Unsafe and Unsound Practices

Abstract

In this chapter, I change perspective again.⁵¹ Like the ancient Trojans, we hail the strange horses with names like privatisation, technology, increasing cooperation between public policing with regulators and the intelligence community. We say praise to cooperation in security networks and want to combine ‘nodes’ and govern security to safeguard society from the evil of crime, fraud and terrorism. But the new security architecture — designed for public order, crime control and national security — could very well foster unsafe and unsound practices. In essence, what I am saying here is that policing and security are, in some ways, at the individual or collective levels, a hazardous, unpredictable and risky enterprise and that this needs to be recognised. At the institutional and operational levels, organisations have to anticipate and institutionalise responses to critical incidents. This is because policing and ‘trouble’ go hand in hand in the sense of controversy, adversarial disputes, legal actions and medialed affairs (Newburn, 1999). The organisation’s response to dealing with ‘trouble’ and its repercussions are often crucial to determining the legitimacy and credibility of the executives in the eyes of the public.