crm3305

meso theories in policing

Organizational structures, police culture, community relations

The state

Central authority with monopoly on legitimate force

Capitalism

Economic system based on private ownership and profit

Neo-liberlism

a specific form of capitalism

liberalism

the original, less of a focus on free market economies and othereconomic matters

Marxism

Class-based analysis of power and institutions

Political Economy

The relationship between politics and economics, and how these influence one another.

It examines how economic systems (like capitalism or socialism) are shaped by political instituions, laws, and ideologies

How economic interests shape political decisions, governance, and public policy

politiical economy power and resources

Focuses on how power is distributed and how resources are allocated

political economy Institution and Ideology

Analyzes how institutions (e.g., the state, markets) and ideologies (e.g., neoliberalism, liberalism) shape social outcomes

links between economics and policing

Conceptual Links (Ideas)

Structural Links (Social Forces and Institutions)

Instrumental Links (Individuals)

Conceptual Links between Police Politics

Inability to think of police as anything but the crime fighter

Police within a capitalist system

societies of a different time period tend to think about markets and government set limits on the ways in which we are capable of concevncing of policing  as an issue.

\markets should serve us, how we think markets tend to behave, and what we feel the proper relationships between governments and markets ought to be, all greatly impact our views and beliefs about what policing and police are and could be

Conceptual Challenges to Policing

Globalized world, little consensus of who police should be, what they should do, and how they should do it

Big government? Small government?

Structural Links between police and politics

Existing economics structures ensures and deficit-driven approach to policing, which allow for allocation of police funding to go something else.

Strutrual changes in how human beings move around and do business with one another usually related to new technology in society influence crime and open new crime control

Within structural, growth and occasional decline and reorganization of financial markets produce structural pressures that both force and enable different possible policing responses

Free Ridder Issue:

others pay you benefit

Pareto Law

Market incapable of regulating problems of public good that are difficult to quantify

Instrumental Links between Police and Politics

Individual advocacy with new opportunities for personal benefit(monetary, humanitarian

• At the instrumental level people matter, influential reformers seize upon structural and conceptual shifts in economics to successfully push their agendas

• New problems and opportunities for policing create spaces for people to push competing agendas about the institutional forms that the system of policing ought to take.

Instrumental challenges to policing

Lobbying, constant expansion of the police

strengths of linking economy and politics

Reveals hidden economics behind policing

Connects crime control to broader governance

weakness of linking economy and politics

May overlook cultural, psychological, or symbolic dimensions;

Can be overly deterministic

weber and modern state

policing is part of a bureacratic power.

Legitamacy through legal-rational authority(Formal rules, laws, bureaucratic procedures).

Emphasis on rules, hierarchy, and efficiency.

Tension between rationalization and responsiveness to community needs

Weber:Legal rational authority

A form of legitimate domination where power is derived from a system of rules and laws-not from tradition or personal charisma. People obey leaders not because of who they are, but because of the office they hold and the legal framework that grants them power

legal rational authority is

rule based:authority is exercised through formal laws and procedures

Impersonal:Decisions are made without regard to personal relationships or emotions

Hierarchical: Power is distributed through a structured chain of command

Meritocratic: Positions are filled based on qualifications, not inheritance or charisma

Weber: Strengths

Explains formal structure and legitimacy

Weber:weakness

Doesn't address informal practices or power inequalities

Classical Police Theories

Police are the "thin blue line"

Police were reaction to disorder

Without police, society would be anarchy

Classical police theories strengths

Foundational understanding

Easy to interpret

classical police weakness

Ignores issues of intersectionality

Revisionist

Marxist Interpretations

police are state agents of class control(protecting property and supressing disteint)

Policing helps maintain ideological consent

Necolous in marxist interpretation

Policing as essential to capitalist prosperity and discipline

Policing was born out of the breakdown of feudalism and the State seeking new ways to ensure social order

