, apart from the quantification cited in the press releases. In interview, personnel in the ECU revealed that, as of that date, they had not been able to analyse the data to hand in order to say anything systematic about the quality of reporting.2 The analytical capacity of the unit was more or less completely absorbed with the task of inputting the volume of reports received and contributing to an unspecified number of active operational investigations. In interview, regulators at the Financial Services Authority (FSA) professed not to understand the emphasis on quantity: … if suspicious transactions reports were at, say, 50,000 that could be read as a bad thing because it would mean that we, the regulators, were not doing a good job in ensuring that financial service providers were in compliance with the basic regulations. If they fell to zero 2

On this point, the NCIS subsequently indicated that the analysis of the quality of this information had been scheduled (written communication, May 2002).

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that could be read as good, since regulation may have squeezed the opportunity to launder money. On the other hand, that could mean that we were doing such a bad job that suspicious transaction reporting officers can’t recognise a suspicious transaction when it is staring them in the face. So, I would say that you can’t really use a quantitative measure by itself. (FSA regulator, interview, 11 September 2001)

Observing the volume of data coming from the financial system, one intelligence officer likened the task of intelligence analysis to ‘drinking from a fire-hose’. Compulsive data demand is a failure to recognize that more data are not necessarily better data. Non-reporting and Non-recording Non-reporting or non-recording of relevant intelligence is problematic from the point of view of a well-functioning intelligence system. Recording intelligence in standardized formats is time-consuming (Ericson 1981, 1994; Ericson and Haggerty 1997). Onerous recording burdens are made all the more so because of the digital divide, which means that information must be entered manually (double keyed) on more than one information system. The issue for police detectives is the ‘burden of paperwork’. Intelligence-reporting rarely contributes to successful prosecution outcomes; therefore effort is put into making records associated directly with law enforcement ‘case building’ at the expense of intelligence-reporting. Recording procedures observed in situ revealed the many occasions for separate data entry. For example, concerning firearms, there may be separate data banks relating to the ammunition, the weapon and/or the incident that generated the report. Further, each separate report could necessitate double (or even treble) keying the same information (for example, addresses, phone numbers or the details of car number plates). Moreover, each of these types of information could be of interest to other agencies and this might generate yet more reporting requirements. When pressed for time, especially in the context of shift work, it is easy to miss one or more of these. Non-reporting results in preventable ‘intelligence gaps’ (see below), and may result in linkage blindness. In Britain, local intelligence officers expressed a degree of frustration with regard to data held on the Police National Computer (PNC) and other data stored in central repositories at the national level. Recording on multiple systems absorbs time, and resultant delays may mean that data are out of date. Intelligence Gaps Any one of the above issues can result in a gap in knowledge about a specific crime, series of crimes or crime type. Moreover, intelligence gaps are also the product of the hierarchical nature of the intelligence system. As previously explained, within the UK NIM, there is a threetiered system of intelligence corresponding roughly to three ‘levels of criminality’. Level 1 ‘nominals’ are criminals whose ambit of activity is geographically narrowly circumscribed. Many of these are teenage boys and young men who are considered to be prolific offenders. Level 2 ‘nominals’ are criminals with a wider territorial ambit: for example, teams of burglars or armed robbers whose activities range across divisional and force boundaries.

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Level 3 ‘nominals’ are understood to be serious criminals of national importance. There is a significant ‘gap’ in this pyramid of criminality between the second and third levels. As one officer explained it: You can see how young offenders … graduate from stealing cars and nicking things to bigger things and they might become level twos. That’s okay because for the most part we can handle them … The real problem is between the level twos and threes. You get what you might call a level two-and-a-half. These are criminals whose activities are beyond us. They may be drug dealers who travel to Manchester from here and we don’t have the resources to take that on. But from the point of view of NCS, well that dealer might only be turning over half a kilo [per week] and it’s not worth their while because they only want to take on criminals that are turning over five kilos. That is our biggest problem, because there is a big volume of crime going on at that in-between level.

The gap between Level 2 and Level 3 nominals is not only an aspect of the intelligence system; it also stems from the nature of the targets themselves. One officer used the notion of a continuum of surveillance awareness to explain this. According to this person, criminal activity by Level 1 nominals was primarily opportunistic. Surveillance of persons was seen to be time-consuming and not a good use of resources, but surveillance of crime ‘hot spots’ could be useful with respect to certain issues. Nominals spanning the range at the ‘top end’ of Level 1 and into Level 2 were understood to be susceptible to conventional mobile surveillance. Drug couriers and others responsible for moving criminally acquired goods were mentioned in this regard. The use of ‘technical surveillance’ (i.e. telephone intercepts) was said to be useful against these targets. The ‘top end’ of the Level 2 nominals and all Level 3 nominals were said to be, by definition, ‘surveillance aware’. With regard to this level of criminality, intelligence gaps emerge owing to the difficulty of focusing scarce surveillance resources on what was, in effect, a rather large suspect population. Duplication There is always the possibility that some active criminals are of interest to more than one intelligence unit or agency, and duplication of effort may result. Two problems follow. Perhaps the most obvious is that duplication is a waste of scare resources. However, duplication is most worrisome when coupled with linkage blindness. In such instances, crucial analytical connections might not be made. Duplication in the context of ‘undercover operations’ may result in ‘blue-on-blue fire’, where officers from one agency mistake those of another for criminals (Fijnaut and Marx 1995; Marx 1988). Duplication is institutionalized in the UK in the separate intelligence systems maintained by HMCE and NCIS. This duplication extends to the system of overseas liaison officers maintained by both agencies. In the UK context, the solution to duplication has been sought in efforts at improved tasking and co-ordination. Thus, Customs takes the ‘lead’ with regard to overseas drugs importation, whereas local police are interested in mid- and low-level drugs markets. This does not eliminate duplication, although it probably mitigates the worst possible outcomes (especially blue-on-blue fire). Duplication fosters the development of ‘information silos’ (see below).

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Institutional Friction As with most multi-agency work, intelligence-sharing is based on a collaborative rather than a command relationship. Customs officers at ports of entry may be in a position to gather and report data of relevance to police constabularies, for example with regard to the shipment of stolen vehicles or the importation of firearms and ammunition. In the UK context, any such reporting would be voluntary since the Customs agency cannot be compelled by the constabularies, NCIS or the NCS to commit resources to gathering and reporting information of this kind. Institutional friction is structural in origin and is not restricted to the interagency context, nor is this problem limited to the UK (Bayley 1994). Particularly in large multifunctional organizations, such as police departments, there is variability in definitions of ‘the job’, so that institutional friction can occur within an ostensibly unified command structure. Insofar as intelligence sharing is concerned, ‘institutional friction’ describes the difficulties of moving information across bureaucratic boundaries. It is possible that the emergence of ‘multidisciplinary integrated teams’, as envisaged in Recommendation 20 of the European Council’s Action Plan, might overcome such friction, but this would depend on factors like the size of such teams. In the UK, at the time of writing, the NCIS combines personnel from around 25 different agencies in a large-scale multidisciplinary working environment. Although multidisciplinary and multi-agency, the UK NCIS is a large organization with hundreds of personnel working according to a division of labour along functional lines (economic crimes unit, vehicle crimes, football hooliganism, etc.). Even at the apex of an intelligence pyramid such as the NCIS there are difficulties moving information across the boundaries created by the intelligence division of labour and, as a consequence, intelligence products are but fricative emanations. Intelligence Hoarding and Information Silos Institutional friction may result in a specific set of pathologies relating to the intelligence function: ‘information hoarding’ and, what is but a structural expression of the same thing, ‘information silos’. Information hoarding is partly symptomatic of the enforcement-based subcultures common in the police sector (see below on occupational subcultures). In this subculture, a ‘good pinch’ equates with personal prestige and may serve to advance a career. There is thus an obvious motive to try to monopolize certain types of information. Since information may be crucial to bringing about a notable success, it is a valuable commodity that must be kept back until it can realize its best return for the one who holds it However, intelligence-led policing (ILP) works according to a different logic. The ILP model depends on the sharing of information in order to produce accurate pictures of crime and disorder problems. These pictures may bring about an enforcement ‘result’, but they may also lead to different outcomes, perhaps some clue as to how to prevent future occurrences of the same or similar events. Intelligence hoarding is corrosive of the principles of intelligence-led policing. Hoarding need not be deliberate; it may be a post hoc rationalization for not communicating relevant information that stems, in the first instance, from institutional friction. It may also be an expression of non-reporting or non-recording – such information, in effect, being ‘hoarded’ inside the head of the individual officer who finds the task of double-keying information too

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time-consuming. Whatever its cause, the result is that information remains confined within one individual, unit or segment of the system. This hampers the ability to undertake timely and useful analysis of criminal intelligence. Information silos are slightly different. They are the structural expression of hierarchical information systems. For example, intelligence pertaining to vehicle theft is expected to flow upwards from local basic command units, to force intelligence bureaux, then perhaps to regionally-based intelligence analysts and/or up to NCIS headquarters. Similarly, intelligence relating to illegal drug markets is also supposed to filter upwards in the intelligence system. What can be lost in this upward flow is an emphasis on horizontal linkages between crime types. It may be more useful for linkages between intelligence relating to different ‘sectors of criminality’ (in this example, vehicle and drug crime) to be made at the local level, than for this information to flow to the top of their respective information silos. However, within information silos, there is only one direction for information to flow and that is up. Intelligence packages may be disseminated back down the silo, or may be released out into the wider information environment from the top, but vertical flow of information most often inhibits information dispersal at points further down the organizational hierarchy. Defensive Data Concentration The above-mentioned pathologies result in an understandable pressure to ‘do something’ in spite of the difficulties presented. In the intelligence environment, one obvious short-term solution is to take steps to gather relevant data for a given problem. For example, difficulties in gaining an accurate strategic picture of firearms-related incidents, or data about the number of handguns in circulation in the illicit market and the availability of ammunition for such weapons, may result in extra efforts to create a specific database for that task. This results in another reporting requirement being sent out across the police sector in order that the relevant facts be concentrated in one place and analysed. Efforts to concentrate information in this fashion usually focus on themes that are already enforcement priorities. Concentrations of data pertaining to immigrant smuggling, class A drugs, alcohol and cigarette smuggling, theft of high-value vehicles, sex offenders, firearms, extortion, armed robbery and other select types of ‘serious crime’ are thus created in a variety of agencies for strategic and other analytical purposes. The short-term solution to the catalogue of organizational pathologies that affect the police intelligence system actually creates more problems. It is, in effect, another duplication of data and it comes in the context of already overstretched reporting, recording and analytical capacities. Moreover, since defensive data concentration usually comes about in response to crime problems that are already high-profile, strategic analysts may be systematically robbed of the chance to develop information about lesser-known problems that are not already systemically reported. Occupational Subcultures The introduction of criminal intelligence analysis into the police sector casts new light on the occupational subcultures that comprise it. Criminal intelligence analysts have a keen perception about intelligence bottlenecks and the difficulties of collection and timely

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dissemination of good-quality intelligence. In interview, one intelligence analyst professed a degree of frustration about the working environment, describing information hoarding as ‘root and branch’. Many analysts spoke of the utility of horizontal information sharing across institutional boundaries and of the need to view intelligence systems as a ‘complex web’ rather than ‘the spokes of a wheel’. As the previous discussion has indicated, however, the intelligence system has been configured not as a web, but rather as a centralized and hierarchically organized information environment. Or, rather, not one centralized information system, but a number of (sometimes competing) intelligence systems. These are structural issues and intelligence analysts see them rather clearly. The professional crime analyst is a relative newcomer to the police sector. The arrival of this new profession has provided new insights into the different occupational subcultures inhabiting these organizations, not least because differences in occupational subculture may result in friction. Subculturally-related organizational pathologies can be conceptualized under two headings. First, there are issues that arise in the context of a single organization or agency. These are problems of intra-agency subcultures. Secondly, there are those that arise in the context of the multi-agency setting that comprises the police sector as a whole. This is the problem of inter-agency subcultures. This is somewhat blurred in practice by the introduction of a relatively new expertise across the police sector, that of the intelligence analyst. The rivalry between detectives and uniformed Intra-agency occupational subcultures patrol officers is standard fare in the policing literature (Reiner 2000). Less is known about these sorts of rivalry in other parts of the police sector. In interview, personnel in HMCE revealed not dissimilar subcultural divisions, the most stark being between the ‘VAT-men’, ‘who are more like accountants’, and ‘enforcement’, who ‘think they are cops’. Large institutions that appear to the outside observer as monolithic entities are divided up according to complex internal divisions of labour. Where these function well, the long-established differences in the constituent internal subcultures – for example, between management and operations, staff and line, or service providers and administrative support – are underpinned by a modus vivendi. A full analysis of these cannot be undertaken here, and is probably not necessary given the special focus of this essay. What is more important is insight into the present circumstances, where a new profession and type of expertise (crime analysis) is being introduced into an already established division of labour. There are immediate issues that arise from the accommodation of the new occupational role. One analyst interviewed observed that, although she had been in post for three years, it had been only within the preceding 12 months that she had worked with actual intelligence. Prior to that she had ‘just been typing memos’. It was not uncommon for young female staff trained as analysts to report being given ‘inappropriate’ tasks. Long-serving personnel may have difficulties in adapting their ways of thinking to accommodate the new intelligencebased approach. Detectives involved in policing at divisional level have built their role around crime investigation and arrest leading to successful prosecution. To detectives, information equates with evidence and so, in the words of one senior analyst, intelligence can be ‘subverted into detections by another name’. In certain circumstances, the long entrenched subcultural expectations of detective work may reduce the intelligence process to evidence gathering and evaluation. In contrast to detectives, analysts are trained to look at information more

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broadly. They are not merely interested in the evidence in a criminal case, although they can be involved in that too. Rather, intelligence analysis provides tools for the discovery of trends and patterns and tries to explain why these occur (Dintino and Martens 1983). Since the detective role is more long-standing and is a relatively high-status role within the police agencies (and key performance indicators reflect this), there is an observable tendency to coopt crime analysis for the purposes of crime investigation. Some analysts clearly identify with the detective world-view. Celebrating the ‘good pinch’ is not necessarily antithetical to the analyst’s role, neither is it the sine qua non of crime analysis. With intelligence-led policing, it is undesirable that crime analysis should become narrowed to the limited set of practices concerned with law enforcement. This tendency is not confined to police constabularies. In other agencies where success in law enforcement operations looms large as a marker of job success, and therefore prestige, the analytical process can be narrowed in a similar way. The introduction of criminal intelligence analysis in a variety of settings across the police sector has marked implications for the established way of doing things, but it is evidently not easy to introduce the new roles into already existing divisions of labour. Faced with these sorts of problems, managers talk about the need for additional training. There is much talk in the police sector internationally about the need to train personnel to be ‘good intelligence customers’ (IALEIA 1997, 1999). This may have a longer-term impact, but in the short term there is limited scope for training longerserving personnel, not least because of staff shortages. Staff extractions for the purposes of training, together with sick leave and other situational exigencies, mean that many units in the police sector suffer from an at least perceived chronic shortage of personnel ‘on the ground’. In such circumstances, (re)training of existing staff may be perfunctory and insufficient to change old habits. This problem may be superseded as younger cohorts come of age under the intelligence-led paradigm and move into positions of responsibility. Some of these issues arise simply because of the imbalance in status and prestige of different occupational roles. Intelligence analysts, who are often merely ‘civilians’ in police agencies, are unable to advance very high up the career ladder.3 However, the problem is not just between civilian and police personnel. Intelligence officers frequently report that they do not receive the same acknowledgement for their role that detectives have traditionally claimed. The ‘good pinch’ looms large in this occupational milieu: crimes detected are granted higher status than crimes prevented. This is a variant of institutional friction, which may be partly (or even substantially) eliminated over the longer term. However, in the contemporary period the friction between the new arrivals and the old hands casts a harsh light on the functioning of these organizations. Inter-agency occupational subcultures There are pronounced differences in the workplace cultures of the various agencies that comprise the police sector. HMCE is one of the oldest departments of government in the UK. Established in 1642, it is certainly the oldest with police-type powers (search, seizure, arrest, etc.). In the contemporary period it is a department of the Treasury, has a centralized management structure and has a division of labour that reflects its relatively limited operational remit and narrow ambit of discretion. The 3 An attendant issue is that analysts leave jobs in police organizations after gaining experience and training. Analytical skills acquired in the context of police work can be sold for much higher rewards in the private sector.

