Global Policing

Ben Bowling, James Sheptycki

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781446292174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

In the transitional networked society, police power is no longer constrained by the borders of the nation state. It has globalised. Global Policing shows how security threats have been constructed by powerful actors to justify the creation of a new global policing architecture and how the subculture of policing shapes the world system.

Demonstrating how a theory of global policing is central to understanding global governance, the text explores:

- the ?new security agenda? focused on serious organised crime and terrorism and how this is transforming policing

- the creation of global organisations such as Interpol, regional entities such as Europol, and national policing agencies with a transnational reach

- the subculture of the ?global cops?, blurring boundaries between police, private security, military and secret intelligence agencies

- the reality of transnational policing on the ground, its effectiveness, legitimacy, accountability and future development.

Written by two leading international experts who bring cutting-edge theoretical debates to life with case studies and examples, Global Policing will prove captivating reading for students and scholars in criminology, criminal justice, international relations, law and sociology.

1

THEORISING GLOBAL POLICING

Our first task is to contextualise our subject with regard to theories of policing, globalisation, social order and governance. We examine the role of the police within the classic nation-state system and how this has become problematic. We explore the idea of the ‘social contract’ and how this has been re-shaped by an emerging transnational-state-system. The chapter also sets out two typologies of policing that mark the conceptual boundaries of the field. The first explores the distinctions between policing that aims to secure territory and that which aims to maintain surveillance over suspect populations. It distinguishes between high policing (seeking to maintain particular interests of state and social elites) and low policing (seeking to maintain the interests of the social order more generally) and between public and private forms. A second typology suggests four geographical spheres of policing – glocal, national, regional and global. These typologies create the conceptual space within which the various forms of transnational policing explored in later chapters are theorised and understood. The groundwork covered here provides the basis for making global policing visible as a theoretical object.

The problem of global policing

There is no such thing as a global police force but there is global policing. Global policing refers to the capacity to use coercive and surveillant powers around the world in ways that pass right through national boundaries unaffected by them.²¹ The many examples that we provide in this book include police officers who live permanently overseas or regularly use phones and computers to collect and share intelligence, investigate criminal conspiracies, to authorise arrest, or provide emergency services across a wide number of jurisdictions. A global police force would be different in subtle but important ways. If it existed, it would be an institution with universal jurisdiction, global mobility and the formal powers to arrest and detain suspects anywhere in the world. It would also have to have solid foundations in public international law and have some kind of system of control and accountability linking it to the peoples who inhabit the globe. Such a thing exists only in fiction and in the imagination of a small number of scholars and policymakers.²²

The idea of a global police force occasionally appears in books and films, most hilariously in the 2004 action-comedy film Team America: World Police. Declaring that ‘world crime is at an all time high’, a US paramilitary force of marionettes is given a global mandate to eliminate criminals, terrorists and their backers, and to ‘put the F back in freedom’. A more dramatic and edgy portrayal is the 2005 thriller Lord of War. The villain, a gunrunner played by actor Nick Cage, is pursued internationally by actor Ethan Hawke, a ‘global cop’, complete with Interpol badge, gun, body-armour and power to arrest his quarry anywhere in the world. These movies provide distorted images of something that is really happening: policework is globalising and many thousands of police officers work transnationally. At any given moment somewhere such agents are in the air travelling to provide consultancy services, training, investigative assistance, conference presentations and much else. Some will be local beat cops, others intelligence officers or private investigators. They might be identified with big city police forces, national agencies or supranational institutions such as the UNPOL or Interpol.

Stories about policing transnational organised crime, terrorism, people trafficking and cybercrime are now part of the standard daily commercial news diet, often garnished with snippets about Interpol or FBI involvement. Sensationalised global crime stories are hot topics that convey anxiety, fear and insecurity. However, global cops seem distant from everyday life. Global crime stories always seem to happen to other people: ‘wanted criminals’ or ‘terrorist suspects’ arrested in murky circumstances in far away places. The tone of the reportage signals that the forces of law and order are protecting good people from the ‘dangerous classes’ of the world – the global ‘folk devils’.

