Policing in the 21^st century: facing up to the challenges of the privatisation of policing

In 1999 an Australian Institute of Criminology publication concluded that, "The late twentieth century is a period of profound change in modern police history, as important as the deployment of the Bobby on the streets of London in 1829."

This statement holds true for the early 21st century. Today’s society is going through a change as, if not more, radical than the Industrial Revolution, which is credited with causing the social conditions which led Jeremy Bentham to call for the establishment of a force of peace officers to prevent crime – the call which was answered by Sir Robert Peel when he established the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1829.

Globalisation, information technology, the growing distance between the rich and the poor, small government, blind adherence to economic rationalism and the power of the market, are all having a profound impact on the institutions which underpin that society, and the way in which services, which we have traditionally viewed as public goods, are delivered.

It is within this context of world-wide societal change, that the profound change in modern policing history, which the Institute of Criminology referred to, is occurring. The change is the ‘privatisation of policing’ and there are some potential problems and policy challenges associated with the issue.

One of the trends that is of great concern is the emergence in Australia of ‘gated communities’ – fenced-off communities where residents have private roads, private communal space, and private security.

Gated communities are just one aspect of the ‘privatisation of policing’ phenomenon. I have deliberately used the phrase ‘privatisation of policing’, because what we are beginning to experience is broader than the private provision of security, or protection services.

We have been concerned in Australia for some time about the proliferation of private security agencies but until now debate has focussed only on licensing and regulating the agencies. We need to be aware of and bring into public consciousness and public policy debate the broadening of private provision of security into the privatisation of policing.

I am referring to "policing" in the same way as Jeremy Bentham did – as all the functions which make up domestic peace keeping. The actual list of functions would be enormous, but as an indication, it would include law enforcement, security patrols, crime prevention, criminal investigations, the imposition of fines, dispute resolution and making arrests.

Academics, particularly in the US and the UK, have been describing the phenomenon of private policing for over a decade now. In the early 1990s, English criminologists, lead by Les Johnston, were saying that society needed to reassess the traditional concept of policing as an activity carried out exclusively by public personnel. In support, Johnston pointed to reality: in most countries, including Australia, the police are not the only, nor in many cases the prominent, provider of security to the community.

It is not merely the number of private security agencies that gives rise for concern. The larger concern is the functions in which they are involved and the effect which this is having and could have on public policing and the services which are available and delivered to the community.

On the 22 of March this year the Sydney Morning Herald carried the bold headline: "Private crime-busters patrol the street". According to the article, a group of 20 Sydney hoteliers and retailers, led by the Waldorf Apartments development, have joined together to form the Chippendale Crime Control Committee. The Committee has hired a private security firm to carry out foot patrols between 4pm and 4am weekdays, and 24 hours on weekends. Residents have been offered the service for free.

Why? This is an area which has seen residential investment – it has been transformed into an area with trendy apartments. The Waldorf Apartments management sees heroin dealing as to blame for house break-ins, bag snatches and muggings in the area. And these activities are threatening the ability of the Waldorf to attract guests. They want to see their residents protected.

The group has not only procured private security controls, it has also undertaken community activities – meeting with elders of the Aboriginal community, supplying equipment to the local soccer team. Apparently it is keen to become involved in local projects such as the creation of murals on railway walls, retarring streets and promotion of the arts district.

So what is so wrong with business stepping in to help the community where government has failed? Well, the residents have at least one pertinent concern – they fear that if the patrol results in a fall-off in crime complaints to the police, this will be used as justification for the closure of the Redfern police station.

I think there are also other, more universal questions which must be asked and answered, including:

• Will private policing patrols attempt to become involved in bringing offenders within the criminal justice system, or will their role be simply deterrence and dispersement of criminal activity?
• How will the priorities and actions of private patrols be determined? If it is by the clients who have paid for their services by what mechanism will those who can’t afford to pay be able to have a say in the patrol’s activities?
• If the police patrols are replaced by private patrols, what would happen if, for whatever reason – say a change in investment priority – the purchasers of private policing withdraw their financial support for private security? And
• What will happen when groups such as the Chippendale Crime Control Committee, or residents of gated communities, start insisting that, since they don’t use the public police system they should no longer have to pay to support the public police system – as is starting to happen in the United States?

The instinctive response for police federations, and for those of us on the left of the political spectrum, is to say that private policing is fraught with too many dangers, too many problems, and it should be rejected out of hand.

Yet private policing is a growing phenomenon we can not ignore. Peter Grabosky, from the Australian Institute of Criminology, even claims that whether the public or the private sector carries out law enforcement is a misplaced question. He thinks that we have already gone so far along the privatisation path that the real question now is what blend of institutional forms is best suited to any given task.

Is he right? Do we have to placidly accept the encroachment of private agencies into all aspects of law enforcement? I hope not, because there are reasons to be concerned about the trends towards privatisation of policing. There are two principal reasons.

The first is accountability. No-one claims that public policing is error free, nor that instances of abuse and corruption do not exist – but public policing is under constant public scrutiny and the public can demand accountability through their own directly elected members of Parliament. By contrast, there are few processes of accountability for misuse in private police bodies.

The second reason is inequality. If policing becomes a residual service, provided only where private individuals and corporations cannot afford their own private protection services, public policing soon will cease to be funded adequately and the least well off in our community will again suffer from the contraction of the public sphere in the increasingly post-welfare state. Vigilantism will increase and a vicious spiral towards a society very different to that which we wish to endow to our children will set in.

