You guys now. So it's my pleasure to welcome here today to give the final also summing up the term to welcome Ben Bowling
who is professor of criminology and criminal justice at the Dixon CUNY School of Law at King's College,
London. Ben works on various aspects to do with policing scholarship,
and so [INAUDIBLE] be talking to us today about some of the most recent work he's been doing, and he has,
over the course of his career, been advisor to the UK Parliament,
Foreign Office Equality and Human Rights Commission, the European Commission, Interpol and the United Nations.
Ben is founding member of Stop Watch,
a charity that works to inform the public about the use of stop and search powers and to promote fair, effective and accountable policing.
Ben had circulated a paper ahead of time, which hopefully everybody received.
Although I've warned him, I suspect few people will have had time to read.
But he will be talking to that paper today.
And just so that I don't forget to tell you, for those of you who want to accompany us afterwards, we do generally go to a pub for a drink.
We normally go to the King's Arms for Julian every week befuddles me by suggesting somewhere else.
And so this week he has suggested the matter, which is closer because it's too cold to walk to the king's arms.
So we're going to go we're going to go to the Mitre, which I think is that direction.
So if you want to come along, please do spend it over to you.
Thank you very much indeed for that very warm welcome. So wonderful to see so many people here on a rather chilly and grey Oxford Day.
So the title of my talk today is The Politics of Global Policing.
And What I'm going to be speaking to is chapter nine of the fifth edition of The Politics of the Police,
which anybody who will have studied policing up to this point will know is Robert Ryan as a sort of monograph,
a textbook he thing the one of the key, if not the key book on policing in the UK, first published in 1985.
So what I plan to do is to say a little bit about the politics of the police
and progress towards the fifth edition and what's new in the fifth edition.
And then to speak to the paper, which is, as I say, a chapter in the book to raise some questions around the definition of global policing,
what it constitutes in practice, and some of the particular issues that it throws up in terms of democratic accountability of policing.
So first, the politics of the police.
So our book was written in 1984, published in 1985, just as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act have been passed.
And so for the first time, procedural law, happy was being established in statute,
really providing a new framework for the regulation for the governance of the police.
It was also a a time of very significant social conflict.
There'd be major police riots in 1981, and there were riots again in March 85.
And they've been a kind of rumbling, slow riot throughout the very end of the seventies and throughout the 1980s.
So the first edition of The Politics of the Police was published at a time of major social
conflict with a focus on policing that had not really been the case up until that point.
Since the early part of the 20th century, even sometime in the 19th century,
there had been a kind of what have been described as a sort of golden age of policing in the immediate post-war period,
which mythical or otherwise was clearly not the case by the time we were into the 1980s.
So it was a fractious time in policing. It was the first textbook or the first attempt to provide a textbook like book about the police in Britain.
But really it's about the English police because it has so much to say about Northern Ireland, Scotland or even Wales.
But it was Robert's attempt to bring together all that was written about the police up until that point.
And in 1985, Robert says that pretty much everything that was written about the police in England and most of
what had been written about the police in English was included in the bibliography of that book.
It was possible to have read everything about the police. That is now impossible.
I think there may be maybe one or two people in the room for the capacity to do that, but it's the amount of research which is coming out.
Policing now is so extensive that it's I would say it's actually practically impossible
to read everything about the police that is even being published at the moment.
So that was a that was where it sort of started there. So the second edition came out in 1992.
By that time, there had been some significant changes and that kind of lost.
The political politics around policing in general had subsided.
The Conservatives had cooled a little bit on the police.
The third edition came out in 2000 and now moved to Oxford University Press from from Harvester.
And there were a number of major transformations that were occurring in in in the police and also in the study of policing with some challenges,
particularly coming in around the observation that private policing,
that policing was much more plural than the than the first two editions of the Politics of the Police that really recognised
policing being provided by a very wide range of different kinds of providers in the in the public and in the private sector.
But by 2000, there was something of a consensus around policing with a big, major, significant focus on policing as crime control.
