Policing Soviet Society: The Evolution of State Control

The Soviet militsiia (regular police) has evolved in the past 70 years from a feeble body seeking to ensure the survival of Soviet rule to a massive bureaucracy corrupted by nearly absolute power. As the Soviet militia has developed the focus of its activities, its ethos, professionalism, and its relationship to both the Party and KGB have changed in all periods, the militia has had political, economic, and social responsibilities, but the balance among the three has wed depending on the conditions of the state.
The militia, like the Soviet state, is currently in crisis. It remains an instrument of the party that is losing its legitimacy among the population. Perestroika's objective of making institutions subordinate to the law is a sharp deviation from existing practice. But even if the militsiia responds to these new expectations, because of the demands of a centrally planned socialist state the regular police will remain we intrusive into the lives of the citizenry than are police in Western democratic societies.     

Patterns of Policing and Policing Patten

In September 1999 the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland, chaired by Chris Patten, published its recommendations. This article examines the political context of policing reform, the contents of the report and the rejection of its core ideas in the Police (Northern Ireland) Bill published in May 2000. The central argument of the paper is that the Commission's radical model of policing – a network of regulating mechanisms in which policing becomes everyone's business – failed, because it gave insufficient attention, like much modern writing on policing, to the role of the state and the vested interests within policing. The overall outcome is that the Patten Commission has been effectively policed and Northern Ireland will be left with a traditional, largely undemocratic and unaccountable model of policing with most of the control resting with the Secretary of State and the Chief Constable.     

Policing appearances

Cet article établit une distinction entre deux stratégies policières, respectivement dénommées police de relation et police d'intervention. La police de relation vise à modifier les perceptions et les sentiments du public à l'égard de sa propre sécurité ou à l'égard de l'image de la police. Cette stratégie repose sur la communication et la persuasion et elle est illustrée par ce qu'on appelle la police communautaire. La police d'intervention tente de modifier certaines situations extérieures comme l'occurence de désordres et les taux effectifs de criminalité et de victimisation. Elle se fonde sur l'usage de la force et correspond à la police réactive traditionnelle et à certaines formes plus récentes de police intensive. La distinction proposée est articulée à travers une discussion de la crise que traverse présentement la justice pénale, des remèdes qu'on tente d'y apporter au niveau de la police et des évaluations de l'efficacité de ces remèdes.     

Diversity in Policing

Abstract

Police and minority relations have received much interest among public and academic audiences, yet little is known about policing in Latino communities. As Latinos emerge as the largest minority group in the United States, researchers and police agencies are increasingly concerned with the experience of Latinos in the criminal justice system. One strategy for improving police and community relations is to enhance the diversity of law enforcement agencies. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the ethnic composition of law enforcement agencies in major U.S. metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2000. Using data from the U.S. Census and the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, it appears that the growth in the U.S. Latino population has been met with an increase in the percentage of Latinos as sworn full-time police officers. Further, the degree of enhanced diversity varies by the ethnic composition of the community served. Implications of findings for improving relations between police and the Latino community are discussed.     

Policing the homeless

Research Summary Police officials across the United States are increasingly relying on place-based approaches for crime prevention. In this article, we examine the Safer Cities Initiative, a widely publicized place-based policing intervention implemented in Los Angeles's “Skid Row” that focused on crime and disorder associated with homeless encampments. Crime reduction was the goal. The police division in which the program was undertaken provides 8 years of time-series data serving as the observations for the treatment condition. Four adjacent police divisions in which the program was not undertaken provide 8 years of time-series data serving as the observations for the comparison condition. The data are analyzed using a generalized additive model. On balance, we find that this place-based intervention is associated with meaningful reductions in violent, property, and nuisance street crimes. There is no evidence of crime displacement. Policy Implications This study provides further evidence that geographically targeted police interventions can lead to significant crime prevention benefits, with no evidence that crime is simply displaced to other areas. Criminologists and the media have given the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) little credit for major reductions in crime that have occurred during the past 5 years following a number of major policy reforms. We suggest that researchers should look more closely at the targeted interventions the LAPD has undertaken for evidence-based examples of effective policing. Importantly, this work suggests that crime associated with homeless encampments can be meaningfully reduced with targeted police actions. However, law enforcement actions do not address the roots of homelessness nor most of its consequences. Getting tough on the homeless should not be confused with policies or programs that respond fundamentally to the social and personal problems that homelessness presents.     

