NCJ Number
227112
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 49 Issue: 2 Dated: March 2009 Pages: 150-164
Date Published
March 2009
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This paper presents the results of two analyses of Ericson and Haggerty's (1997) paradigm which centers the role of the police in the production and processing of information and expert knowledge for public or private nonpolice institutions, going from a notion of 'policing the risk society' to that of 'policing the road risk society'.
Abstract
Ericson and Haggerty's 1997 book, Policing the Risk Society (referred to as EH), represents a formidable epistemological gamble. The EH set out to replace Egon Bittner's (1970) classical, coercion-based reading of the police with a radically new model that foregrounds the panoptical or knowledge work dimension of the police and its potential to serve the interests of nonpolice social-disciplinary institutions. This paper analyzes this neo-Foucauldian model on the basis of a body of research into road traffic policing or 'policing the road risk society' (RRS). The first test analyzed in historical depth the development of road risk policing in the United States and the history of the interaction between the police organizations concerned and the environment of the public and private owners of road risks. The second test recapped the first in the form of two interlocking details to be added to the EH model: (1) analysis of the social pressures on police organizations in terms of road risk management could conceivably reestablish the primary progressive meaning of social control viewed as the capacity of a society for self-regulations and (2) the police organizations are not becoming centers of calculation in the pay of those asking for services. As a result of the analyses, it was observed that though nonpolice owner-managers of new risks challenge the societal immanence, centrality and publicness of police organizations, with time, these challenges fail. It is therefore argued that Ericson and Haggerty's notion of panoptical policing should be taken as a theoretical innovation, enhancing Bittner's model with a new force. References