Description,

Conceptualizatio

and Research Agen

research report

David H. Bayley and Clifford D. She

The New Structure of Polic
U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

810 Seventh Street N.W.

Washington, DC 20531

John Ashcroft

Attorney General

Office of Justice Programs National Institute of Justice

World Wide Web Site World Wide Web Site 

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij
The New Structure of Policing:

Description, Conceptualization, 

and Research Agenda

David H. Bayley and Clifford D. Shearing

July 2001

NCJ 187083
Eric Jefferis

Program Monitor

National Institute of Justice

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the

Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency

Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime.

Prepared for the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, under award number

98–IJ–CX–0017 to David Bayley, State University of New York at Albany, and Clifford Shearing,

University of Toronto. Points of view or opinions stated in this document are those of the authors and 

do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
iii

Acknowledgments

The research for this report was made possible by

the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department

of Justice, under grant number 98–IJ–CX–0017. We are

grateful for NIJ’s support and encouragement throughout this project. 

We were assisted by three diligent and hardworking

research assistants at the Centre of Criminology,

University of Toronto: Michael Kempa, Ryan

Carrier, and Janesse Leung. We are also grateful to

Rita Donelan, Centre of Criminology, and Arlene

deGonzague, Hindelang Criminal Justice Research

Center, State University of New York at Albany,

for their painstaking efforts in administering this

research program. 
v

Contents

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................................................iii

Executive Summary................................................................................................................................................vii

Chapter 1: Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................1

Chapter 2: Auspices..................................................................................................................................................5

Chapter 3: Providers...............................................................................................................................................13

Chapter 4: Mentalities............................................................................................................................................17

Chapter 5: Explanations.........................................................................................................................................21

Chapter 6: The Role of Government.....................................................................................................................29

Chapter 7: Research Agenda..................................................................................................................................35

Chapter 8: Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................................39

Bibliography............................................................................................................................................................41
vii

Accepting evidence from many sources that

policing is undergoing a historic restructuring,

this report describes the forms this restructuring is

taking, the reasons for it, and the issues that it raises

for governance, especially with respect to the issues

of justice, equality of protection, and quality of service. We believe that the current restructuring is

worldwide, although information for the report is

drawn more extensively from democratic countries,

both developed and developing. The report does not

undertake original research but, rather, explores how

the topic should be studied. The report concludes

with a discussion of the topics that most urgently

need to be studied if contemporary developments in

policing are to be understood and made responsive

to public policy. 

The major findings of the study are:

1. Policing is being reconstructed worldwide. Its

distinguishing features are (a) the separation of

those who authorize policing from those who do

it and (b) the transference of both functions

away from government.

2. The change in policing cannot be understood

in customary terms. It is often mischaracterized,

for example, as “privatization.” Because the distinction between public and private domains

becomes problematic in the new policing, the

more appropriate description for what is occurring is “multilateralization.”

3. To understand what is happening to policing,

it is essential to distinguish the way in which

policing is authorized from the way in which it

is provided. In other words, those who authorize

policing may differ from those who provide it. 

4. Policing is authorized currently under five auspices: economic interests, both legal and illegal;

residential communities; cultural communities;

individuals; and governments. 

5. Policing is provided by commercial companies,

nongovernmental authorizers of policing, individuals, and governments. 

6. Many nongovernmental providers now perform

the same tasks as the public police. 

7. Although public and private providers perform

the same tasks, they employ distinctive practices.

Specifically, governmental providers tend to prevent crime through punishing; nongovernmental

providers do so through exclusion and the regulation of access. 

8. In response to the restructuring of policing,

the role of the public police may be changing

significantly. In particular, its agenda is becoming increasingly that of government rather than

individuals; it is specializing in criminal investigation and undercover surveillance; its operations

are undertaken in groups; and it is increasingly

militarized in equipment and outlook.

9. The explanations for the current restructuring

of policing involve shortcomings of the public

police; increases in crime; the nature of economic systems; the character of government;

and the social structure, ideas, and culture. The

most popular explanations fall under the first

three categories.

10. These explanations are largely hypotheses. Very

little empirical research has been done to test or

confirm them.

Executive Summary
viii

Executive Summary

11. It is important for governments to continue to

safeguard justice, equity, and quality of service in

the current restructuring of policing. 

12. To safeguard the public interest in policing, governments must develop the capacity to regulate,

audit, and facilitate the restructuring of policing.

13. Research on the structure of policing has been

fragmentary and uneven. The extent and character of the changes in the structure of policing,

their impact on society, the role and responsibilities of government, and the causes of the

changes must be studied. 

14. Policing is being restructured through the development of new auspices and providers within

nations and by the transference of police functions to transnational and international agencies. In other words, policing is being challenged

by forces inside and outside contemporary

nation-states.
1

Introduction

Chapter 1

Policing is being transformed and restructured

in the modern world. This involves much more

than reforming the institution regarded as the police,

although that is occurring as well. The key to the

transformation is that policing, meaning the activity

of making societies safe, is no longer carried out

exclusively by governments. Indeed, it is an open

question as to whether governments are even the

primary providers. Gradually, almost imperceptibly,

policing has been “multilateralized”: a host of nongovernmental groups have assumed responsibility

for their own protection, and a host

of nongovernmental agencies have

undertaken to provide security

services. Policing has entered a

new era, an era characterized by a

transformation in the governance

of security.

Although a number of studies have

attempted to document in particular countries the rise of what is

loosely referred to as “private security,” the extent of the transformation of policing has yet to be

determined (Johnston 1999, 1994,

1992; Shearing and Stenning 1981,

1980; Nalla and Newman 1991; Cunningham and

Taylor 1985). We believe, however, that the following statements about the current restructuring are

true and amply justify our effort to understand what

is happening: 

1. In most countries, certainly in the democratic

world, private police outnumber public police. 

2. In these same countries, people spend more

time in their daily lives in places where visible

crime prevention and control are provided by

nongovernmental groups rather than by governmental police agencies. 

3. The reconstruction of policing is occurring 

worldwide despite differences in wealth and 

economic systems. 

Viewed historically, what is happening to policing

is not unprecedented. It could be argued that the

monopolization of policing by government is an aberration. It is only in the last 100 to 200 years that

policing has been effectively monopolized by government, and even that was not uniform across countries (Spitzer and

Scull 1977b; Shearing and Stenning

1981; Blair 1998). In Europe, for

example, France led the way in the

systematic nationalization of policing in the 17th century (Bayley

1975). Nationalization followed fitfully throughout the rest of continental Europe, concentrated largely

in towns and often deferring to the

private authority of the landowning

aristocracy. Prussia permitted the

landowning Junker aristocracy to

police their large estates up to the

unification of Germany in 1871. Russia, too, allowed

policing to be shared between government and the

landed gentry until the early 20th century. In England,

policing remained largely in private hands until well

into the 19th century. In the United States, where

policing was gradually governmentalized by cities

in the middle of the 19th century, private policing

never really died (Walker 1977; Monkkonen 1981).

The constituent States did not begin to develop

organized police forces until the early 20th century,

and the national government did not do so until a

decade or so later (Smith 1925). 

Is the current restructuring

of policing, then, simply a

return to the past, another

cycle in the historical ebb

and flow of policing power

between governmental and

nongovernmental agencies?

Yes and no.
Chapter 1: Introduction

2

Is the current restructuring of

policing, then, simply a return to

the past, another cycle in the historical ebb and flow of policing

power between governmental and

nongovernmental agencies? Yes

and no. Clearly governments

have shared, even conceded, the

power of policing to nongovernmental groups before (Bayley

1985a). Sometimes security has

been so precarious that government could scarcely be said to

exist at all in many parts of the

world. At the same time, the

restructuring that is taking place

today is taking a different form

than in the past because contemporary societies are organized

differently than previous ones.

Indeed, the concepts and terminology inherited from the past are

inadequate for understanding what is happening

today. For policymakers to comprehend, and possibly

deal effectively with, the current transformation in

policing, it will be necessary to examine contemporary developments with a fresh intellectual eye. 

Our knowledge of what is occurring is based largely

on studies from democratic countries. These, after

all, are where information about policing can be

most freely obtained. The character of government,

then, affects what is known about policing and, as

we shall discuss, probably the extent of restructuring

as well. Although we believe the restructuring is

worldwide, it remains for new research to document

its extent across the globe. We do know that the

change in policing is occurring across the divide of

economic development, with developing democracies participating along with developed ones.

When the term “policing” is used in this report,

it does not refer to all the means by which human

beings provide safety for themselves—policing is not

synonymous with social control.

Societies create order, and hopefully

thereby safety, through processes

of socialization and informal discipline. Everyone plays a role in these

processes—parents, siblings, peers,

friends, acquaintances, colleagues,

and a host of authority figures. This

report will not reinvent social control theory. Its focus is on intentional

attempts to regulate the distribution of

physical security produced by actual

or potential use of force.1 The report

deals with the governance of security in the modern world. Emphasis is

placed on physical security because

that is what people want foremost

from police, despite the fact that

technology has produced new forms

of insecurity in relation to information, nonreal property, and cyberprocesses.

The purpose of this report is threefold:

1. To review systematically what is known about

the contemporary restructuring of policing. 

2. To reflect about the meaning and significance of

what is occurring and to develop concepts and

terminology that do justice to the phenomenon. 

3. To specify a prioritized research agenda for

understanding the restructuring of policing and

for supporting the development of policy to deal

with it. 

This report is derivative—that is, based on what

others have found and documented. Our contribution is in outlining what is known, suggesting what

needs to be found, and showing how these matters

should be thought about. This is not the last word

on the restructuring of policing. It is an invitation to

others to join in studying one of the most momentous but, so far, understudied topics of our time. 

This report’s contribution is

in outlining what is known,

suggesting what needs to be

found, and showing how

these matters should be

thought about. This is not

the last word on the restructuring of policing. It is an

invitation to others to join in

studying one of the most

momentous but, so far,

understudied topics of

our time.
Chapter 1: Introduction

3

The report covers four topics. The first and longest

part describes the new forms that policing has taken

in the late 20th century (chapters 2, 3, and 4). In

so doing, a crucial distinction is made between the

auspices and the providers of policing. Auspices are

groups (and sometimes individuals) that explicitly and

self-consciously take upon themselves the responsibility for organizing their own protection (chapter 2).

Providers are the groups that actually do the policing

asked for (chapter 3). Sometimes auspices and providers coincide. A defining characteristic of the new

paradigm of policing, however, is that auspices and

providers may not be the same. In the old paradigm,

governments had responsibility for articulating security needs and for developing institutions to meet them.

Distinguishing between auspices and providers

allows an escape from the oversimplification of

describing policing as being either public or private.

Auspices may be either public (governmental) or

private (nongovernmental); so, too, may providers.

Furthermore, they may be combined in four ways—

public/public, public/private, private/public, and 

private/private. The current restructuring of policing

involves more, then, than privatization. It involves

the multilateralization of the sources of both demand

and supply of policing. As will be shown, distinguishing public from private auspices conceptually is

not easy. 

To describe what is happening today, it is important

to determine whether there are characteristic differences in the practices of the new policing. Do these

new combinations of auspices and providers carry out

policing in new and different ways compared with

the governmental, or public, police? We refer to these

as “the mentalities of policing” because they reflect

different practices in the way in which security is

provided (chapter 4). 

The second major topic of this report is a discussion

of the reasons that have produced the current restructuring of policing (chapter 5). Here, all the explanations for the current restructuring that have been

suggested by observers, scholars, and practitioners

are reviewed. 

In order to review what is happening to policing

and why, a team of librarians and research assistants

searched for all the written material that might conceivably touch on contemporary policing and domestic

security. The review was limited to materials written

in English. From this voluminous and diverse writing, the team compiled lists of all auspices, providers,

mentalities, and explanations that were mentioned. 

Chapter 6 raises a third topic; namely, the role that

government is playing and should be playing in the

formation of the new policing paradigm. Relatively

little has been written about this because the extent

of the transformation has not been recognized by

either intellectuals or policymakers. Reality has outrun efforts to understand what is happening or to

shape it to appropriate civic ends. 

Finally, building upon what was found to be known

about the restructuring of policing and the problems

of governance that are thereby generated, a research

agenda reflecting we believe to be the most important topics requiring study is presented (chapter 7).

Ways to go about this research also are suggested. 

In a short conclusion (chapter 8), we reflect upon

the meaning of what is occurring and the prospects

for policing in the future. 

Note

1. People familiar with writing about the police will

recognize that this is not a complete definition of

the police. It is an approximation, indicating what

people commonly expect of the police. For a discussion of the concept of “police” and one attempt at

a definition that can be applied comparatively both

historically and geographically, see Bayley’s Patterns

of Policing (1985a).
5

Auspices

Chapter 2

Until recently, governments assumed primary

responsibility for providing security. “Providing”

has a double meaning: Governments determined

what sort of security was needed and provided the

means to achieve it. Governments were the organizational auspices for formulating demand for policing,

and they were the providers who

supplied it. In the current restructuring of policing, these two functions

have become separate. Furthermore,

it has become acceptable for groups

other than governments both to

take control of their own policing

and to select the providers of it. In

short, the responsibility for authorizing policing and for providing it

instrumentally has been multilateralized and denationalized. 

This restructuring of policing is

often referred to as “privatization.”

This is an oversimplification, at

the heart of which is a significant

conceptual problem. The function

of policing—providing security

through physical constraint—is a quintessential function of government. Many theorists have followed

Max Weber’s lead in defining states, which have been

the most inclusive and powerful level of government

in history, in terms of the possession of a “monopoly

of force” (Weber 1968). In this formulation, government is recognized in part by the control of policing.

This implies that the capacity to authorize policing

indicates the existence of government. It would follow, then, that policing can never be privatized. But

this defies our common understanding. 

The contemporary restructuring of policing separates

both the authorization of security and the activity of

policing from what is recognized as formal government. In so doing, the distinction between “public”

and “private” itself becomes problematic. This confusion also afflicts judgments about the public/private character of policing before

the rise of states (Bayley 1985a).

The problem becomes even more

acute today when the auspices

and providers of policing become

mixed in terms of being public or

private, as shall be seen. For these

reasons, it is more accurate to

characterize what is happening as

multilateralization in the governance of security rather than the

privatization of policing.