The perception that global cops are a problem only for suspect populations consigned to the margins of the world system is one reason that we were interested in the story of Mr Derek Bond, a 72-year-old British citizen, retired engineer, unassuming mild-mannered grandfather of six who was arrested and held in custody while on a South African wine tasting holiday in January 2003.²³

Mr Bond was first questioned by immigration authorities at Cape Town airport. Later he was arrested on the basis of an Interpol Red Notice and locked up in the cells of Durban central police station. Red Notices, naming a suspect wanted by police for an alleged crime, are circulated through the Interpol communications network of National Central Bureaux (NCBs) to police forces around the world. They are not ‘international arrest warrants’, because there is no international authority with the power to issue such things, but in most jurisdictions they are interpreted as authorising, or even compelling, local police to arrest.

Mr Bond was detained by the South African police as a suspected fugitive because the details of his passport, stated on the Interpol Red Notice, matched that of another Englishman, one Derek Lloyd Sykes. Accused of a US$4.8 million telemarketing fraud in the United States, Sykes was on the FBI’s ‘most wanted list’ and was known to use Derek Bond as a false name. On the basis of an arrest warrant for Mr Sykes (alias Mr Bond) issued by the FBI in Houston, Texas in 1999, a Red Notice was circulated through the Interpol network. Unfortunately, this resulted in the detention of the real Mr Bond four years later at the insistence of the FBI legal attaché in Pretoria. The repercussions of this case of mistaken identity eventually prompted into action officials at the UK Foreign Office and the FBI Headquarters in Washington DC. The diplomatic spat between the USA and UK embassies in South Africa seems to have led to some activity on the ground and the real Mr Sykes was arrested in a Las Vegas hotel on 26 September, three weeks after the unfortunate Derek Bond had been arrested in South Africa.²⁴ On release and return to the UK on 28 September, Mr Bond described in vivid detail the dire conditions of his three weeks sleeping on the filthy concrete floor of a Durban police cell.

Like a character from a Franz Kafka novel, Bond found himself accused of a crime of which he had no knowledge, imprisoned by an impenetrable transnational policing system with no helpful means to protest his innocence or provide redress. Afterwards Mr Bond considered the merits of a civil case seeking compensation from US authorities but abandoned it on the advice of his solicitor and in the interests of a quiet life.²⁵ The case of Mr Bond raises questions about the relations between the individual and the complex web of institutions that makes up the global policing enterprise. Derek Bond was powerless to resist while his family, desperately trying to help, were trapped in a bureaucratic hall of mirrors.

The Red Notice issued by the FBI and circulated by Interpol in the Bond case contained inaccurate and incomplete information. It lacked a clear photograph or fingerprints. This case raises many questions. Who is responsible for checking the facts on a document that can result in depriving someone of their liberty? When police power is deployed intercontinentally, which laws are enforced? Where? By which authority? In whose name? What system of external accountability regulates policing beyond borders? Who is in charge when things go wrong and from whom can redress be sought? Who pays for the globe-trotting police? How are global cops recruited and trained? How are the problems known to afflict domestic policing – legal and procedural errors, corruption, racism and the abuse of force – remedied in the transnational realm? In the following pages we aim to provide the theoretical basis on which to answer these questions.

The case of Mr Bond is far from typical, not least because as a white, middle-class English retiree, he does not fit the stereotypical image of the ‘usual suspect’. Across the world uncounted numbers of people are held in custody as a result of some aspect of global policing, the vast majority of whom are economically marginal people often with black or brown skin. The atypical case of Mr Bond piques curiosity about how the world is policed. In trying to make global policing theoretically visible we draw from an inter-disciplinary mix of sociological, legal and political theory, and extend our thinking to include insights from cultural anthropology, international relations, critical geography and history. Our aim is to make the idea of ‘global policing’ theoretically comprehensible to students of the social sciences and humanities generally.

Policing and social theory

One way to begin to think about contemporary policing would be to provide an overview of globalisation theory for criminologists.²⁶ We certainly think that understanding the evolution of policing offers a uniquely useful window through which to view globalisation. Many books on similar subjects begin by assuming that the meaning of ‘police’ is self-evident, a position that has an underlying functional logic: there are criminals so we need police to go after them.²⁷ Most accounts of transnational policing simply extend this logic: there are international criminals so we obviously need international police to go after them.²⁸ Instead of taking this ‘common sense’ approach, we have chosen to build a theory about global policing from first principles. We begin this by asking ‘who are the police?’ and ‘what is policing?’ and seek answers by turning to some basic sociological theories of social ordering.