The 2010 edition, the fourth edition, emphasised the importance of understanding police in their social and economic context,
particularly the persistence of the entrenchment of social inequality.
And what Robert identified as the emergence of a neoliberal political economy, of deregulation, and of a kind of laissez faire politics.
So that's 2010. I guess about two years ago,
Robert contacted me and also James sceptically to ask whether we would be interested in
working with him on the fifth edition of The Politics of the Police and What We Parties,
which was the sort of thing you do when you offered an opportunity like that to work on this amazing book.
And it is amazing book. And lots of people have written reviews of it and sort of commentaries on it over the years, and it was a great honour.
But there are some significant weaknesses in the fourth edition, despite the recognition of the importance of plural policing.
Really the whole area of privatisation and policing is it's talked about in the previous edition and the people's last two editions,
but perhaps not to the extent that it was required,
given the debates which had really overtaken the field in the early in the late 1990 and early 2000.
So that was a gap was needed to be filled. Less was said about militarisation than perhaps should have been.
It tends to focus on the uniformed policing function.
Not very much is said about, but not as much as could be said about the detective function and less still
about high policing the sort of intelligence based sort of covert policing,
informal surveillance, intelligence gathering, undercover policing.
It's very English. It's a very English book.
So much less is said than could be said about the continental model and the origins of
understandings of policing the code and prior to the beginning of the 19th century.
So the models of policing in continental Europe,
very little was said in in previous editions about colonial policing and how the British model travelled overseas.
And less was said than would be optimal about the emergence of transnational policing and the particular challenges in understanding police work,
which emerge as the power to police begins to migrate beyond the boundaries of the nation state.
And what that means for for domestic policing and also for policing more broadly.
So that brings us to the chapter itself.
So what I do, first of all, just to say something about the core argument of the politics of the police.
So the core argument of this book, which has remained consistent throughout all its editions and is very much part of,
I suppose, the, the the education that Tiggy and I had doing our PhDs at the London School of Economics when Robert was there.
And we sort of, you know, we took in the politics of the. In a sense with our doctor or mother's milk.
It's the course of glycemic story,
and policing is the aspect of social control that identify identifying and rectifying conflict and
achieved through surveillance and the use of legitimate violence or coercive force to impose sanctions.
So the heart of the policing task than to paradox is the first that the use of coercive
force or physical violence is a morally dubious means to achieve the goods of peace,
order and tranquillity. So the way to reduce violence is by through the use of violence is paradoxical.
And the resolution of what Robert refers to as the perpetual scandal caused by the deployment of this diabolical
power is resolved by the claim that the police represent the democratic will of the people and the rule of law,
so that the use of coercive force, the use of violence, is legitimated by its rootedness in democratic processes.
The second paradox is that not all that is policing lies with the police.
And although the police stand as romantic symbols of crime control and the sources of order and community,
in actual fact, those sources of order and safety lie to a large extent beyond the ambit of the police.
They lie in the political economy and culture of society, or as maintains a complex web of the family,
of the social institutions, other kinds of policing functions.
It's not all about the police. So the politics of the police in a just society should be geared towards enhancing informal social control and
minimising the need to resort to police intervention so that when they do respond to occurrences of crime and disorder,
their intervention is understood to be fair, effective and legitimate.
So these assertions give rise to a wide range of questions that are covered in the book, such as the meaning of fairness, effectiveness,
and the legitimacy of the ways in which the police power can be held accountable to the people that it purports to serve,
and about the nature of the political processes that govern policing.
So what we tried to do in this particular chapter is to move beyond an exploration of policing in the domestic context,
in like localities, to try to understand the globalisation of policing and its implications for the politics of the police in Britain.
In 1985, when the politics of the police was first published, its subject was conceived of almost exclusively in domestic terms.
The sources of crime and insecurity and disorder were understood to be local and when there was a discussion of travelling criminals,
this was usually to refer to urban violence in London and Manchester and and Birmingham,
travelling out to the shires that was often referred to today's county lines.
Consequently, most discussions of policing in previous editions were either explicitly or implicitly concerned with local policing,
with a limited debate about arguments for and against the creation of a national police force.
