Policing New Risks in Modern European History

Xavier Rousseaux, Jonas Campion, Xavier Rousseaux, Jonas Campion, Xavier Rousseaux, Jonas Campion

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137544025
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Authorities often fear societal change as it implies finding a new balance to live together within society. Whether it is defined by economic, political, social or cultural factors, the transformation of life in society is considered by authorities as a 'risk' that needs to be framed and controlled. The state's response to this situation of transformation can be analysed through the prism of the police. Informally or not, police systems adapt their regulatory frameworks, their structures and their practices in order to respond risks, new threats and new rules. This process, which is mostly of a contemporary nature, is also deeply historic. Analysing it on the long run is therefore particularly relevant. From the late nineteenth-century until the second half of the twentieth-century, Policing New Risks in Modern European History provides a panorama of political and police reactions to the 'risks' of societal change in a Western European perspective, focusing on Belgium, France, and The Netherlands, but also colonial perspectives.

1

New Threats or Phantom Menace? Police Institutions Facing Crises

Jonas Campion and Xavier Rousseaux

Abstract: Social, economic, political, regime, or environmental crises bring about challenging periods for the proper working of society. Crises take part in the transformation process of structures and practices of established authorities. The latter develop new policies to best handle these unconventional times and safeguard the effectiveness or legitimacy of their actions in changing environments. The relation of police forces toward crises is ambivalent. As guarantors of order closely linked with the authorities they serve, they would allegedly be wary of – or even defiant towards – changes, which are seen as synonyms of ‘fears’, ‘threats’, or ‘risks’ for order and public security. On the other hand, crises also appear to be periods of institutional opportunity for police forces.

Keywords: policing; police history; risk; threat

Campion, Jonas, and Xavier Rousseaux, eds. Policing New Risks in Modern European History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137544025.0004.

Social, economic, political, regime, or environmental crises bring about challenging periods for the proper working of society. Crises take part in the transformation process of structures and practices of established authorities. The latter develop new policies to best handle these unconventional times and safeguard the effectiveness or legitimacy of their actions in changing environments (Boucher, Falochet, 2012; Rosenthal, Arjen Boin, 2012). In contemporary states, one of the major consequences of crises is to foster changes in the frameworks of citizenship and social statuses, which are reconfigured between victims, ‘dangerous’ groups to be closely watched, leading elites, or populations which have been recently integrated within the social and political life of the state.

The relation of police forces towards crises is ambivalent by definition (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, 1978; Oram, 2003; Reinke, 2008). As guarantors of order closely linked with the authorities they serve, they would allegedly be wary of – or even defiant towards – changes, which are seen as synonyms of ‘fears’, ‘threats’, or ‘risks’ for order and public security. On the other hand, crises also appear to be periods of institutional opportunity for police forces. These periods that act as reform experiments, where the exception becomes the norm, reveal loopholes or necessities and foster autonomies. They are also characterized by an acceleration of police forces’ transformation or growth paces.

This ambivalence regarding the effects of crises on the short run should be put in perspective thanks to an analysis of the changes in the policing structures framing societies in the medium term. Since the 19th century, with the development of the Modern State, police bodies structured themselves and bureaucratized. The police function became an occupation (Reinke, De Koster, 2014). This professionalization went hand in hand with a wider set of tasks entrusted to the police, which corresponded to the wider scope of intervention of public authorities. The authorities’ competences gradually extended from the public toward the private sphere while covering economic, social, family, industry, or health issues. The emergence of a ‘modern police’ (Napoli, 2003), is undoubtedly essential to understanding the way the states deal with crises and their consequences.

The police’s attitude and role in times of crisis need to be scrutinized in detail in view of how important they are for life in society. Acting as an interface between multiple authorities (political, administrative, judicial, or military), official institutions and a population that has to be controlled and protected, the police are key players in the social sphere. In order to comprehend the peculiar relation between the police and crises, the researcher’s attention must cover time and space.