Police were a means of addressing class strife

Criticizes classical interpretations of the emergence of police, sees it as

Marxist intrepretation strengths

Exposes economic interests behind policing

Highlights linkages between economy, classism, and conflict

Marxist intrepreation weakness

Can be overly structural

May neglect agency and reform possibilities

At times, can reify class and class attribution

Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Robyn Maynard critiques anti-black state violence in Canada and with also Challenges myth of Canadian exceptionalism,

Highlights surveillance, criminalization, and systemic racism and Intersectional lens: black women queer and trans people, migrants

Contemporary Critical Perspectives strengths

Grounded in lived experience;

Strong historical approach

Exposes racialized violences

contemporary critical perspectives weakness

Some argue it may be too radical or pessimistic to allow for reform

Crime Control Model

Efficiency, presumption of guilt, swift justice

Due Process Model

Legal safeguards, presumption of innocence, fairness

police service

Community-oriented, collaborative, responsive

power for the public

police Force

Coercive hierarchical, militarized

power over the public

Democratic policing

Transparent, accountable, rights-respecting, equity of service, police responsiveness to citizen demand, citizen participation

Authoritarian policing

Centralized, repressive, politically driven,more concerned with mainintance of state power

Totalitarian policing

Surveillance-heavy, ideological enforcement,concerned more with the total control of power, like nazi germany or stalin, they are invading

Policing reflects

regime type and political culture

informal, ad hoc,reactionary poilcing

informal, mostly a community, eye on eachother

Hue and cry policing

someone do something bad you cry out, alert the community to respond

Different interpretations of poilicing

Classical (traditional, "cop-sided") vs Marxist (classist, revitionist)

Birth of policing tradtional view/cop sided

police as a rational response to the twin pressures of urban and industrual revolution,police were of the public, previous police was corrupt

birth of policing maxist view

urban/indus revolution happened in caitilist economy, police reform was the need to control new classes clashing in the cities as the industrual revolution began

continental policing

The policing model seen in France and mainland Europe was rejected by England

high policing

political policing with 4 feautres

Bourdieu and policing

police operate within a field of power

habitus

shapes how officers perceive and respond to social cues

Doxa

refer to pre-conscious beliefs and associations

symbolic power

is the power to constitute the given through utterances, to
make people see and believe, to confirm or transform the vision of the world
and thereby action on the world.

Bourdieu and policing symbolic power and the state

Police as a strong, emotional symbol propped up by various media, rituals, and
symbols

Foucault and policing

Focus on power, knowledge, surveillance, and disciplinary institutions, macro foccused

pastoral power

Roots in religious organizations
– Teaching, right from wrong, self-governance
– “A prelude to what I have called governmentality through the constitution
of a specific subject, of a subject whose merits are analytically identified,
who is subjected in continuous networks of obedience, and who is
subjectified through the compulsory extraction of truth” (Foucault)

Governmentaility

A form of power, alongside sovereign and disciplinary power that all work
together to govern

Governmentality analyzes

how problems-solutions (or and technologies) of
governance are formulated and addressed

Goal of governmentality is to

make docile, self-regulating bodies that contribute to the
betterment of society, to State goals and to State reproduction

Techniques of Control

Surveillance, data analytics, and predictive
policing are framed as technologies of neo-liberal governmentality.
These are tools that shape behavior and preempt disorder

Normalization

Police practices increasingly focus on maintaining
norms (e.g., “quality of life” policing), subtly (or not so subtly)
enforcing what is considered acceptable or deviant

Panopticon

Idea emphasizes State surveillance
– Combines pastoral power (self-control) with discipline

police force and service are

• These two are intertwined in historical roots to police

• To serve and protect in anglo police system mottos reflects how their is a intertwined idea of force and service

• Force and service have remained modal concerns in politics of policing

low policing

• routine law enforcement and street level maintenance

• A forceful reaction

high policing

• concerns the control of overly political behaviour

• high policing reaches out for potential threats to preserve the distribution of power in a given society

• High policing is concerned with the promotion of the status quo and the acts of elites

cop sided view of policing

The ‘cop-sided’ view sees the professional police as a rational response to the twin pressures of urban and industrial revolution

revisonist view of new policing

revisionism stressed that industrialization and urbanization occurred within a specifically capitalist framework