But there is one aspect of Grabosky’s position which is unarguably correct – we have to start thinking innovatively, strategically, logically. If private policing is here to stay, what are we going to do with it?

And just as importantly, how are we going to stop it becoming everything that we don’t want and that we fear it could become?

South Australian Shadow Police Minister Patrick Conlon told me when we were both talking to a forum of neighbourhood watch coordinators that local governments in South Australia have considered paying private agencies to carry out one of the traditionally core functions of the police: street patrols. This is not supporting community patrols, it is contracting private policing.

This potential move by no means makes South Australia unique. New Zealand has experimented with private patrol services, which patrol selected streets, bus routes, vulnerable parked vehicles, unattended premises and also call on baby-sitters and elderly people.

And in Australia, the Howard Government recently rewrote the Fraud Control Policy of the Commonwealth to explicitly provide for Commonwealth departments to contract out fraud control responsibilities to the private sector.

Of course, a government body contracting private policing is a different model of private policing to the Chippendale Crime Control Committee example, where a completely private organisation is paying for private policing. But they are both aspects of the same phenomenon.

These developments should be making everyone involved in law enforcement – police, governments, policy makers – stop to ask some very important questions.

Why do community groups and local governments feel that they need to purchase policing in addition to what is publicly supplied?

If there is such a need out there, if public police forces on their own can not satisfy this need, and if private agencies are ready to step in and fill the gap, to what extent should we allow this to happen, and how?

What is better – that the sort of private policing which is being carried out in Redfern occurs without any involvement or control by the state, or that we somehow bring private policing within the influence of the public sphere?

Palatable or not, we have to ask these questions.

There has to be an involvement of Government and policy makers in shaping the role private policing is allowed to play in our community. We do not want to become a country like America, where in many cities security for sale means that those who cannot afford it cannot have it. Security and policing controlled by the rich is not accountable to Government, and it is not democratic. The people who need policing the most are, ironically, the ones who can afford it the least.

In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 15 March this year, Professor John Braithwaite, from the Australian National University, pointed out that the bush is losing out in terms of policing. Braithwaite’s argument was that the bush is under-‘policed’, both in terms of the number of blue clad police officers, and in terms of the regulatory officers which are located in country towns.

Braithwaite suggested that one solution to this problem "… is to abolish the police budget in favour of a policing budget, and to do likewise with every kind of regulatory budget … Country towns could bid competitively to the National Competition Council for a bundling of their share of the police and regulatory budgets into a multi-purpose local policing/regulatory service." Braithwaite acknowledged that the "policy detail would be difficult", however, he contended that "it may be a path to better justice and local democratic empowerment of rural communities. It could help national competition policy give the bush a win for a change."

From the notion that communities are not getting the policing they need comes the idea of allowing agencies other than the police to supply it. It is dangerously attractive.

Braithwaite’s "contestable policing budget" idea is an adaptation of the work of Professor Clifford Shearing. The UK Government commissioned Professor Shearing to prepare a report on the possible administrative and operational structure the Northern Ireland police force should take.

Professor Shearing’s report, known as the Patten Report, developed a model of policing based upon the totally laudable notion that policing must use local knowledge and capacity, must be responsive to local needs, and must be transparent and accountable … state and non-state security services should be accountable and serve all citizens, not a particular class of citizens or the market.

Shearing promotes policing as a public good.

But he does not view it as something which should therefore be delivered by the public sector. Or which the police should have the dominant role in.

Shearing proposed that, instead of a Police Commission, governments should set up "Policing Boards". In Shearing’s model, Policing Boards would have a budget which would be used to pay for security and law enforcement functions, which could be provided by private or public agencies. Shearing’s model relies on cooperation, information sharing, and common priorities between private agencies, the police and the community.

The recommendations of the Patten Report were not adopted by the UK Government. However, Shearing’s approach has been adapted by the Law Commission of South Africa which has recommended a model of people-driven policing and community justice. The Toronto Municipal Council has recently voted to introduce contestable policing budgets. And the idea has been suggested at least once in Australia.

I have not mentioned Shearing’s model or the concept of contestable policing budgets in order to endorse or promote them. I think the UK was right to reject this approach. In countries which have built strong and responsible systems of public policing, it is the thin edge of the wedge towards the residualisation of public policing.

At the same time, however, we can not ignore the positives in Shearing’s proposal. It does have the advantage of setting up a structure focussed on serving communities’ needs and bringing private agencies under the overview and regulation of a statutory authority. But it has ramifications for some of the more traditional activities associated with the law enforcement functions of policing which I believe require us to solve the problems of community safety in a better way.

We cannot ignore these issues. They will not go away.

Today’s police forces – both state and federal – are required to carry out two distinct yet inherently connected functions. They are being required to develop more professional, more sophisticated responses to transnational organised crime – the national security element of being domestic peace keepers. They are also required to carry out street controls, respond to criminal incidents, increase community safety, regulate a range of citizen behaviours and apprehend offenders – the street level response element of being domestic peace keepers.

I am well aware, in fact I am an active proponent of the argument, that police forces (particularly the Australian Federal Police) must focus on fighting transnational crime and the threat it poses to our national security.

But we can not focus on it to the exclusion, or the detriment, of local, community policing.

Inevitably, transnational crime has a local effect. Focussing public policing resources on the big players in transnational crime is necessary but not sufficient – it will always be the case that crime trends reflect local conditions, affect local communities, and require local policing.