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police constabularies, on the other hand, are a product of nineteenth-century state institution building. The public police in England and Wales are subject to a wider system of political and democratic control than is HMCE and, in policy matters, are subject to the purview of the Home Office. Public policing is multifunctional and decentralized. The work of police officers is characterized by a wide degree of discretion. There are other (newer) agencies in the policing sector, namely the NCS and NCIS, as well as longer-standing institutions such as Her Majesty’s Immigration Service and the security services. In addition there are more peripheral institutions, such as the Financial Services Authority and the Benefits Agency, to name only two. Looked at internationally, it is possible to point to yet more differences in the subcultural traditions of institutions that make up the policing sector: between transnational agencies (i.e. Interpol and Europol); between agencies in specific national contexts (e.g. in Germany between the Länder Polizei, the Bundeskriminalamt and the Bundesgrenschutz); across national contexts (e.g. between the French Gendarmerie and the Dutch KLPD); across functional responsibilities (e.g. between the Italian Guardia di Finanza and the Caribinieri). All of these institutions (and more) are affected by the new practices of intelligence-led policing and all are drawn into a strategic enterprise by intergovernmental efforts such as the European Council’s Action Plan. It is important to recognize that the working practices of these various agencies are rather different and so too are the subcultures within them. It is a long established fact that multi-agency working is adversely affected by differences in working practice and that there can be a struggle for power and resources (including information) between agencies in these circumstances (Blagg et al. 1988). Such institutional friction can affect multi-agency working in the most mundane ways. Consider joint police/ customs operational work in the UK, where one of the most frequently mentioned difficulties is associated with payment for overtime. With regard to intelligence sharing, frequently there are differences in the terminology used to describe varieties of intelligence. For example, in the UK, agents working in HMCE make a three-tier distinction between ‘operational’, ‘tactical’ and ‘strategic’ intelligence. The first type is defined as ‘intelligence product which supports front line units in taking case specific action to achieve compliance or enforcement objectives’. An example of this might be information that suggests that a specific aircraft is ‘high risk for drug mules’ (likely to have persons on board who are in possession of quantities of drugs). Tactical intelligence is defined as an ‘intelligence product which supports national and local managers of front line units in planning activity and deploying resources to achieve operational objectives’. An example of this would be intelligence analysis that indicates that a specific airport, airline or route is being systematically used for the purposes of drug importation. Strategic intelligence is much broader still and entails ‘looking at the national picture, of an industry, or the problem presented by illicit trafficking from a particular country, or national problems caused by the institution of a particular piece of legislation or other new development’. As an example of a new development, reference was made during interviews to an ongoing strategic assessment on tax compliance problems arising in the context of Internet-based business (e-commerce). In contrast, the UK National Crime Squad (NCS) operates with a basic two-tier distinction. Tactical intelligence is ‘directed towards specific criminal activity and targets. It is case specific and directly contributes to the enforcement objectives of the National Crime Squad’. Strategic intelligence, however, pertains to the predictive assessment of current and emerging trends.

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It delivers an ‘overview of criminal capabilities, threats, trends and intentions, in accordance with the organization’s strategic aims and principles’. Like the NCS, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) views tactical intelligence as being directed towards specific criminal activity and targets. To this end, it seeks to produce ‘tactical products for use by law enforcement teams to mount operations against major criminals and their organizations who operate at national and international level’. Tactical intelligence is set against strategic intelligence, which ‘involves assessing the scale and nature of the threats from serious and organized crime, identifying potential areas for new legislation, recommending prevention techniques, and forecasting future threats’. Differences in nomenclature indicate contrasts in subcultural style. Where multi-agency working is requisite, this may result in suboptimal working practices. One way around this, which is currently being adopted in the UK policing sector, is to assign ‘lead agencies’ to take overall charge of strategic tasking and co-ordination in relation to specific ‘sectors’ of organized crime. So, for example, Customs is the lead agency with regard to drug importation, the NCS for armed robbery, the NCIS for vehicle theft, and so forth. The problem remains that, although lead agencies may acquire more of a command relationship with regard to their specific sector and hence a degree of control over intelligence requirements, the need for co-operative intelligence sharing, and the ease with which this can be accomplished, are not addressed. Cross-sectoral intelligence sharing, of information held by Customs relating to the exportation of stolen vehicles or the importation of illegal firearms for example, is easier if policing agents share a common argot and a common subculture. Differences of occupational subculture may be minimized through shared key performance indicators. When the organizations that make up the police sector are commonly evaluated against commonly held measures of agency success, it may be less easy to maintain substantially different subcultures within and across the sector. Organizational Pathologies of the Police Intelligence System in Context Before concluding, it is useful to view these organizational pathologies in context. After reading through the above lexicon for describing the variety of organizational problems that beset the contemporary policing sector, the reader could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the system is in chaos and ‘nothing works’. Although an exaggeration, this would not be entirely incorrect, but it is also only a partial view. As intimated earlier, these pathologies are integral to the institutional thought processes that comprise the policing sector as a whole. This is a reference to Mary Douglas, who argued, in a book entitled How Institutions Think, that ‘institutions survive by harnessing all information processes to the task of establishing themselves’ (1987: 102). She explained further that any given institution will be concerned with the projection of images and events ‘which sustain the view of nature that is complementary to itself’ (1987: 112). According to Douglas, institutions are ‘thoughtcollectives’ bound together by specific ‘thought-styles’. Further, on this basis it is possible to say that, if a given thought-style exhibited in a given institution is predicated on the use of surveillance and data acquisition, any problem encountered by that institution, including

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problems that may act to undermine the legitimacy of its thought-style, can be answered only by calls for more surveillance and better data acquisition. The intelligence-led policing paradigm has been adopted by a host of agencies that comprise the policing sector. The gathering, processing and dissemination of criminal intelligence takes place in many separate agencies, each of which harnesses information processes to its own reproduction. The organizational pathologies outlined in this essay show that the processing of criminal intelligence is not as rationally ordered as may appear in the pages of the strategic analyses that are its product. Despite the disjuncture and disorganization that close observation reveals, the policing sector reliably produces strategic threat assessments yearon-year that target ‘the usual suspects’ (Gill 2000). How is this so? One way to explain this is to suggest that, despite its apparent fragmentation, the policing sector remains an institutional ensemble that successfully places parameters on what can be considered legitimate ways of thinking. All institutions generate their own world of images, symbols, ideas and past experiences, and, insofar as people participate in the institution, they are products of this ‘thought-world’. So it is in the policing sector. The institutional thought-world of the policing sector orders experience and memory and exercises a relatively large degree of control over the way problems of organized and serious crime are perceived. This is so not only for those who are direct participants in the institution (police agents, criminal intelligence analysts and the policy makers whom they feed), but also for the public at large. Building on Douglas’s terminology, the police sector is a complex institutional mélange that exercises social control over our understandings of organized crime. The plausibility of the output coming from the policing sector’s intelligence system(s) does not rest on the rationality of its processes, but rather depends on the hegemony of a certain thought-style that focuses on law enforcement means against traditional targets. In the contemporary period there is a concern to use the product of strategic criminal intelligence analysis to re-order priorities. Policy makers in the field of organized and serious crime in all of the member states of the European Union are consequently exercised with commissioning and interpreting strategic assessments of the organized crime problem and making policy of the basis thereof. There is an expectation that strategic analyses of criminal intelligence provided by the policing sector will aid policy makers in making decisions about resource allocation in the management of a wide range of organized criminal activity. This includes not only the usual suspects – such as drug smugglers and urban gangsters – but also crimes against the environment, white-collar crime, identity theft, and much else. Given the catalogue of organizational pathologies that affect the policing intelligence system, it will be necessary to use the analytical products of that system with circumspection. Conclusion This essay began by observing that most of what has been written about intelligence systems in the policing sector has tended to focus on how they ought to work rather than on how they do work. Following this, the essay aimed to contribute to the lexicon of intelligence-led policing by providing some terms that describe the organizational pathologies that impair the intelligence function. If nothing else, the vocabulary thus provided enunciates in clear terms the

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management problems that beset the intelligence-led policing paradigm. The guiding purpose of this essay is broader still. It has been to show why it is that criminologists and others who are interested in the emerging issues surrounding the policing response to organized and serious crime need to interpret the outputs of the police intelligence system with greater caution than they perhaps currently do. Governmental institutions such as the European Commission, or national governments themselves, have been facilitating the development of institutions that function as centralized information units at the national and transnational level. The European Council’s Action Plan to Combat Organised Crime asks such units to produce a picture of what constitutes organized crime. Policing agencies such as Europol, the UK NCIS and sister agencies worldwide produce well-packaged ‘intelligence products’ for public consumption and for the consumption of policy makers. The ‘annual threat assessment’ has become an exercise in advertising agency expertise. In interpreting these documents, it is important to keep in mind that they are not the products of a perfectly functioning information system, that there are blind spots, room for errors and need for interpretation. It is also important to remember that other sources of information – ones that are not the product of police sector information management – are crucial if criminologists and policy makers are to make sound judgements about the state of play with regard to organized and serious crime problems – whether they are practical ones about ‘what is to be done’, or merely theoretical. It is too early to tell if, by policing with intelligence, organized crime problems can be successfully governed. It is certain, however, that if we ignore the organizational problems of policing intelligence systems we will miss the mark.

[18] High Policing in the Security Control Society1 Introduction This information is top security. When you have read it, destroy yourself. Marshall McLuhan

Elsewhere (Brodeur, 1983; 2007) scholars have considered the concept of ‘high policing’, its historical genesis and import for practical policing. The concept represents what was, for a considerable period, an analytical and research backwater in Police Studies. Some time ago, other scholars observed that high policing ‘is a subject which government would prefer academics and others should ignore’ (Thurlow 1994: 1) and it was noted, an even longer time ago, that the vocabulary for talking about high policing (internal security, national security, intelligence gathering, etc.) is euphemistic; its ‘meaning has been ravaged, reduced to disembodied buzz words’ (Donner 1980: xv). At the millennium, things seemed to change. The pace of organizational transformation in policing institutions (and every other major social institution) was ramped up as a result of the so-called information revolution (Castells 2000) and policing scholars saw a resulting shift in policing vocabulary with the introduction of new terms such as ‘strategic’ and ‘proactive’, together with ‘intelligence-led policing’ (Maguire 2000). Scholars coined the term ‘surveillant assemblage’ to describe the concatenation of surveillance technologies and techniques that are currently deployed in the governance of individuals and populations (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). It is not implausible to suggest that there has been a revolution in intelligence affairs, brought about by a variety of causes: the rise of ‘postmodern’ society, the cross-currents of economic, social, cultural and political ‘globalization’, and the ‘information revolution’. One of the key anxieties of our age has to do with the pervasive sense of insecurity that exists amidst, and in spite of, the multiplication of tactics and techniques for ensuring security. The irony is that the undeniable increase in surveillance and security practices is only congruent with the multiplication of insecurity and fear. This is the paradox of the security control society and it lies at the heart of the politics of policing surveillance. The almost endless possibilities for disassembly and reassembly of information into intelligence – via techniques of data mining – intensify this paradox because the purpose is not merely cura promovendi salutem (concerned with the promotion of public safety or the public good) but is also cura advertendi mala futura (concerned to avert future ills) (cf. Sheptycki 1998b). Furthermore, 1



Originally published in Policing, 1(1), pp. 70–79 (2007).

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in the transnational state system where governance transcends national jurisdictions and simultaneously valorizes the national security function, there are no confident and clear lines of political accountability, so the responsibility for globally defining the public good and any future ills that may impact upon it is left in the shadows (Loader 2002). It is also the case that the technologies of surveillance underpinning the revolution in intelligence affairs have both ‘panoptic’ and ‘synoptic’ qualities (Mathiesen 1997). They enable both the few to watch the many and the many to watch the few, and this has a number of outcomes, sometimes discussed in terms of the viewer–voyeur society, or the society of the spectacle. The paradox ensures that the spectacle is one of security control, and, a fortiori, the way in which it is played out tends to be punitive and vengeance-oriented (cf. Haggerty and Ericson 2006). Understanding the revolution in intelligence affairs potentially offers a way out of the paradox of the security control society. Critical analysis may allow for the possibility to intervene and undercut the conditions that foster it. However, it has to be recognized at the outset that crime and security intelligence processes are politicized. Globally, we are in the midst of a transformation of the architectures of policing (Sheptycki 2007b; Walker 2000). In tandem with the redesignation of serious and organized crime as matters of national security concern, the declaration of a world-wide war on terrorism has powerfully reshaped – and is reshaping – the policing apparatus. These tropes have accompanied the establishment of new supra-ordinate policing institutions – for example, the Serious and Organized Crime Agency in the UK and the Department of Homeland Security in the USA – and increasingly, the entire ambit of state-based policing activities have acquired the hallmarks of high policing. In the current climate of fear, academics who concern themselves with policing practice will have to work very hard to cultivate critical awareness, especially among senior police officers, if the conditions that underpin the security control paradox are to be undermined. Inside the Machine Some time ago, and considerably prior to the supposed watershed marked by 9/11, scholars studying the changing morphology of European police institutions observed that the secretive and elitist ethos of the security services was gaining ground and worried that ‘the ideal of a transparent, rule governed and politically neutral [police] system would become no more than a remote possibility’ (Anderson et al. 1995: 175). A veil of secrecy has been cast over increasingly large parts of the policing apparatus, making it more difficult for academics to gain research access in order to gauge the nature and efficaciousness of the new intelligence-led policing paradigm (ILP) (Sheptycki 2007b). Lack of transparency retards the development of a critical perspective on contemporary high policing, a perspective which is essential because, as advocates of ILP have noted, ‘the paradigm shift to an intelligence-driven model needs a reality check’ (Christopher 2004: 190). Fortunately, in the UK at least, there has been enough empirical research relating to these transformations to allow for such an analysis (e.g. Cope 2004; Gill 2000; Innes and Sheptycki 2004a). This is crucial because, although changes in the broader societal context of policing undoubtedly shape the current predicament, it may also be the case that the method of responding to that predicament is, itself, part of the problem. In