In this chapter, we will examine

the sorts of people, for the most

part groups, that undertake to

authorize policing. They are called

the auspices of security, as opposed

to the providers of security, who

actually do the work of policing. This review shows

that control of policing today is exercised under five

auspices: (1) economic interests, (2) residential communities, (3) cultural communities, (4) individuals,

and (5) governments. Each category contains a variety of auspices (see table 1). 

Economic Interests

The most familiar subset of economic interests consists of businesses, which may act individually or

cooperatively to organize security. Businesses create

The contemporary restructuring of policing separates

both the authorization of

security and the activity of

policing from what is recognized as formal government.

In so doing, the distinction

between “public” and 

“private” itself becomes

problematic.
Chapter 2: Auspices

6

their own in-house security forces or hire others

to police for them (Shearing and Stenning 1981;

Johnston 1992). They also band together to protect

themselves on the basis of both geography and function. In the United States, the best example of the

former are business improvement districts (BIDs),

which tax members to support police patrols, trash

collection, or physical improvements to the environment (New York Times 1994; Greene, Seamon, and

Levy 1995; Murphy 1997). In New York City, BIDs

have been established for Times Square, Grand

Central Terminal, Bryant Park, 34th Street midtown, and other areas. Businesses that provide a

common service, such as banks, bars, and taxi companies, also collaborate to enhance mutual security.

These functional economic interests are less likely

than geographically based ones to hire and share

police. Instead, they work cooperatively to minimize

threats to their common enterprise by warning one

another about potential threats, sharing ideas about

improving security, and supporting one another in

time of need. 

Unfortunately, the economic interests active in constructing security are not always legal. In many parts

of the world, criminal enterprises, such as crime syndicates and juvenile gangs, play a significant role in

organizing security. They do so in their own interests, of course, and usually in direct opposition to

government. But in so doing they govern security

for the people among whom they live, becoming

in some places the only effective police that exist.

Such illegal but parallel security regimes that create

order benefiting others exist and have existed in

Mafia-dominated neighborhoods in New York City,

the favellas of Latin America, the barrios of Los

Angeles, and the major cities of Russia (Leeds 1996;

Shlapentokh 1995). Violent revolutionary groups, as

well, often try to establish parallel governments in

the geographical areas they dominate, serving both

as the local police and the military. 

Governments may be complicit in these parallel but

illegal security activities. The public police sometimes turn a blind eye to the illegal activities of

crime groups in exchange for information that helps

them solve crimes, especially if those crimes threaten

the government. The Royal Ulster Constabulary

(RUC), for example, depended upon warnings by

the Irish Republican Army (IRA) about impending

bombings to protect the general population. The

RUC, in turn, allowed the IRA to become the effective police for several Catholic “no-go” areas of

Belfast (Hillyard 1993). In some areas, the IRA

established “Provo Police Stations” to address community problems as well as to document abuses by

the RUC. Similarly, Japan’s organized crime—the

Yakuza—performs the useful function of enlisting

and disciplining unemployed and potentially delinquent young men (“chimpera”) who would otherwise

TABLE 1:

Nonstate Auspices of Security

Economic Interests

1. Legal: Businesses

• Singly

• Cooperatively

2. Illegal: Criminal gangs

Residential Communities

1. Gated communities: Horizontal and vertical

• By real estate company

• By cooperatives

2. Voluntary capitation

3. Local utilization of in-kind resources 

• By local initiative

• By government initiative

Cultural Communities

Individuals

Governments

1. Permitting

2. Encouraging

• By sponsoring

• By requiring

• By delegating

• By collaborating
Chapter 2: Auspices

7

gravitate toward predatory crime. Although the

Japanese police periodically crack down against the

Yakuza, there seems to be an informal understanding

that the rigor of enforcement will be influenced by

the Yakuza’s adherence to certain rules, specifically

whether they victimize the public directly (Bayley

1991; Szymkowak and Steinhoff 1995). Violence

among the Yakuza themselves is tolerable, provided

it is kept out of public view; violence against the

public is not. As a final example, the conduct of the

so-called “good Donos” (drug lords) of Brazil is often

tacitly tolerated by the public police because they

help to maintain order (Leeds 1996). Tolerance runs

out, however, when drug-trade violence is turned on

the public. 

Furthermore, corrupt governments may actively foster parallel but illegal security activities. In Russia,

for instance, members of the government have been

observed to provide and solicit illegitimate krysha

(roofs) of security for themselves and favored members of the private sector (Shlapentokh 1995). 

The general point is that criminal enterprises may be

“cut some slack” by governments provided they contribute to public safety in ways the public police cannot. They may even be actively courted by corrupt

state agencies in service to their own interests. 

Residential

Communities

Residential communities exist in many forms. First,

gated communities may be created where policing is

constructed either by realty companies or by the

homeowners themselves operating as a cooperative.

Our impression is that the former is more common

in private housing estates (horizontal gated communities), and the latter is more common in condominium apartments (vertical gated communities).

In gated communities, policing involves regulating

access, surveillance, and patrolling. Gated communities are especially popular in the United States,

where they have been the fastest growing segment

of the housing market (Egan 1995; Kennedy 1995;

Blakely and Snyder 1997; Garreau 1991; Jones and

Newburn 1999; Owens 1997). 

It is worth noting that creating gates for communities does not happen exclusively under private auspices. When the public police barricade streets to

create cul-de-sacs that impede driveby criminal

activity, as in Houston and Los Angeles in the

1980s, they are creating gated communities, and

often for the poor (Sparrow, Moore, and Kennedy

1990).

Second, residents of neighborhoods may agree to pay a

small per capita fee to support private security services.

This happened recently in parts of Glasgow, Scotland,

London, England, and Melbourne, Australia. Such a

practice demonstrates again the problem with describing security auspices as being either public or private.

The financial levies agreed to could be regarded as a

form of local government or as nongovernmental selfhelp. In cases like these, cooperative activity looks

very much like self-government.

Third, residential neighborhoods may form ad hoc

advisory councils to mobilize in-kind community

resources that address security needs (Blakely and

Snyder 1997; Baron 1998). Residents may undertake

to watch one another’s houses, alert police to suspicious strangers, patrol the streets at certain times of

the day, improve dangerous physical conditions,

mediate neighborhood disputes, and organize restorative justice conferences (Braithwaite 1989; Bayley

1994; Shearing 1995). Rachel Neild, writing about

Latin America, calls this the “informalization” of

security (1997). In the United States, the Federal

Government has given some communities grants to

support the security plans they have developed

(Sheppard 1998). Similar initiatives have been

undertaken in South Africa and Ireland (Shearing

1997; Independent Commission on Policing for

Northern Ireland 1999).

In traditional societies, whole villages may organize

to take responsibility for security, supplementing
Chapter 2: Auspices

8

what is regarded as inadequate protection by the

public police. As in developed settings, it is difficult

to know whether such activity should be regarded as

public or private. In India, for example, the government passed legislation authorizing villages to create

“village defense forces” and paying some of their

costs. In Tanzania the government sponsored vigilante groups (“sungusungu”) to protect cattle from

rustlers. In addition, various nongovernmental

groups have sponsored local

security initiatives facilitated by

microlending and technology

transfer (Cassani 1995; Conger

1997). Should these be regarded as

devolution to private auspices or

decentralization to local government auspices? On the other hand,

if villages take advantage of opportunities within the law to organize

their own self-defense, even

though not explicitly authorized to

do so, is this local government or

private policing? We submit that

this sort of argument can be avoided altogether by not using the

“public/private” terminology when

describing the current restructuring

of policing, except where such

application is unambiguous.

The concept of centralization/decentralization also

becomes difficult to apply in this context. The new

paradigm of policing represents more than decentralization within existing governmental institutions.

Governments are not just devolving power on subordinate levels of government—they are accepting

new bases of legitimate government. And they are

doing more than acquiescing; sometimes they are

actively promoting the sharing of responsibility for

policing with new institutions, as shall be seen. 

Cultural Communities

Cultural communities may be ascriptive groups

where membership is a matter of inheritance or

voluntary associations that people join by choice.

In either case, groups with which people identify

because of shared cultural beliefs and practices occasionally serve as auspices for the construction of

policing (Stenson 1999; Stenson and Factor 1994).

In the United States, for example, the Nation of

Islam, often called the Black Muslims, has organized

a group of young men known as the Fruit of Islam to

protect members and their businesses. The Rashtriya

Swayamsezak Sangh (RSS) in

India is a militant band primarily

consisting of young men whose

avowed purpose is the physical

defense of Hindus. 

Individuals

Individuals have always been auspices of policing in the sense that

they worry about security, think

about ways to minimize risk,

and act to enhance their personal

safety. Self-defense is accepted

everywhere as a human right,

although it may be regulated by the

state. Today people in many countries go to elaborate lengths to

protect themselves—residing in

protected communities, living in

houses designed for security, avoiding dangerous

areas, attending self-defense classes, buying security

equipment, and joining crime-prevention organizations. Most important for this analysis, they also hire

their own human protectors. It stands to reason that

private guards are most often hired by people of

wealth, although relatively poor people engaged in

unpopular or criminal enterprises hire bodyguards as

well. Our impression is that individual self-defense,

especially the hiring of private guards, is much more

common in less developed countries, where the

homes of well-to-do individuals are frequently surrounded by high walls topped with broken glass or

barbed wire. In Latin America, for example, wealthy

individuals have hired private police to protect

The new paradigm of

policing represents more than

decentralization within

existing governmental

institutions. Governments

are not just devolving power

on subordinate levels of

government; they are actively

promoting the sharing of

responsibility for policing

with new institutions.
Chapter 2: Auspices

9

themselves and their families from an epidemic of

kidnaping (Heine 1994). Owing to the turbulence of

political life, politicians in less developed countries

frequently employ private guards who are sometimes

used offensively against their opponents as well as

defensively. This is also true in Russia (Shlapentokh

1995). 

The State

During the past century, governments have been both the primary

auspices and the primary providers

of policing. Paradoxically, they

have also, in their role as authorizers of policing, contributed

substantially to the current multilateralization of policing, the very

phenomenon that is undermining

their monopoly. In recent years,

governments have facilitated, encouraged, and

required nongovernmental groups to become both

auspices for authorizing policing and providers of it.

They have done so in two ways—by creating permissive environments and by actively encouraging nonstate police activity. 

Passive encouragement has come primarily through

the creation of legal space into which nonstate

auspices could expand (Hauber et al. 1996). In the

United States, for example, businesses have defensively protected themselves against damaging civil

suits by improving the physical security of their

employees or customers (Benson 1998). The law also

allows owners of businesses to regulate the access of

people who violate rules of dress and behavior. This

legal environment, coupled with the expansion of

so-called mass private property—premises privately

owned but open to the public—has made possible,

even necessary, a new territorial division of labor

between public and private police (Shearing and

Stenning 1981). Finally, by requiring providers of

certain public services to be insured, government

has created a set of security monitors who can create

financial incentives for businesses to improve their

security performance. 

Governments may even enable people to share the

coercive power of the police. They do this when

they permit private persons to be armed in their own

defense, as in the United States.

Ironically, this not only undermines their monopoly on the use

of force but also encourages the

notion that public policing is

inadequate. 

But governments have not simply

acquiesced in allowing nongovernmental groups and individuals to

authorize. They have actively

encouraged them in several ways. 

First, governments have sponsored

the growth of private policing. The

best example is the community policing movement

of the 1980s and 1990s (Skogan and Hartnett 1997;

Skolnick and Bayley 1986, 1988; Greene and

Mastrofski 1988; Goldstein 1990; Trojanowicz n.d.;

Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux 1990; Stenson 1999;

Stenson and Factor 1994; Crawford 1995; Crawford

and Jones 1995; Sheppard 1998). Acting on the

insight that crime cannot be prevented or solved

without the active assistance of the public, police

departments have mobilized neighborhoods in their

own defense (Bayley 1994). Members of the public

collectively consider security needs, advise the police

about problems requiring attention, give information

to the police about suspicious persons, patrol neighborhoods on foot and in cars, fix up the physical

environment, mediate disputes and quarrels, install

security devices, force businesses that cause disorder

to move, and pressure fellow residents to adhere to

community norms of propriety. In the language of

the day, community policing seeks to “empower”

neighborhoods to share responsibility for policing

with the state (Crawford 1995; Crawford and Jones

1995; Sheppard 1998).

Governments have

contributed to the current

multilateralization of policing

by creating permissive

environments and actively

encouraging nonstate

police activity.
Chapter 2: Auspices

10

Some local governments have directly sponsored

commercial private policing. For example, several

municipalities in Montreal hired private police to

augment the patrols of the metropolitan police. By

1998, within the jurisdictions of 18 of Britain’s 43

police forces, local governments had hired private

security patrols (Blair 1998). 

Private security companies working for the state

should be distinguished from low-cost quasi-police

agents who work side by side with the public police.

In the Netherlands, for example, most towns now

have “City Guards” (Stadswacht) to patrol high-use

public areas. Similar agents known as Sicherheitswachen

have emerged in Germany, where

they perform surveillance functions,

including stopping people on the

street and requesting identity cards

(Nogalla and Sack 1998; Lacey and

Zedner 1998) In Britain, several

towns have hired long-term unemployed people as “City Stewards” or

“social caretakers” to patrol public

housing estates (Blair 1998). All of

these “policing” agents receive minimal training and pay. Their chief

function is to be visible and to alert

the public police to real or potential

dangers. 

Second, governments have enacted regulations

requiring private persons to act in ways that enhance

public safety. For example, they require banks to

transport cash in approved ways, hospitals to report

suspected child abuse, airlines to inspect hand baggage, gun owners to register, people in sensitive occupations to submit to background checks, sporting

events to be covered by private guards, construction

companies to manage traffic around building sites,

and ethnic groups to follow stipulated rules for

parades and fairs (Grabosky 1995). 