35 years on, much has changed and the policing agenda is now much more evidently transnational from disrupting organised crime and terrorism,
managing mega events, sporting and cultural events, responding to transnational disasters, searching for people missing overseas.
The varieties of police work mirror the transnational possibilities of everyday life,
and the political responses to the globalisation of social ordering have had a profound
impact on the architecture and métier of policing its organisational culture,
priorities and processes. So what I'll speak about in the next sort of half an hour to 45 minutes is the development
of policing agencies that operate in regional and global arenas beyond the nation state,
the role of foreign police working overseas, the emergence of the Overseas Liaison Officer as a distinct policing specialism,
and the impact of these developments on debates about national and local police capacity, accountability and control.
The simplistic,
functional explanation for the growth of transnational policing is that criminality is no longer constrained by the boundaries of the nation state.
The global cops are needed to chase global robbers. The list of crimes which exemplifies this trend is very long.
Transnational organised crime. The trade in toxic waste, drugs, guns, tobacco.
Stolen artworks and antiquities. Endangered species.
Modern slavery, financial crimes, fraud, money laundering, terrorism, cybercrime, online child exploitation and so on.
The global reach of criminality, the argument goes, means that the long arm of the law should stretch well beyond local police force boundaries.
And there is a kernel of truth to this argument.
The 21st century is much more globally connected than any previous area, and you can see this in economic and political and social spheres.
We all know about globalisation. The chapter includes data on intercontinental travel, intercontinental movement of goods and services, migration,
the growth of the internet, instantaneous communications, the use of computers to enable financial markets and so on.
All of those things clearly mean that the possibilities for transnational crime of various different kinds are more extensive.
And so there is, as I say, a logic to this functionalist argument about transnational policing.
But we think that the recent expansion of transnational policing is not simply a functional response to transnational organised crime.
To start, transnational policing is not new. The arguments that led to the creation of Interpol and the United Nations police capacity,
but first articulated in the 19th century when the moral panics of the folk devils were international anarchism or the white slave trade.
Got to talk about travelling criminals in the in the 1890s.
Moreover, the European Colonial Project established a global network of policing that was rooted
in the metropolis but spread across the British Empire and indeed other empires.
So my last empirical work was on the policing of the Caribbean, where most of the Caribbean,
the English speaking Caribbean territories have a policing model, which is a kind of replica and fractal replica of of the British policing model.
Most senior commanders in the West Indies are trained in at the UK training centres.
They have uniforms, the lot of them. The Royal Police Force is the Royal Barbados Police Force, the Royal St Vincent and the Grenadines and so on.
And that was a network of policing, which was a transnational network where all the senior officers were British or sometimes Irish police officers,
sometimes from elsewhere in the colonies. And the local police were drawn from the locality or maybe moved from one island to another.
Policing has been transnational, probably even since its very origins,
and certainly ideas about policing have travelled around from the middle of the 19th century onwards.
So the idea that globalisation, this kind of late, modern globalisation,
has caused transnational policing just doesn't add up to it doesn't stand scrutiny.
In our view, transnational policing is and its growth is better understood as a change as a result of changes in patterns of governance.
So the beginning of the modern period policing was largely a matter of parochial governance to the officers of the town or village,
constable and justice of the Peace. And its focus was on local crime and disorder.
That shifted in the 19th century as the police, along with other branches of government,
became more important to the international internal social order, the modern nation state competing in the international state system.
After World War Two, the trans nationalisation of policing intensified instead with the globalisation of politics, economy and society.
If you think about the emergence of the supranational, the transnational institutions which emerged after the the Second World War,
I think it's actually analytically more convincing to think of policing as being in step with the globalisation of governance.
United Nations and its agencies. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the WTO, World Customs Organisations.
And also the growth of regional organisations like. The European Union will play a role in the emergence of global and pan continental policing.