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confronting the security control paradox, it is essential to have a view of the inside workings of the policing machine. At a very fundamental level, the advent of new information technologies is driving drastic changes in the architecture of policing. The information revolution challenges a very basic premise of bureaucratic institutions – to which police agencies certainly conform – and that is their classic pyramidal structure. The literature on the social significance of information technologies defines IT broadly. The concept includes computers, obviously, but extends to include the entire array of machines for collecting, storing, analysing, duplicating, and disseminating information (Castells 2000). Empirical observation confirms the significance of all these technologies; they tend to erode information hierarchies and supplant them with networks. I realized this some time ago when interviewing undercover police officers working cross-border between The Netherlands and Belgium (Sheptycki 2002b: 84). I naively asked my interviewees about the difficulties I thought they might be experiencing due to the fact that they were from different national police agencies which used different radio equipment and communications protocols. They laughed and assured me that, with their newly acquired cell phones, they could be in touch with any number of colleagues in any number of locations irrespective of jurisdiction and without need of their centrally controlled radio systems. Many theorists of the information society argue that networked organizations are organizationally superior to hierarchically organized ones and this may, indeed, be the case generally (Zuboff 1988). However, some organizations – particularly policing-type organizations – aggressively work to impose hierarchical models of information flow on to the naturally emerging networks. Irresistible force meets immovable object and a number of organizational pathologies arise (Sheptycki 2004b, 2004c). Among professionals directly concerned with policing intelligence, one of the most often mentioned organizational pathologies is that of ‘information silos’ – a concept which reflects the significance of the tension between hierarchical models and networked thinking. In information silos there is only one direction for information to flow and that is up. This contributes to another organizational pathology that professionals recognize: ‘linkage blindness’. Loosely speaking, because information is constrained to flow in bureaucratically defined pyramids – each with different governmental objects (e.g. drugs, illegal immigrants, illegal firearms, stolen property, terrorist cells, etc.) policing agents frequently fail to link bytes of information coursing in the veins of their intelligence systems and turn them into meaningful intelligence. Recognizing these organizational pathologies leads to mission failure and wishing to avoid accusations of incompetence, ad hoc task forces and intelligence centres are frequently formed. One example of this is the special intelligence-led policing squads dedicated to the pursuit of outlaw motorcycle gangs that have been constituted in a number of police institutions in Europe, Scandinavia, and North America. Crime attributed to such groups is very often high-profile and notorious, and it would be widely seen as a dereliction of duty if policing bodies failed to do something about it (Sheptycki 2003c). However, and despite any well-advertised tactical successes that may be scored, the multiplication of ad hoc special task forces and intelligence centres undermines attempts to refine a reliable and valid strategic intelligence picture. The result is a failure of the intelligence process, but one that remains hidden behind public announcements regarding the successes of the special task forces. The extent of the failure to form a strategic view is practically incalculable, but

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a thought experiment is suggestive. Compare and contrast the harm due to crimes against the environment and those due to intellectual property theft (admittedly a difficult empirical question) and ask, on balance, how much harm is attributable to phenomena that fall under these rubrics and how much policing resource is presently devoted to preventing them? Police executives know that a considerable portion of policing resource is now devoted to the latter concern, but that very little is devoted to the former. By making us aware of the serious harm that results from eco-destruction and the sad future that will surely follow, this thought experiment ought to provide a sense of the magnitude of failure in the current strategic intelligence view of police agencies in countries with advanced economies. There are several more organizational pathologies that could be mentioned, but two are especially important; these are the continuing problem of ‘intelligence gaps’ and the difficulties that arise from ‘compulsive data demand’. Intelligence gaps exist for any number of reasons: inappropriate allocation of intelligence acquisition resources, hierarchical information flows, failure to report or record information to name only the most obvious. Such gaps exist at the same time that organizations are becoming equipped with new technologies which allow for the amassing and storage of inconceivably huge amounts of data, some of it held by private sector operators and sold to police and security intelligence organizations on a contractual, for profit, basis. So equipped, policing organizations compulsively demand ever more data in wanton pursuit of the chimera of ‘total information awareness’. Because compulsive data demand and intelligence gaps continue to exist side-by side, intelligence systems are invariably awash in low-grade ‘noise’ – information with little practical value – and intelligence officers find themselves struggling to overcome problems of ‘information overload’. In one of my field interviews, an intelligence analyst likened the task of analysing the tens of thousands of suspicious financial transactions coming to his unit to ‘drinking from a fire hose’ (Sheptycki 2004b: 17). Because of these many organizational pathologies, the functioning of the security intelligence process is deeply problematic. The structural basis of policing intelligence processes is at odds with itself. Within policing institutions, the reaction of agents to the possibilities of the information revolution has been to unwittingly act so as to preserve the already existing principles of hierarchical organization. The all-too-often unremarked organizational pathologies result in the failure of strategic vision. Moreover, while intelligence processes are not strategic, the tactical successes may be rather capricious, as evidenced by the many ‘false positives’ and other intelligence failures that plague the intelligence system. The effort to impose information hierarchy on to communications networks is not an instinctive reaction by police professionals, but rather is a result of the embeddedness of their subculturally learned ways of thinking. It is the inability of a subculture based upon crime fighting and the status concerns of a rank-structured bureaucracy to grasp the significance of networked thinking and to change itself that has brought about the range of organizational pathologies briefly discussed above. Thus hobbled, large-scale policing and security intelligence systems offer few safeguards against overt politicization of the intelligence process, save the integrity of the individual personnel who give it life. Articulated within an increasing climate of fear and insecurity, these pathologies undermine the credibility and the efficaciousness of the entire enterprise even while they feed on the increasing sense of panic.

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The Changing Context of Policing Intelligence-led policing is a transnational phenomenon (Ratcliffe 2004). Looking inside the global police security intelligence system, so to speak, it is apparent that there is a deep structural disjuncture between information hierarchies and information networks and that this has given rise to a number of organizational pathologies. These have undercut to an unmeasured, but nevertheless significant, extent both the strategic effectiveness and legitimation of the intelligence process. At the same time, massive societal changes – themselves partially driven by the IT revolution – are also taking place. A variety of concerns may be raised, but chief among them are the various processes of transnationalization. National societies are no longer what they once were when modern state structures (and their attendant policing and security apparatuses) were being put in place at the dawn of modernity. Transnational corporations, the transnational capitalist class and the cultural ideology of consumerism have been put forward as the three fundamental building blocks of globalization (Sklair 2001), and criminological analysis suggests the resulting system as inherently criminogenic (Pearce and Woodiwiss 1993; Sheptycki and Wardak 2005; Woodiwiss 2005). Popular explanations regarding globalization and crime seldom display any awareness of the systemic or structural bases of transnational crime. Instead they usually focus on a welter of different diasporic communities – cultural others who are easily labelled even if they are poorly understood. Such communities, it is true, provide the basis of identities that are transgressive of national boundaries and therefore potentially enriching of the realms of human experience. Globally and locally, diasporic communities have differing degrees of political influence, but it is necessary to be cautious before unreservedly advocating their enhanced and equal influence, for example, under the rubric of multiculturalism. Of course, we must guard against the view that the Outsider is somehow inimical to peace, order and good government. However, it is also true that diasporic communities provide the basis for the transnational reproduction of social conflict in diverse settings and that the detrimental influence of these conflicts has been cross-regional and world ordering.2 Admitting the difficulties of policing conflicts that have gone transnational due to the dispersal of diasporic communities is not the same thing as giving in to the anxious excesses of purveyors of theories that relate to a global terrorist-organized crime ‘nexus’ or ‘continuum’ (Shelley et al. 2005). It does, however, lend a sense of urgency to thinking about how, under conditions of transnationalization, to authorize and render accountable normatively robust policing (Goldsmith and Sheptycki 2007b). 2 I am thinking here of the shadowy underworld of Miami Cuban exiles – a good example of a diasporic community whose political clout is felt locally in Miami and transnationally through their influence in Washington DC. A number of people in this community have been involved in various terrorist plots and attacks over the past four decades or more. Possibly the most notorious incident is the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 on 6 October 1976. On that day, two time bombs planted by several Cuban exiles exploded, killing 73 people. One of the perpetrators of the attack, Luis Posada Carriles, was arrested but subsequently escaped custody in Venezuela and eventually fled, via Panama, to the United States. The case gained some renewed notoriety in April 2005, when a new warrant for Posada’s arrest in connection with the bombing was issued by Venezuela under the government of Hugo Chávez. In September 2005, a US immigration judge ruled that Posada should not be deported to either Cuba or Venezuela because he might be subject to torture.

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Even more fundamental than multiculturalism, is the deracination of self-identity formation in the contemporary wired world. Echoing Richard Sennett (1998), it is possible to say that, as traditional bases for self-identity formation have faded, people have come to mystify their own condition. Absent the traditional sources of self-identity, people increasingly mould the sense of self narrowly – on the basis of their limited personal experience – and on the basis of cultural information sources: the mass media and the Internet. Margaret Thatcher famously said that ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families’ – an obvious overstatement – and yet, societal atomization has long been clearly recognizable in the ever growing occupation, dispossession, and reterritorialization of everyday life by the abstract grids, geometries and routines imprinted on to social life by globalized capitalism and the transnational state system, leading people to increasingly seek refuge in privatized and narcissistic existences (Sennett 1977).3 Crucially, the atomization of the basis of self-identity is happening simultaneously with the transnationalization of social life. The feeling grows that the relevance of the nation-state as the linchpin of governance, the font of sovereignty and the basis of good social order is increasingly tenuous even while state-based bureaucracies – especially those devoted to policing in its broadest sense – strive to impose authority transnationally and to secure legitimacy for doing so. Perhaps this recalls nineteenth-century efforts to police and order the shifting populations of Europe (Deflem 1996, 2002a) and perhaps it gives rise to a sort of ‘Westphalian fatalism’ wherein, by imputation, state-based police authorities are said to hold an ‘in-the final- instance’ authority over the governance of insecurity (Loader and Walker 2007). It certainly brings to mind Emile Durkheim’s caution that ‘a society made up of a boundless dust-heap of unrelated individuals whom an overdeveloped state tries to hem and hold in, is a true sociological monstrosity’ (quoted in Baltzell 1989). Seldom remarked on, and yet crucial to contemporary policing scholarship, should be recognition of the dual connection between the intelligence process and the new mediated forms of self-identity formation found on the Internet and through the mass media. The intelligence process is connected to these media through various surveillance practices, ranging from monitoring the news media through to the stealthy monitoring of Internet use, and even satellite tracking – that much is obvious. But there is a second, less well-studied, connection. This is manifest in the idiom of intelligence analysts as ‘open source intelligence’ – a term which refers to the entire gambit of publicly available sources of information including both the old-fashioned newspaper and the weblog. Intelligence analysts use a variety of intelligence sources in their research – for example, technical surveillance, or clandestine human sources, as well as information from ‘open sources’. Some of the results of their analyses seep out into the public realm with the potential to become yet another byte of open-source intelligence. Herein lies the institutional basis for a spiralling information feedback loop. Swedish criminologist Janne Flyghed (2002) has argued that the expansion of security measures has come through the depiction of imminent danger of dramatic proportions based on scant empirical evidence. He argues that repeated references to insecurity threats, based on unattributed ‘intelligence sources’, produce a popular false consciousness of impending danger linked to perceptions of non-specific and diffuse, but nonetheless serious, threats. These threats are often the results of intelligence reports (leaks) and are based upon knowledge (intelligence) that is difficult to 3

Although Sennett certainly does not mention it, here one thinks of online paedophiles, sex tourists, and cyber-bullying.

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independently verify. The circuits of the security intelligence apparatus are woven into, and help to compose, the panic scenes of the security control society. All the while, the background to the emergent security control society is a scene of intense global political and economic restructuring. The rise to prominence of global neo-liberalism, which has given free rein to mighty torrents of hot capital, is hollowing out the capacities of local state governance and policy is increasingly being set at the transnational level and is therefore largely unaccountable. Transnational governance, such as it is, resides in the shadowy world of the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Wolfsberg Group, as well as in somewhat more well-known transnational entities such as the UN, G8, OECD, WTO, World Bank and IMF. Apart from its less than democratic basis, the institutional fragmentation of contemporary transnational governance results in repeated failures to turn concerns for the global common interest into practical action (Ericson and Stehr 2000; Held and McGrew 2002). These institutions of transnational governance appear as background factors in most analyses of transnational policing and security, but policing institutions, only some of which are transnational themselves, form part of the fragmented terrain of transnational governance. Furthermore, looked at in the context of the transnational condition, the unaccountability and lack of transparency in the function of high policing exacerbates the ungovernability of the global system (Held 1995: 113–120). The information revolution has given rise to electronic money (Weatherford 1997) and interpenetrated illicit and licit markets for every conceivable commodity encircle the globe (Ruggiero 2000). This further exacerbates the symptoms of impoverishment and economic polarization characteristic of neo-liberalism (Young, 1999), especially in what the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells referred to as the ‘black-holes of global capitalism’ (Castells 1998: 74–82, 164). The ‘global South’ finds itself segregated inside the heartlands of the metropolitan countries, while beleaguered outposts of prosperity, sitting amidst surrounding seas of impoverishment, continuously fortify themselves with the latest security devices (Caldeira 2001; Davis 1992, 2006). From top to bottom and all around the world, the foundational assumptions about relationships between the individual, the social and the institutions of governance are rapidly changing. All of this provokes anxiety. The rapid pace of change gives rise to the thought that governance is impossible, that ungovernability is only to be expected, and all of the potential of high policing is thus expended in a vain attempt to impose a vision of transnational order. Conclusion What are we to make of this? That is to say, given this understanding, what is to be done? This is obviously a huge question and one that is difficult to answer within the confines of a short essay. However, it is possible to suggest that part of the answer, but by no means all of it, lies within the ambit of the policing intelligentsia. Critical scholarship can help policing elites to recognize the limitations of their subculturally defined world-view and shrug it off as an instance of bad faith. If they do this, the mandarins of high policing stand a chance of throwing off the organizational pathologies that plague the institutions of policing. And anyway, these subcultural means and ends emanate ultimately from the doctrine of national

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security, a clearly outdated notion for a globalizing world and one which should be replaced by a much more general understanding of human security. Human security – the freedom from fear and the freedom from want – should be elevated to the new watchwords and the doctrine of individual human rights should be its worldwide code of practice (Goldsmith and Sheptycki 2007b). The practitioners of high policing must think of themselves as human beings first and foremost and act on the basis of their common humanity and in the interests of the global commonwealth, rather than on the basis of narrowly prescribed institutional choices. By itself, this is not enough to ensure a better future, since so much depends on individuals in all walks of life confronting their own choices instead of simply being swept along by the – often trivial – circumstances of their momentary lives. Collectively and globally, there must be an authentic conversation about the possible futures for mankind and the planet that does not privilege the already established practices of power habitually watched over and nurtured by the doyens of global high policing. While it would be wrong to say this would, by itself, guarantee a better future, it remains the case that a likely first step to ending the present security control paradox would be if the individual practitioners of high policing themselves openly and transparently contributed to the global collective conversation about genuine human security by speaking truth to power.

