Security: A Sign of the Times?
Were Baudelaire, Benjamin, or Simmel to stroll through the streets of a contemporary British city on a Friday or Saturday night, they could hardly fail to be struck by the extent to which contemporary urban life is âsecuritisedâ through the âassemblageâ of a range of personnel, practices, and technologies concerned with preventing crime, ensuring public safety, and reducing harm and risk, in short, with âmaking the future secure and certainâ (Schuilenburg 2015: 1). The police remain perhaps the most obvious security presence in contemporary urban life, appearing in significant numbers at any location popular with large numbers of late-night revellers; increasingly that presence is magnified in the UK through high-visibility âBattenburgâ markings on police vehicles and uniforms, alongside the ubiquitous flashing lights. The very visibility of these officers is central both to their (apparently rather limited) ability to deter troublemakers, and their capacity to reassure the public that their safety is ensured. However, were our urban traveller to pay closer attention to the milieu, they would see that the police are only one of many security forces, their numbers now being supplemented by a much larger array of private security personnel, from bouncers guarding the entrances to pubs and nightclubs through to security guards protecting and patrolling commercial premises and shopping centres, tasked with maintaining decorum and ejecting the undesirable or the disorderly (Button 2002; Minton 2012; Wakefield 2012). These professional security forces are also augmented by âbottom upâ volunteer bodies: street pastors, who attempt to look after the safety and well-being of those who have revelled too much, dealing with the lost and drunk at the end of a night out, or âstreet watchâ patrols who seek more generally to ensure the safety of their own localities (Middleton and Yarwood 2015; Swann et al. 2015; Williams 2005).
Alongside the human agents involved in the securitisation of the city, the very urban fabric itself is mobilised as an agent in the discipline and exclusion of people configured as sources of threat or unease: benches, ledges, and concourses are specially designed with protrusions, obstacles, and uncongenial surfaces to deter tramps, skateboarders, graffiti artists, and other âundesirablesâ from using or abusing them; this forms just part of the wider shaping of the material environment through the principles of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and Design Against Crime (Atlas 2008; Crowe 2013; Ekblom 2005, 2010). These securitised urban spaces are watched over by an ever-present array of CCTV cameras, monitoring the comings and goings of all concerned; these, of course, represent only the most visible element of a âsurveillant assemblageâ that is in principle able to monitor almost all aspects of electronic life, from patterns of telephone calls and internet usage through to the data mining of credit and debit card transactions or social media posts (Aas et al. 2009; Ball et al. 2012; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Lyon 2007).
Should our flâneur tire of constant observation, human or electronic, or be made wary by the warning signs that inform tourists of the presence of bag snatchers and mobile phone thieves, they might seek the relative sanctuary of the suburbs. However, undertaking the journey by public transport, whether by bus, train, tram, or underground, they would still be monitored all the way by CCTV, bombarded with security and safety information, and induced to report âsuspicious packagesâ or âsuspicious behaviourâ to the relevant authorities. Even attempting to escape the public sphere by driving or cycling would not release the traveller entirely from the grasp of security: the journey would almost certainly be monitored by the extraordinary number of traffic surveillance cameras which routinely observe and record the actions of millions of road users every year (Travis 2010). Indeed, in order to begin the journey, our flâneur might first have to disarm the car alarm, release the steering lock, or unchain the bicycle in order to set themselves moving.
Reaching the suburban streets might bring either reassurance or disappointment, for there is no release there from the grip of security: the presence of gated communities, the persistent blinking of car alarms and burglar alarms, signs drawing attention to neighbourhood watch associations, and the flash of security lighting on passing the entrance to propertiesâall are more or less familiar features of the contemporary urban environment. On arriving at their destination, our fictitious flâneur might yet have to grapple with locks, security codes, and perhaps disarm a burglar alarm to gain entry to their own home. Indeed, the entire neighbourhood, and even the very dwelling itself, may well have been âsecuritisedâ in its construction through the principles of CPTED. In fact security does not stop at the front door, it extends deep into personal life, with an extensive array of security products for the home and the individual, ranging from personal CCTV systems through to rape alarms and self-defence training. Outside the UK, of course, the securitisation of personal life often extends to weapons, from the relatively crude and low-impact, such as pepper spray, to the lethal, such as firearms (on which see Carlson 2012, 2014; Squires 2014).
Security, then, has entered the home, the head, and the handbag, as surely as it has shaped our urban habitat. Indeed, so pervasive has âsecurityâ become that Mark Neocleous (2008: 3) suggests that our society has become âsaturatedâ by security so that âthe paradigm of (in)security has come to shape our imaginations and social beingâ. To paraphrase Robert van Krieken (2012: 8), security has become central to the organisation and operation of many of our social institutions, to the ways in which we interact with and govern other people, and even to the ways in which we govern and relate to ourselves: our behaviour, our lifestyles, and even our very sense of identity and selfhood are all related to the subject of security, for which reason scholars have begun to refer to our society as a âsociety of securityâ or a âsecurity societyâ (Foucault 2009: 10â11; Gordon 1991: 20; Zedner 2000, 2009).
There are now a number of excellent criminological analyses of the contemporary âsecurityâ field, from both a criminological perspective (Crawford and Hutchinson 2016; Loader and Walker 2007; Wood and Shearing 2007; Zedner 2009) and from the field of âcritical security studiesâ more generally (Collins 2016; Peoples and Vaughn-Williams 2014). The purpose of this book is not to add to or directly critique these fields (for which see Neocleous 2008; Neocleous and Rigakos 2011); rather, the purpose of this book is to reflect on how we arrived at the condition of living in a âsecurity societyâ. The subject of security came to both public and academic attention towards the end of the twentieth century as a range of new security interventions, policies, technologies, and anxieties coincided with the proliferation of discourses and practices associated with personal security and crime prevention (Garland 2000, 2001; Gilling 1997; Zedner 2009). In the UK these discourses developed at the intersection of a series of closely related contexts: rapidly rising rates of recorded crime and victimisation between the 1960s and the 1990s and the creation of the phenomenon of public âfear of crimeâ through the victimisation survey (Lee 2007; Lee and Farrall 2008; Farrall et al. 1997; Stanko 2000); a highly politicised debate about âmuggingâ, law and order, and moral decline driven by the ânew rightâ, with its self-conscious invocati...