Third, governments have delegated activities previously carried out by the public police to private contractors. Police in many countries have outsourced

their housing and transport of prisoners, street

patrolling, guarding of public buildings, investigation of traffic accidents, electronic monitoring of

parolees, provision of security advice to businesses,

and conduct of crime-prevention workshops for atrisk populations (Johnston 1994). James Q. Wilson

suggested 30 years ago that because most calls to the

police for assistance involved noncriminal matters,

governments could save a great deal of money by

turning this responsibility over to private firms

(1968). Farfetched at the time, a great deal of public

policing has since become “commodified” in just the

way Wilson suggested (Wood 1999; Spitzer and Scull

1977a). According to Peter Manning, the largest

employer of private security in

the United States is the Federal

Government (Forst and Manning

forthcoming).

Fourth, governments invite firms to

collaborate with them in improving public policing. In Durban,

South Africa, the public police

share a communication channel

and computer with a private security company. The private firm often

responds first to criminal emergencies, preserving the scene until the

public police arrive. In the United

States, Australia, and Canada, private businesses have been solicited to purchase equipment such as automobiles for the police and to provide

offices, telephones, and furniture for neighborhood

police posts.

In this discussion of the role governments have

played in facilitating multilateralization, we are not

suggesting that governments have been the prime

movers. For the most part, they have been playing

“catchup.” The government’s monopoly on policing

has been eroded because it has not provided the sort

of effective consumer-responsive security that private auspices and suppliers have proved to be capable of giving. 

When it comes to policing,

what is governmental or not

governmental, public or

private, depends more on

legal status than on the

nature of the activity

undertaken or the size of the

entity undertaking it.
Chapter 2: Auspices

11

Conclusion

The United States is often criticized by those in

other countries for having an ungovernable police

system composed of more than 17,000 separate

police forces. Indeed, Bruce Smith, a famous authority on the American police, said that the United

States did not have a police system at all (1949).

This radically decentralized system produces for

Americans many of the benefits achieved elsewhere

through community policing because it represents

restructuring on the basis of neighborhoods.

Americans properly describe their system as decentralized because it occurs within a constitutional,

established system of government. But when the

same functions are authorized by unincorporated

neighborhoods or residential communities that are

no larger than the jurisdictions of many local governments, they are seen as being private. The point is

that when it comes to policing, what is governmental or not governmental, public or private, depends

more on legal status than on the nature of the activity undertaken or the size of the entity undertaking it. 
13

Providers

Chapter 3

Security companies such as Burns, Wackenhut,

and Pinkerton represent what most people think

of when they hear the phrase “private policing.” But

large commercial security companies are only the tip

of the iceberg of restructuring. They provide policing,

but they do not authorize it. And they are only one

sort of nonstate provider among several. In our survey, we found four major groups of policing providers

in the late 20th century world: (1) commercial security companies, (2) nongovernmental auspices acting

as their own providers, (3) individuals, and (4) governments (see table 2). Governments are included,

paradoxically, because they contribute police services

through the market to nonstate policing auspices.

Commercial Security

Companies

The archetypical private security company is one

that provides uniformed security personnel to guard

and patrol. They are particularly visible in malls,

banks, large stores, and sports stadiums—places that

are privately owned but to which the public has

access. They also protect private housing and businesses that are not open to the general public, such

as gated communities and factories. But commercial

companies provide many other sorts of security personnel as well, such as inquiry agents, personal bodyguards, security consultants, control room operators

for closed-circuit TV and police communications,

manufacturers and sellers of security equipment,

installers and repairers of security equipment, and

trainers in personal protection (Prenzler and Sarre

1998). All these functionally varied companies offer

themselves through the market, filling gaps in policing that governments cannot or will not fill. 

Nongovernmental

Auspices

Private groups as well as individuals may take security

into their own hands, as we have seen, supplementing

or supplanting the protection provided by governments. They may decide to provide protection themselves, becoming providers, or to hire commercial

firms. Many large businesses, for example, create

their own in-house police forces. So, too, do developers of some large housing estates. Guards for apartment buildings and condominiums may be employees

of outside firms or of the housing complex itself.

Neighborhoods provide policing to themselves when

residents join the Neighborhood Watch or serve in

foot patrols or mobile patrols (Johnston 1992). 

The Guardian Angels in the United States are an

interesting hybrid of the inside/outside provision of

policing. Composed primarily of young men from

minority communities, they provide visible patrol to

selected neighborhoods and businesses that request

TABLE 2:

Nonstate Providers of Policing

Commercial Security Companies

Nongovernmental Auspices 

(for example, industries, real estate developers,

apartment and condominium cooperatives, and

neighborhoods).

Individuals

Governments

• Moonlighting

• Fee for service
Chapter 3: Providers

14

their services. They are outsiders in service to local

auspices, sometimes working as volunteers, sometimes working for a fee. 

By protecting themselves, criminal organizations

sometimes protect others as well, as in the favellas

of Rio, the barrios of Colombia, the bustees of India,

and the immigrant neighborhoods of American

cities. In these cases, private auspices operating in

their own illegal interest create a

public good. 

Individuals

Individuals become providers of

policing when they undertake protective actions on others’ behalf,

for example, as volunteers in

neighborhood street patrols,

Special Constables in Britain,

police cadets and reserves in the

United States, and Police Explorer

Scouts. Individuals also take selfprotecting defensive actions, such

as purchasing firearms or taking

martial arts classes. Because we have defined policing as a collective action for collective benefit, 

self-defense activities do not qualify individuals as

providers of policing. Individuals may be both the

auspices and the providers of policing, not necessarily at the same time. 

Governments

One of the most curious developments of modern

policing is the public police acting as private suppliers

of protection. The assumption behind government

policing is that it is available to everyone equally on

the basis of citizenship. Increasingly, however, the

public police are offering their services through the

marketplace for profit. This takes two forms. 

First, some governments allow individual officers to

work off duty for private interests in their official

uniforms as visible police. In the United States this

represents the expansion of an older practice of

allowing police officers to “moonlight” as completely

private persons for private security companies (Reiss

1988; Bayley 1994). For American police officers,

the opportunity to work two jobs is a prized benefit

of police employment. 

Moonlighting may be highly organized. Some American police departments sign contracts with private

interests to provide uniformed offduty police. In Honduras, too, in

the late 1980s, the Public Security

Force (FUSEP) contracted with

businesses to provide security guards

(Kincaid and Gamarra 1995). 

Second, many police forces, especially in North America, now

charge for services they previously

provided free of charge, such as

responding to burglar alarms and

regulating traffic around construction sites. They do so on the argument that because these efforts

disproportionately benefit a commercial interest, the general public should not bear

the cost. The same is true for policing rock concerts,

sporting events, and special interest parades. 

In this way the profit motive has begun to affect the

allocation of public policing. Private interests have

tried to do this in less obvious ways for many years.

For example, fast-food restaurants and convenience

stores, especially if they operate around the clock,

sometimes provide food to police free of charge or at

concessional rates to encourage their patronage and,

hence, protection. More overtly, businesses may offer

in-kind support, such as equipment or buildings, to

the police in exchange for increased coverage. The

Alliance for Downtown New York, for example,

recently offered the police department $5 million to

set up a new police substation on Washington Street

if it would assign 40 police officers to patrol the area

south of Chambers Street (New York Times 1998).

Such practices have been an integral part of some

One of the most curious

developments of modern

policing is the public police

acting as private suppliers of

protection. Increasingly, the

public police are offering

their services through the

marketplace for profit.
Chapter 3: Providers

15

community policing programs, as police departments

have required local communities to provide office

space, furniture, and equipment in

order to obtain a neighborhood

(storefront) police station.

In all these examples, public policing is no longer being treated as a

public good, available equally to

all and paid for by general tax revenues. It has become a publicly

created service that can be sold as

a commodity through markets. 

None of this should be confused

with the civilianization of police,

where tasks formerly carried out

by sworn officers are performed

by civilian employees. Civilians,

who make up 30 percent of police

employees in Australia, Britain,

Canada, and the United States,

now direct traffic, investigate accidents, collect physical evidence,

and organize crime prevention

activities. Nonsworn people sometimes work in

policelike roles, often in uniforms that are very similar to those of sworn officers. 

Without close scrutiny, it has become difficult to tell

whether policing is being done by a government

using sworn personnel, by a government using a private security company, by a private security company

using civilian employees, by a private company using

public police, or by a government employing civilians. Even carrying firearms does not always distinguish public from nonpublic providers (Forst and

Manning forthcoming). Interestingly, a politician in

Australia recommended recently that the private

security guards already deployed by government on

trains should be armed so that they would not be

regarded as “Keystone Cops”

(Walker 1999). Guns, he thought,

were “an absolute . . . necessity to

cope with the job.” 

Today, a distinction between public and private policing is increasingly meaningless. The world

has come a long way since the

Hallcrest Report (Cunningham

and Taylor 1985) documented the

size of the private security industry.

Both public and private entities

have assumed responsibility for

authorizing policing; both public

and private entities provide policing to these auspices. Even government’s role is no longer exclusively

public. It authorizes policing,

encourages nongovernmental

groups to authorize policing, and

provides policing to specialized

consumers on a fee-for-service basis. Similarly, private providers are not exclusively private, since they

sometimes work under public auspices and are sometimes staffed by public police personnel. 

Policing today is not just being “privatized.” It is

being restructured though the development of new

groups as both instigators and providers of policing.

The public and the private are being combined in

new ways, ways that sometimes make it difficult to

separate public from private. Multilateralization,

although an awkward term, is a more accurate way of

describing what is happening to policing in the late

20th century than privatization. 

Without close scrutiny, it

has become difficult to tell

whether policing is being

done by a government using

sworn personnel, by a

government using a private

security company, by a

private security company

using civilian employees, by

a private company using

public police, or by a government employing civilians.
17

Mentalities

Chapter 4

The restructuring of policing under way in the

world today involves more than changes in the

types of people who are involved in it. The character

of policing—meaning its practices and activities—is

also changing. We call these elements the “mentalities” of policing because how policing is conducted

reflects distinctive ways of thinking about it. 

It is important to distinguish the tasks that police

undertake from the mentalities they adopt. While

different auspices may require different sorts of services from their

providers, the functions may be

performed differently by different

providers. The extent to which

this is so is an important topic for

future research. This research will

be complicated because auspices

and providers may independently

influence the way in which similar

tasks are performed. Furthermore,

because state and nonstate auspices

and providers may be combined

in different ways, the relations

between auspices/providers, on the one hand, and

the mentalities of policing, on the other hand, may

be very complex. 

With respect to the functions of policing, we agree

with Les Johnston that nonstate providers of security

now perform all the tasks once reserved to the public

police (Johnston 1992). They patrol, guard, investigate, respond to emergencies, monitor, collect intelligence, work undercover, constrain, ameliorate

crime-producing conditions, advise about crime prevention, and control disorder. The tasks of policing

are increasingly being shared between public and

private providers. 

Historically the two core tasks of public policing

have been patrolling and criminal investigation

(Bayley 1994). Although investigation has long been

a specialty of commercial security companies as well

as in-house security agencies, patrolling has not been

until recently. Today the employed and consuming

public are as likely to see private security personnel

guarding and patrolling in the course of a day as they

are to see public police. In addition to providing a

visible presence, private police necessarily respond

to emergencies and, when crimes

occur, preserve evidence and hold

suspects until the public police

arrive.

In Britain, street patrolling is

being performed today by the

public police, private security

privately employed, private security employed by municipalities,

unsworn but uniformed personnel

hired by municipalities, constabularies with jurisdiction in particular places such as parks or housing

estates, and community volunteers (Bayley 1994;

Johnston 1994). In many places, these varied forces

work side by side, sharing offices, radio frequencies,

information, and plans. 

Private providers have one major advantage over

the public police with respect to the tasks they perform—they can pick and choose. The public police,

on the other hand, must provide the full range of

police services, an obligation they find increasingly

burdensome and have begun to take steps to reduce. 

The insight that private policing exhibits a different

mentality from that of public policing was formulated

Today the employed and

consuming public are as

likely to see private security

personnel guarding and

patrolling in the course of a

day as they are to see

public police.
Chapter 4: Mentalities

18

originally by Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning

and has since been elaborated on by others (Shearing

and Stenning 1980; Farnell and Shearing 1977;

Shearing, Farnell, and Stenning 1980; Prenzler and

Sarre 1998; Forst and Manning forthcoming). The

consensus is that private policing

is more concerned with preventing

than punishing crime. Rather than

deterring crime through the threat

of detection, arrest, and punishment, private policing tries to regulate behavior and circumstances

to diminish the possibility that

crime will occur. In so doing, it

focuses less on people who are

behaving unreasonably and more

on reasonable people who will

comply with crime- and disorderreducing directives. By emphasizing the responsibilities of all,

private security tries to create an

environment of discipline and

order that limits opportunities for crime, reassures

law-abiding people, and constrains the deviant few. 

The mentality of private policing is similar to that

of self-help by individuals: conciliatory rather than

penal, emphasizing desistance rather than punishment, concerned with outcomes more than rules,

and speedy rather than measured (Black and

Baumgartner 1980). 

The metaphor for private policing’s distinctive mentality is gates. Private security regulates entry, limits

participation, and excludes on the basis of presumptive signs of bad behavior—membership (residence,

employment); dress (T-shirts, bare feet); and behavior (obscene language, skateboards, boom boxes). It

can do what the public police have recently come

under strong attack for doing—it can profile. It can

take premonitory action on the basis of social criteria that do not have to be justified in terms of law.

Unlike the public police, private police are not hampered in their regulatory actions by probable cause. 

The restructuring of policing results in the substitution of banishment for incarceration. Governments

can banish only by incarcerating, and that can be

done only on the basis of behavior adjudicated to be

illegal. Private agents can banish by regulation based

on presumptive signs of deviancy

and disorder.

Private security is primarily concerned with governing the future:

its objective is to prevent crime.

Public policing is concerned with

governing both the future and the

past: preventing crime and rendering justice with respect to past

crimes. Its favored strategy is

deterrence based on punishment

because punishment promises both

to prevent crime and to exact a

cost for misdeeds already done.