[19] Policing, Intelligence Theory and the New Human Security Paradigm: Some Lessons from the Field1 Introduction This essay briefly reviews some recent discussions concerning intelligence theory and suggestions that we are in the midst of a revolution in intelligence affairs. Taking a page out of the sociology of surveillance literature it is argued here that, while it is possible to say that we are in the midst of technological revolution in intelligence affairs there has not, as yet, been a revolution in intelligence theory (Haggerty and Ericson 2006). Rather, a dominant intelligence paradigm, referred to here as the ‘national security intelligence paradigm’, prevails. This paradigm is predicated largely on the assumptions of international relations realism: Realpolitik. An alternative conception is offered here, namely the ‘human security intelligence paradigm’. The tenets of this approach to intelligence security will be briefly outlined following which, by way of illustration, two case-study vignettes of contrasting intelligence-led police interventions are presented. These examples pertain to UK domestic police operations and they represent two quite different ways of organizing intelligence-led operations which analogically map on to the national-security/human-security distinctions. Here it is suggested that the sociology of policing literature offers a useful touchstone in thinking about the reorientation of transnational security issues. This is so because the institutions of liberal democratic policing offer a different kind of institutional basis for thinking about security intelligence than do the bases of the currently dominant national security paradigm which are the military and secure intelligence institutions. The essay concludes by arguing that human security doctrine offers a way out of the impasse that the now-dominant paradigm persists in. Critical debates on the meaning of security have, since the end of the Cold War, been stuck on the cleft stick that is the realist–idealist distinction, with the result that the national security intelligence paradigm has remained largely unmoved (Krause and Williams, 1996; Krause 1998;.Williams 1999; Booth 1997; Dalby 1997). This essay is a contribution to these discussions, but it is a contribution with its empirical and theoretical roots in the literature on the sociology and politics of policing, rather than that of the military institutions that are the Originally published as Chapter 10 in Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates, ed. P. Gill, S. Marrin and M. Phythian, London: Routledge, pp. 166–85 (2009). 1

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traditional reference points for the ‘intelligence community’. This is useful for at least two reasons. Firstly, as I and Andrew Goldsmith have argued elsewhere, it is the case that there has been a blurring of policing and military functions over the recent past and so, for good empirical reasons, it is important to understand how policing theories and capacities alter the conditions and nature of security discourse and practice (Goldsmith and Sheptycki 2007). Secondly, the dead end that has been reached in critical debates about the nature of security is, it seems to me, at least partly because that scholarship has not identified an alternative to the traditional means – mainly military ones, but also of the ‘security and intelligence services’ – that have been so central to international security practice. Both policing and military institutions may muster coercive capacities and, despite the ‘militarization’ of policing that is undoubtedly taking place in Western liberal democracies, this essay will argue that these institutions may yet do so in very different ways.2 The argument suggests that the broad scope of human security is both theoretically comprehensible and practically realistic when encompassed by democratic policing means, whereas the current security agenda is simply incoherent, unrealistic and beholden to a mindset devoted exclusively to military means. The National Security Intelligence Paradigm Elsewhere a variety of perspectives on intelligence have been offered (Pythian and Gill, 2008). This essay is an attempt to shift the focus away from the traditional concerns of the ‘intelligence community’. It draws on the sociology of policing literature and the emerging doctrine of human security in order to show the practical potential of a genuinely new intelligence doctrine both in theory and in practice. Lessons from the police sector look rather promising in helping to establish theoretical accounts about the nature, purpose and normative basis of intelligence and security practice. This is so for a number of reasons. Firstly, intelligence practice in the police sector is long established, not only with regard to crime, as may be supposed, but also for a variety of other purposes. The use of intelligence by UK police agencies is well known, if not always well understood by the public at large. For many years, police services in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, have made use of intelligence for a variety of purposes which may be grouped under three headings: crime control, political policing and public safety (see, for example, Bruisma and van der Vijver, 1999; Bruisma. Effers and Keijser 2004). Thus, not only is the security agenda of policing already quite broad, but there is also a reasonable track record of empirical study. 2

Research concerning the ‘militarization of police’ is substantial and impossible to do justice to in a single footnote. Peter Kraska’s Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and Police (2001), is a tour de force, but is largely confined to the American scene and scholarly literature, P.A.J. Waddington’s The Strong Arm of the Law: Armed and Public Order Policing (1991) offers an excellent, although somewhat dated, starting point from which to take in the corresponding British literature. Most pertinent to the interests of this essay, Kevin Haggerty’s and Richard Ericson’s essay ‘The Militarization of Policing in the Information Age’ (1999) provides empirical insights into the cross-fertilization of theory and practice from the military to the policing sectors as facilitated by innovations in the adaption for use of a vast array of information and surveillance technologies.

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A second reason why it is worth turning to the scholarly literature regarding police for lessons on intelligence practice is that the academic empirical study of policing in liberal democracies has been substantial for several decades. Crucially, this literature includes a rich vein of scholarship combining historical awareness, together with a critical analytical and empirical focus on intelligence theory and practice (Bunyan, 1976; Mazower, 1997; Fijnaut and Marx, 1995; Gill, 2000; Marx, 1988; Ratcliffe, 2004 Reiner, 2000). It is true to say that policing with intelligence was, for a considerable period, an analytical and research backwater in Police Studies (Sheptycki 2000a: 9). However, at the turn of the millennium things seemed to change. The pace of organizational transformation in policing institutions (and every other major social institution) was ramped up as a result of the so-called ‘information revolution’ (Castells, 1996/200; 1997/2004; 1998/2000). Not uncoincidentally, policing scholars saw a resulting shift in policing vocabulary with the introduction of new terms such as ‘strategic’ and ‘proactive’, together with ‘intelligence-led policing’ (Maguire 2000). Other policing scholars coined the term ‘surveillant assemblage’ to describe the interlocking nexus of surveillance technologies and techniques that are currently deployed by police agencies and other security providers in the governance of individuals and populations (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). So, the empirical study of policing and security intelligence practices is, by now, both well established and theoretically sophisticated. Another reason why the academic literature on the sociology of policing is useful in this context is that, within it, there is an interesting strand of work concerning the historical manifestations of transnational policing in its many guises (Anderson and Killngray, 1991; 1992; Anderson el al, 1995; Andreas and Nadelmann, 2006; Nadelmann, 1993b; Deflem, 2002a. This point is worth stressing since the dominance of the national security intelligence paradigm partly rests on its historical lineage and global reach. It is therefore pertinent to point out that policing has been an important aspect of world affairs for some time now and that the academic study of policing has been useful in understanding the trajectory and contemporary circumstances that make up the transnational world order. A final reason to be mentioned here is that scholars working on policing have long been aware that, largely due to the transformative thrust of neo-liberal philosophies of governance, the state has been losing its classic Weberian claim to the monopoly of legitimate use of force. Consequently, theories about policing in the contemporary period cast considerable light on the ‘governance of security beyond the state’. This is important because, as has been belatedly acknowledged in at least some of the IR literature, on of the distinctive features of the contemporary transnational system is that the state qua State is no longer the structural keystone; the world system is a polycentric power system where non-state, supra-state, and sub-state actors all play roles in the governance of security that are equal to, and perhaps even more central than, the roles played by state actors (Bayley and Shearing, 2001; Spitzer and Scull, 1977; Shearing, 2004; 2006; Shearing and Stenning, 1983; Shearing and Stenning 1985; South 1988). For all of these reasons the scholarly literature on policing offers alternative points of insight regarding intelligence theory and security practices more generally. This is crucial because the dominant perception of intelligence practice is largely shaped by the assumptions of Realpolitik and all the signs are that this paradigm is not working in the sense that political and human insecurity has only increased since the end of the Cold War.3 3

Important recent contributions to the literature which bear out this point include: Davies (2004); Johnson (2003); Kahn (2001); Lander (2004); and O’Connell (2004).

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Grounded in the literature on policing, a discussion of theoretical innovation for intelligence may be cut loose from its current paradigmatic moorings without running the risk of becoming too theoretically abstract. There are many contributors to the currently dominant paradigm and so there are some subtle variations in emphasis. One attempt to draw together the various threads into a comprehensive theory of intelligence was a workshop undertaken by the RAND National Security Research Division – henceforth the RAND workshop (Treverton et al. 2006). If there can be any doubt that the mainline of thought in the ‘intelligence community’ strictly concerns national security under the assumed conditions of IR realism, this document lays them to rest. The keynote speaker was Ernest May, who is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. According to his biography, he has been a consultant at various times to the Office of the Security of Defence, the National Security Council and other similar agencies and, at the time of the workshop was a member of the DCI’s Intelligence Science Board and of the Board of Visitors of the joint Military Intelligence College. His address to the experts at the RAND workshop concerned the stories of the German invasion of France in 1940 and the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001. He used these examples to explain not only the nature of intelligence success/failure (a distinction which depends on which side you are on in a conflict), but also to argue that the intelligence community needed to exercise more ‘imagination’: ‘Asking these “what ifs” needs to be done regularly and routinely in all steps of military and political planning. It was done on a regular basis during the cold war, a practice that needs to be reinstituted’ (Treverton et al. 2006: 18). Clearly, the national security intelligence imagination remains within specific parameters, but those parameters are interesting. As Michael Warner, a representative of the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence and another speaker at the RAND workshop put it, ‘intelligence is a secret state activity designed to understand or influence foreign entities’ (ibid.: 2). According to him, ‘intelligence for states can mean life or death’; the driving impulse ‘dates from the earliest days when sovereign powers decided to war with one another for control of territory and populations (and to exclude traitors who divulged their secrets)’ (ibid.: 3). Among the workshop’s 41 participants a number of other points of discussion were raised. This included the apparently limited basis of knowledge for understanding crossnational variation in approaches to intelligence and also the extent to which there is, or was, a specifically American theory of intelligence. It also considered such matters as the approximate mix of ‘human intelligence’ (HUMINT) and ‘signals intelligence’ (SIGINT), the effects of technological change on intelligence craft, the psychological dimensions of intelligence collection and dissemination, the politicization of the intelligence function, various aspects of organizational theory as it pertains to intelligence processes and the potential for measurement of intelligence success and failure. But, again and again, the discussion drifted back to the changes to the international system since the end of the Cold War and concomitant changes in the internal, and especially external, threats to the nation-state. Another invited speaker at the workshop, Loch Johnson from the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia, argued strongly that: For too long, the role of intelligence in world affairs has stood in shadows of traditional research on international relations. What a pity that it takes events like Pearl Harbor in 1941,

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the revelations of Operation Chaos and COINTELPRO in 1974, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the mistakes about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq in 2002 to underscore the importance of intelligence. But at last the public (and perhaps even hidebound international relations theorists) seem ready to acknowledge the need to understand the hidden side of government. (Treverton et al. 2006: 12)4

Johnson has his intellectual roots in international relations theory and his proclivities are clear, just as the central message of the RAND workshop report as a whole is clear in its depiction of the international state system as a Hobbesian war of all against all. According to this view, and looked at in psychological terms, if states were persons they would be paranoid, if not also schizophrenic. This brings to mind a famous passage from R.D. Laing’s The Politics of the Family: As long as we cannot up-level our ‘thinking’ beyond Us and Them, the goodies and baddies, it will go on and on and on. The only possible end will be when all the goodies have killed all the baddies, and all the baddies all the goodies, which does not seem so difficult or unlikely since to Us, we are the goodies and They are the Baddies, while They are the baddies, while to Them, we are the baddies and they are the goodies. (Laing 1971: 135)

This tangential reference to existential psychoanalysis is not entirely fanciful. Directing our thinking to the realm of theories about the nature of the contemporary world system, David 4

The cyclical recurrence of scandal is a systematic feature of national security intelligence doctrine, but Johnson interprets these events as evidence that the guardians of intelligence apparatus – ‘two standing intelligence oversight committees on Capitol Hill’ (Treverton et al. 2006: 13) – are doing their jobs. As further evidence that these committees are suitable guardians, he notes that ‘the staffs of the intelligence committees have regular queried intelligence professionals about their activities and pored over annual budget requests line-by-line’ (ibid.: 14). Vigilance in the details does not seem to provide an antidote to recurring scandal because, as the record shows, periodically new scandals arise and the guardians are again caught off-guard. To be fair, elsewhere Johnson has taken a more critical view of intelligence oversight (Johnson 2003: 13 ff.), but again there is another interesting and worthwhile intersection with the scholarly literature on policing. Similar cycles of scandal and reform have also been observed in the police sectors of a number of liberal democracies and have been studied in close empirical detail; see, for example, Peter Manning’s and J. Redlinger’s important and insightful essay, ‘Invitational Edges to Police Corruption’ (1977) and Larry Sherman’s book Police Corruption: A Sociology Perspective (1977). These studies tend to show that secrecy is the structural sine qua non of police wrongdoing and thus, in his ground-breaking book, Conduct Unbecoming (1985), Maurice Punch came to the conclusion that ‘the most we can expect is a cycle of deviance, scandal, reform and repression, gradual relaxation and relapse into former patterns of deviance, followed by new scandal’ and, in the end, ‘when the sound and fury die away, it is all too often a case of returning sooner, or later, to business as usual’ (1985: 200). And so it remains, as long as official and unofficial secrecy prevails. So, too, it is with the intelligence sector writ large, and for the same reason. The scholarly literature on policing strongly indicates that any complete theory of intelligence would need to take account of these recurring and negative features of secret intelligence practice because of the unforeseen consequences of delegitimation and desecuritization they bring with them. Such questions are difficult, if not impossible, to ask from within the dominant paradigm of national security intelligence where secrecy is understood to be the most valuable asset.

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Held traces the historical ascent of the Westphalian model, which entrenched, for the first time, the principle of territorial sovereignty in inter-state affairs but argues that, although many of the assumptions underpinning it are still operative in international relations today, the contemporary applicability of the model is dubious (Held 1995: 77 and 78). Held’s point has been, by now, well established by a host of other globalization theorists: that the stretching of social relations across space and time along a variety of institutional dimensions (technological, organizational, legal, cultural) is evidence of the intensification of transnational connections which changes the nature of the global systems (Mann 2003; Sklair, 1995). These transnational institutional domains create new challenges, not least of which concerns the governability of the global social order, and raises urgent questions about how the whole project might be made democratic. Crucially, Held also observed that the logic of national (in) security permeates the transnational condition, pointing especially to the behaviour of what Fred Halliday referred to elsewhere as ‘seigneurial states’ (Halliday 1994). Held warned that the continuing of ‘logic of state security has created a cycle of violence and preparation for violence in the international system which hinders the development of policy for a durable peace – weather national, regional or global’ (Held 1995: 120). Stuck in the national security intelligence paradigm, the underlying structure of self-perpetuating insecurity remains intact. Confronted with such a knot, it is tempting to want to untie it, for as Laing – himself no stranger to knots – suggested, ‘As long as we cannot up-level our “thinking” beyond Us and Them, the goodies and baddies, it will go on and on’. This brings us to the question: what is the practical alternative to the national (in)security intelligence paradigm? Human Security If the roots of the national security intelligence paradigm can be traced back to the Westphalian Peace established in 1648, the roots of the human security paradigm are much more recent, dating to the period just after the Cold War ended Christie, 2003; MacLean, 200; 2002). Whereas national security focuses on the defence of ‘the state’ and is organized especially around the fear of an external attack directed against the state, human security is about protecting individuals and communities from any form of political violence and, in its broadest conception, includes both freedom from fear and freedom from want (ICISS 2001; Report of the Secretary General 2005). The human security paradigm partly focuses on political violence, its causes and consequences, and it does so from the perspective of individuals and communities. Further, the broad concept of human security articulated in the UN Development Programme’s 1994 Human Development Report and the Commission on Human Security’s 2003 report, Human Security Now moves the ‘threat agenda’ beyond incidents of political violence and disorder to include poverty, hunger, disease and natural disasters because these kill far more people than war, genocide and terrorism combined. Because the fundament of the human security paradigm is that of universal human rights, rather than state sovereignty, it offers up an obviously very different discourse than national security doctrine. But it is also one that may be all too easily derided from the standpoint of the now dominant paradigm – based on IR realism – on the grounds that it is good in theory but it is not realistic. That is where practical lessons from the sociology of policing might

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be used to make a case for a different intelligence paradigm. In the existing sociology of policing literature much of the discussion about human security doctrine is centred on fear and violence where the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) is articulated with reference to such principles such as ‘community policing’, ‘harm minimization’, ‘problem solving’, ‘strategies of minimal force’ and the ‘constabulary ethic’ (Goldsmith and Sheptycki 2007: see also Brodeur 1997; Pino and Wiatrowski 2006). ‘Good policing is minimal policing – minimally intrusive and carefully controlled in its use of force’ (Neyroud and Beckley 2001: 21). Some of this literature is intended to create an awareness of the police role in natural and manmade disasters, giving it even wider applicability. Of course, national security-type doctrine is much in evidence in the policing literature as well. The point being stressed here, however, is that practical and realistic alternatives to the national security paradigm which exhibit the characteristics of a new way of thinking – the human security paradigm – can be found in the existing policing literature. Human security doctrine, however nascent, is a part of a conscious effort to shift the discourse pertaining to global security away from one which focuses on national state (in) security to the point of view of humanity as a whole. Under this doctrine the success of policing intelligence can be ultimately judged according to criteria concerning the general health of society and the overall public good, but not narrow law enforcement outputs or military-style pacification criteria. The human security agenda shares close affinity to liberal democratic policing ideology because, although it may occasion the use of coercive force in the maintenance of general social order, it does so only on the basis that the community being policed and secured broadly understands and endorses the mission. This approach aims to be proactive about the causes of insecurity and not simply a reaction to manifestations of insecurity. Further, the doctrine holds that its own legitimacy can only be secured through transparency and public engagement with the political processes of the civil society in which it operates (Berkely 1969; Henry and Smith 2007). At a United Nations summit in September 2005 a portion of the human security agenda was accepted into the discourse on ‘humanitarian intervention’ – that portion which aims at ‘security first’ and ‘freedom from fear’ (but, significantly, one that does not aim at ‘freedom from want’). The responsibility to protect, as defined in this document, was limited to a concern with populations at risk from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. At the UN summit it was accepted that: Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help Sates to exercise this responsibility and should support the United Nations to establish an early warning capability.