Also, non-state actors play a pivotal, pivotal role in global governance,
including domestic and international non-governmental organisations, multinational corporations and financial institutions,
which are arguably more powerful and more important than many, if not all,
governments, and they control a vast movement of vast quantities of capital.
So understanding globalisation draws attention to the sense that many of the problems facing police
organisations operating at any level stem from the consequences of shifting flows of capital,
of employment opportunities and of people. And although debates about transnational policing equates the police role with crime control,
there are also transnational order, maintenance and service functions as our own domestic policing.
The most obvious case is in relation to contributing to public order in post-conflict situations.
In post-conflict situations where, for example, in UN missions, the UN blue helmets are followed by UN blue berets,
formed police, something like 17,000 police officers working fully under a United Nations banner in failed and failing states.
But a really interesting example, and there's very little work on this, is the police.
The transnational policing role in the case of a major national natural disaster.
So unless as I say this, I don't think as any scholarly research or by little anyway, on the 2004 Asian tsunami, the Boxing Day tsunami,
which we think was the largest international police operation in history,
with around 700 police officers and staff from 30 countries supported by Interpol.
And over a two year period, the police identified more than 3000 bodies,
assisted with the recovery of bodies and repatriation of those investigative victims, last known movements.
So the police role in dealing with sudden death, which is commonplace in the domestic realm, when you think about who do you call?
It's the police, not Ghostbusters. It's it is an element of the role of international liaison officers who take responsibility
for dealing with the aftermath of citizens from their countries who die overseas.
I don't have time to talk about the kind of the ebb and flow and the arguments for and against the kind of globalisation thesis.
But clearly globalisation is not a one directional ever moving flow, as we can see from,
you know, two words Trump, Brexit and can say any more than that he's done.
Thank you. So that's the kind of the context.
Transnational policing is a growing subfield.
It really only began as an academic subject of study in the late 1980s.
But the work of people like Michael Anderson,
if a middleman John Bennion and colleagues publishing significant works in the very late eighties and early 1990s,
one of the first observations is that there was by that point evidence of a qualitative shift in the nature of police work,
and it was clear that there was a growing global presence of police officers working outside of the countries
that they would normally work in and research on airports and seaports and the regulation of human mobility.
So bringing the kind of the wider police family of customs and immigration officers,
perhaps siblings and others in security and intelligence services within within that within the ambit
began to began to be clear that there really was an emerging a growing subject of academic study.
Malcolm Anderson said there seems to be, quote,
a gradual transfer of internal and external security control from the nation state to international institutions.
That was an observation.
In 1995 the US police were studied by Ethan Nadelmann in 1993 and that was his doctorate and he argued that wasn't really trans nationalisation.
This was the Americanisation of policing in within the US sphere of influence,
starting with Latin America and then heading to the east and then to the Middle East,
where the kind of an Americanisation of techniques and methods of policing which
were being pioneered and developed right at the very boundaries of what was.
Lawford at that time. The book, The Chapter contains a typology of transnational policing,
which attempts to look at the way in which policing is transforming it at all socio spatial levels.
So you can see the emergence of global institutions, the highest level of associated high socio spatial level international.
So relationships amongst police from sovereign states, regional, subregional, national and also the the globalisation of local policing.
One of the things that we kind of struggle with in the book is how do you kind of
is it possible to kind of to make an entire book based on the English police,
really transnational and comparative? Actually, that is actually not possible.
It comes through the book, but it's it's basically can't be done in a single, you know, 130,000 word sort of epic volume, except.
So it would be a much bigger project, I think.
So what we settled on was trying to understand the impact of transnational analyzation on debates around English policing.
So that's kind of where we set up an example I'm sure will be familiar to everybody in the globalisation of local policing is the the Skripal affair.
415 on Sunday, the 4th of March 2018. Remember,
the public called the Wiltshire Police to report that a middle aged man and a young woman slumped unconscious on a park bench in a central Salisbury,
a medieval cathedral city in the south of England. The view was perhaps they were just sort of drunk or something that had been on drugs.
The initial police response revealed that Mr. Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent and his daughter had been poisoned.