This explains why the mentality

of punishment is so popular with

the public as well. It is an all-purpose solution to

two important concerns. Restructuring has occurred

today in part because groups within the state, notably

businesses, realized that they would be better protected if they uncoupled security from justice, which

the public police cannot do. The new auspices and

providers of security are more interested in reducing

losses than in validating legal norms. Consequently,

they also rely less on deterrence and more on premonitory prevention. It may also be true that when

private police are called upon to do justice, they

act in a less punishment-oriented way. Shearing,

Stenning, and Braithwaite have all argued that private policing is more likely than public policing

to act according to principles of restorative justice

(Shearing and Stenning 1980; Braithwaite 1989). 

We are arguing that changing the governance of

security can affect the way in which justice is done.

The converse may also be true: the way in which

justice is done can affect the achievement of security

(Bayley 1999). Restorative justice conferences seek

The mentality of private

policing is similar to that of

self-help by individuals: conciliatory rather than penal,

emphasizing desistance

rather than punishment,

concerned with outcomes

more than rules, and speedy

rather than measured.
Chapter 4: Mentalities

19

to produce undertakings among all parties that

reduce the chances of reoffending. In the search for

justice locally understood and accepted, the conferences also engage in policing. The lesson is that

security and justice are intimately, linked but not

exclusively through punishment. 

Dichotomizing the mentalities of public and private

providers of policing is, of course, too simplistic. We

are not saying that all nongovernmental providers of

policing exhibit one mentality and all governmental

providers another. Our analysis is heuristic, describing the poles of a continuum along which the mentalities of policing can be arrayed. Private providers

of policing are not always “warm and fuzzy” but can

behave punitively, illegally, and brutally. Conversely,

governments are learning to incorporate some of the

mentalities of private policing. In the past 20 years,

public police agencies throughout the world have

consulted with communities about security needs,

adapted their tactics to local circumstances, encouraged neighborhoods to work cooperatively with

them, and proactively changed conditions that breed

danger, violence, and disorder (Bayley 1994; Skogan

and Hartnett 1997). Similarly, they have used the

civil law to pressure landlords and other guardians

of private space to control access, evict disruptive

persons, improve physical conditions, and monitor

behavior. Called third-party policing, these practices

conform to a compliance model of policing similar

to what private police do (Buerger and Mazerolle

1998; Reiss 1987).

The public police have also begun to adopt a familiar technological tactic of private police: they are

using closed-circuit television to monitor behavior

in public places. Electronic patrolling has moved

from banks, stores, and hotel lobbies to streets, parks,

and transportation hubs. Television cameras now

monitor traffic flow and can detect individual

violators of traffic regulations. By the mid-1990s in

Britain, 550 closed-circuit television surveillance

programs, involving more than 5,000 cameras, had

been approved by the Home Office (Blair 1998). 

It is worth remarking that the mentalities associated

with private policing may have been operating in one

sector of government policing for many years; namely,

the policing of military personnel. Military police

operate in a controlled environment with a population

subject to a host of disciplinary sanctions not available

to the public police. The study of military policing,

long neglected, may provide valuable insights into the

conditions required to institutionalize the mentalities

of private policing in public policing. 

Finally, public and private policing may be moving

toward a division of labor where the public police

increasingly specialize in investigations and counterforce operations while private police become

decentralized, full-service providers of visible crime

prevention. There are signs in Europe and America

that this is occurring. For all the heartening signs

that public police are adopting community-oriented

crime prevention strategies, there are counterindications that they are focusing more on threats to society

at large, such as drugs and terrorism, than on crimes

directed toward individuals; that law enforcement is

the tool of choice; that proactive undercover operations are gaining in importance; and that military

equipment and tactics are being used more often

(Kraska 1996; Kraska and Cubellis 1997). Private

policing, by contrast, specializes in risk reduction,

focuses on ordinary crime and disorder, stresses visibility and availability, seeks compliance rather than

punishment, and eschews confrontational tactics. If

this division of labor were to become structured by

class, as is likely, with public policing for the poor

and private policing for the rich, the consequences

for social justice, equality before the law, and political stability would be serious (Bayley and Shearing

1996). 

Whether we are right or wrong about this trend,

the point to underscore is that the connections

between who authorizes policing, who provides it,

and how it is done need to be studied. Not only may

they not be independent of one another, but their

distribution socially has enormous political implications for the future. 
21

Explanations

Chapter 5

After a prolonged period in which nation-states

gradually monopolized policing, why have

groups outside the state undertaken to develop it

on their own now? The research literature on policing and the evolution of government offers many

suggestions and some agreement on a few major

factors. We will describe these hypotheses and then

offer some comments of our own. 

Hypotheses 

The explanations suggested can be grouped into

seven major categories: government performance,

crime, economics, political character, social relations, ideas, and culture. These are discussed in

declining order of importance as reflected in the

literature reviewed.

Government Performance

The failure of government to provide adequate

police protection is the reason most commonly cited

for today’s restructuring of policing

(Sklansky 1999; Johnston 1992,

1999). This explanation seems

intuitively correct but not very

informative, because it would be

irrational for people to concertedly

construct new forms of policing

unless the existing system was

perceived to be inadequate. More

helpfully, five hypotheses have

been suggested about the particular ways in which the actions of government have

led to policing’s reconstruction. 

1. Faith in the public criminal justice system has

declined because it is perceived to be unable

to punish criminals successfully because of a

growing number of procedural rules (Braithwaite

and Pettit 1990; Lunney 1989). Consequently,

people doubt that it can be an effective deterrent to crime (Packer 1968). This has increased

the attractiveness of more locally focused prevention systems based on regulation, where

informal constraint is more important than formal law (Reiss 1984). The ability of the police

to intervene in community life through premonitory regulation has also been diminished in

many countries by the decriminalization of publicorder offenses, such as loitering, panhandling,

drinking in public, and lewdness. 

2. Governments have become much more cost conscious due to declining revenue and are therefore

more willing than in the past to share responsibility for crime control and other functions with

private auspices (Shearing and Stenning 1980).

For example, local governments in Britain and

the Netherlands have tried to reduce the cost

of policing by creating city watches and guards

(Blair 1998). The Chief Constable

of West Yorkshire even proposed

in 1994 to create his own security

force of Special Constables that

would compete with private security companies. In Australia, a committee on workforce reform in New

South Wales suggested that the

police hire “Career Constables” on

short-term contracts at low rates of

pay and minimal training to perform general patrolling and emergency response

(Anonymous 1998). 

Governments around the world have reduced

the functions their police are expected to perform (load shedding). In Britain, for example,

The failure of government

to provide adequate police

protection is the reason most

commonly cited for today’s

restructuring of policing.
Chapter 5: Explanations

22

there have been several major reviews of police

responsibilities during the last decade, all recommending a reduction (Home Office 1995;

Sheehy Committee 1993; Cassels Committee

1996). The Home Office Review of Police Core

and Ancillary Tasks (1995) recommended giving

up 26 functions.

Cost-consciousness also accounts for the rapid

pace of civilianization over the past few years

and for the hiring of private contractors (outsourcing) to perform tasks that were previously

police functions, such as prisoner transport and

radio dispatch. 

3. The development of the professional police

model in the 20th century narrowed the focus

of public policing, disconnected it from communities, and weakened its ability to reduce risk

and prevent crime (Kelling and Moore 1988;

Kelling and Coles 1996; Goldstein 1990). Order

maintenance gave way to crimefighting, meaning preoccupation with the investigation and

punishment of criminals; deterrence replaced

informal regulation (Kelling and Moore 1988;

Monkkonen 1981). The separation between

police and their communities was further intensified by the professionalization of social services,

notably social work, psychological counseling,

and family mediation. Police officers no longer

are engaged in community-based crime prevention; they became specialists in law enforcement. The movement to remake public policing

through community policing in the past 20 years

explicitly recognizes these defects in public

policing. 

4. The public police are increasingly perceived to

be corrupt, brutal, and unreliable, especially in

less developed countries. People would rather

take security into their own hands than trust

discredited government police. This perception

has grown in part as a result of the “democratization” of previously repressive governments

that followed the collapse of the Communist

bloc. Stories about official misconduct that were

once suppressed are now more freely publicized. 

5. Businesses, especially in North America, have

felt a growing need to decrease the financial risk

of being sued for failing to adequately protect

their employees or customers. Concerned about

legal liability, they created police forces that

would focus exclusively on reducing risk to

themselves (Sklansky 1999). 

Crime

Crime has risen sharply in the past 40 years and

with it the public’s fear of crime (Prenzler and Sarre

1998). This fear has been magnified by what are perceived to be new criminal threats in some countries,

such as kidnaping of businessmen and their families

in Latin America and international terrorism in the

United States. The world is in a “moral panic” about

crime (Johnston 1992; Caldeira 1996). This moral

panic may be part of the constellation of forces that

are leading to the very police restructuring that it is

helping to bring about.

First, with the growth of market capitalism around

the world, the media have become increasingly

commercialized and free of governmental control.

Knowing that crime sells, worldwide media conglomerates exaggerate the threat of crime by highlighting

the most sensational crimes wherever they occur

(Chermak 1995). 

Second, increasing competition in the policing market leads all providers, public and private, to exaggerate the danger from criminal activity. In this way

the restructuring of policing becomes self-reinforcing

after a certain threshold has been reached. 

Third, the more people are mobilized to protect

themselves, the greater their fear. Protective activity,

such as installing burglar and car alarms, heightens

rather than allays fear. In effect, supplying protection

increases the demand for it (Loader 1997a). 
Chapter 5: Explanations

23

For all these reasons, the public’s expectations about

what constitutes reasonable security have risen. But

people are also convinced that risk can be reduced.

They believe what providers tell them—crime can

be controlled, if only policing is done right, which

means by nongovernmental agencies. 

Economics

Three hypotheses have been put forward under this

heading.

Commercialized policing. Policing has become

increasingly “commodified,” a service to be bought

and sold, due to the expansion of free-enterprise

economic systems internationally (Sklansky 1999;

Kaplan 1998; Johnston 1999). It should be noted

that this hypothesis applies to only one sector of the

restructuring phenomenon; namely, commercial,

for-profit policing. Moreover, it is not clear why the

existence of markets creates the commercialization

of policing specifically. To be sure, without markets

there would be no commodification. But policing

has not always been as commodified as it currently

is, even in market economies. 

Mass private property. A particular form of property, namely, “mass private property,” that has expanded in the past half-century requires a different sort of

policing (Shearing and Stenning 1981). When private entrepreneurs expand facilities to which the

public has access, such as shopping malls, large retail

stores, cinemas, and sports complexes, the responsibility of owners to provide security grows, especially

in an environment of legal liability. In this setting it

is more important for policing to manage risk than

to assign blame. 

Drawing on the work of Spitzer and Scull, Shearing

and Stenning have generated a larger principle:

Nongovernmental policing expands regardless of the

nature of the economic system as the size of landholdings in private hands increases, whether it be

feudal manors, industrial towns, or mass-public

accommodations (Spitzer and Scull 1977b; Shearing

and Stenning 1981). Private policing grows as the

proportion of private landholdings accessible to the

public grows. It has been suggested that the mass private property hypothesis is especially relevant to the

North American context, where its growth has been

most extensive. Some think that this account is less

applicable to Britain and Western Europe where

there is a greater tradition of public ownership of

space (Jones and Newburn 1999). At the same time,

mass private property continues to expand in tandem with new forms of policing in many developed

countries, notably those of Latin America and South

Asia, suggesting that the explanatory power of the

mass private property hypothesis extends beyond the

North American context (Caldeira 1996; Nalla

1998). 

We will not pass judgment on the validity of this

explanatory account pending further empirical

research into the expansion of mass private property

globally. It may be that Britain and Western

Europe—where it has been suggested that the mass

private property principle may not hold—are the

aberrations in the broader global context. 

Economic development. Economic development

increases criminal opportunities with respect to

property crime, such as theft, robbery, and burglary,

because personal property becomes more valuable

as well as portable (Clarke 1997; Cohen and Felson

1979; Prenzler and Sarre 1998). Furthermore,

because economic development distributes these

goods more widely in the population, the consciousness of risk and the need for protection becomes

more generalized. 

Although we have not seen this argued as an explanation for restructuring, economic development is

also known to raise expectations, which may in turn

have the effect of intensifying dissatisfaction arising

out of inequalities of wealth and opportunity. As

people become less content with less, they may

become less willing to accept the rules of what they

perceive to be an unjust society. Thus economic
Chapter 5: Explanations

24

development increases both the quantity of goods

to be readily stolen and the number of potential

property criminals. 

Political Character

The expansion of democracy globally facilitates restructuring (Cerny 1995; Drainville 1995; McMichael 1996;

Slaughter 1997). Democratic governments can accommodate diverse centers of power, whereas authoritarian

regimes cannot. Democratization facilitates restructuring by providing political space into which it can grow.

As political pluralism increases, so too do the auspices

that want to share responsibility for policing. 

Social Relations

We found three hypotheses that explained the

restructuring of policing in terms of changes in

large-scale features of social organization.

Social complexity. As societies

become more complex, so too do

the security needs of their people.

Complexity refers to increased

specialization in the roles people

play as well as the spatial dispersion of these roles (Durkheim

1973; Elias and Boulding 1996;

Jervis 1997). Social complexity

also multiplies the number of

interest-based communities, which

then become potential auspices

for constructing security on behalf

of their members. Furthermore, if

social complexity, especially the

separation of work from residence,

decreases the willingness of people

to exert informal social control,

what Cohen and Felson refer to as

“guardianship,” then crime and disorder increase as

well, outpacing the capacities of the public police

(Cohen and Felson 1979; Jacobs 1962). It would be

natural in these circumstances for people to use the

interest communities they inhabit to provide security. 

Modernization. Modernization of societies leads to

a decline in the authority of primary social groups

such as families, residential communities, and occupations (Nisbet 1969, 1975; Tonnies 1957; Wirth

1938). This leads to rising crime and disorder

(Caldeira 1996; Rodriguez and Winchester 1996). If

governments are unable to meet public expectations

about protection, people will look for other auspices

to take responsibility. In capitalist societies, markets

provide one solution by commodifying security.

People buy what they need when they can afford to

do so. Commodified security replaces what Louis

Wirth called the “little platoons” of traditional social

control (Wirth 1938).