Policing organized crime

Conclusions Recent criminological research in the Netherlands underscores the fact that organized crime is embedded in society and the overall picture makes it clear that police emphasis on a crime fighting model of the police, based solely on criminal law will not be entirely effective. Therefore, the Twente police force developed a new strategy of policing organized crime in their region. This strategy is based on criminological knowledge and on the approach of community policing: preventive, pro-active and integrated actions taken by various partners of the police in order to reduce illegal activities of organized crime groups. This strategy, however, can only succeed when two conditions are satisfied. First, this approach can only function in an open democratic society in which numerous public and private organizations and the public feel responsible for the emergence of organized crime in their environment. Secondly, the police force and their partners must be (relatively) free of corruption. This implies that this strategy can only be effective in societies in which organized crime has not deeply penetrated democratic institutions and business organizations. Respectively Commissioner of Police and head of the Division Organized Crime of the Twente Police force and Professor of criminology and director of the International Police Institute (IPIT) at the University of Twente. PO Box 217, 7500 EA Enschede, The Netherlands. We would like to thank Alexis Aronowitz of the IPIT for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper and for her grammatical corrections, as well as the members of the editorial committee for their suggestions for improvements.     

Policing Unauthorized Camping

We argue that the links between welfare, policing, and exclusion, though rarely made explicit, nevertheless form the undercurrent of the modern neo-liberal state. In making this argument, we draw particularly upon the voluminous literature which amplifies the seminal work of Foucault, especially as it relates to government. Thereafter, we apply this set of understandings to the way in which the unauthorized encampments of Gypsies and Travellers are policed. We concentrate first on the construction of legislation and its legal aftermath. Subsequently, we draw upon case study evidence to illustrate our thesis, particularly focusing on the sorting processes of decision-makers.     

Private Policing in Context

This article considers the development, growth and significance of private policing in a wider context. Section one suggests that the rebirth of private policing is associated with - and, in effect, demands - a change in the conceptual framework with which policing is analysed. While section one addresses the conceptual context of private policing, section two examines its theoretical context by considering various explanations for the post-war growth of commercial security. Moving from specific to general accounts, it is suggested that two explanations - one based upon sociological accounts of the development of modern societies, the other on genealogical accounts of developing mentalities - provide a crucial context for understanding contemporary changes in policing and governance. In the next section, two of these changes - the growing influence of risk-based policing and the increasing significance of diverse patterns of governance - are considered in the context of the fragmented forms of security provision (commercial, municipal, civil and state policing) which are prevalent today. A short concluding section offers some final thoughts on how these arguments impact on the governance of policing. One of the implications contained in this article is that the re-emergence of private policing needs to be considered not only as a problem, but also as an opportunity to identify and address critical questions of contemporary governance.     

Policing terrorism in India

Policing terrorism in India is fraught with difficulty. India is a large, heterogeneous democracy that is surrounded by countries experiencing their own intense problems with terrorism. The legal structure, inherited from the colonial past, is struggling to cope with the demands placed upon it by a country of 1.1 billion. India is a federation and this also complicates the structures needed for counter-terrorism. Despite the democratic framework, policing in India is largely an inheritance from the non-democratic colonial past—a past that paid scant regard to the doctrine of separation of powers. Given these problems, India’s performance in policing terrorism has been mixed. We should not look for any early resolution of the problem of terrorism, either through preventive investigation or political amelioration of the issues that contribute to terrorism. But for all of that, India has done well to adhere to its basic democratic norms in the face of what is, by Western standards, a major terrorism problem.     

后现代法学的特征

发端于20世纪60年代的后现代主义建筑、绘画、诗歌、小说等思潮也很快进入到了富有哲理的法学领域.后现代法学对现代法学的基本原则和理念提出了强劲的质疑,试图运用各种新的方法重新解释现代法及其基本原则.其中,法国福柯的"权力学说"、美国罗蒂的"实用主义法律观"和日本柄谷行人的"世界帝国与法"的理论各具特色,具有较大影响.尽管后现代法学对现代法学提出了许多耐人寻味的质疑,但这并不意味着后现代法学已经取代了现代法学的主导地位,它的成就主要在于对现代法学理论的调整和补充.