In this book, which includes most papers presented at the occasion of a GERN Interlabo workshop in June 2014,¹ we consider police responses to the processes, the forms and paces of social changes that have taken place in the wake of the successive crises which have structured societies from the 19th century in Continental and Western Europe (France, Belgium, Netherlands) or within the colonial world (Belgian Congo). Analysing the polysemic notion of crisis from a new perspective, this book studies the transformation of the police institution, especially as regards its objective of security management in these particular periods. By tackling the history of the police institution at a time when its framework of action changed, we focus our analysis both on the reality and the intellectual development and identification process of the threats that caused these changes. Our goal is to demonstrate to what extent the police are an important stakeholder of the social construction of contemporary risk, how they are influenced by the latter, and are consequently an ideal point of view to observe the steps in developing responses to ‘perceived’ risk within each society.

Our aim is to understand when, how, and why police bodies and police staff adapted their organisation and practices to these unusual circumstances. Fitting in line with a socio-political history of the state – in view of the fundamental links existing between police institutions and police functions, as well as the authorities they serve (Fijnaut, 1979; Loubet Del Bayle, 2006) –, this perspective’s purpose is to analyse continuities and discontinuities in police history. Between facts, myths, fears, strategies, and amplifications, this is a political economy of security that needs to be brought to light, between the offer proposed by multifaceted and legally bound police forces; changing demands according to political stakes, ideological stakes, and public opinion’s weight; and human, material, and financial means that were sometimes limited or inadequate.

In this introduction, we first propose a socio-historical analysis of the concepts of ‘risk’ and ‘threat’, as well as of the ‘security’ required to deal with them. We will then shift to the police institution. On the one hand, in the light of the gathered papers and an expanding historiography, we underline the methodological perspectives which are a critical aspect of an innovative historical approach to police systems. On the other hand, building on these first analyses, we will introduce a few hypotheses for a history of risk management through the prism of police issues.

A historical approach to risk and security²

The police institution which, according to Paolo Napoli or Dominique Monjardet, cannot be exclusively defined by what it represents (Napoli, 2003; Monjardet, 1996 and 2008), but also by its actions, is one of the most debated research topics in social sciences (sociology, political sciences, law, criminology) and – in recent years – history. There are several reasons for such a dynamism: the role of ever-growing importance played by police bodies in the functioning and dysfunctioning of social life; the massive amount of documentation produced by police forces, extensively used by historians (Berlière, 1998, 2001 and 2009); the observation that researches on policing are all the more necessary to understand society because of the wide gap between norms and practices.

In this perspective, the ‘modern’ police institution would be one of the first social institutions trying to predict future disorders in order to deal with today’s law enforcement. In many ways, this observation is in accordance with the reflections on risk sociology. This has been central to recent debates, especially in the French-speaking scientific sphere since Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society was translated in 2001, after its initial publication in German in 1986 (Beck, 2001). In this book, Beck is the first to develop the observation of a breaking in modern society, characterized by the emergence of new risks of unprecedented magnitude, especially in industrial and technological fields (Niget, Peticlerc, 2012). According to this approach, the issue of the distribution of these risks should be raised in order to guarantee a certain level of security and respond to a need for insurability. In the end, this insurability is impossible to guarantee in many fields considering the new kinds of risks which have to be addressed.

Although they are stimulating as ‘know-how sociology’, Beck’s works have been criticized. Among the most relevant criticisms, those summarised by Jean-François Cauchie and Gilles Chantraine are based on questioning the comprehensive, unique, and general character of this approach to risk. In order to go beyond these limits, they propose to contextualize the concept of risk based on the governmentalist approaches initiated by Michel Foucault. In this framework, risk and risk management become tools ‘to guide behaviours and the carrying out of a particular power underpinned by a specific political rationality’ (Chantraine, Cauchie, 2006). This new rationality proves to be a kind of governmentality (Gordon, 1991; Rose, 1996) which can be defined as a ‘form of activity aiming at influencing, guiding or affecting the behaviours of one or more persons’.