It was later discovered to be by Novichok, a military grade nerve agent, within 24 hours.
But it started as a routine call to the local shire constabulary turned into a matter of national and international security.
Wheelchair constabulary was very soon overwhelmed by the task that confronted them,
and they soon passed operational responsibility to other parts of the British police network,
notably the counter-terrorism command of the London Metropolitan Police,
but also engaged the Royal Marines, the R.A.F., the COBRA Emergency Committee of Government.
Am I fired? Am I? Six Q Subsequent investigation involve crime scene, forensic analysis,
chemical weapons inspectors and detective work in the UK and Russia a rare but
not unique example of the glow of a local impact of transnational criminality.
The bulk of everyday local global linkages. I mean, police officers, it's much more mundane.
The paradigm example of transnational policing concerns drug smuggling.
In England, we don't grow so much coca leaf poppy and hemp.
They grow like weeds and in many parts of the world.
And so drugs, production, importation, supply, distribution is an inherently transnational business.
And even where there is local manufacture, it also tends often to involve transnational supply chains.
I mean, what happened after Brexit? So whether we're looking at drugs,
but also people smuggling and human trafficking to understand the distribution of
supply of narcotic and psychotropic drugs requires a kind of a transnational mindset.
It needs to be a more intense phrase indigenous but globally aware.
And when you talk to domestic drug squad commanders, well,
talk about not just what's happening in their locality, but it's transnational connectedness.
And that is particularly true, I think, in the West Indies, where small islands are transshipment points.
And so the drugs are coming from somewhere.
They are not in for a short period of time before they leave, usually arriving by small boat, leaving by air.
And so this is a transnational business the that the Caribbean Drug Squad commander has.
So perhaps three or maybe even four mobile phones, one from the Americans, one from the British.
Is that a domestic in a local police force? And this one for his wife and kids or her husband and children, usually men.
And so that kind of the transnational ization.
Of policing is linked to the trans nationalisation of the problems facing police in this context.
So that's the globalisation of local policing.
At the same time, although the debates around do, do we need a national police force in Britain has kind of petered out.
Although I did notice that there was an article on the National Crime Agency today
which described the chief officer as the most senior officer in British policing,
which is usually reserved has historically been reserved for the High Commissioner, Metropolitan Police.
So maybe something else, maybe that signals a change in it.
And so national level policing capacity is developed in many countries alongside the globalisation of local policing,
but varies widely across jurisdictions in the UK in in in, in Britain.
There's been a gradual accumulation of power in national agencies.
So most domestic policing is undertaken by the 43 police forces in England and Wales.
A number of national specialist agencies like the British Transport Police finish its fence.
Police and it's a long list of those is a really interesting book, if you like.
Directories and dictionaries, which I do. The Almanac of British Policing.
And it's just sort of a sort of list of all the all the agencies very, very, very, very diverse.
Since the 1990s, there's been a building on on regional crime squads formulated in the 1960s into,
first of all, a National Crime Squad and National Crime Intelligence Service.
These were amalgamated in 2005 to create a serious organised crime agency and then reorganised and renamed the National Crime Agency in 2013.
And that has responsibility for, well, as it says on the tin, serious and organised crime.
The impetus for nationalisation comes from a number of sources.
First, there's a belief that local police forces lack the capacity and expertise to deal with organised,
serious organised criminal activity and that with transnational connections in the Wiltshire case as a sort of an example of that.
So national police forces have dedicated units for cyber crime, financial crime, online child exploitation, modern slavery and so on.
Second, centralised national hubs have been created to respond to the rapid growth of
demands from overseas police requesting information about suspects wanted overseas.
So prior to the creation of these national units, if you wanted to know whether you're a foreign police organisation,
you wanted to know whether a suspect was abroad. By and large, you would have to engage with 43 separate police forces in England and Wales.
The creation of a I mean, that was the Interpol network, of course,
but essentially what one of the key functions of the National Crime Agency is to provide effectively a clearinghouse for requests from overseas,
both incoming and and outgoing. It also intersects with the trend of integrating policing with other law enforcement agencies.