There was some controversy about this. Catherine Dumait-Harper, Médecins sans Frontières delegate to the summit, warned that ‘In [terms of] realpolitik, the protection of populations is still a secondary objective for most Member States, in particular [those of] the Security

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Council, unfortunately less important than other concerns like “national interest”’.5 Critics of the responsibility to protect point out, not without good reason, that there is a real danger that seigneurial states might use the idea to justify furtherance of narrow national interests rather than broader human security needs. Nevertheless, ideas about human security, however inchoate and contested, could signal a step away from national (in)security doctrine, and as such could provide some opportunity to change the thought-style that determines security intelligence thinking globally. Interesting in theory, but how might we understand the practicalities of this new thought-style? Two Case Vignettes; Search and Disrupt versus Problem Solving What follows are two short case studies concerning two differing approaches to ‘intelligenceled policing’ as it was being practised in England circa 2002. The material that constitutes the data for these vignettes was gathered as part of two larger research projects, and full discussion of research methods and data collection involved can be found there (Sheptycki 2002b, 2004b). Readers are also advised that these case studies gain added meaning when read against the backdrop of the literature on intelligence-led policing more generally (see also Cope, 2004; Innes and Sheptycki 2004). But before outlining the two cases, it is well to explain to the reader that the academic literature concerning police work routinely contrasts two styles of policing (Brodeur, 1998; Goldstein, 1990; Reiner 2000). On the one hand there is community policing along the ‘Peelian model’, which emphasizes inter alia: the police officer as a mere citizen in uniform, the strategy of minimal force, the social service role of police, crime prevention, the rule of law, efficiency and the effective bureaucratic control of operations, legitimacy and democratic accountability. The second style is the paramilitary policing style of ‘zero tolerance’, which emphasizes the police officer as an enforcer empowered to use decisive force within and against communities and individuals that are conceptualized as uncivil and largely ungovernable. The two cases considered here map on to this theoretical distinction reasonably well and, analogously, also map on to the human security/national-security distinction discussed previously. These empirical examples serve to illustrate that differences in theoretical orientation can have fundamental consequences for intelligence and security practice. Case 1: Search and Disrupt in Northern Town Opiate usage in the north of England is a matter of long historical practice going back into the nineteenth century. It became a matter of policing concern only in the 1970s when legislative change led to its criminalization (Plant 1975; Young 1971). By the 1980s the police in Northern Town had developed an active drug squad that had been thoroughly inculcated into drug enforcement discourse. An informal practice of crime disruption had developed whereby officers in the drug squad made a point of destroying injecting equipment whenever they 5 The full text of Dumait-Harper’s speech and an overview of the summit itself can be found online at: www.msf.org/msfinternational/invoke.cfm?component=article&objectid=388662F3-FB8F4F12-B6D4ECB69A1A3D64&method=full_html.

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found it. This was at a time when the HIV/AIDS virus was still relatively new and poorly understood as the ‘gay plague’. It was not until some time later that it became evident that the prevalence of the HIV virus (along with hepatitis) in the northern drug-injecting community had come about because of the scarcity of injecting equipment and the adaptive behaviour of ‘sharing works’. Some 20 years later the strategic intelligence indicators showed only that drug use in the UK had escalated and the prices for most illicit drugs had fallen. The Economist reported in 2002 that the UK had the highest mortality rates due to illicit drugs in Europe (‘Britain’s Bad Score’ 2002). At that time, according to documents circulating within the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), purity-adjusted retail prices (the price-purity level) for heroin had fallen from just over £300 per gramme in 1990 to about £150 in 2001.6 British Crime Survey (BCS) data showed some interesting trends in drug use, including significant rises in the reported use of cocaine and ecstasy and significant rises in reported lifetime use of cannabis up from thirty-six per cent in 1994 to forty-five per cent in 2000. Use of hard drugs, including heroin and methadone, had remained fairly stable with only slight increases in reported use ‘over the previous month’. up from three per cent to five per cent between 1998 and 2000.7 These trends remained largely stable and in 2005 it was reported that BCS indicators over the previous decade had shown a significant increase in the use of illicit drugs, primarily cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy, with heroin and methadone use remaining fairly constant nationally over the period, but with slight falls in the use of amphetamines, steroids and glues (Chivite-Matthews et al. 2005). Patterns of consumption and supply were being documented ethnographically in the north-east of England during the period, as was the nature and structure of the so-called ‘middle market’ which revealed that there was not so much a national drugs market, but rather a series of loosely interlinked local and regional supply networks (O’Brien, 2006; Parker et al, 1998; Pearson and Hobbs, 2001). The patterns of drugs and crime in the north-east were laid on the historical foundations of previous generations’ habits of drinking and public disorder amid the post-Fordist desolation of de-industrialization (Hobbs et al. 2003). Some of the ethnographic research revealed drug use to be chronic in particular local public housing estates in the north-east with, at times, seemingly ubiquitous mass consumption of cannabis among adolescents. Moreover, a strong poly-drug-using subculture was well established among young adults, who fuelled their participation on the pub-and-club circuit with powder cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines, magic mushrooms and LSD, depending on availability and season. From the mid-1990s smoking ‘brown’ came to be perceived by many young users as an extension of the already standard drugs menu, sometimes as a ‘chill-out drug’ after periods of bingeing on party drugs and alcohol. In the midst of this was a small population of several hundred hardcore heroin addicts – stigmatized, scattered, labelled and excluded as ‘junkies’, ‘skaggies’ and ‘smackheads’ – dispersed and living in small groups. 6

Prices adjusted for real purity levels show a different trend to nominal unadjusted purity prices. Nominal street prices have remained largely stable, while purity has risen over time, which means there has been a fall in real purity-adjusted prices. 7 Self-report surveys concerning drug use deploy both ‘lifetime use’ and ‘use over the previous month’ as alternative measures of use prevalence. Lifetime use measures in the UK show more consistent trends than do measures of use over the previous month, but what is important is that use prevalence trends have been generally upwards since the 1970s. See Ramsey et al. (2001).

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According to police intelligence analysis, the region had been experiencing a renaissance of heroin use since the early to mid-1990s and the indicators of widespread heroin use, in terms of drug seizures and police arrests, were pointing upwards. Recorded crime rates were, however, not rising, and the view was that most drug-related crime remained hidden in shoplifting and user-dealer income generation. Crime pattern analysis at divisional level was, in some instances, capable of revealing clusters of burglaries along the routes strung out between user-dealers and their customer base. An analysis of mortality statistics revealed a problematic spike in heroin-related deaths that was attributed to a ‘bad batch of heroin’ and which may in fact have been due to rapid changes in price-purity levels during the period. Confidential police intelligence sources in Northern Town identified a local white man in his late thirties, who had a long and distinguished reputation for violence, as the main local supplier. This individual, who had a record of one prior arrest (for cruelty to animals) was thought to be the key player in a larger ‘family firm’. His younger brother, who also had a reputation for violence but no previous convictions, was also known to be part of the distribution network. Discussions with the National Crime Squad (NCS) revealed that an undercover operation would only be considered based on an analysis of the volume of business. Undercover operations are expensive and a rough cost–benefit ‘rule of thumb’ had evolved whereby only ‘Class A’ suppliers wholesaling in excess of two-and-a-half kilos per week were deemed to justify the mobilization of these resources. It might therefore do to stress that it was on the basis of the presumed volume of business, and not the reputations for violence, that an undercover operation was mounted. Thus, based on the available local intelligence, the decision was taken to run an undercover operation using outside operatives. The NCS arranged to have two undercover officers (one male and one female) brought in from the south of England. With the co-operation of local housing officials they were placed in accommodation on the housing estate where the hub of the network was known to be located. The two undercover officers employed a cover story regarding domestic violence – she had supposedly fled the violence of her former boyfriend and run away north with her new boy friend. Within two days the local street dealers had come to know the female undercover officer as a heroin user and she began to make small purchases. After a three-month operation it was concluded that the case had indeed identified a multi-kilo dealer who was laundering money through a casino and had invested heavily in local property, including a pub. It was thought that his supply originated in Manchester. At this point, the decision was taken to disrupt the local heroin market by making arrests; the subsequent trial led to the conviction of 25 people and the original target received a sentence of seven years.8 According to a local drug squad officer, ‘Bosses want immediate results and they wanted the operation repeated in another venue’. Within months of the trial, senior police in the region admitted that illegal drugs were still cheap and plentiful on the streets, that the 8 Disruption was a key performance indicator for the NCS at this time. This indicator existed alongside traditional outcome measures, such as arrests leading to prosecution and crimes cleared up. Measures such as ‘disruption’ had been heavily criticized by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee for being based ‘to a significant degree on the subjectivity of the investigating staff involved in the individual cases. Even Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) had observed that “the current method of assessing performance did not adequately reflect what was being achieved and there was concern regarding the quality of disruption”’ (cited in Sheptycki 2004b: 31–32).

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stark reality was that police could not, by themselves, contain the situation and that the region was being swamped by the demands and pressures arising from the illicit drugs market. The operations, intelligence-led and largely driven by covert means, had been another tactical success in a long history of strategic failure. Case 2: Problem Solving in Coastal County The frontier marked by the English Channel has been associated with a variety of forms of transnational criminality, and associated policing practice has been documented back to 1968 (Sheptycki 1998c, 2001a). However, the opportunities for illicit gain through smuggling extend back to the time of the Stuart monarchs when, in 1642, the Boards of Customs and Excise were first introduced in England and Wales. This was the first UK government department with police-type powers (search, seizure, arrest) and so, in a sense, crime in the region has been marked for centuries by the attempt to enforce transboundary trade restrictions. Such enforcement restrictions effectively create an illicit market opportunity, and smuggling in various guises has long been an aspect of the regional informal economy. Largely unbeknownst to the primary actors involved in the intelligence-led operation described below and, similarly, unbeknown to many others involved in cross-border policing issues at the time, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise (HMCE, as it was then called) was systematically involved in a whole series of mismanaged undercover operations, both nationally and transnationally. The extent of incompetence was made public explicitly in a series of newspaper articles beginning in early 2001 (Hencke 2001a, 2001b). However, the media had been reporting on the attendant criminogenic potential of the massive illicit market in alcohol and tobacco from rather earlier (Hopkins 1999). The full social ramifications of this have been little studied, but there has been at least some academic scrutiny of these illicit markets (Hornsby and Hobbs 2006). Briefly stated, the principal illicit market in the English Channel region at the turn of the millennium concerned bootleg tobacco, cigarettes and alcohol as a profitable criminal economy evolved in the interstices of the internal European market because of something as mundane as national tax differentials – a criminal economy made all the more robust because of the administrative inefficiency and incompetence of the agency responsible for enforcing the rules. Coastal County Constabulary, which facilitated the operation considered here, was fully committed to a set of principles articulated under the rubric of intelligence-led policing by the early 1990s, and these commitments were sustained over the entirety of the decade and into the next. Concomitant with the commitment to ILP was a concern to abide by the strictures of the European Convention on Human Rights, adopted into UK law in 1998 (Henry and Smith 2007; see also House of Lords 1999). One training officer in the force described the organization’s power as: … awesome, when you consider the surveillance capabilities we have, and the range of information we can draw on, plus we also have the power to arrest, search, seize etcetera etcetera. So you’ve got to be sure that it [intelligence-led policing] is both done under human rights and for human rights. Which can be very difficult in the practical run of things. (Personal communication to the author)

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Both human rights and ILP are sets of abstract principles and, in combination, they equate admirably well with the notion of human security intelligence. The case arose from a community safety audit which pinpointed a problem with truanting youths causing a nuisance, engaging in acts of vandalism and small-scale public-order disturbances. Discrete mobile and static surveillance revealed that these youths were frequenting a particular address. The surveillance also discovered that the address in question was a point in an illicit alcohol and tobacco distribution network. HMCE intelligence liaison officers confirmed that the address was known to be part of a broader network of distribution. For police intelligence analysts the issue was a local crime and disorder problem, but the ultimate causes of this social problem were beyond local influence and therefore could not be fixed. Rather than unilaterally mount a police law enforcement operation, however, the analysts looked for a more comprehensive approach to the problem, and they did so by involving a number of other agencies. The first of these was the local education authority. The issue initially came to light as an issue of truanting youths and the question that this posed included concerns for their health and safety as much as the nuisance they were causing in the community. Disengaging the group from their low-key but nonetheless nefarious pursuits logically required that they be engaged in more legitimate ones, and the school system was the line of first resort. Surveillance of the illicit supply network had revealed that the principal retail outlet for the illicit goods was a less than salubrious café. Local Trading Standards and Environmental Services officers inspected the premises which were found to be in breach of a variety of health and safety regulations. Subsequently, the business licence was revoked due to reasons of food hygiene. Background checks on vehicle ownership revealed a number of inconsistencies due to fraud and vehicle licences were suspended. Further checks revealed that members of the network were also involved in housing benefit fraud and related activities and so the local Housing Department and the Benefits Agency were also brought in. In the planning and execution of the response, the emphasis was on working with the local responsible authorities to alleviate manifestations of social harm embedded in aspects of the illicit market operating in the area. Those guiding the operation continually emphasized the cross-benefits that the various agencies involved would accrue and the overall benefits to community safety. The problem originally identified became an occasion to strengthen local capacities across a range of governmental services, and the guiding objective was to try to find ways of reducing crime and improve the quality of life in the area. This broad-based approach was attractive to Coastal County police because it allowed them significantly to dismantle the criminal group’s ability to conduct business without pursuing prosecutions in court. Punishment was not the aim. Rather, the aim was preventing, as much as possible, criminal enterprise deemed damaging to the community. In the circumstances, none of the intelligence analysts and others involved in the operation could have expected significantly to impact on the illicit alcohol and tobacco market. What is significant is that the solutions sought aimed primarily at maintaining and strengthening regular routines of good local government and minimizing harm and, in both these regards at least, the strategy met some success. Understanding this small operation in the context of the broader strategic architecture of national policing in the UK at the time is important. Looked at in terms of sociology of organizations, the national crime intelligence system was driven by a number of