The link with the policing institution then becomes obvious. Indeed, if governmentality has to be understood as ‘the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics that enable to carry out this very specific, although very complex, form of power [ ... ] which aims at controlling the population’, modern police indeed appears as an ideal tool according to the triple dimension identified by Foucault: set of technologies; form of power tending to supersede the sovereignty and discipline; result of the transformation of the state into a governmentalized state’ (Foucault, 2004, p. 112). The police institution is typically confronted with the management of risks to social order, especially those who derive from an ever-increasing circulation of people, goods, and ideas (Blanc-Chaleard, Douki, Dyonet, Millot, 2001 and Deflem, 2002). Within the development of Western societies, the police are a response that emerged simultaneously to this new perception of social risk from the 17th century to guarantee both an individual and collective security.

Methodological references for an entangled history

This observation shows that it is compulsory to analyse the police management of crises and the risks that derive from it, but also to underline their impact on police bodies. In this perspective, we first need to emphasize a few essential insights of a renewed historical analysis of policing duties. Used in various ways by the participants to this book, these insights both outline and define the methodological framework and points of reference aimed at going deeper into a socio-political history of the police forces. These insights will favour a well-structured understanding of risks realities and related discourses.

Firstly, analysing police responses to risks requires taking into account the diversity of stakeholders at play. A socio-political history of social regulations needs to be carried out. This is a known fact: The police are a multifaceted authority, from the point of view of carried out tasks (which are traditionally divided in administrative, judicial or state-related missions, though the terms used may vary) (Bittner, 1990, pp. 82–232) and the multiple bodies they are made up of. Police tasks are divided into many divisions. This leads to the coexistence of multiple institutions, which can be distinguished by their territorial distribution, their theoretical competences, the missions they carry out, their civil or military identity, their hierarchy, and, more recently, their private or state-related character (Ocqueteau, 1997 and 2004; Leloup, 2014). Thus, this results in the emergence of ‘police systems’, in their own right (Levy, 2012), made up of multiple institutions that compete with each other and complete one another, the structures of which are based on political philosophical choices related to the state, citizens, or fundamental freedoms and restricted by temporary or local circumstances.³

Ultimately, within increasingly centralized states, political, and judicial decision-makers endeavoured to propose coordinated and comprehensive response to threats and risks, in spite of a recurring ‘police wars’ discourse (regarding this topic, see Laurent López’s paper which illustrates the latent conflict between military police and civil police) (López, 2014). The researchers need to focus on understanding the different steps in the development of police systems by both considering the institution as a whole and also each of its components. It is necessary to analyse the links, the relations and logics that bind the different stakeholders together, that is to say (judicial, municipal and national) police bodies, the gendarmeries, the army, intelligence services, private bodies active in the security field, but also the state’s political, judicial, and administrative institutions. This results in a nuanced understanding of the security landscape which is defined according to its missions and action levels. Is this a consistent system or rather a mix of multiple stakeholders organized according to a more or less hierarchical task distribution?

Police practices are partly determined by the stakeholders the police interact with. In order to establish the legality and legitimacy of police forces, a society-specific triangle relationship is defined between the authorities, the police system, (as well as its institutional interests), and the populations. This relationship articulates around hierarchical dynamics, control dynamics, and cooperation or opposition logics (Emsley, Weinberger, 1991; Mawby, 2002 and De Koster, 2010). The triangle can become more complex: fringe groups, experts, opinion makers, but also occupational groups are all sub-categories that need to be considered (this is a non-exhaustive list), as they play a role in defining threats, in taking into account social transformation or the resulting police response (Fijnaut, 2014). As illustrated by David Somer, the debates concerning the difficu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  New Threats or Phantom Menace? Police Institutions Facing Crises
• 2  Crossing Frontiers to Chase Offenders: The Hardships of French and Belgian Police Collaboration at the Beginning of the 20th Century
• 3  The Criminology and Forensic Police School: The Twofold Project to Humanize Judicial Practice and to Implement Technical Police in Belgium
• 4  Suspect Cities and the (Re)Making of Colonial Order: Urbanization, Security Anxieties and Police Reforms in Postwar Congo (19451960)
• 5  The Dutch Police and the Explosion of Violence in the Early 1980s
• 6  Conclusion: Risk Policing and the Art of Adaptation
• Index