Social heterogeneity. Social heterogeneity within

nation-states leads to the restructuring of policing

when constituent groups, both economic and ascriptive, lose faith in the willingness or ability of government to protect them. This development is

almost inevitable if people believe

that they have been denied rights,

among them adequate physical protection, because of their communal

affiliation. The restructuring of

policing on the basis of identity

can be benign, enhancing safety

where it was problematic, but it is

inherently dangerous. Visible acts

of communal self-protection often

polarize social relations. Political

compromise becomes increasingly

difficult, the ability of government

to perform declines, and people

take policing into their own hands

for what they feel are righteous 

reasons. 

In a less dramatic way, restructuring

may also increase when democratic countries valorize minority norms and practices out of respect for

“diversity.” To protect cultural heritages, groups may

claim from nation-states the ability to determine

what is enforceable as right and wrong. On one

If governments are unable to

meet public expectations

about protection, people

will look for other auspices

to take responsibility. In

capitalist societies, markets

provide one solution by commodifying security. People

buy what they need when

they can afford to do so.
Chapter 5: Explanations

25

hand, they may disagree with the majoritarian moral

consensus about, for example, matters of dress or preventive medicine. In this case, they want government policing to be looser. On the other hand, they

may define security more narrowly than government,

wanting it to embody communal morality, for example, about contact between the sexes. They may feel

that the criminal law is too permissive; they want

policing to be tighter but under their control. 

Whether based upon interest or identity, communities are simultaneously sources of social cohesion and

fragmentation, of discipline and disruption. The way

in which security is organized is both a reflection of

the structure of societies and a determinant of it. 

Ideas 

Ideas about government and crime have been cited

as contributors to restructuring because circumstances alone do not determine the nature of policing. How people think about things constrains what

can be done.

Markets as a cost-effective alternative. During the

1980s, the idea became popular, especially in developed democracies, that governments were inherently

less efficient than private auspices in providing services. In particular, markets were accepted by many

people as a cost-effective alternative to government.

As a result, public policing’s loss of market share

was viewed not as a threat to public safety but as a

sensible response to proven inadequacy. Intellectual

support for the marketizing of policing came from

several sources. The influential economist Frederick

Hayek argued that government bureaucracies, especially national ones, were less efficient than markets

because they could not take advantage of local

knowledge (Hayek 1989). Macrosocial policies of

earlier periods, such as the New Deal, were criticized

as being too generic and therefore unable to adapt to

variations in circumstances across countries. Social

problems were best solved by individuals working

together in small arenas (Murray 1988; Osborne

and Gaebler 1993). Local knowledge was essential

because governing should be done, in Burchell’s fine

phrase, “in accordance with the grain of things”

(Burchell 199l).

The communitarian movement also provided an

idea that encouraged the restructuring of policing.

Communitarians argued, as conservatives did, that

government was too remote and impersonal to meet

the needs of diverse communities (Etzioni 1983,

1993, 1996). Their solution, however, did not

involve economic markets. Instead, they urged government to formally devolve responsibilities upon

neighborhoods and communities so that its activities

could be more closely supervised and directed by

clients and stakeholders. Government would become

more effective not by transcending government, but

by allowing local communities to assume more

responsibility for their own well-being. 

In sum, powerful intellectual voices, both conservative and liberal, have called for the devolution of

government services to new auspices—markets in

one case, local communities in the other. Policing is

one of several functions to which these analyses can

be applied. 

Recognizing the changed political climate, the public police responded with well-publicized schemes

to demonstrate that they too were responsive to

local communities and giving “value for money.”

Community partnerships became very popular, as did

community policing. “Accountability” and “effectiveness” were watchwords, exemplified by performance

audits in Australia, citizens’ charters in Britain, and

COMPSTAT in the United States. 

Local knowledge. Independently of both Hayekians

and communitarians, criminologists and police

reformers discovered during the 1970s and 1980s

that local knowledge was a neglected resource in

policing. It was needed to specify and prioritize

security needs (Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux 1990;

Goldstein 1990), to diagnose problems (Goldstein

1990), to implement remedies (Bayley 1994; Goldstein

1990), and to render justice in acceptable terms

(Braithwaite 1989). Localizing policing is the basis
Chapter 5: Explanations

26

of community- and problem-oriented policing as

well as of restorative justice. They are arguably the

most important, certainly the most coherent, reform

philosophies to be developed in policing during the

past half-century. 

Culture

Whether societies are individualistic or communitarian in culture may affect the way they provide

policing (Bayley 1985b). Although both sorts of

cultures may restructure policing,

the form that it takes will differ.

Individualistic societies are more

likely to restructure through commercial markets, communitarian

societies through communitybased mobilization (Bayley 1999). 

Discussion

Reflecting on the range of explanations that have been put forward to explain the current

restructuring of policing, it is

apparent that there has been more

conjecture than science in these

offerings. Reasoning has generally

been a priori, although often

grounded in sound descriptions

of trends. But the connections

between these trends and policing

have been assumed rather than

demonstrated. 

We offer three observations about

the processes that have brought

about the current reconstruction

of security. 

First, it appears to be unlikely that a single explanation for the phenomenon will be found. At the same

time, because restructuring seems to be global, there

may be a small number of generic factors contributing to it throughout the world. Three that may be

playing a role almost everywhere are (1) fear of

crime, (2) marketization of economies, and (3) the

passing of a critical threshold in the creation of commercial multinational security companies. The first

two points have already been discussed. With respect

to the third, we are suggesting that after the commercial security industry reaches a certain size, it

creates continuing demand for policing through

enhancement of fear, emulation among consumers,

and presumptive protection against liability. 

Second, the reconstruction of

policing may occur as the result of

small changes in many different

social arenas. Borrowing from

Kuhn and Gould, the restructuring

of policing may represent a paradigmatic shift in social organization

that is not connected to any single

factor (Kuhn 1962; Gould 1996).

Small and essentially fortuitous

changes in many places may have

produced a qualitative “phase”

change in policing that could not

have been predicted from changes

in any one of them. In complicated

processes of social change, the

whole may be greater than the sum

of its parts. 

Third, multilateralization evolves

along different paths using different

institutions and displays different

mentalities depending on the relative power of governments, groups,

and individuals. Countries will

vary in the trajectories they follow

to restructuring. In the Western

democracies, national governments

monopolized policing during the 18th, 19th, and

20th centuries at the expense of subordinate groups.

Policing was nationalized, increasingly constructed

from the top down. In the 20th century, these same

democratic governments made policing available

The restructuring of policing

may represent a paradigmatic

shift in social organization

that is not connected to any

single factor. Small and

essentially fortuitous changes

in many places may have

produced a qualitative

“phase” change in policing

that could not have been

predicted from changes in

any one of them. In complicated processes of social

change, the whole may be

greater than the sum 

of its parts.
Chapter 5: Explanations

27

to individuals through the creation of emergencyresponse systems. Indeed, legitimate self-help was

limited to calling 911 or its equivalent. In this way,

democratic governments made the public police

serve the interests of disaggregate individuals. Later

in the century, however, democratic governments

became concerned that the police were not as effective in controlling crime as the public wanted.

Acting on the insight that local knowledge and

resources were essential to effective crime control,

the police encouraged residential and interest groups

to share policing responsibility with them. This

was community policing, and it devolved policing

authority from the government to nongovernmental

groups. At the same time, nongovernmental groups

themselves in many countries took advantage of

market opportunities to hire their own police.

This evolutionary trajectory produced policing that

responded to collective needs represented by nongovernmental groups and mediated through either

markets or voluntary organizations. In communitarian countries such as Japan, however, policing has

always relied more upon nongovernmental structures, such as families, neighborhoods, and workplaces, to assist the government in maintaining

social order (Bayley 1991). At the end of the 20th

century, therefore, they had less need to commercialize policing than Western countries, although

nonstate groups were free to use markets if they

chose to do so.

In authoritarian countries, policing is controlled by

government and its primary objective is always the

protection of the regime. Authoritarian states try

hard to maintain their monopoly on policing and

discourage groups from acting as either auspices or

providers of policing. They too, however, recognize

that effective crime control requires assistance from

the public. They obtain it through mobilizing groups,

just as democratic governments do, but not by allowing them to participate in markets. They mobilize

local knowledge and resources through coopting

direction. This trajectory produces the pretense of

multilateralization and a style of policing that is preoccupied with threats to governments rather than

to individuals. 

Although we believe that policing is being restructured around the world, the extent and form of the

restructuring depend on local history and circumstances, in particular on the trajectory by which

policing is already developing. Locality matters,

even to generic trends such as restructuring.
29

The Role of Government

Chapter 6

The contemporary transformation of policing is

like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—without anyone paying attention, “it just growed” (Stowe 1852).

But Topsy is no longer a beguiling adolescent; she has

become a giant that many find menacing (Forst and

Manning forthcoming; Loader 1997b; Grabosky 1996;

Johnston 1992). Peter Manning, for example, says:

[T]he essence of the economic/free market

paradigm, or extracting fees and profit from

human misery and commodified needs, is

inconsistent with the police mandate, the

nature of collective goods and their distribution, and in some sense the moral bases of

collective solidarity and trust that as yet bind

us. (Forst and Manning forthcoming)

Echoing our concern with a growing dualistic division of labor between the public and private sectors,

Rod Morgan observes:

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 anarchic emergence of unregulated self-help

and private “police” or “security” services in the

hands of sectional local interests. (Morgan 1994)

Among people who have noticed that policing is

being changed dramatically, questions are being

asked about whether the change is good or bad.

And if it is bad, what should be done about it? For

example, should government supervise what is occurring? Should nongovernmental police agencies be

made publicly accountable in the way that public

police agencies are? Can government regulate nongovernmental policing without stifling its creativity

and efficiency? Can government regulate nongovernmental policing in the public interest when its own

bureaucracies have a vested interest in preserving

their monopoly? Should government encourage the

restructuring of policing, especially for populations

underserved by existing security arrangements? Can

it do so constructively without losing the very benefits that restructuring promises? In short, what is the

role of government in a restructuring of policing that

is changing the governance of security?

Not surprisingly, this report does not try to answer

these questions. Too little is known at this time

about restructuring itself, and still less is known

about the effect of alternative regulatory regimes

upon it. There are many opinions about the role of

government, but they tend, with a few exceptions,

to be general and philosophical rather than pointed

and programmatic. 

What the report can do, however, is explore the

kinds of public interests that governments should be

concerned about as the transformation continues.

Although we are unsure about the balance that

should ultimately be struck between governmental

and nongovernmental policing, especially because of

the hybrid nature of contemporary policing, we will

suggest functions that government should retain

with respect to policing.

The Public Interests

of Policing

Three public interests must continue to be served as

the governance of security is transformed: justice,

equality of protection, and quality of service. 
Chapter 6: The Role of Government

30

Justice

As with the public police, nongovernmental

providers may violate the law and behave in illegal

ways. For example, private security personnel have

denied access on the basis of race, engaged in industrial espionage, and forcibly broken the picket lines of striking

workers. They have harassed

homeless people in an effort to

“clean up” neighborhoods and

used excessive force in maintaining order in bars and sports venues. They have violated the

privacy of individuals by obtaining

and acting on privileged information obtained from the police.

Moreover, it is not just commercial security agents that engage in

such practices. Community-based

providers of policing have discriminated against residents or overreached legally (Owens 1997;

Ross, Smith, and Pritt 1996;

Smith et al. 1997). One must

never forget that the substitution

of policing by states for policing

by communities was an important

factor in the liberation of workers,

women, and minority groups from

local, often customary, tyrannies. 

The leverage that governments

have over such behavior varies from country to

country. Some countries protect human rights with

laws; others do not. Some countries value human

rights so highly they write them into constitutions

and other fundamental laws, creating judicially

enforceable standards to which all actions of government must conform. This is true, for example, in the

United States where nongovernmental police are

viewed as private persons under contract to perform

a particular service. As such, they may be held

accountable for wrongful acts under criminal, civil,

and contract law. They enjoy none of the immunities allowed the public police (Sklansky 1999). 

Equality of Protection 

No service of government is more fundamental than

protecting people’s bodies and possessions. Indeed, the relationship

between personal security and government is tautological: if people

are not provided with protection at

some minimal level, government is

not considered to exist. Anarchy is

the absence of enforced public safety. Public safety in democracies is

considered a public good—an obligation of government to all. 

Restructuring policing through

markets distorts the distribution of

security in favor of those who can

afford it; restructuring policing

through voluntary mobilization distorts it in favor of those who are

creative and committed enough to

organize it in kind. The former

runs the risk of creating a dualistic

system of policing where the poor

are protected by the public police

operating with a deterrent, lawenforcement mentality and the

rich are protected by private police

using a more consumer-responsive,

regulatory mentality (Bayley and Shearing 1996;

Braithwaite forthcoming). 

According to Sam Walker, this is not a new problem

for the United States—the rich have always been

protected better and less punitively than the poor

(Walker 1975). In the past several decades, various

levels of American government have sponsored

voluntary neighborhood policing precisely to make

policing more effective and more acceptable to insecure inner-city populations. As Patrick V. Murphy,

former Commissioner of Police of New York City,

If the distribution of policing

coincides with structural

divisions of race and class,

the legitimacy of government

itself may be jeopardized.

People may be encouraged

not only to take the law into

their own hands for their

private protection but also to

defy law associated with

unresponsive government.

Societies that fail to pay

attention to the distribution

of security are playing with

dynamite blindfolded.
Chapter 6: The Role of Government

31

has observed, “Community policing is private policing for the poor” (private communication).

If the distribution of policing coincides with structural divisions of race and class, the legitimacy of

government itself may be jeopardized. People may

be encouraged not only to take the law into their

own hands for their private protection but also to

defy law associated with unresponsive government.

Societies that fail to pay attention to the distribution

of security are playing with dynamite blindfolded. 

With the growth of market-based policing, there is

always the danger that affluent people will become

less willing to support public policing on the argument that they are paying twice for the same service.

Robert Reich refers to this as the “secession of the

successful,” which is already occurring in the field of

public education (Herrnstein and Murray 1994). 