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‘organizational pathologies’. The root cause of these pathologies lies in the attempt to centralize policing intelligence leading to a direct clash with the transformative power of information technologies which tends to flatten hierarchies and empower social networks, a trend which runs counter to organizational expectations of rank-structured bureaucracies. These pathologies give rise not only to internal problems of command and control but also external problems of accountability and legitimacy. The language of strategic intelligence analysts is peppered with concepts that denote organizational pathology: information silos, intelligence gaps, linkage blindness, noise, compulsive data demand, information black holes, and other concepts are exhibits in a lexicon of institutional failure. And yet, undeniably, the technological power of intelligence-led policing, for good or for ill, is awesome. What this short case vignette illustrates is how policing intelligence capacities can be used to muster non-punitive responses to identified problems, which aim at changing the circumstances that produced the problem in the first instance, without unintentionally amplifying social harms. In short, it shows the possibility of an intelligence theory of realistic and practical action, tempered by broader thinking about how to solve problems. Case Study Discussion Debates regarding theories of intelligence tend towards abstractions and so it is good to ground deliberations about the limitations of currently exiting intelligence paradigms in practical examples. This is especially the case because the traditional intelligence paradigm, one built around the suppositions of ‘national security’, lays claim to roots in ‘realism’ – international relations realism and, by extension, criminological realism – and so any challenging paradigm lies open to the charge of being idealistic, or at least not realistic (Krause 1998: 2ff). Although it is true to say that the case material being discussed here is partial and particular and that difficult issues regarding generalizability are not properly addressed, that they are in some sense real should not be in doubt. The vignette concerning the case of search and disrupt in Northern Town is used here as a stand-in for the national security paradigm. Like the paradigm it exemplifies, this example is based on assumptions about utility of clandestine means to unilaterally achieve a knockout blow that will achieve a specified end; in the case of drug enforcement and interdiction that end being the eventual demise of the illicit drug economy. The approach valorizes, above all else, secret surveillance and hard coercive capacities that aim to identify suitable targets and neutralize them by enforcement means. Its measures of success are abstract ones that are actually measures of agency process and not measures of impact in the real world. In the instance discussed here, cost–benefit calculations were made with regard to the financing of a medium-term undercover operation balanced against the number of arrests and successful prosecutions, and associated outcome measures such as sentence length. The unwarranted assumption is that these enforcement and disruption measurement outcomes will translate into improved conditions in the community where the operations take place, but the strategic intelligence picture should continually remind practitioners that this assumption is incorrect. Indeed, the historical record shows that opposite is the case and that the replication of tactical law enforcement ‘successes’ has, over time, actually accompanied an escalation of the problem; indeed, these tactical successes actually seem to exacerbate it. The logic can go on repeating itself indefinitely because the outcome measures used to judge

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success are abstractions. That a case of drug law enforcement is an exemplar of the national security intelligence paradigm cannot be in doubt, since Richard Nixon explicitly made it so in his remarks to media executives at the Flagship Hotel in Rochester, New York, in 1971 (Nixon, 1971). Although it is scientifically improper to generalize from a single case, the case certainly suggests that the dominant paradigm is not only falsifiable in theory, but also in practice, which surely raises doubts about the realism inherent in national security thoughtstyles. The vignette concerning problem solving in Coastal County represents a significantly different way of thinking. The predicted outcome of the operation was not based on any measures of agency process – indeed, it would have been very difficult to organize the intervention on such a basis given the variety of agencies involved, each with quite different functions. Instead, the outcomes were intended to be highly tangible ones felt directly by the community and were aimed at improving public safety and fostering the local capacities of governance that underpin the general public good. This operation was orchestrated in the clear recognition that the ultimate causes of the immediate problem – differentials in ‘sin taxes’ across the territory of the European Union – were beyond local influence. Then, too, the topheavy structure of the national crime intelligence system and its varieties of organizational pathology rendered it an unsuitable resource. The case discussed reveals how intelligence analysts working at the divisional level of the local constabulary could serve to mobilize the capacities of a variety of actors in the broad governance of community security. Through acting as an analytic resource these actors helped to animate what the eminent policing scholar Clifford Shearing (2001) has called dispersed ‘nodal’ security. Consciousness of human rights legislation provided a normative underpinning to the operation – a constabulary ethic – but the theory of intelligence mobilized was grounded in the local conditions of possibility; as seen in this example, human security practice is realistic. Conclusion A central task in this essay has been to argue that the literature from the sociology of policing provides a useful alternative basis on which to consider theories of intelligence. The dominant intelligence paradigm has its institutional basis in the military and, for want of an alternative organizational touchstone, intelligence theory has languished there. There is a key difference between democratic policing practice and the practices of any military. Democratic policing capacities are exercised on behalf of people who, on the whole, both understand and endorse the police mission – even when it might entail the use of force in those limited circumstances where general social order and the public good are undermined by the actions of the few. The military are trained for the ‘killing job’ and the role is not so constrained by considerations of legitimacy among subject populations; and if it becomes so, the military function has begun to shade over into policing (Brodeur 1997: 26ff). This chapter has glossed over the point that the policing apparatus in many jurisdictions is rapidly becoming militarized in order to make the point that sustained empirical and theoretical efforts to understand and theorize the intelligence function, and thereby change its practices, can be found in the sociology of policing literature. A fortiori, because of the emphasis on minimal use of force, human rights

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and democratic legitimacy, the sociology of policing opens up an alternative and realistic vantage point from which to view the possibility of a set of intelligence practices suited to the apparently idealistic notion of human security. Of course, the policing sector has its own version of the national security mindset, what Jean-Paul Brodeur (1983), theorized as ‘high policing’. It is also true to say that this thought-style has amplified itself during the recent past (Webb 2007). Regardless of these trends, democratic policing has, since its historical inception during the nineteenth century, effectively depended upon community legitimacy in order to carry out its mandate. The two lessons from the field related here illustrate the point that it is not hopelessly idealistic to advance a human security intelligence paradigm to replace the old one and that the policing sector offers realistic prospects for testing the practicability of human security intelligence in a sustained programme of action research. For too long the national security intelligence paradigm has been allowed to prevail because of its pretensions to realism. Despite, or perhaps because of, the danger that both the policing sector and notions of human security could end up providing cover for the continued imposition of national security intelligence doctrine, it is necessary to find a way out from under this failed way of thinking, which, by any realistic assessment, has gone on making matters worse for long enough.

Afterword A volume such as this one should arrive at some kind of resolution but, given the protean nature of these essays, conclusions are probably best left to the reader. Having said that, it does seem appropriate to provide some kind of ending to this collection otherwise the whole project is simply left hanging. Given the complex, contradictory and uncertain nature of the present time it will not do to leave important matters concerning transnational policing altogether unresolved. Readers will quite reasonably want to know where the author stands at the end of the road. Having travelled so far and over so many years what do I, the author, make of it all? Thus, while this short afterword does not offer a conclusion it can say something about my own understandings come journey’s end, which will hopefully help readers to define some kind of dénouement for themselves. From the outset I have had the conviction that the study of transnational policing is much more than the empirical description of the transnational practices of police agencies and that this kind of research provides a good window onto globalization more generally. All along I have held to the view that, come what may, any complex system of social order will ipso facto require something that, for want of any better term, can be called a system of policing. It therefore logically follows that what Lesley Sklair called the ‘global system’ must itself be policed. But there is even more to my work than that, since I now believe that transnational policing is both a viewpoint from which to study the global system and a microcosm of it. Policing is a central mechanism in reproducing the transnational-state-system and constitutes its most general characteristic. Ben Bowling and I have argued elsewhere (2011) that transnational policing is a synecdoche of globalization. The essays in this volume chart the way to this realization. Although nowhere in this collection is this theoretical finding explicitly stated, it lies latent within it. From where I stand at journey’s end it seems very clear to me that the abstract claim that transnational policing is part and parcel of the global system rests on the empirical foundations and theoretical explorations that these essays reveal. Having said this much, my interests have wandered over a good deal of territory and quite a number of topical concerns, so in no sense do I claim a straightforward evolution of ideas. Looking over these essays, I am struck by how much my early thinking about transnational policing was tied to questions concerning the role of information technology and how, over time, this morphed into an understanding of intelligence-led policing that is rather different from most other scholars now writing about ILP. The idiom and style of postmodern sociology was exciting to me twenty years ago and it still appeals in the same way that the poured paintings and colourful abstractions of Frank Bowling’s visual art do. There is something to be said for splashing the paint around and seeing what sticks to the canvass, which is analogous to my writing method nearly twenty years ago. But the creative approach also develops and now in my writing I strive for a higher degree of clarity and transparency. In that regard, and extending the painting analogy, my more recent work has become less postmodern pastiche and more like the traditional pastels and water colours of the English landscape artist Claire

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Spencer. My subject matter remains complex, but the style in which it is conveyed has settled into something more traditional. I think the technique and approach to writing changed partly because over the years my explorations into transnational policing took some unexpected tangents that offered a bundle of confusing insights. The essay on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and serial killers is an example of those tangential explorations. Other pieces I have written which were not included in this collection, for example one on police-related scandal in the Low Countries and another on public order policing in Bolivia (Sheptycki, 1999, 2005) are also examples of the sometimes oblique nature of my thinking processes. In covering all of this ground I eventually learned that the subject matter is complex enough without the postmodern jive and began to strive for a simpler style. Navigating a way through this subject matter has been made more difficult not only because of my meandering route but also because of my ambivalence about the politics of policing. As a young scholar it seemed obvious to me that the conflict perspective in the sociology of policing has a lot going for it. In a nutshell, this perspective maintains that the institutions of policing are instruments for the protection of the interests of dominant social groups and classes in society. To conflict theorists, concerns about the legitimacy of policing are grasped in the metaphor of the ‘iron fist in the velvet glove’. Usually the velvet glove is on, but it can easily be taken off when it becomes necessary to preserve the order and the interests of the ‘upper classes’. To quote Marx’s summary concerning the relationship of the state to the ruling class in the Communist Manifesto: ‘The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. The ‘police’ are the ‘strong arm of the law’ and thus are the most visible and practical manifestation of ‘the state’. When things get rough the gloves come off. Many examples from around the world testify to this view: the billion dollar boondoggle of policing for the meetings of the G20 in Toronto in June of 2010 (which produced the largest mass arrests in Canadian history), the bloody actions of Syrian security forces in protecting the Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad during the Arab Spring of 2011, the thuggish actions of the Greek riot police in Syntagma Square that same year. Contemporary history is full of examples of policing as a naked instrument of political power and oppression. One does not need to recall Tiananmen Square or the crushing of the Prague Spring to recognize that policing power is about the enforcement of order and the suppression of social and political conflict in the interests of those already in power. Outright police oppression can happen in putative democracies too. Western political thought from Plato to NATO has frequently justified the repressive actions of the powerful on the grounds that the alternative is anarchic disorder and, in Hobbes’ terms, a ‘war of all against all’. The Utopia that Plato envisions in The Republic is, within his terms of reference, perfectly good and just. It resembles a well-oiled machine where everyone has their appointed function and economic niche, but its machine-like character seems repellent despite any claims to be a perfect and harmonious social order. Its ‘guardians’ are either ‘philosophical watchdogs’ or ‘philosopher kings’, depending on your point of view. The seductive logic expressed by Socrates that emerges from an intertwining metaphysic concerning the four ‘Platonic virtues’ of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice either satisfies, or not, our worries about how to protect the social order from the immorality of powerful men and women. Readers of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince well understand that

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the corruption of power is directly proportional to the level of control available and are not so easily seduced. Surveying contemporary policing power with its array of surveillance technologies and ‘less than lethal’ weaponry, and the justifications of its use brings to mind Lord Acton’s famous dictum: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men’. So, while it is undoubtedly true that the potential for social conflict is ever present within complex social orders and that a means to police such antagonisms therefore necessarily arises, a nagging doubt remains. Following Tocqueville, it is worrisome to think that the social conflict used to affirm the need for a strong state often turns out to be inimical to human freedom because it tends to amplify social tensions which then further justifies the existence of a strong state. This is a perfectly negative dialectic of unfreedom. With these very observations in mind, I cling to a liberal and democratic theory of policing politics rather like a sailor clings to the timbers of a scuppered ship. This is largely due to the huge influence of my mentor Robert Reiner to whom I owe so much. It was Robert’s veneration of British policing which convinced me that conflict theory was necessary but not sufficient in explaining the politics of policing. His point of view rested partly on the historical fact that the British police were ‘the first modern police force in a nation with representative government’ (1992b: 435), an achievement which, in the mid-twentieth century, showed that the ideal of the police officer as a ‘citizen in uniform’ acting for a public which both understands and endorses the policing mission was not a remote possibility but rather a nearly achievable social fact. In the first edition of the Politics of the Police he quoted from Max Weber’s essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’, to wit: ‘he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant’ (Reiner, 1992b: ix). Reiner taught all of his students that policing was necessary to any social order and could not be wished away. The radical recipe for a society without policing seems theoretically practical only in the minds of utopians. Like any institution of social power, the real practical problem is how to keep it in check so that policing can do more good than harm. The more balanced view he advocated is challenging intellectually because it forces us to grasp the nettle: given that policing is a social necessity, how is it possible to harness it to the general interests of society as a whole? Not unlike the Left Realists, Reiner drew attention to the hard fact that, even the under the circumstances created within a plausibly egalitarian, legitimate and just social order there would inevitably be some kind of policing system. It is a paradox that any would-be democratic society needs protection both by police and from police and that should create ambivalence in any serious thinking about the police idea. Theories concerning policing are not political abstractions lying outside the world, they are the practical expression of politics in the world. That is why policing is such a rewarding subject area for those interested in political philosophy and that is why questions about transnational policing are so useful to entertain when thinking about the sociology of the global system. Although my feelings regarding transnational policing are ambivalent, I strive for a degree of balance which takes into account the various points of view just mentioned. As I have argued elsewhere in this volume, there is a difference between cynicism, which denies hope, and pessimism, which does not. Thinking thus, in my scholarly work and especially my work

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alongside other scholars, I always strive to be merely sceptical and sometimes even hopeful (Goldsmith and Sheptycki 2007; Wardak and Sheptycki, 2004). Certainly the tone of the final substantive essay in this collection is somewhat promising. However, it would be a mistake for the reader to conclude that this author harbours any great aspirations that untutored transnational policing will be a force for good in the world. My feelings on that count are not optimistic. Another recent essay (Sheptycki, 2010), also unfortunately not included in this volume for reasons of length, reflects my mood more accurately. In that piece I provide a meditation on Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa which, I maintain, provides an eloquent metaphor for understanding global policing. The painting depicts a small group of desperate men floating on a few planks of wood, waving their shirts towards a ship’s topsail far off in the distance. These were the few survivors of the sailors and crew of the Medusa, who were forced to abandon ship due to the incompetence of her captain, the vain and feckless Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys, who escaped disaster himself in the ship’s lifeboat while almost all of the men and crew were cast adrift on the raft. We have been warned that the coming decades will be a time of climate change bringing drought and flood, water and food shortages, ever more crowded mega-cities and intensified social conflict. We have come to this because of our own hubris, it is true, but there is no denying that the political and economic elites who captain the global institutions of governance, commerce and industry have fostered the hubris from which they greatly profit. At this late hour, the privileged seek refuge in exclusive enclaves, rather like de Chaumereys who commandeered the lifeboats for himself and his entourage. Meanwhile the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves amidst disaster. Globally it is police who enforce this state of affairs. There are already signs of the coming revolt and the transnational policing infrastructure that has been installed leaves room only for pessimism. The global system, I fear, has become like the Raft of the Medusa and transnational policing seems likely to get uglier before it gets better. The near future looks bleak, because ‘we are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us’ (Barnes, 1989, p. 137). In the coming time of troubles we must remember that humanity has lost and recovered its civilizing impulses before. Hope therefore remains a possibility.