The police idea is a modern one. It came into political parlance during the period known as the European Enlightenment and should be understood as much more than mere criminal law enforcement. The ‘science of police’ refers to a broad set of social practices intended to order and control, organise and regulate. As Pasquale Pasquino put it: ‘What police regulations regulate, or try to regulate, or purport to regulate, is everything which in the life of this society [...] goes unregulated’.²⁹ Similarly, for Marcus Dubber, ‘among the powers of government none is greater than the power to police and none less circumscribed’.³⁰ The order ensured by a ‘science of policing’ is underpinned and facilitated by statistical information on populations, the conditions of prosperity, health and public happiness. Statistics (a concept derived from ‘Staat’, ie. ‘the State’) becomes the ‘science of the state’; political arithmetic in which a calculative rationality is used to govern citizens and the life of a society.

This broad definition of policing is both forward and backward looking. It is forward looking because it seeks to prevent future ills, and backward looking because it also concerns itself with past misdeeds and seeking out those who break the law. It follows from this definition that our concern with policing must take in the complex mode of functioning of an entire network of institutions encompassing the administrative apparatus of the modern state.³¹ Adam Smith, founder of classical economics, and Cesare Beccaria, founder of classical criminology, both agreed that policing in this broad sense is central to a healthy and happy economic order.³² Beccaria declared, in 1769, that ‘the sciences of education, good order, security and public tranquillity, objects all comprehended under the name of police [...] constitute the last object of public economy’.³³

The modern sociology of policing defines its object somewhat differently. According to Egon Bittner, the functions of police in modern society centre on the Weberian sociological dictum that ‘the State’ claims the monopoly of coercive power in the maintenance of social order.³⁴ Bittner referred to coercive force as the core of the police function.³⁵ The police, he argued, are ‘nothing else than a mechanism for the distribution of situationally justified force in society’.³⁶ This view of the police focuses on a central problem of society, which is how to contain (for the good of all) violence, dishonesty, conflict and other contingent harms that are detrimental to social life. This branch of the sociology of policing focused almost entirely on urban police conceptualised, in William Muir’s words, as ‘streetcorner politicians’.³⁷ The police are the keystone in the system of modern governance and an essential political interface between the state and society. Police are to government ‘as the edge is to the knife’.³⁸ Of course, it makes a difference whether the knife is a scalpel or a bayonet.³⁹

The pathways from the Enlightenment idea of ‘police science’ to today’s manifestations of policing are many and varied.⁴⁰ The policing idea has been broken up into a hotchpotch of institutions, each with their own specific functional logic, sometimes working at cross-purposes, rarely rationally harmonised and without a reasoned separation of powers. For example, in the United States drugs are policed by two major federal agencies, the DEA and the FDA. There are points of tension between the rationality of these two agencies: illegal drugs have medical uses and medicines can be used unlawfully. There is, as yet, no overarching theoretical rationality of policing governance that reconciles the potential of this conflicting irrationality. The practical Balkanisation of the policing idea into a myriad of enforcement, regulatory and security agencies – policing everything from street crime and tax evasion, to water and food quality – provides the institutional surface of emergence for policing subcultures that we explore in further detail later in this book. Some social theorists have argued that these policing institutions are united by a common governmentality or risk discourse.⁴¹ Our view is that the complexity of the field of transnational policing activities also gives rise to institutional friction. Consequently, policing may, contrary to its professed ideals to ‘protect and serve society’, actually contribute to harm.⁴²

Policing and the social contract

The modern idea of police sprang from the same intellectual ground as the idea of the social contract, which itself is integral to thinking about the modern state. The social contract is the key to police legitimacy and forms the basis of the liberal idea of policing by consent. The language of the social contract is one for justifying political authority and describing the structure and content of just political authority. That is why the notion of ‘policing by consent’ is a key constituent of the language game of social contract theory and, by extension, liberal political philosophy and the practice of liberal democratic government.⁴³

Simplifying for the sake of clarity and brevity, we outline four positions relevant to social contract theory.⁴⁴ On the left, we have the vision of Jean Jacques Rousseau who foregrounded the ‘general will’ whereby the sovereign resides in the entire people who are all equally free. On the right, we have the vision of Thomas Hobbes, according to whom society consists of a people beneath the sovereign authority. The difference between the two lies in their conception of human beings ‘in a state of nature’. For Hobbes the natural state of humanity is ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’ and in a perpetual ‘war of all against all’, which requires that the social contract ultimately be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Theorising global policing
• 2 Policing and the transnational-state-system
• 3 The global policing architecture
• 4 The occupational subcultures of global policing
• 5 Global policing in practice
• 6 Conclusion: the global cops have arrived
• Endnotes
• Name Index
• Subject Index