Assuming that multilateralization skews the distribution of security, what can be done about it and by

whom? Even in countries where safety is regarded as

a fundamental right, it may not be enforceable in

law. In the United States, for example, the courts

have determined that minimal levels of security are

not guaranteed under the Constitution (Sklansky

1999). Nor is government liable for civil damages if

it neglects to provide adequate protection, except in

a few limited circumstances (Sklansky 1999).1

The danger arising out of an unequal distribution of

public security has been considered so serious and

so imminent that one British chief constable has

proposed that all police providers should be made

“police compliant,” meaning that their services

should be supervised and coordinated by the public

police (Blair 1998). Policing should remain a public

good whose distribution cannot be distorted by commodification. The public police, he argues, “should

put itself forward, first, as the central point for

interagency cooperation designed to strengthen

communities and, secondly, as the center point of a

coordinated system of patrol services, carried out by

a mixture of police, volunteer, local authority and

private sources” (Blair 1998). In other words, government may share policing, but it should not share

the responsibility for it. 

The rationale of devolving the practice of policing

to multiple auspices and providers while maintaining

ultimate responsibility for the equitable distribution

of its benefits—safety and security—underlies the

recent proposals for the renewal of policing in

Northern Ireland (Independent Commission on

Policing for Northern Ireland 1999). Specifically, the

proposals call for the creation of a Policing Board

that is responsible for regulating the activity of all

the agencies involved in the multilateral process of

governing security and not simply the activities of

the public police. 

A question of national sovereignty also arises in

connection with the restructuring of policing.

Because commercial security is sometimes provided

by multinational corporations, the distribution of

security within countries is shaped partially by decisions made abroad (Shearing and Stenning 1981).

In some countries, it can fairly be argued that foreigners working for large multinational corporations

are better protected than locals. It is one thing for

government to cede policing control to domestic

nongovernmental auspices and quite another to

cede it to offshore interests. 

Quality of Service

Nongovernmental police agencies may fail to provide

the service promised. With commercial providers,

competition in the marketplace should be the corrective. But this does not always happen. Caveat emptor

is an empty admonition if information is not available to consumers about the relative quality of the

service they are receiving. Voluntary neighborhoodbased security programs, too, may not work as expected, serving instead the interests of a self-perpetuating

few (Crawford 1995). 

Nongovernment police, like public police, also engage

in questionable, even reckless, practices. For example,
Chapter 6: The Role of Government

32

Braithwaite and Grabosky 1986). Regulation may

be done, for example, through command regulation

with nondiscretionary punishment, command regulation with discretionary punishment, enforced selfregulation, and voluntary self-regulation (Ayres and

Braithwaite 1992). One size does not fit all regulatory problems, and both regulatory efficacy and regulatory costs vary with the choices made. 

Auditing

If the public interests of justice, equality of protection, and quality of service are to be safeguarded,

government must audit what security agencies provide and monitor

what is going on in a systematic

way. Government must use this

information to evaluate the distribution of security provided by

various combinations of providers.

This requires the development of a

capacity that governments currently do not have, namely the capacity to evaluate the relative quality

of police protection throughout its

territory and across social classes

and divisions. The intellectual as

well as the administrative problems

in doing this are daunting and require the collaborative effort of social scientists, lawyers, and specialists

in public administration.

Facilitation

Providing equitable security imposes an additional

and very difficult obligation upon governments.

They must learn to mix and match policing services,

which means they must learn how to facilitate the

growth of different kinds of policing. As Peter

Grabosky has said:

Whether it is the public or private sector

which carries law enforcement has become a

misplaced question. One must now inquire

what institutional form, or what blend of

a private security firm in Australia offered a sophisticated course in installing burglar alarms that was

taken by known armed robbers wanting to learn

how to bypass electronic systems (Anonymous

1998). Private police have endangered the public

in shootouts with would-be kidnapers and hijackers.

They have been widely criticized for inadequately

training personnel; supervision may also be lax. Some

American companies have hired illegal aliens; others

have failed to discipline employees who drink on

duty (New York Times 1995). Finally, security companies may misrepresent their services, delivering

much less than promised.

The point to this enumeration of

public interests that endure in the

new policing—justice, equality of

protection, and quality of service—

is that multilateralization affects

not only the governance of security; it also affects the security of

governance. Unless these interests

are protected, the legitimacy of

government itself may be affected.

Security is both a subject of governance and a requisite for it. The

public interest in policing endures

despite restructuring. The important question is: How can it be safeguarded? 

Discussion

From our survey of writing about accountability, we

conclude that the public interest in policing can be

protected if government retains three functions—

regulating, auditing, and facilitating. 

Regulation

Regulation comes in many forms. It involves more

than enacting rules and punishing people for failing

to abide by them. John Braithwaite and his colleagues have given a nuanced discussion of regulatory modalities (Ayers and Braithwaite 1992;

If the public interests of justice,

equality of protection, and

quality of service are to be

safeguarded, government

must audit what security

agencies provide and monitor

what is going on in a

systematic way.
Chapter 6: The Role of Government

33

institutional forms, is best suited to a given task.

The design and guidance of hybrid law enforcement systems is an essential task of government

in the next century. (Grabosky 1996) 

Governments have many instruments for mixing and matching

forms of policing: subsidies, entitlements and incentives (such as

tax rebates), mandated coordination, cooperative support, contracting out, delegation, and

abdication of responsibility

(Grabosky 1996; Bayley 1999;

Prenzler and Sarre 1998). We need

to know more about the costs and

benefits of these mechanisms.

Governments seem generous and

responsive, for instance, when

they talk about forming “partnerships” with nonstate police auspices and providers, but their

assistance may be more stultifying

than encouraging. Partnerships

can be a clever way of staying in

charge (Johnston 1999; Crawford

1995; Cruikshank 1999; Lacey and

Zedner 1998; Fu 1993; Hou and Sheu 1994). For

governments to become effective at diversifying

policing appropriately, police policymakers need to

study the record of government facilitation in other

arenas, such as education, irrigation, communications, and electrical power (Ostrom 1990).

Conclusion

Given the fragmentary nature of current knowledge

about the restructuring of policing, we cannot approve

or disapprove of it in principle. Its advantages and

disadvantages depend on social

conditions, combinations of auspices and providers, the nature of

criminal threats, and the feasibility

of alternatives. We discount,

therefore, the apocalyptic visions

of restructuring, although we

acknowledge the dangers to freedom in any form of policing.

Vigilance will be the price of liberty, as Thomas Jefferson said, in the

future as in the past. For this reason we also discount the view that

restructuring will generate new

forms of accountability on its own.

It may, but governments as we

know them are the only institutions that have the authority and

capacity to make this determination and take corrective action

as required.

Note

1. The courts have denied tort liability on three

grounds: (1) they do not have the ability to make

judgments about the adequacy of protection; (2) the

law provides no justiciable standards; and (3) adequate redress exists through the political system

(Sklansky 1999).

Given the fragmentary

nature of current knowledge

about the restructuring of

policing, we cannot approve

or disapprove of it in principle. Its advantages and disadvantages depend on social

conditions, combinations of

auspices and providers, the

nature of criminal threats,

and the feasibility of

alternatives.
35

Research Agenda

Chapter 7

The current transformation of policing has not

yet attracted the sustained scholarly attention it

deserves. Although researchers have nibbled around

the edges of the topic, the extent, nature, and

impact of police restructuring have yet to be determined. Based upon our survey of published research

and thought and our understanding of what is happening, we have constructed the following research

agenda. These are the questions, grouped into four

categories, that most urgently require study: 

1. Foundational description: What is happening

to policing? 

2. Social impact: What effect is restructuring

having on justice, equality of protection, and

quality of service? 

3. Government policy: What is government doing

and with what effect? 

4. Causation: What factors are shaping the reconstruction of policing and government’s relation

to it? 

Foundational

Description

1. Who is constructing and delivering policing

in the modern world? Answering this requires

more than counting public and private cops. It

requires determining the people responsible for

public safety (the auspices of policing). Because

security regimes vary across time and space, the

research needs to be conducted comparatively,

which requires that researchers employ a common format for describing what is happening. 

Two approaches might be taken in answering this

question. First, people in different places could be

asked to identify the entity they expect to provide protection. Who are the frontline providers

of policing locally, and who is responsible for

them? Second, maps could be constructed showing the amount of time a cross-section of people

inhabit various locations in the course of a normal day/week/month and what the security auspices and providers are in each.

2. How many nongovernmental providers of policing, both voluntary and commercial, are there,

what do they do, how much do they cost, and

whom do they serve?

3. How have the public police adapted to restructuring? Are the nature and scope of public

policing changing? Are its functions increasing

or decreasing? Are public police defining their

responsibilities differently than in the past? Have

they changed their geographical deployment as

a result of the growth of private security? 

4. How do governmental and nongovernmental

policing agents interact in the field? In other

words, what is the interface between auspices

of both kinds and providers of both kinds? Do

they ignore, hinder, or help one another? Do

they plan together, coordinate operations, or

exchange information?

5. To what extent is public policing being commodified; that is, being made available to private

interests for money? 

6. Do different providers of policing take different

operational approaches when performing the
Chapter 7: Research Agenda

36

same task? In our terminology, do mentalities

differ among providers of security? An important

source of information would be public police

officers who have worked for commercial security companies. They would be asked what they

find different in operations and management

between public and private police agencies.

7. With respect to the commercial security industry, several questions need answering:

a. How many companies are there? How many

people do they employ? Whom do they work

for? How much does this form of policing cost? 

b. What is the degree of industrial concentration

in the private security industry? 

c. Do the activities of multinational security

companies vary from country to country? How

much central direction is exerted by multinational companies over the operations of local

providers?

Social Impact

1. How effective are the different auspices/providers

of security? Especially, has restructuring produced

greater or less public safety and for whom? This

could be studied cross-sectionally, comparing

places with different mixes of policing, or longitudinally, examining changes in criminality and disorder before and after a major shift in the nature

of policing in a particular place. In both cases,

great care must be taken in describing the nature

of the policing mixes. 

In this connection, it is curious that no one, to

our knowledge, has suggested that the recent,

much-publicized decline in crime in the United

States might be due to the growth of nonstate

policing, especially in its commercial form.

Criminologists have attributed the decrease to

changes in demographics, crime patterns, gun

crime, and police numbers and tactics. There

are four reasons the restructuring of policing may

have played a role. 

a. Multilateralization may have produced a more

visible police presence. Cumulatively, the visibility of police has grown dramatically over

the past decade. 

b. Crime may be reported less to the public

police and more to the private police, reducing

its chances of becoming an official statistic. 

c. More people may be living, working, buying,

and playing in environments regulated by

nongovernmental police; hence, the opportunities for crime have decreased. 

d. Formerly disadvantaged social groups, among

whom crime is likely to be high, may be more

intensively policed by either voluntary associations or public police redeployed away from

areas covered by commercial security. 

2. Who gains and loses in terms of public safety

as a result of the reconstruction of policing? In

other words, has the distribution of security

changed as the result of restructuring? For example, Ian Loader (1997b) has suggested that multilateralization will displace crime from private

to public spaces. This critical question is difficult

to answer because it requires the construction of

a test for the quantity of security. Public opinion

surveys as well as official measures of crime and

disorder could be used. 

3. Does restructuring cause a decline in support for

public policing among privileged groups, Reich’s

“secession of the successful” (Murray 1988)? Are

people who are covered by commercial police

protection less likely to support public expenditures for policing?

4. Are the rights of individuals more or less at risk

when policing is provided by nonstate rather

than state auspices/providers? Do violations of

rights vary according to the nature of the policing? Generally, do the forms of misbehavior vary

with the type of policing? 
Chapter 7: Research Agenda

37

5. Are nonstate providers of policing more or less

accountable than state police? This question has

two dimensions. First: How effective is the oversight of the group that has instigated the nongovernmental policing? For example, do they

pay close or only episodic attention? Are there

well-understood ways of bringing problems to

their attention? Second: Whose interests are represented in the operations of the new police? For

example, are some people being policed without

representation in the accountable body? 

6. To what extent do community-based justice systems, such as mediation and restorative-justice

conferences, enhance security through the undertakings they develop among participants?

Government Policy

1. What are the variations in legal conditions

within which restructuring occurs from country

to country? What is legally allowed and not

allowed?

2. What aspects of nonstate policing are regulated

by governments and in what ways? What aspects

do governments think require more regulatory

attention?

3. In what ways are nongovernmental providers of

security held accountable for violations of laws,

human rights, and contracts? 

4. What is the relative effectiveness of different

mechanisms in achieving accountability? In

Australia, for example, Prenzler and Sarre

(1998) say, “To date, there have been no controlled studies of expanded legislation to test the

impact of new requirements.” 

5. How have the public police responded comparatively across countries to the growth of nonstate

policing? It seems that some have been indifferent, others hostile, a few cooperative, and some

co-opting. 

6. What regulations do governments have for managing the relationship between public and private police, for example, with respect to sharing

information, using facilities, reporting crime,

making arrests, submitting cases for prosecution,

and employing personnel?

Causation

1. What factors account for the growth of nonstate

policing? In addition to the customary approach

of correlating changes in policing with other

measurable social factors, it might be useful to

ask people what motivated them to create alternative auspices of policing or to seek other suppliers of policing. 

Historical research would also be important in

determining the evolutionary paths followed by

different countries with respect to the auspices

and providers of policing. Chronological comparison of the changes in policing among countries will reveal likely determinants. 

2. What governmental regulations facilitate or

retard the development of nonstate policing?

3. What factors explain differences in the types of

regulations and legal environments countries

have developed with respect to nonstate policing?

4. If operational mentalities differ among police, as

we believe, what accounts for them? There are

several possibilities: the nature of the tasks they

are assigned, the conditions in which they work,

the directions given by sponsoring auspices, and

their in-house professional experience. 

5. Can governments manipulate the conditions

required for the successful development of (a)

security markets (commodified security) and (b)

cooperative security auspices (community-based

security)? What should government do and not

do? To this end, it would be useful to study
Chapter 7: Research Agenda

38

government’s experience with restructuring in

other dimensions of social policy as well, such

as housing, irrigation, and education.

Conclusion

It may not be easy to marshal the kind of sustained

intellectual attention that current developments in

policing deserve and that our agenda calls for. There

are three reasons for this. 

