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

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.