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