James Sheptycki

York University, Canada

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Williams, P. and Savona, E. (1996), The United Nations and Transnational Organised Crime, London: Frank Cass. Willmer, M.A.P. (1970), Crime and Information Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilson, J.Q. (1985), Thinking About Crime (rev. edn), New York: Vintage Books. Wilson, J.Q. and Herrnstein, R. (1985), Crime and Human Nature, New York: Simon and Schuster. Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G. (1982), ‘The Police and Neighborhood Safety: Broken Windows’, Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), pp. 29–38. Wintle, M. (1996), ‘Policing the Liberal State in the Netherlands’, Policing and Society, 6(3), pp. 181– 97. Witte, R. (1993), ‘Racist Violence: An Issue on the Political Agenda?’, in T. Bjorrgo and R. Witte (eds), Racist Violence in Europe, New York: St Martin’s Press. Wood, A. (2007), ‘RCMP Warned on Air India’, Toronto Star, 4 May. Available at: http://www.thestar. com/article/210386. Wood, J. and Dupont, B. (2006), Democracy, Society and the Governance of Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, J. and Font, E. (2007), ‘Crafting the Governance of Security in Argentina: Engaging with Global Trends’, in A. Goldsmith and J.W.E. Sheptycki (eds), Crafting Transnational Policing, Oxford: Hart Publishing. Wood, J. and Kempa, M. (2005), ‘Understanding Global Trends in Policing: Explanatory and Normative Dimensions’, in J.W.E. Sheptycki and A. Wardick (eds), Transnational and Comparative Criminology, London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 287–316. Woodiwiss, M. (2001), Organized Crime and American Power: A History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Woodiwiss, M. (2005), Gangster Capitalism, New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers. Wright, R. and Decker, S. (1997), Armed Robbers in Action: Stickups and Street Culture, Michigan: Northeastern University Press. Young, A. (1996), Imagining Crime, London: Sage. Young, J. (1971), The Drug Takers, London: McGibbon and Kee. Young, J. (1994) ‘Recent Paradigms in Criminology’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Renier (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 69–124.Young, J. (1999), The Exclusive Society, London: Sage. Young, J. (2003), ‘Merton with Energy, Katz with Structure: The Sociology of Vindictiveness and the Criminology of Transgression’, Theoretical Criminology, 7, pp. 388–414. Young, M. (1991), An Inside Job: Policing and Police Culture in Britain, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Zedner, L. (2003), ‘Too Much Security?’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 31, pp 155–84. Zuboff, S. (1988), In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, Oxford: Heinemann.

Index abduction, and due process 33 account-ability 88–9, 155, 156–7 accountability 145–50 control, distinction 155 corporate security guards 145–6 specialists 146–7 as cultural construct 157 Europol 19 external/internal mechanisms 155 high policing 279 meaning 155 and peacekeeping 144 police detectives 149–50 of policing 156 private detectives 149–50 private security guards 148 problems 140–1, 142, 143–4 security services 147, 274 standard paradigm 153, 154 and transnational state system 158–9 typology 156 uniformed patrol officers 148 see also under Interpol Acton, Lord, on power 299 ACUPIES (Automated Canada USA Information Exchange System) 52 administrative friction 99, 109, 111 Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception 211 al-Assad, Bashar, President 298 Alain, Marc 126 Alvarez-Machain case, and national sovereignty 37 Alvarez-Machain, Humberto 33, 37 Anderson, M. 165 antique smuggling, and CCIC 106 Arab Spring (2011) 298 Arendt, Hannah xvii, 50 Arnold, Eric 4 ASF (Automated Search Facility) 24, 51 Ashworth, A. 231 ASIA (Air Smuggling Investigators Association) 32

asset seizure see under crime Audit Commission, Helping with Enquiries 180, 215 Bauman, Zygmunt 209 Bayley, David 155 BCS (British Crime Survey) 289 Beccaria, Cesare 3 Becker, Howard 205, 210 Belgium police agencies 77fn4, 110, 129–30 serial killers 81–2 see also Bruges, Police Judiciaire Benjamin, Walter xiii Bernardo, Paul & Karla Homolka 72 see also ‘serial killers’ Bertillion, Alphonse 211 Bertillion System 66fn7 Bigo, Didier 251 Bilderberg Group 279 Bittner, Egon 7, 10, 11, 64, 127 Bondi Beach, racist riots 211 border security xxiv jurisdiction issues 132–3 see also CCIC; English Channel region Bossard, Andre, General Secretary Interpol 163–4 Bourgois, Philippe, El Barrio 208 Bowling, Ben 297 Bowling, Frank 297 Brodeur, Jean-Paul 141, 295 Brodeur’s Law 34 Brooks, Pierce 75 Bruges, Police Judiciaire 88, 104, 106, 109, 110 Burton, John 200 Caldeira, Teresa 44 Campbell, Beatrix, Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places 209 Canada CLEU 63 fingerprint technology 61

332

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organized crime 243–4 governance 248–50, 253 media representations of 244–6 Organized Crime Impact Study 248–9 public perceptions 246–8 police agencies 238 security screening 61 serial killers 72–3, 75, 298 see also CISC; RCMP capital (finance) global 254 transnationalization of 29 Carabinieri, Italy 43 cars, stolen 126 and CCIC 106–7 Castells, Manuel xx, 279 CCIC (Cross Channel Intelligence Conference) 63, 88, 104, 105 and antique smuggling 106 communication modes 112–13 and drug smuggling 107, 114–17 future 122 and immigrant smuggling 106 meetings 109, 110–12 and stolen cars 106–7 telex use 113 see also English Channel region CCTV 100, 127, 208 CELAD (Comité Européen pour la Lute AntiDrogue) 17 Centre for the Study of Public Order, Leicester University 14 Channel Tunnel, and transnational policing 86–7, 118 see also English Channel region Channel Tunnel Act, protocols 59–60 character, hollowing out of 67–8 Chatterton, M. 56 Christie, Nils 207 CISC (Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada) 181, 238 Annual Report of Organized Crime in Canada 243 clandestine markets, transnationalization 48–50, 53, 94–5 CLEU (Combined Law Enforcement Unit), Canada 63 Clifford, James 85, 100 Clinton, Bill 47

coercive force and criminology 204 police subculture 64, 127 state monoply of 193 Coggins, Paul 36 collators see crime, analysts Commission Rogatoire 116fn15 communities diasporic 277 enclave 44–5, 208 UK 45fn11 transnational 86 community policing 7, 13, 42, 47, 288 compulsive data demand 197 ‘constabulary ethic’ 151–2 contact zones 100 control, accountability, distinction 155 corporate security guards, accountability 145–6 specialists, accountability 146–7 CPIC (Canadian Police Information Exchange Centre) 52, 75, 168 credit cards, stolen 126 CRI (Centrale Recherche Informatiedienst) 88 crime analysts 219, 224, 228, 257 asset seizure xxiii, 182–4 corporate 254 and day-trippers 126 definition problems 171–2 disruption of 216, 225–9, 229–30, 292 drugs 288–91 limits 232–3, 233–4 fear of 40, 44, 139, 208 and globalization 277 and inequalities 209–10 local nature of 13 mobile 126 normality of, Durkheim on 202 pre-emption xxiii–xxiv prevention, partnership 46 social causes 206 see also political crime; transnational crime; white-collar crime criminal opportunity structure 182, 183, 191, 197 criminology classic critical 204–6 and coercive force 204 constructionism 205

INDEX ethnographic 208 and globalization 85, 207–8 and Marxism 202 and organized crime 235 and realism 203–4, 211 theory 202–4 data protection 61 dataveillance 87, 92 Schengen Information System 135 day-trippers, and crime 126 de Menezes, Jean Charles 210 DEA (Drugs Enforcement Agency) 16fn8, 32, 33 defence forces (military) law enforcement 34–5 police, connection 35fn4 ‘war on drugs’ role 34–5, 37 Delphi survey method, Project Sleipnir 239 democracy, conceptions of 30–1 deportation xv, 131 deviance amplification 204 sociology of 204 diplomats, police officers 65–6 disruption see under crime DLOs (Drug Liaison Officers) 17, 32 DNA profiling 58, 211 domestic violence 13, 290 Douglas, Mary 81 How Institutions Think 189, 270 Douglas, William O. 135 Downes, David 55 drug economy, reasons for 208 drug smuggling, and CCIC 107, 114–17 see also ‘war on drugs’ drug use, UK 288–91 Dublin Police Act (1786) 5, 41 Dumait-Harper, Catherine 287–8 Durkheim, Emile 278 on normality of crime 202 Dutroux, Marc 81 see also ‘serial killers’ DVLC (Driver Vehicle Licensing Centre) 121 Echelon Scandal 147 see also ‘surveillance’ economic/financial crime xviii, 126, 186, 191, 248, 249, 254 NCIS Economic Crime Unit 262, 265

Edwards, Adam 177 Edwards, David 86 Egger, Steven 77, 78 ELU (European Liaison Unit) cases 93–7 data sources 87–9 interviews 88 establishment 121, 126 inquiries received 89–90 and Linguanet 90fn4, 105, 121 purpose 86–7 enclave communities 44–5 enforcers, police officers 67 English Channel region illicit markets 291 intelligence-led policing 291–3 police agencies 109–11 transborder policing development phases 104–22 example 114–17 entrepreneurs, police officers 66 environmental crime 191, 244, 249, 251 Ericson, Richard 56, 155, 180, 215, 237 ethnography 86 and criminology 208 EUROJUST, establishment 133 European Arrest Warrant 173 European Council, Action Plan to Combat Organised Crime 272 European Court of Human Rights 62 European Court of Justice 62 Europeanization, of law 99, 134 Europol 160 accountability 19 Drug Unit 21, 23, 24 evidence, intelligence, distinction 230–1 Ewald, François xxiv Executive Outcomes (EO) 142 extradition and political crime 172–3 and September 11 (2001) events 173 Extradition, European Convention on 172 FATF (Financial Action Task Force) 49fn19 FBI Behavioural Sciences Unit 74 and serial killers 81 financial crime see economic/financial crime fingerprint technology 51, 58

333

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adoption of 60–1 Canada 61 see also Bertillion System Flyghed, Janne 278 folk-devils 10, 27, 139, 195 definition 71fn1 examples 31–2, 210 serial killers as 72, 82 transnational 11, 12, 50 Fooner, Michael 167, 168 Football Intelligence Unit (NCIS) 57fn1, 88 ‘Fortress LA’ 44–5 Foucault, Michel xvi, 27 Fouche, Joseph 4 Fourth Epoch 9, 10, 12, 27 France paedophile network 82 police agencies 110–11 policing 43 freedom 101 Freeh, Louis, FBI Director 49 French policing and émigrés xv origins xv, 4 Fukuyama, F. 190 G20 meeting (2010), policing 298 Galton, Francis 211 Garland, David 9, 10, 27, 46, 64, 236 Gates, Daryl 67 Geller, William 7 Géricault, Théodore, The Raft of the Medusa 300 Germany border police 134 ‘stop and search’ powers 134 Giddens, Anthony xxiv, 66, 209 Gill, Peter 177, 180, 232 GIS (Geographical Information Systems) 79 global cities 207–8 global commonwealth 175, 186, 190, 198, 280 Global Governance, Commission on 251 globalization and crime 277 and criminological theory 85, 207–8 definition xiv, 157 and the nation-state 158, 201 theories 201 Goffman, E. 222 Gogh, Theo van, murder of 210

Goldsmith, Andrew 282 Goldstein, Herman 46, 59 governance through crime 211, 212 global 158, 178 and TOC 178, 188 meaning 178, 236 and the nation-state 157 nodal 175, 193, 194 organized crime 236–7, 250–2 Canada 248–50, 253 transnational 7–8, 279 see also accountability governmentality police work as 101 and policing 41, 42 Greece, riot police behaviour 298 Haggerty, Kevin 180 Hague Convention (1912) 107 Hall, Stuart, Policing the Crisis 205 Halliday, Fred 286 Hegel, G.W.F., on freedom 101 Held, David 158, 286 Henry, Edward 43, 66 heroin prices 289 use 290 high policing accountability 279 action needed 280 low policing, distinction 141–2, 193 history, and postmodernism 40 HIV/AIDS 289 HMCE (Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise) 109, 217, 221, 267 criticism of 291 subculture 268–9 HMIC (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary), Policing with Intelligence 219, 257 HMIS (Her Majesty’s Immigration Service) 109, 131, 217 Hobbs, D. 232 Hobsbawm, E. 191 HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Inquiry System) 77 Hoover, J. Edgar 4, 60, 171 hot pursuit, right of 34, 60, 62fn4, 133

INDEX Human Security Commission on, Human Security Now 286 and intelligence 292, 295 paradigm 286–8 IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police) 33, 50 IALEIA (International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts) 128–9 ICC (International Contact Centre) 88, 126 ICPO (International Criminal Police Organization) 33 see also Interpol identity, self 27, 209, 278 identity documents xv Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, Convention 34 immigration, illegal 94–6, 109fn6, 131, 134, 148 and CCIC 106 inequalities, and crime 209–10 information, intelligence, distinction 219–20 information management, centralized and decentralized systems 75–6 limitations 98–9 information overload xxi, 197, 276 information revolution 51, 57, 61, 98, 99, 120, 122, 127, 256, 273, 275, 276, 279, 283 information silos intelligence systems 266 and linkage blindness 196, 275 information technology and intelligence-led policing 237 and shape of policing 275 and transnational policing xvii, 24, 58–9, 127–9, 297 non-standardization 129, 136 as unifying framework 26 insecurity marketization of 44–5, 53 ontological 209 pervasiveness of 273 see also security intelligence concept, fluidity 223 contextual 223 criminal, crime intelligence, distinction 222 definition 223 encoding frames 222–3, 225

335

evidence, distinction 230–1 function 219 gaps 197 and human security 292, 295 information, distinction 219–20 as informational construct 218 military 222 nomenclature 221 recycling 222 sharing 269 strategic 220, 221–2, 269–70, 275 tactical 220, 221–2, 226, 269, 270, 275 see also intelligence systems; intelligence-led policing intelligence systems data sources 256–7 formal models 257–9 pathologies 256, 259–70, 271–2, 293 compulsive data demand 197, 262–3, 276, 293 context 270–1 defensive data concentration 266 digital divide 260 duplication 264 false positive xxi, 197, 276 information silos 266, 275 institutional friction 265 intelligence gaps 263–4, 276 intelligence hoarding 265–6 intelligence overload 261–2 linkage blindness 260–1 noise 261, 276 non-reporting/recording 263 occupational subcultures 266–70 see also NIM intelligence theory 281, 294 RAND workshop 284–5 intelligence work 223–5 acquisition 224 action 225 analysis 224 assay 225 specialisms 224 see also crime analysts intelligence-led policing (ILP) 215–16, 265 case studies 288–94 development 180–1 English Channel region 291–3 and information technology 237