First, criminal justice education and scholarship

focus almost exclusively on institutions of government. Governments are its main supporters, practitioners its primary clientele, and state agencies the

main employers of its students. Perhaps this was

inevitable in a field that grew out of the perception

that research about the activity and effectiveness of

the institutions of crime control was being neglected

by traditional criminology. Criminal justice education and research thereby tied itself to the chariot

wheel of the state and it remains so today. 

Second, criminal justice scholarship is more concerned with institutional effectiveness than with institutional evolution. This, too, reflects its concern with

public—meaning government—policy. For criminal

justice social scientists, institutional variation is studied to determine the relative effectiveness of different

policies, but not, except for a handful of researchers,

to account for the variety itself. American historians

have done better than social scientists in this regard,

and for a simple reason. Because they are concerned

with changes over time, their research does not take

institutional forms as givens.

Third, American criminal justice scholarship is

parochial and not internationally comparative. In

part, this reflects its preoccupation with efficacy.

Americans generally assume that policies that work

in one country will not work in another owing to

differences in social setting, culture, and history.

They believe that social processes in the United

States are unique. This deeply rooted belief overlooks the fact that the only way it can be tested is

through comparative research. As a result, because

American criminal justice scholars focus so exclusively on the United States, they fail to see that

institutions are artifacts, created out of combinations

of contemporary exigencies and historical traditions.

Context for them is a given, much as water is to fish,

and just as uninteresting. 

For all these reasons, American criminal justice

scholarship is not prepared to perceive the significance of what is occurring in contemporary policing.

It is doubtful that it will able to provide the sort of

intellectual support needed to guide public policy.
39

Conclusion

Chapter 8

Policing is changing today as profoundly as when

Sir Robert Peel put the first bobby on the streets

of London in 1829. The new model that is being

constructed consists of two elements. First, the people who authorize policing have become separate

from the people who do it. Second, the new players

in policing are not part of formal government. As

a result, governments, especially governments of

nation-states, have lost their monopoly on policing.

The change that is occurring is paradigmatic because

it cannot be understood in customary terms (Kuhn

1962). The current restructuring involves more than

“privatization.” It involves a blurring of the boundary between the public and private. The new paradigm also involves more than decentralization or

devolution because these terms apply to changes

within a single institutional system. What is taking

place in policing today crosses institutional boundaries. Because of the unprecedented nature of today’s

reconstruction, we have coined the term “multilateralization” to describe the nature of the restructuring. 

What is happening to policing today is also paradigmatic because it is more than an elaboration on

what has gone before. It is a fundamental transformation in the way security is governed. 

In the new paradigm, the very concept of government, technically the state, becomes problematic.

How can government be recognized if policing is no

longer done exclusively by the public police? How

should people who have been authorized expressly

to police but are not employed by government be

referred to? When people deliberately and legitimately construct policing, either through authorizing

or providing it, are they not engaged in governance?

Of course, what has been said about the importance

of what is happening depends on current trends

being general and stable. Only time will tell whether

we have overestimated or underestimated their significance. For this reason, it is critically important

to study the structure of policing now to establish

benchmarks by which to judge the extent of change

in the future. Contemporary changes in policing

should also be studied because policing affects

human well-being so fundamentally. Failure to provide public safety fairly and equitably can affect the

stability of government itself. 

Finally, insights into the changing governance of

security have implications for foreign policy. A

country like the United States that is concerned

about the expansion of democracy abroad must pay

careful attention to policing. The governance of

security is both an indicator of the quality of political life and a major determinant of it. 

The restructuring of policing that has been described

refers to a process of transferring the construction of

security to nongovernmental groups within existing

states. But there is another process going on, one

that constitutes an equally profound challenge to

nation-states. At the very moment that policing is

being distributed to new groups within states, it is

also being developed vigorously at international levels. Nation-states are ceding their authority to police

both upward and downward. This globalization of

policing has several dimensions that are not always

distinguished.

First, private multinational corporations now provide

policing on a worldwide basis (Johnston 1999;

Patterson 1995; Zarate 1998). They are providers

of transnational policing.

Second, transnational cooperation among law

enforcement agencies of nation-states is developing
Chapter 8: Conclusion

40

rapidly (Nadelman 1993; Fijnaut and Hermans 1987;

Murphy 1998). National law enforcement agencies

cultivate relations with colleagues abroad, undertake

joint operations, exchange information, and share

facilities. Pooling collective resources in an ad hoc

way to meet a common threat, they are similar to

the posse in America’s Old West. INTERPOL was

the earliest transnational institution created by this

sort of transnational collaboration. Such actions

encourage the presumption, undoubtedly correct,

that effective policing at the turn of the millennium

requires governance at transnational levels. 

Third, policing is being undertaken by genuinely

international institutions, such as the United

Nations, the World Court, and the European Union.

Functionally specific agencies, too, such as the

World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,

increasingly require countries to either develop or

reform policing in specific ways as conditions for

receiving assistance. The impulses to create supranational auspices for policing are the same as those

that created existing nation-states out of previously

sovereign principalities, estates, kingdoms, cities,

and small countries. The common precipitator in

both cases is the need to construct security at more

encompassing levels (Bayley 1975, 1985b). Note

that the organization of policing at international

levels of government, like restructuring within

nation-states, will cause conceptual confusion. Are

armed forces acting under international direction

considered to be police or military? What Americans

call the Korean War was technically a “police

action” carried out by the United Nations. 

Policing today is being restructured away from

nation-states by two forces: multilateralization within countries and supranationalization among countries. In both cases, policing is no longer being

constructed and provided exclusively by nationstates. It is quite unclear how these forces will play

out in the next few years. The possibilities are worthy of a millennium.
41

Bibliography

This bibliography contains more references than

are cited in the report. It presents the most useful writing in English on the current restructuring of

policing. 

Anonymous. 1998. “Private Investigator’s Case

Study #12: The Vanishing Public Policeman.”

Sydney, Australia: New South Wales Police.

Ayers, Ian, and John Braithwaite. 1992. Responsive

Regulation: Transcending the Deregulation Debate.

New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Baron, Lois M. 1998. “The Great Debate.” Builder.

21(3): 92–100. 

Bayley, David H. 1975. “The Police and Political

Development in Europe.” In Charles Tilly (ed.), The

Formation of National States in Europe. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Bayley, David H. 1985a. Patterns of Policing. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Bayley, David H. 1985b. Social Control and Political

Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, Center

of International Studies. 

Bayley, David H. 1991. Forces of Order: Policing

Modern Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press.

Bayley, David H. 1994. Police for the Future.

New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Bayley, David H. 1999. “Security and Justice for

All.” Paper for the Restorative and Civil Society

Conference, Australian National University,

February 1999. 

Bayley, David H., and Clifford E. Shearing. 1996.

“The Future of Policing.” Law and Society Review.

30(3): 585–606. 

Benson, Bruce L. 1998. “Crime Control Through

Private Enterprise.” The Independent Review. 2(3):

341–71. 

Black, Donald, and M.P. Baumgartner. 1980. “On

Self-Help in Modern Society.” In Donald Black

(ed.), The Manners and Customs of the Police.

New York, NY: Academic Press. Pp. 193–208. 

Blair, Ian. 1998. “The Governance of Security: Where

Do the Police Fit in Policing?” Unpublished draft. 

Blakely, Edward J., and Mary G. Snyder. 1997.

Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United

States. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. 

Braithwaite, John. 1989. Crime, Shame and

Integration. Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press.

Braithwaite, John. Forthcoming. “The New

Regulatory State and the Coming Decline of

Criminology.” British Journal of Criminology.

Braithwaite, John, and Peter N. Grabosky. 1986. Of

Manners Gentle: Enforcement Strategies of Australian

Business Regulatory Agencies. Melbourne, Australia:

Oxford University Press. 

Braithwaite, John, and Philip Pettit. 1990. Not Just

Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice.

Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. 

Buerger, Michael E., and Lorraine G. Mazerolle. 1998.

“Third-Party Policing: A Theoretical Analysis of an

Emerging Trend.” Justice Quarterly. 15(2): 301–28. 
Bibliography

42

Burchell, G. 1991. “Civil Society and the System of

Natural Liberty.” In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and

P. Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in

Governmentality. London: Harvester, Wheatsheaf.

Pp. 119–50. 

Caldeira, Theresa. 1996. “Building Up Walls: The

New Pattern of Spatial Segregation in Sao Paolo.”

International Social Science Journal. 47: 55–66. 

Cassani, Robert. 1995. “Financing Civil Society for

a Global Responsibility.” Futures. 27(2): 215–21. 

Cassels Committee. 1996. The Role and

Responsibilities of the Police. London, England:

Police Foundation/Policy Studies Institute. 

Cerny, Phillip G. 1995. “Globalisation and the

Changing Logic of Collective Action.” International

Organization. 49(4): 585–625. 

Chermak, Steven M. 1995. Victims and the News:

Crime and the American News Media. Boulder, CO:

Westview Press. 

Clarke, Ronald V. (ed.) 1997. Situational Crime

Prevention. Albany, NY: Harrow and Heston

Publishers. 

Cohen, L.E., and Marcus Felson. 1979. “Social

Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity

Approach.” American Sociological Review. 44:

588–608. 

Conger, Lucy. 1997. “Tilting at Neo-Liberalism.”

Institutional Investor. 31(5): 91–103. 

Crawford, Adam. 1995. “Appeals to Community and

Crime Prevention.” Crime, Law and Social Change.

22: 97–126. 

Crawford, Adam, and Mathew Jones. 1995. “InterAgency Co-Operation and Community-Based

Crime Prevention: Some Reflections on the World

of Pearson and Colleagues.” British Journal of

Criminology. 35(1): 17–33. 

Cruikshank, Barbara. 1999. The Will to Empower:

Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press. 

Cunningham, William C., and Todd H. Taylor.

1985. The Hallcrest Report: Private Security and Police

in America. Portland, OR: Chancellor. 

Davis, Mike. 1992. City of Quartz: Excavating the

Future of Los Angeles. New York, NY: Vintage Books. 

Drainville, Andre C. 1995. “Left Internationalism

and the Politics of Resistance in the New World

Order.” In David A. Smith and Jozef Boroez (eds.),

A New World Order? Transformations in the Late 20th

Century. London, England: Praeger. 

Durkheim, Emile. 1973. On Morality and Society:

Selected Writings. Robert Bellah (ed.). Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press. 

Egan, Timothy L. 1995. “The Serene Fortress.”

New York Times, 3 September 1995. 

Elias, Khalil, and Kenneth E. Boulding (eds.). 1996.

Evolution, Order and Complexity. New York, NY:

Routledge. 

Etzioni, Amitai. 1983. An Immodest Agenda:

Rebuilding America Before the Twenty-First Century.

New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Etzioni, Amitai. 1993. The Spirit of Community:

The Reinvention of American Society. New York, NY:

Simon and Schuster.

Etzioni, Amitai. 1996. The New Golden Rule:

Community and Morality in a Democratic Society.

New York, NY: Basic Books. 

Farnell, Margaret B., and Clifford D. Shearing. 1977.

Private Security: An Examination of Canadian Statistics,

1961–1971. Toronto, ON: Centre of Criminology,

University of Toronto. 
Bibliography

43

Fijnaut, C.J.C.F., and R.H. Hermans. 1987. Police

Cooperation in Europe. Lochem, Netherlands: Van

den Brink. 

Forst, Brian, and Peter K. Manning. Forthcoming.

The Privatization of Policing: Two Views. 

Fu, Hualing. 1993. “The Security Service Company

in China.” Journal of Security Administration. 16(2):

35–44. 

Garreau, Joel. 1991. Edge City. New York, NY:

Anchor Books. 

Goldstein, Herman. 1990. Problem Oriented Policing.

Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. Full House: The Spread of

Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York, NY:

Harmony Books. 

Grabosky, Peter N. 1995. “Using Non-Governmental

Resources to Foster Regulatory Compliance.”

Governance: An International Journal of Policy and

Administration. (October) 8(4): 527–50. 

Grabosky, Peter N. 1996. “The Future of Crime

Control.” Paper for the Australian Institute of

Criminology Outlook Seminar, Canberra, Australian

Capital Territory. 

Greene, Jack R., and Stephen Mastrofski (eds).

1988. Community Policing: Real or Rhetoric?

New York, NY: Praeger. 

Greene, Jack R., Thomas M. Seamon, and Paul R.

Levy. 1995. “Merging Public Private Security for

Collective Benefit: Philadelphia’s Center City

District.” American Journal of Police. 14(2): 3–20. 

Hauber, Albert, Bart Hofstra, Leo Toornvliet, and

Anke Zandbergen. 1996. “Some New Forms of

Functional Social Control in the Netherlands and

Their Effects.” British Journal of Criminology. 36(2):

199–219. 

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1989. The Fatal Conceit: The

Errors of Socialism. London, England: Routledge.

Heine, Kimberly. 1994. “Body Double: Protecting

Company Executives.” Security Management. 38(2):

57. 

Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. 1994.

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in

American Life. New York, NY: Free Press. 

Hillyard, Paddy. 1993. “Paramilitary Policing and

Popular Justice in Northern Ireland.” in Mark

Findlay and Ugljesa Zvekic (eds.), Alternative Policing

Styles: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Boston, MA:

Kluwer Law and Taxation Publishers. Pp. 139–56. 

Home Office. 1995. Review of Police Core and

Ancillary Tasks. London, England: Crown HMSO. 

Hou, Charles, and Cheun-Jim Sheu. 1994. “A

Study of Determinants of Participation in a Private

Security System among Taiwanese Enterprises.”

Police Studies. 17(1): 13–24. 

Independent Commission on Policing for Northern

Ireland. 1999. A New Beginning: Policing for Northern

Ireland. Belfast: Independent Commission on

Policing for Northern Ireland. 

Jacobs, Jane. 1962. The Life and Death of Great

American Cities. New York, NY: Vintage Books. 

Jervis, Robert J. 1997. System Effects: Complexity in

Political and Social Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press. 

Johnston, Les. 1992. The Rebirth of Private Policing.

London, England: Routledge.

