Cultural change in the governance of security

Abstract Issues of cultural change typically plague advocates of policing reform. Scholars often argue that due to their defining capacity to exercise coercion, the police possess occupational sensibilities that tend to undermine new ways of thinking and acting introduced in reform programmes. A notable exception to this pessimism is found in the work of Janet Chan, who argues that cultural transformation can and does take place through iterative changes at the levels of "field" (structures) and "habitus" (practical dispositions) of the police. Extending the work of Brogden and Shearing, this article argues that further optimism can be reached by explicitly acknowledging the plural nature of security governance. Not only do different "nodes" of governance possess different ways of thinking and acting, they also take on the sensibilities of other nodes to maintain or improve their position in the security field. The normative possibilities raised by this explanatory line of inquiry will be examined. Keywords: PoliceGovernanceSecurityCultureReformDemocracy Notes Correspondence to: Jennifer Wood, Research Fellow, Security 21: International Centre for Security and Justice, Regulatory Institutions Network, Law Program, Australian National University, Australia. E‐mail: jennifer. wood@anu.edu.au. The author is grateful to Scott Burris, Jenny Fleming, Peter Grabosky and Clifford Shearing for comments on an earlier draft, and to Ian Ayres, Jennifer Brown, Mike Dowdle, Sarah Harding and Monique Marks who provided valuable feedback at a seminar organized by the Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University. Similarly, these non‐state players have sought to incorporate sensibilities associated with the public police in order to accumulate more political, cultural and symbolic capital, which in turn leads to more economic capital (Dupont, 2003). I am grateful to Peter Grabosky for this point. Rather, business organizations are engaged in three main functions: opportunity management (e.g., personnel screening and profiling of corporate employees to ensure they will be prudent, self‐regulating individuals); population management (e.g., security gates; closed circuit television; access control systems to observe, contain or exclude individuals within or outside of the premises); and information management (techniques for controlling misuse, abuse or loss of corporate information) (Johnston & Shearing, 2003: 80–81). As an example of the punitive dimension of private security, Grabosky notes in a personal communication that "[t]he software and entertainment industries have been pressuring governments all over the world to investigate, prosecute, and punish information pirates". Consistent with Herbert's argument (2001), one can also locate broken windows policing within a wider culture of crime control depicted recently by Garland (2000, 2001). Focusing on the transformation of criminal justice, he writes: although the structures of control have been transformed in important respects, the most significant change is at the level of the culture that enlivens these structures, orders their use, and shapes their meaning. A reworked pattern of cognitive assumptions, normative commitments, and emotional sensibilities is now inscribed in the field, motivating the actions of crime control agencies, given new purpose and meaning to their practices, and altering the practical effects and symbolic significance of their conduct. (Garland 2001: 174–175) Central to this culture, he argues, is a punitive sensibility that sees individuals as rational‐choice actors who must be managed as risks in the most cost‐effective manner as possible (see CitationO'Malley, 1992 on the compatibility of risk‐based thinking and punitive sensibilities). Garland (Citation2001: 182) describes a growing "social and cultural divide between 'us' and 'them'" in the larger society. In this culture, the rights of victims and offenders are seen to be incompatible. He argues that in circumstances where there is no individual victim, there now tends to be the invocation of a collective victim—"the community" and its "quality of life"—that is deemed to suffer the ill‐effects that must always flow from prohibited behaviour, however trivial. Public drinking, soft drug use, graffiti, loitering, vagrancy, begging, sleeping rough, being "uncivil": these cease to be tolerable nuisance or pricks to the middle‐class conscience and become the disorderly stuff upon which serious crime feeds. (CitationGarland, 2001: 181) For example, the Safe Streets Act (another broken‐windows‐based initiative) is a provincial law in Ontario, Canada providing the police with more authority to target begging as well as the conduct of "squeegee kids". It has emerged in the context of an overall growth in loitering and anti‐panhandling by‐laws in different Canadian cities (CitationHermer et al., 2002; CitationHermer & Mosher, 2002), and is argued to be "both extraordinarily detailed and vague and sweeping" (CitationHermer et al., 2002: 61) in its definitions of "solicitation in an aggressive manner" and "solicitation of a captive audience". The Argentine Project for Safe and Just Communities is supported by the Canadian International Development Agency and administered by the Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. The description of the Argentine model is drawn from CitationWood and Font, 2003. These monies are allocated as follows: 50% goes into the pockets of Foro members to compensate for the work that they do, and 50% goes into a peacebuilding fund to support the peacebuilding initiatives described above and cover the administrative costs of the Foros. The Foro members themselves administer the peacebuilding fund. This funding structure ensures that funds remain within poor communities and are administered by poor communities themselves according their own determination of needs. Money is spent frugally and efficiently because the funds have been earned personally and based on output. In South Africa, evidence that Peace Committees have effectively "negotiated the field", as Chan would put it (2001), is a recent invitation by the public police to work jointly with them in the establishment of "Community Peace Centres". In contrast to a police detachment, where police capacity is the only available option, the Peace Centres are designed to refer cases to Peace Committees where emergency response and coercion are not required. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJennifer Wood Footnote Correspondence to: Jennifer Wood, Research Fellow, Security 21: International Centre for Security and Justice, Regulatory Institutions Network, Law Program, Australian National University, Australia. E‐mail: jennifer. wood@anu.edu.au. The author is grateful to Scott Burris, Jenny Fleming, Peter Grabosky and Clifford Shearing for comments on an earlier draft, and to Ian Ayres, Jennifer Brown, Mike Dowdle, Sarah Harding and Monique Marks who provided valuable feedback at a seminar organized by the Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University.

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