So national level policing creates a crucial linkage with international policing systems.
So it's training, development, selection and posting of officers overseas.
So whereas once police officers would have expected to work most of their career at one particular
organisation or to perhaps have moved around a couple of local police forces during their career,
particular if they were ambitious and being promoted. But now it would be quite common for police officers to have a posting in a
national agency and then gain the skills of what you might call a police diplomat.
There's no standard model for national policing hubs, but in all cases their role is to link domestic police agencies within a nation state linked
to police forces in other countries and provide a link to global and regional agencies.
So that's the local and the national regional policing agencies.
So the emergence of regional, economic and political blocs has been occurring for some time.
The European Union clearly being the most but one of the most advanced of those, perhaps the most advanced.
So you have Europol, which has emerged in that context, but there are similar organisations elsewhere.
There's Africa all. Every poll, action poll career poll, which has emerged in recent years.
This also reflects the sense that domestic policing capacity can't respond to the terms nationalisation of crime and insecurity.
And so these regional entities are being created to share information about criminal threats,
to develop a strategic response, to bring officers together, to develop strategic, tactical, operational capacity.
Some regional entities also have shared databases, training programs, conferences and so on.
The European Union can be regarded as one of the most advanced examples of an emerging system of supranational
governance in which the sovereignty of individual member states is being pooled in certain spheres.
The idea of European police cooperation goes back to the 19th century.
The Congresses, which eventually led to the creation of Interpol.
There were also numerous forms of bilateral police cooperation, exchanges and practices.
So, for example, the French Regional Brigade, two teams of mobile police, were established in 1907,
which provides an opportunity for Francophone police officers from Luxembourg to have placements in French
units with the idea of developing competencies within the French police and policing border zones today.
Transnational police cooperation is an integral part of the European enlargement agenda,
with the objective to create a common security and justice area.
Strengthening regional cross-border cooperation between law enforcement agencies
and judicial authorities in the fight against organised crime and corruption.
That includes networking, mutual legal assistance, the transfer proceedings,
request for extradition, joint investigation teams, witness protection and so on.
I'm tempted to get into the detail of European policing, so perhaps keep everybody awake.
I'll just skip over that a little bit. It's interesting,
but complex Europol vote with saying a few words about probably the most advanced and ambitious attempt at Pan
Continental Police cooperation fully integrated into the European Union following a Council decision decision in 2009,
responsible for collecting and disseminating criminal intelligence as well as law enforcement cooperation specialist units,
including an organised crime centre.
The European Cybercrime Centre, established in 2013, Counter-Terrorism Centre, established in 2006, sometimes characterised as a European FBI.
The agency has no enforcement powers but exists to enable cooperation among police agencies within the EU, irrespective of where we're looking.
In terms of the emergence of PAN regional cooperation, the preference for informal cooperation,
horizontal cooperation amongst police officers is one of the key findings from numerous studies of transnational policing.
So there's a sort of there even where there exist extensive formal transnational policing arrangements,
police officers tend to find ways of being able to cooperate horizontally.
And so this kind of raises interesting questions about the nature of governance as it moves outside
of the purview of individual nation states having the capacity to know what their police are doing.
A few words about global policing agencies. Interpol in the news a lot, just the last week or so or last few weeks.
Interpol declares itself to be the world's largest international police organisation,
the world's only global police organisation, and the world's most effective international policing body.
It is without doubt, the leading global policing brand.
The seeds of Interpol can be found in the latter part of the 19th century,
which germinated at the first International Criminal Police Congress in Monaco in 1914 and came to fruition and the International
Criminal Police Commission in 1929 based on an agreement among 22 European and US police chiefs and headquartered in Vienna.
The Commission then annually in Vienna until 1938, on the eve of World War Two, when the Nazis assumed control.
In 1942, the CPC fell completely into German control and relocated to Berlin.
The post-war rebuilding was led by Belgium and in 1946 the IPCC moved to Paris and then later to Leon.
The structure of Interpol has remained remarkably stable over the years of its existence.