Johnston, Les. 1994. “Policing in Late Modern

Societies.” Unpublished paper for the Workshop

on Evaluating Police Service Delivery, Montreal,

Canada.
Bibliography

44

Johnston, Les. 1999. “Policing Britain: Risk,

Security, and Governance.” Unpublished draft. 

Jones, Trevor, and Tim Newburn. 1999. “Urban

Change and Policing: Mass Private Property

Reconsidered.” European Journal on Criminal Policy

and Research. 7(2): 225–44. 

Kaplan, Robert D. 1998. “Travels Into America’s

Future.” The Atlantic Monthly. August: 37–61. 

Kelling, George L., and Catherine M. Coles. 1996.

Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing

Crime in Our Communities. New York, NY: Martin

Kessler Books. 

Kelling, George L., and Mark H. Moore. 1988.

“From Political to Reform to Community: The

Evolving Strategy of Police.” In Jack R. Greene and

Stephen Mastrofski (eds.), Community Policing: Real

or Rhetoric? New York, NY: Praeger. 

Kennedy, David J. 1995. “Residential Associations

as State Actors: Regulating the Impact of Gated

Communities on Nonmembers.” The Yale Law

Journal. 105(3): 761–93. 

Kincaid, A. Douglas, and Eduardo A. Gamarra.

1995. “Disorderly Democracy: Redefining Public

Security in Latin America.” Paper for the Annual

Conference on the Political Economy in the World

System. Miami, FL: University of Miami. 

Kraska, Peter B. 1996. “Enjoying Militarism:

Political/Personal Dilemmas in Studying U.S. Police

Paramilitary Units.” Justice Quarterly. (September)

13(3): 405–30.

Kraska, Peter B., and Louis J. Cubellis. 1997.

“Militarizing Mayberry and Beyond: Making Sense of

American Para-military Policing.” Justice Quarterly.

14(4)(December): 607–30. 

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 

Lacey, Nocola, and Lucia Zedner. 1998. “Community

in German Criminal Justice: A Significant Absence.”

Social and Legal Studies. 7(1): 7–25. 

Leeds, Elizabeth. 1996. “Cocaine and Parallel

Polities in the Brazilian Urban Periphery:

Constraints on Local-Level Democratization.”

Latin American Research Review. 31(3): 47–83. 

Loader, Ian. 1997a. “Private Security and the

Demand for Protection in Contemporary Britain.”

Policing and Society. 7: 143–62. 

Loader, Ian. 1997b. “Thinking Normatively about

Private Security.” Journal of Law and Society. 24(3):

377–94. 

Lunney, Robert F. 1989. “Police Management: The

Past Twenty Years and the Next Twenty.” In Loree,

Donald J. (ed.), Research Leaders in Policing: Symposium

Proceedings. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Police College.

McMichael, Philip. 1996. “Globalisation: Myths and

Realities.” Rural Sociology. 61(1): 25–55.

Monkkonen, Eric. 1981. Police in Urban America,

1860 to 1920. Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press. 

Morgan, Rod. 1994. “Shadows on the Beat: A

‘Shadow Constabulary’ to Take Over Community

Policing.” Policing. (August 5): 16–18. 

Murphy, Christopher. 1998. “Policing Postmodern

Canada.” Unpublished draft. 

Murphy, James P. 1997. “The Private Sector and

Security: A Bit on BIDs.” Security Journal. 9: 11–13. 

Murray, Charles. 1988. In Pursuit of Happiness and

Good Government. New York, NY: Simon and

Schuster. 

Nadelman, Ethan A. 1993. Cops Across Borders: The

Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement.

University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University

Press. 
Bibliography

45

Nalla, Mahesh K. 1998. “Opportunities in the

Emerging Market.” Security Journal. 10: 15–21. 

Nalla, Mahesh K., and Graeme R. Newman. 1991.

“Public Versus Private Control: A Reassessment.”

Journal of Criminal Justice. 19: 537–47.

Neild, Rachel M. 1997. “Human Rights and Citizen

Security: The Framework for Democratic Models of

Policing.” Unpublished paper. Washington, DC:

Washington Office on Latin America. 

New York Times. 1994. “Business Districts Grow at

Price of Accountability.” November 20. A1.

New York Times. 1995. “City Council Report Lists

Abuses in Business Improvement Districts.” October

8. A1.

New York Times. 1998. Editorial. “More Police on

Wall Street.” February 19. A18.

Nisbet, Robert A. 1969. The Quest for Community.

London, England: Oxford University Press.

Nisbet, Robert A. 1975. Twilight of Authority.

New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 

Nogalla, Detleft, and Fritz Sack. 1998. “‘Private’

Reconfigurations of Police and Policing: The Case of

Germany.” Paper presented for the GERN-Seminar

“Police et Securite: Controle Social et L’Interaction

Public-Prive.” Hamburg, Germany. 

Osborne, David, and Thomas Gaebler. 1993.

Reinventing Government. New York, NY: Plume. 

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons:

The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.

New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 

Owens, John B. 1997. “Westec Story: Gated Communities and the Fourth Amendment.” American Criminal

Law Review. 34 (Spring): 1127–60. 

Packer, Herbert. 1968. The Limits of the Criminal

Sanction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 

Patterson, Julien. 1995. “Forging Creative Alliances.”

Security Management. January: 33–35. 

Prenzler, Tim, and Rick Sarre. 1998. “Regulating

Private Security in Australia.” Trends and Issues in

Crime and Criminal Justice. Canberra, Australian

Capital Territory: Australian Institute of

Criminology. 

Reiss, Albert J., Jr. 1984. “Selecting Strategies of

Social Control over Organizational Life.” In Keith

Hawkins and John Thomas (eds.), Enforcing

Regulation. Boston, MA: Kluwer-Nijoff. 

Reiss, Albert J., Jr. 1987. “The Legitimacy of

Intrusions into Private Space.” In Clifford D.

Shearing and Philip C. Stenning (eds.), Private

Policing. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Reiss, Albert J., Jr. 1988. Private Employment of Public

Police. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice,

National Institute of Justice. NCJ 105192.

Rodriguez, Alfredo, and Lucy Winchester. 1996.

“Cities, Democracy and Governance in Latin

America.” International Social Science Journal. 147:

73–83.

Rosenbaum, Dennis P. 1986. Community Crime

Prevention: Does It Work? Beverly Hills, CA: Sage

Publications. 

Ross, Mary M., Larry J. Smith, and Robert D. Pritt.

1996. “The Zoning Process: Private Land-Use and

Gated Communities, the Impact of Private Property

Rights Legislation, and Other Recent Developments

in the Law.” The Urban Lawyer. 28(4): 801–17. 

Shearing, Clifford D. 1992. “The Relation Between

Public and Private Policing.” In M. Tonry and

N. Morris (eds.), Modern Policing. Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press.
Bibliography

46

Shearing, Clifford D. 1995. “Reinventing Policing:

Policing as Governance.” In Fritz Sack (ed.),

Privatisierung Staatlicher Konrolle: Befunde, Konsepte,

Tendenzen. Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos

Verlagsgesellschaft. Pp. 70–87. 

Shearing, Clifford D. (with the assistance of Jennifer

Wood). 1997. “Towards Democratic Policing:

Rethinking Strategies of Transformation.” In Policing

in Emerging Democracies: Workshop Papers and

Highlights. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of

Justice, National Institute of Justice, and U.S.

Department of State, Bureau of International

Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. NCJ

167024.

Shearing, Clifford D., Margaret B. Farnell, and

Philip C. Stenning. 1980. Contract Security in

Ontario. Toronto, ON: Centre of Criminology,

University of Toronto.

Shearing, Clifford D., and Philip C. Stenning. 1980.

“The Quiet Revolution: The Nature, Development

and General Legal Implications of Private Security

in Canada.” Criminal Law Quarterly. 22: 220–48. 

Shearing, Clifford D., and Philip C. Stenning.

1981. “Modern Private Security: Its Growth and

Implications.” In Michael Tonry and Norval Morris

(eds.), Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research,

Vol. 3. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 

Sheehy Committee. 1993. Inquiry into Police

Responsibilities and Rewards. London, England:

HMSO. 

Sheppard, David. 1998. Promising Strategies to Reduce

Gun Violence. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of

Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency

Prevention. NCJ 173950.

Shlapentokh, Vladimir. 1995. “Russia: Privatisation

and Illegalisation of Social and Political Life.” The

Washington Quarterly. 19(1): 65–85. 

Sklansky, David A. 1999. “The Private Police.”

UCLA Law Review. 46(4)(April): 1165–1287. 

Skogan, Wesley G., and Susan M. Hartnett. 1997.

Community Policing: Chicago Style. New York, NY:

Oxford University Press. 

Skolnick, Jerome H., and David H. Bayley. 1986.

The New Blue Line: Police Innovation in Six American

Cities. New York, NY: Free Press.

Skolnick, Jerome H., and David H. Bayley. 1988.

Community Policing: Issues and Practices Around the

World. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice,

National Institute of Justice. NCJ 111428. 

Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 1997. “The Real New World

Order.” Foreign Affairs. 76(5): 183–97. 

Smith, Bruce. 1925. The State Police. New York, NY:

Macmillan. 

Smith, Bruce. 1949. Police Systems in the United

States. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Smith, Larry, Mary M. Ross, Robert R. Prit, Brian

Woram, John Witt, and Terrance S. Welch. 1997.

“Gated Communities: Private Solution to a Public

Dilemma?” The Urban Lawyer. 29(3): 413–26. 

Sparrow, Malcolm, Mark H. Moore, and David M.

Kennedy. 1990. Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing.

New York, NY: Basic Books. 

Spitzer, Steven, and Andrew T. Scull. 1977a.

“Privatization and Capitalist Development: The

Case of the Private Police.” Social Problems. 25:

18–29. 

Spitzer, Steven, and Andrew T. Scull. 1977b. “Social

Control in Historical Perspective: From Private to

Public Responses to Crime.” In David F. Greenberg

(ed.), Correction and Punishment. Beverly Hills, CA:

Sage Publications. 

Stenning, Philip C. 1989. “Private Police and Public

Police: Toward a Redefinition of the Police Role.” In

D. Loree (ed.), Future Issues in Policing: Symposium

Proceedings. Ottawa, ON: Ministry of Supply and

Services.
Bibliography

47

Stenson, Kevin. 1999. “Crime Control, Governmentality and Sovereignty.” In R. Smandych (ed.),

Governable Places: Readings in Governmentality and

Crime Control. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate. 

Stenson, Kevin, and F. Factor. 1994. “Youth Work,

Risk, and Crime Prevention.” Youth and Policy. 45:

1–15. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1852/1998. Uncle Tom’s

Cabin. Jean Fagan (ed.). New York, NY: Oxford

University Press. 

Szymkowak, K., and P.G. Steinhoff. 1995. “Wrapping

Up Something Long: Intimidation and Violence by

Right-Wing Groups in Post-War Japan.” Terrorism

and Political Violence. 7(1): 265–98. 

Tonnies, Ferdinand. 1957. Community and Society:

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Trans. and ed. Charles

P. Loomis. New York, NY: Harper Torchbook.

Trojanowicz, Robert. n.d. An Evaluation of the

Neighborhood Foot Patrol Program in Flint, Michigan.

East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

Trojanowicz, Robert, and Bonnie Bucqueroux. 1990.

Community Policing: A Contemporary Perspective.

Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Company. 

Walker, Frank. 1999. “Guns for Train Security Guards.”

Sun-Herald (Sydney, Australia). February 14. 11.

Walker, Samuel. 1975. “The Urban Police in

American History: A Review of the Literature.”

Unpublished paper.

Walker, Samuel. 1977. A Critical History of Police

Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism. Lexington,

MA: Lexington Books.

Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society: An Outline

of Interpretative Sociology. 3 vols. Comps. and eds.

Guenther Roght and Claus Wittich. New York, NY:

Bedminster Press. 

Wilson, James Q. 1968. Varieties of Police Behavior:

The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Wirth, Louis. 1938. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.”

American Journal of Sociology. (July) 44: 1–24. 

Wood, Jennifer. 1999. Reinventing Governance: A

Study of Transformations in the Ontario Provincial

Police. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Centre of

Criminology, University of Toronto. 

Zarate, Juan Carlos. 1998. “The Emergence of a

New Dog of War: Private International Security

Companies, International Law and the New World

Order.” Stanford Journal of Criminal Law. 34: 75–162.
pppgjp

• Evaluates existing programs and responses to crime.

• Tests innovative concepts and program models in the field.

• Assists policymakers, program partners, and justice agencies.

• Disseminates knowledge to many audiences.

NIJ’s Strategic Direction and Program Areas

NIJ is committed to five challenges as part of its strategic plan: 1) rethinking justice and the processes that create jus

nities; 2) understanding the nexus between social conditions and crime; 3) breaking the cycle of crime by testing re

based interventions; 4) creating the tools and technologies that meet the needs of practitioners; and 5) expanding hor

through interdisciplinary and international perspectives. In addressing these strategic challenges, the Institute is involv

following program areas: crime control and prevention, drugs and crime, justice systems and offender behavior, violen

victimization, communications and information technologies, critical incident response, investigative and forensic scie

(including DNA), less-than-lethal technologies, officer protection, education and training technologies, testing and stan

technology assistance to law enforcement and corrections agencies, field testing of promising programs, and internatio

control. NIJ communicates its findings through conferences and print and electronic media.

NIJ’s Structure

The NIJ Director is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The NIJ Director establishes the Institute

tives, guided by the priorities of the Office of Justice Programs, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the needs of the f

actively solicits the views of criminal justice and other professionals and researchers to inform its search for the know

tools to guide policy and practice.

NIJ has three operating units. The Office of Research and Evaluation manages social science research and evaluation a

mapping research. The Office of Science and Technology manages technology research and development, standards de

ment, and technology assistance to State and local law enforcement and corrections agencies. The Office of Developm

Communications manages field tests of model programs, international research, and knowledge dissemination program

a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Ju

Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime. 

To find out more about the National Institute of Justice, please contact:

National Criminal Justice Reference Service

P.O. Box 6000

Rockville, MD 20849–6000

800–851–3420

e-mail: askncjrs@ncjrs.org

To obtain an electronic version of this document, access the NIJ Web site

(http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij).

If you have questions, call or e-mail NCJRS.