Urban Criminology by Rowland Atkinson Gareth Millington

Author:Rowland Atkinson, Gareth Millington [Rowland Atkinson, Gareth Millington]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781134708703
Google: COZ3DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 40757865
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-11-08T03:09:41+00:00

As such, it is important to distinguish between policing as an activity and the police as an institution. What has occurred, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards, is that policing functions have become both fragmented and conflated with the wider policing functions of the state. From this perspective, modern inventions such as the welfare state and social policy (more broadly) can be acknowledged as sharing the bourgeois concern within ‘security’ and social order. Activities previously carried out by the police, such as road cleaning, social welfare and the administration of poverty, became separated from notions of professionalised policing and are now managed by other state bodies. The important point to acknowledge, from this perspective, is that both the police and social policy can often be understood as being pitted against the working class, for both emerged as part of a coordinated attempt by the state to fashion the market and fabricate social order.

Ogborn (1993) provides a historical, geographical account of how the history of professionalised policing belongs to a history of state formation and cannot be reduced to the logic of capital or class. The key argument is that ‘the geography of policing and the administrative hierarchies of the new police forces were arranged and rearranged as part of attempts to order the city’s public space’ (ibid.: 606). The aim of policing, in its early decades (1835–1856), was to organise city life rather than take control of the workforce. Policing, in this respect, was concerned with assuring a thoroughgoing cultural revolution. Ogborn agrees with Neocleous that urban policing must be related to the power of the state to penetrate and coordinate civil society, but this cannot be reduced to an understanding of economic (and class) relations. Rather, the geographical organisation of policing should also be understood in relation to surveillance. Policing comprises a combination of the process of accumulating information and the exercise of direct supervision over urban territory. As such the arrangement of police action over the space of the city intersects with internal authority structures and information flows between constituent parts.

Despite the professionalisation of some policing activities, some scholars have nevertheless held on to a more expansive conceptualisation of the police. Dikeç (2007) endorses Rancière’s understanding of the police ‘as an established form of governance with everyone in their “proper place” in the seeming natural order of things’ (ibid.: 18). As Dikeç explains, Rancière uses the term ‘police’ to refer to all activities that create order by distributing and enforcing the allocation of places, names and functions. In this sense disorder and thus attempts at control are framed by the identification of people out of place or, more literally, out of order. Police forces themselves, which Rancière refers to as the ‘petty police’, are simply ‘a particular form of a more general order that arranges that tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in community’ (Rancière, 1999, cited in Dikeç, 2007: 19). Rancière emphasises how efforts at enforcing distribution can be seen as the essence of police work.

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