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Theoretical Criminology

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First published November 2006

Networked governance and the post-regulatory state?: Steering, rowing and anchoring the provision of policing and security

Adam CrawfordView all authors and affiliations

https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480606068874

Abstract

This article engages with insights from the ‘(post-) regulatory state’ literature in critically exploring the changing face of policing and security. It subjects notions of ‘networked governance’ and ‘responsive regulation’ to empirical examination in the British context. The article illustrates the manner in which state anchoring constitutes a distinctive characteristic of contemporary security governance. It suggests that far from state withdrawal, in relation to the regulation of social behaviour, the British state is engaged in ambitious projects of social engineering in which the deployment of hierarchy, command and interventionism are prevalent. Recent trends in social regulation have seen hyper-innovation against a background of the politicization of behaviour. In this context, the article highlights concerns about the feasibility of ‘responsive regulation’.

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A version of this article was presented to the Regulatory Institutions Network Conference, Canberra, 7-8 December 2005. It was written while I enjoyed a visiting fellowship in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and while I was the recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship award into the ‘contractual governance of anti-social behaviour’. It has benefited significantly from various conversations with, and comments from, John Braithwaite, Jenny Fleming, Peter Grabosky, David Levi-Faur, John Flint, Stuart Lister, Tim Newburn, Rod Rhodes, Clifford Shearing, Laureen Snider, Peter Vincent-Jones, Jennifer Wood and Lucia Zedner, for which I am most grateful. Any errors are mine.

1. There are, of course, important differences and inflections between the post-regulatory state—which is my primary focus of analysis—and governmentality literatures. What they share, I suggest, is a particular conception of authority, regulation and control as primarily, and increasingly, lying ‘beyond the state’. Rose and Miller, for example, note that from their govenmentality perspective the state is reduced to the status of having no ‘essential necessity or functionality’ (1992: 176).

2. Although, they seek to show through selective examples that many of the tenets of ‘entrepreneurial government’ were already evident in the USA, Reinventing Government is essentially a manual designed to prompt reform.

3. Notably with the establishment of a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

4. Figures show that in addition to the use of ASBOs, some 13,000 acceptable behaviour contracts, 800 dispersal orders and over 170,000 fixed penalty notices for disorder were issued in the 2 years to the end of 2005 (Home Office, 2006: 6).

5. Under the 1998 Act, parenting orders resulting from criminal conduct or anti-social behaviour are available in any court proceedings where: a child safety order has been made; an anti-social behaviour order or sex offender order has been made in respect of a young person; or a young person has been convicted of an offence. The availability of parenting orders was further extended by the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 and the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to allow their use at an earlier stage of intervention.

6. Notoriously, in May 2002 Patricia Amos became the first woman to be sentenced to prison for failing to ensure that her two daughters attended school.

7. In February 2006, Tony Blair articulated a similar paradox in a speech to a conference by Safer Croydon partnership:

the other thing I have learnt in over 8 years of being Prime Minister is that you can argue about statistics until the cows come home and there is usually a very great credibility gap between whatever statistics are put out and whatever people actually think is happening, but the real point is not about statistics, it is about how people feel... because the fear of crime is as important in some respects as crime itself.

(http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page9040.asp)

8. Shearing (2006b) has himself used this metaphor in suggesting that while pluralism is indeed anchored, it has multiple state, supra-state and non-state anchors: ‘What we find in practice is not a single anchor that directs the steering of governance but multiple anchors each contesting to realize competing governing agendas.’

9. Pool Re operates a ‘retention’ under which insurers bear the first amount of any claims for an event covered by the scheme.

10.

10. Pool Re’s Chief Executive, Steve Atkins, said of the extensions:

Taken together, they are a comprehensive response to the main difficul-ties faced by our Members in offering terrorism insurance for commercial property risks. They enable Pool Re to continue to play the fullest role in providing the reinsurance support needed by this sector of the insurance market.

(cited in HM Treasury, 2002)

11.

11. By means of the Police Reform Act 2002.

12.

12. Ironically, the White Paper went on to highlight the perceived need to ‘strengthen the ability of the Home Office (working through the Government Offices for the Regions and the Welsh Assembly Government) to actively monitor partnership progress, taking action to address poor performance’ (Home Office, 2004: 123).

13.

13. Personal communication, 25 April 2006. This figure includes those working across a wide array of activities some of which are much broader than police functions, including: door supervisors; vehicle immobilizers; security guards involved in manned guarding, cash and valuables in transit, close protection and CCTV monitoring; key-holders; private investigators and security consultants. The number of in-house security guards is estimated to be up to 100,000.

14.

14. Community Support Officers (CSOs) are a new type of civilian police employee dedicated to visible patrolling, introduced by the Police Reform Act 2002 (s. 38). Without the full powers or training of a sworn police officer, CSOs seek to provide public reassurance by being dedicated to patrol, can issue fixed penalty notices for disorder and have powers to detain suspects for up to 30 minutes pending the arrival of a police constable. The first CSOs started work on the streets of London in September 2002 (see Crawford et al., 2004).

15.

15. By late 2004, there were approximately 250 schemes funded through central government, employing more than 1500 street or neighbourhood wardens. In addition, there were an estimated 250 further schemes, employing some 2000 other wardens funded through diverse local sources (Crawford, 2006c).

16.

16. The Police and Magistrates Court Act 1994 (s. 9) allowed the police much greater commercial freedom to charge more widely for goods and services, including the contracting out of police officer time (Crawford and Lister, 2006).

17.

17. Nor is this a unique development, similar initiatives exist in the Bluewater centre in Kent and at other large-scale ‘mass private property’ venues.

18.

18. Before establishing a community safety accreditation scheme, the chief police officer must consult with the police authority of that force and all the local authorities that lie within the police area. The legislation requires that employers of accredited persons make suitable arrangements to supervise the use of their conferred powers when carrying out community safety functions and have suitable arrangements for handling complaints.

19.

19. ASBOs were initially introduced by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (s. 1) and subsequently extended. Recent Home Office guidance explicitly encourages councils to use publicity to help enforce individual ASBOs (Home Office, 2005), enlisting third parties into the task of policing behavioural controls.

20.

20. For an area to be designated a dispersal order zone, there must be evidence that anti-social behaviour has been a ‘significant and persistent problem’.

21.

21. Monopoly is by no means achieved in any sense but importantly remains a symbolic or mythical aim.

22.

22. In May 2005 in an interview with the Observer, the Chair of the Youth Justice Board, Rod Morgan, called on politicians and the media to stop calling children ‘yobs’ and warned that Britain risks demonizing a generation of young people (Bright, 2005).

References

Audit Commission (2002) Community Safety Partnerships. London: Audit Commission .

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