Organized Crime in Asia: A Review of Problems and Progress

This paper provides a preliminary overview of research on organized crime in Asia drawing on selected papers from a symposium held at the National University of Singapore in June 2007. We draw on these contributions to emphasize the enterprise nature of organized crime and the common problems encountered by law enforcement in controlling and preventing the many harms inflicted by serious criminal activity. Recent attempts to address the changing character and forms of transnational organized crime, especially through the strengthening of mutual legal assistance by regional bodies such as ASEAN, are noted. These measures have yet to develop into the cross-border institutional frameworks now found in Europe, and the level of effective co-operation can only continue to improve. Countering organized crime in Asia also faces additional difficulties arising from the cultural diversity, relative weakness of law enforcement in some states and the lack of common strategies in respect to illicit markets.

Theorizing police response to domestic violence in the Singaporean context: Police subculture revisited

This article focuses on the well documented, yet potentially contested concept of rank-and-file police subculture to conceptualize police response to situations of domestic violence in Singapore. It argues that the utility of the concept to explaining police behavior is often undermined by an all-powerful, homogenous, and deterministic conception of it that fails to take into account the value of agency in police decision-making and the range of differentiated police response in situations of domestic violence. Through reviewing the literature on police response to domestic violence, this study called for the need to rework the concept of police subculture by treating it as having a relationship with, and response to, the structural conditions of policing, while retaining a conception of the active role played by street-level officers in instituting a situational practice. Using Pierre Bourdieu's relational concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field,’ designating the cultural dispositions of police subculture and structural conditions of policing respectively, the study attempted to reconceptualize the problem of policing domestic violence with reference to the Singaporean context.     

The “thinning” blueline: a Bourdieuian appreciation of police subculture

The notion of a recalcitrant “police subculture” is pervasive in the literature on policing, often invoked to explain many of the ills linked to police misconduct and corruption. This article argues that the failure of reform efforts is the result of interventionist strategies which had sought to change police subculture “head-on” without a corresponding change in the structural conditions in which the policing role is so located, and that these efforts, theoretically, have been informed by a conceptualisation of police subculture as homogenous, monolithic, and static. Using the Bourdieuian concepts of the “habitus” and “field”, the view of a “recalcitrant” subculture will be challenged in this article. Using the Singaporean experience as a case in point, it will be shown how changes in the field of policing can bring about changes, intended or otherwise, in the occupational habitus of the police: refashioning the informal repository of knowledge guiding police work.     

Race,reintegration, and social capital in Singapore

Social capital, or the lack of, has variously been acknowledged as contributing to criminal and delinquent behavior among certain groups in society. It has rarely been employed to explain why ex-offenders are unable to break free from recalcitrant behavior and reintegrate into society. We argue that Indians and Malays, as racial minorities in Singapore and disproportionately represented in the prison and re-offending population, are significantly less likely to achieve reintegration than those who belong to the Chinese majority. Because Singapore is a highly racialized society, the effect of race on recidivism and rehabilitation is clearly identifiable. Understanding racial structuration by taking into account the differential impact of a hierarchically organized network of social relationships is central to this argument. For such vulnerable groups, social capital plays a critical role. The uneven distribution of ethnic capital restricts the ability of the Indians and Malays and enables the Chinese to achieve acceptance into the mainstream.