NCJ Number
138805
Date Published
1992
Length
36 pages
Annotation
An effort is made to account for the evolution of private policing by developing and illustrating three alternate conceptions of its character and functions: State centered, laissez-faire, and pluralist.
Abstract
Marked changes have occurred between conceptions of relations between public police and private policing. An understanding of policing as legitimate in its public manifestation and dangerous in its private one promoted a politics of policing as a State monopoly. Consequently, by the middle of the 20th Century, private policing was regarded as an anachronistic institution. The laissez-faire view, a transformation of private policing from a threat to an asset, was accomplished by conceptualizing private police as junior partners in the business of policing. Private policing in recent decades has become an industry which provides both a service and a public benefit. The pluralist conception challenges the laissez-faire position by rejecting the argument that privatization involves no more than a technical transfer of tasks from one service sector to another and argues that what is occurring, under the guise of privatization, is a fundamental shift in the location of responsibility for guaranteeing and defining the peace from the State to corporate entities. Social theorists question the wisdom of the privatization of policing and recommend taking decentralization very seriously. 18 footnotes and 116 references