Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on authors
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- one Introduction: Policing and Security Frontiers
- two Getting to the Frontiers: Methodologies
- three Community Safety Officers and the British Invasion: Community Policing Frontiers
- four Conservation Officers, Dispersal and Urban Frontiers
- five Ambassadors on City Centre Frontiers
- six Public Corporate Security Officers and the Frontiers of Knowledge and Credentialism
- seven Funding Frontiers: Public Policing, ‘User Pays’ Policing and Police Foundations
- eight Conclusion: Policing and Security Frontiers
- References
- Index
one - Introduction: Policing and Security Frontiers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on authors
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- one Introduction: Policing and Security Frontiers
- two Getting to the Frontiers: Methodologies
- three Community Safety Officers and the British Invasion: Community Policing Frontiers
- four Conservation Officers, Dispersal and Urban Frontiers
- five Ambassadors on City Centre Frontiers
- six Public Corporate Security Officers and the Frontiers of Knowledge and Credentialism
- seven Funding Frontiers: Public Policing, ‘User Pays’ Policing and Police Foundations
- eight Conclusion: Policing and Security Frontiers
- References
- Index
Summary
Policing and security are subjects that are central to criminology. Much criminological attention is paid to public police as well as contract private security agencies and guards. Yet there are emergent and other neglected forms of police and security provision on the frontiers of scholarship and practice. These range from brightly coloured ambassador patrols engaging urbanites on the streets, to community safety officers removing graffiti and quelling nuisances just beyond main police beats, to conservation officers walking obscure trails to look for homeless people's camps in the farthest reaches of urban parks, to mostly hidden corporate security personnel in public government, and to public police sponsors drawn from private corporations operating in the shadows.
The idea of the ‘next frontier’ in policing or law enforcement is often invoked to signify something historically unique. Several criminologists have invoked the notion of frontier but usually only descriptively to refer to a space (McDonald, 1995; Hayward, 2004; McCulloch, 2004; Scott et al, 2007; Carrington et al, 2010). So it begs the question, what should ‘frontier’ mean for criminology and for studies of policing and security?
Geographers and political scientists have long distinguished geopolitical frontiers from borders (Newman, 2003, 2006), the latter denoting a rigid, clear-cut nation-state boundary. Since the 1990s, a multidisciplinary critical border studies literature has emerged to challenge a static definition of the border (Kolossov, 2005; Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2012; Brambilla, 2015). For example, Brambilla (2015: 15) identifies a ‘move away from’ borders ‘as naturalised and static territorial lines’, arguing for a notion of ‘borderscapes’, one of several notions that share some features with the notion of frontier, but nonetheless differ from it (see Geiger, 2009). Critical geographers have sought to decouple the notion of frontier from colonial historical accounts of ‘settler societies’ and ‘American exceptionalism’, arguing the ‘frontier notion was ethnocentric in the extreme’ (Geiger, 2009: 17) and reclaim it as a general analytical concept although one which keeps reference to the nation-state. While geographers have written on frontiers, they have rarely provided in these accounts direct and detailed focus on policing and security practices. A frontier is more mobile, less secured and more ambiguous than a traditionally understood border.
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- Information
- A Criminology of Policing and Security Frontiers , pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019