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and organized crime 237–44 studies 217–34, 283 success 271 interagency competition, policing 76 International Criminal Court xx, 188 Interpol xvii, 50, 77, 119–20 accountability xxii, 162–75 external 165–6 legal 162–6 NCBs 167–70 politics of 170–4 practical 166–70 Anglo-American influence 160 brand image 161–2, 175 coloured notices system 161 crime, definition problems 171–2 Criminal Information System 24 development 159–62 establishment 12 French influence 160 as IGO 159, 162, 163, 164, 173, 185 influence, loss of 160 legal status 15, 170–1, 184–5 morse code 23, 98fn8, 113fn13, 160 and national sovereignty 15, 163fn20, 166, 166–7, 174 network 22–3 non-operational role 62, 161 origins 159–60 purpose 15, 61–2, 160–1 status 33 and terrorism 15–16, 173–4 see also NCBs IR (International Relations) theory 199 criticisms of 200 and the nation-state 200 and realism 200, 202–3, 281, 284, 286, 293 Italy, Carabinieri 43 Johnson, Loch 284–5 Johnston, Les 140, 141, 142, 225 ‘jurisdiction shopping’ xx, 99, 133–4 Kelling, G. 203 Kendal, Raymond 174 Kent County Constabulary, liaison role 120, 121 Keohane, Robert 179, 200 Ker-Frisbie doctrine 33 knowledge, circulation of 78–9

knowledge society, and police subculture 58–63 knowledge work, police work as 56–7, 61–2, 90–2 Krause, Keith 201 La Reynie, Nicholas-Gabriel de (and the Police of Paris) 4 Laing, R.D. 189, 198, 286 The Politics of the Family 285 law Europeanization of 99 and police practice 34 law enforcement defence forces 34–5 security services in 35, 36–7 and transnational policing xviii–xix see also transnational law enforcement legal infrastructure police work 59–60 and technological infrastructure (tensions with) 60–1 legal sovereignty issues 116 Lemon, Dawney, Sir 105 Lewis, C.S. 206 Linguanet 52, 66 and ELU 90fn4, 105, 121 linkage blindness 74 examples 131 and information silos 196, 275 intelligence systems 260–1 overcoming 77 London, 7 July (2005) bombings 210 see also UK Louis XIV, sovereign relations to police 4 low policing see under high policing Lucas, Henry Lee 74 see also ‘serial killers’ Maastricht Treaty xiii police co-operation 20 McCahill, Michael 127 McGrew, Anthony 158 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince 298 McLuhan, Marshall 201, 273 MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) 190, 203 MAG (Mutual Assistance Group) 17 Maguire, Mike 180 MAIT (Multi-Agency Investigative Team Manual) 74

INDEX see also ‘serial killers’, see also ‘linkage blindness’ managerial regime, police work 62–3 Manning, Peter 112 marketization of insecurity 44–5 of policing 45–7 Marquis, Greg 61 Marx, Gary 218, 219 Marx, Karl, Communist Manifesto 298 Marxism, and criminology 202 Mathiesen, Thomas 135 May, Ernest 284 Metropolitan Police Act (1829) 5 militarization, of policing 208, 282, 294 Mills, C. Wright 9 The Sociological Imagination 39 Misuse of Drugs Act (1971) 108 Mitsilegas, Valsamis 184 Mohammed, Prophet, caricatures 211 money laundering xviii, 248 countermeasures 184 and September 11 (2001) events 182 Morris, Norval 7 morse code, Interpol 23, 98fn8, 113fn13, 160 MPRI (Military Professional Resources Incorporated) 142 mugging, construction of 205–6 Muir, William Ker 67 multiculturalism 277, 278 Nadelmann, Ethan 11, 33, 34 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area) 52 nation-state definition 42 formation, Tilly on 179 and globalization 158 and governance 157 hollowing out of 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 201, 236, 253, 254 and IR theory 200 monopoly of coercive force 193 and policing 42–3 system and policing 42–3 as protection racket 179–80 Westphalian model 200, 286 national security, intelligence paradigm xxv, 281, 282–6, 295

337

national sovereignty 118 and Alvarez-Machain case 37 and Interpol 15, 163fn20, 166, 166–7, 174 transformation of 175 see also territorial principle NCAVC (National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime) 74 NCBs (National Central Bureaux, Interpol) 15, 166–7 Puerto Rico 22 UK 24 Washington accountability 167–70 NCIC (National Crime Information Centre) 52 NCIS (National Criminal Intelligence Service) 24, 88, 130, 195, 217, 220, 265, 270 Economic Crime Unit 262, 265 Football Intelligence Unit 57fn1, 88 NCLETS (National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System) 168 NCS (National Crime Squad) 130, 217, 220, 269–70, 290 neo-liberalism 45, 150, 193, 207, 209, 236, 279 Nepote, Jean, Interpol General Secretary 163 Netherlands, police agencies 62–3, 110, 129 New World Order 43 Newing, John 36 Newman, Oscar, Defensible Space; People and Design in the Violent City 44 NIM (National Intelligence Model, UK) 217, 256, 257 criminality levels 258, 263–4 system cycle 258 Nixon, Richard 294 November 17 terrorist group 161fn13 NPM (New Public Management) 215, 216fn2, 223–4 NWGSDT (Northern Working Group on Suppression of Drug Trafficking) 32 Nye, Joseph 200 Olsen, Clifford 74–5 see also ‘serial killers’ Opium Wars xvi organized crime attributes 241–2 Canada 243–4 media representations of 244–6 public perceptions 246–8

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and criminology 235 definition problems 235, 237, 248–9 economic 249 environmental 191, 244, 249, 251 focus, selective 251, 253 governance 236–7, 250–2 Canada 248–50, 253 and ideology 254 and intelligence-led policing 237–44 rhetoric on 237 Russia 49 threat measurement 242–3 see also TOC Orwell, George, Politics and the English Language 192 outsiders, cultural 210 Packer, H. 233 paedophiles 51, 81, 191 network, France 82 PALMA project 52 ‘panopticon’, ‘synopticon’ distinction 196 see also ‘surveillance’ Pasquino, Pasquale 4 patrol officers 148 PCC (Police Co-operation Centre) 126, 132, 134 peacekeeping, and policing144 Peel, Robert 5, 41 PERF (Police Executive Research Forum) 33 Phillips Report (UK) 48 ‘philosophy of precaution’ xxiv pirates xvi, 152 Plato, Utopia vision 298 PNC (Police National Computer) 60, 121 POE (policy-oriented empiricism) 39, 53 limitations 54 police defence forces, connection 35fn4 etymology 3 meaning xv–xvi, 41 military connotations 14 oppression 298 postmodern, features 43–7 practice, and law 34 as social control agents 143 social service role 96 violence, São Paulo 44 police idea 299

origins 3–5 USA 5–7 Police Judiciaire, Bruges 88, 104, 106, 109, 110 police styles diplomats 65–6 enforcers 67 entrepreneurs 66 technocrats 65 police subculture 55–6, 130 coercive force 64, 127 and knowledge society, correlates 58–63 rivalries 267 styles of policing 64–7 police work as governmentality 101 as knowledge work 56–7, 61–2, 90–2 legal infrastructure 59–60 managerial regime 62–3 political regime 61–2 Schengen Agreement 62fn4 technological infrastructure 58–9, 98 PoliceSpeak Project see Linguanet policing xiv–xv accountability of 156 changing context 277–9 colonial xvi–xvii, 42 fashions in 180 France 43 G20 meeting (2010) 298 and governmentality 41, 42 interagency competition 76 marketization 45–7 meaning 3 militarization 208, 282, 294 and nation-state system 42–3 nodal theory 193–4 political 4 Reiner on 299 scope 4, 41–2 as service 46 styles 65–7 of territory, and population, distinction 143 transnationalization of 50–2, 53, 78, 81–2 typology 145, 193–4, 195 see also high policing; intelligence-led policing; private policing political crime doctrine of the conflict area 16, 172, 173, 174 and extradition 172–3

INDEX see also ‘terrorism’ political regime, police work 61–2 Pompidou Group 108 Popper, Karl 246 postmodern age, origins 39–40 postmodern state, and transnational policing 9–27 postmodernism and history 40 meaning 9–10 police, features 43–7 power, definition 299 private detectives, accountability 149–50 private policing 13, 47 growth 140, 141 private security guards, accountability 148 privatization xxiv, 201, 202 Project Sleipnir (RCMP) 32, 238–44 Delphi survey method 239 organized crime attributes 241–2 threat measurement 242–3 purpose 238–9 survey responses 240 protection racket, nation-state system as 179–80 PWGOT (Police Working Group on Terrorism) 17, 160 Radzinowicz, L., History of English Criminal Law 41 Rajchman, John 9 RAND workshop, intelligence theory 284–5 RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) 32 structure 76 see also Project Sleipnir Reagan, Ronald 16, 165 realism criminological 203–4 and criminology 203–4, 211 and IR theory 200, 202–3, 281, 284, 286, 293 Reiman, Jeffrey 254 Reiner, Robert 5, 10, 11, 41, 46, 184, 188 on policing 299 Politics of the Police 299 responsibilization strategy xxiv, 46, 53 Riesman, D. 56, 64 risk management xxiv, 53, 64 Roberts, William 36 Rock, Paul 39 Rorty, Richard 9

339

Ruggiero, V. 232–3 Russia, organized crime 49 São Paulo, police violence 44 SAPS (South African Police Service) 181 Sassen, Saskia xiv, xx Schengen Agreement interpretations 99 organization 18–19 police work 62fn4 and transnational policing 23 Schengen Information System (SIS) xx, 23, 51, 88, 100, 120 dataveillance 135 see also SIRENE Schober, Johan 43, 159 Scull, Andrew 140 Sea, Law of the 34 security screening, Canada 61 threats, new xviii see also insecurity security control society 274 context 279 security services accountability 147, 274 in law enforcement 35, 36–7 seigneurial states 212, 286, 288 Sennett, Richard 278 see also identity, self see also character, hollowing out of September 11 (2001) events and extradition 173 and money laundering 182 and ‘war on terror’ 178 ‘serial killers’ Belgium 81, 81–2 Canada 72–3, 75, 298 examples 72 and FBI 81 female 72fn2 as folk-devils 72, 82 and male control 71 numbers 74 signature patterns 75, 78 transnational aspect 82–3 UK 75, 76–7 use of space 79 see also ‘suitable enemy’

340

TRANSNATIONAL CRIME AND POLICING

Seward, Valerie 34 Shearing, Clifford 140, 156, 215 signature patterns, serial killers 75, 78 Simon, Jonathan 246 SIRENE (Supplementary Information System) 51, 88 Sklair, Lesley 212, 297 Skolnick, J.H. 55, 56 SLAs (service level agreements) 261 Sleipnir, Project see under RCMP Smandych, Russell 236 Smith, Adam 4, 41 Snider, Laureen 254 SOCA (Serious Organised Crime Agency) 195, 274 sociology, of deviance 204 South, Nigel 140 Spencer, Claire 298 Spitzer, Steven 140 Spuy, Elrena van der 181 Stehr, Nico 237 Stenning, Philip 140, 155, 157 ‘stop and search’ powers 134–5, 210 Storbeck, Jurgen and Europol 181 suitable enemy see folk-devils surveillance customs, and police agencies 131 panoptic 127, 274 of suspect populations 143 synoptic 274 surveillance technologies xxi, 127, 136, 274 applications 128 safeguards xxii see also CCTV; dataveillance surveillant assemblage 180, 196–7, 273, 283 suspect populations 58, 68, 82, 95, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 150, 180, 264 see also surveillance Sutcliffe, Peter (Yorkshire Ripper) 75 investigation 76–7 see also ‘serial killers’ ‘synopticon’, ‘panopticon’, distinction 196 Syria, unrest 298 technocrats, police officers 65 technological infrastructure legal infrastructure, tensions 60–1 police work 58–9, 98 see also information technology

technology transfer 78, 79, 80, 82, 129, 180, 181 territorial principle 132–3 see also national sovereignty ‘terrorism’ and Interpol 15–16, 173–4 transnational policing 160 see also ‘war on terror’ see also political crime Terrorism, Suppression of, European Convention 173 TEU (Treaty of European Union) 61 Thurlow, Richard 141 Tilly, Charles xviii, 177 on state formation 179 time-space convergence 48–9 TOC (transnational organized crime) 11–12, 49–50, 125, 126, 127 commodities 186 discourse language 191–2, 195 and global governance 178, 188 threat of 177–8 World Ministerial Conference, Naples 250–1 Toynbee, Arnold 39 transborder policing, English Channel, development phases 104–12 Transnational Crime, UN Convention Against 186 transnational criminality xix, 12 transnational law enforcement 35–8 agencies 36 legal instruments 52 transnational policing xiii accountability xxii, 35–6, 37–8, 185–7 Americanization xix and the Channel Tunnel 86–7, 118 ethnographic fieldwork xx–xxi and European politics 117–20 examples 92–7, 114–17 fragmentation 122 as global institution xiv, 297 growth xviii, 50–2, 160 and information technology xvii, 24, 58–9, 127–9, 297 intelligence-led xx–xxi, xxiii and law enforcement xviii–xix pessimism about 300 policing agencies 129–32 and the postmodern state 9–27 and public help 96

INDEX and Schengen Agreement 23 studies 14–15 terrorism 160 transnational state system, and accountability 158–9 transnationalization clandestine markets 48–50, 53, 94–5 of policing 50–2, 53, 78, 81–2 processes 277 TREVI system 16–17, 81, 118, 160 organization 17 secure network 23 Trilateral Commission 279 UK

UN

drug use 288–90 EEC entry 106 enclave communities 45fn11 intelligence-led policing 215–34 police agencies 130, 259 serial killers 75, 76–7 Special Branch 130, 169 ‘stop and search’ powers 134–5, 210 see also NIM

Congress on Prevention of Crime 250 Convention on Psychotropic Substances 108 Development Programme, Human Development Report 286 Fund for Drug Abuse Control 107–8 structure 162 United States v. Alvarez-Machain case 33, 36, 37 Urry, John 207 USA federal law enforcement agencies 6–7 police agencies 62, 77, 130 police idea 5–7 vigilante tradition 6, 42fn6 ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) 66, 74, 75

341

see also ‘serial killers’ ViCLAS (Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System) 66, 72, 73, 74, 79 see also ‘serial killers’ workshop, forces attending 80 vigilante tradition, USA 6, 42fn6 Vollmer, August 43, 57fn2 Wallerstein, Immanuel 200 ‘war on drugs’ xix, xx, 12, 108fn4 agencies 32 defence forces role 34–5, 37 law enforcement, scale of 38 see also drug smuggling ‘war on terror’ xix, 207 and September 11 (2001) events 178 see also terrorism Warner, Michael 284 Weber, Max 202, 256 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ 299 West, Fred & Rosemary 72 see also ‘serial killers’ Westphalian model, nation-state 200, 286 white-collar crime xix, 38, 143, 191, 244, 248, 249, 254, 271 Wilkins, Lesley 204 Willmer, M.A.P. 218–19, 257 Wilson, James Q. 203, 206 Winer, Jonathan and border protection 47–8 Wolfsberg Group 279 world view, black-and-white 190 Yorkshire Ripper see Sutcliffe, Peter see also ‘serial killers’ Young, Jock 206, 209 Zaccardelli, Giuliano 168 see also RCMP zero tolerance policing 151, 203, 288 Zuboff, Shoshana 22, 24, 25, 26, 75–6