Interestingly, it's not a true inter-governmental organisation.
An internal governmental organisation is one which is established by a treaty among nation states.
Interpol is an organisation that was established as an agreement amongst police forces operating, if you like, below the level of the nation state.
It is being given special status as an inter-governmental organisation by AU, although in its functioning it's actually a transnational network.
Its status is facilitated by the fact that its structure mirrors that of a typical IOE.
It has a permanent headquarters in Lille, a decision making body, the General Assembly,
an administrative body of the General Secretariat and an executive committee.
And it runs through National Central Bureau, which are nested within domestic police forces.
So the international and CBSE are where the if you like, the work of Interpol gets done within the local police force.
What's crucial is that Interpol has autonomy from the system of states because the police organisations,
because of the police organisations that make up this,
make up its membership attempts to create an international police force in the late 19th and early 20th century,
founded on the problem of national sovereignty as it was subjected to by national governments who thought it would weaken national sovereignty.
But the way that this can be finessed is, if you like, is for policing to be seen as something disconnected from politics,
but it's concerned simply with the technical matter of responding to a crime.
I won't say much more about how an. Paul works. Another crucial but interesting UN global policing agency is the UN police.
So I misspoke earlier because about 13,000 police officers from 90 countries deployed in 18 police missions.
The UN police division, as it exists today with ambitious development plans and coordination with Interpol to create,
quote, a global policing doctrine comes very close to the vision.
First sketched more than a century central to understanding transnational policing
is the role of the international liaison officer or the Overseas Liaison Officer.
The ILO, this specialism really emerged first amongst the USA and has been taken up by many European
countries and is now something which seems to be happening almost all over the world.
So the liaison officers are to be a bigger describes them as being like station masters in a railway system,
directing and shunting information to where it is needed as quickly as possible.
And they can be posted to other countries within the region, particularly in specialist areas such as counter-terrorism or organised crime,
posted far outside the region, seconded to regional agencies like Europol or seconded to global agencies such as the UN or Interpol.
The liaison officer is a kind of police diplomat.
Typically, police liaison officers will work out of an overseas embassy or high commission.
So where the military attache and the trade attache well established aspects of the diplomatic mission,
the law enforcement or policing attache, is now very much a fixture.
And so my work on Caribbean policing, I mean, one of the the groups that I talked to,
were they the UK liaison officers who had offices in the in the high commissions or embassies, worked, if you like,
under the authority of the ambassador, could only take action with the authority enforcement action with the authority of the local police,
have some accountability back to their home police force.
But questions of accountability were blurred.
Where really, I would say there's no global survey of the number of liaison officers.
There's a system whereby it's Dini and John in 2010 identified 650 liaison officers in 54 countries.
We've done a bit of arithmetic, and there certainly is many more than that today.
I mean, certainly well over a thousand police liaison officers.
France, for example, has a 130, Australia has 80, South Africa 30.
The China Daily reports the Chinese police deploy 63 liaison officers overseas and there also Nordic liaison officers.
It worked together to represent the Nordic region. So the Asian officers, our first point of contact for visiting police officers,
their clearinghouses for information and they like the sort of oil and glue of the transnational policing system.
Or maybe a nicer metaphor is the idea of of the contemporary policing system as being like a patchwork quilt.
This is a city that for patches of different sizes and shape different, different layers.
And in that metaphor, the liaison officer is is the sort of stitching that is stitching together all the pieces they sit at,
the margins of the edges of domestic policing, but are increasingly central to transnational policing.
And they are snitches and rival rivalries amongst officers. They recognise one another is as part of a sort of a transnational law enforcement elite,
a bane of the multilingual understanding about working across languages and cultures.
We can cross different systems and particularly working in these horizontal trust space relationships to allow information to flow,
to enable things to get done. So what we are seeing is a sort of transnational liaison ships,
signs of a new form of public governance that leave open the question of how
transnational governance can be held to account by the global Commonwealth.
So the question then is what does this what are the implications of this for the domestic politics of the police?
Questions of accountability and national sovereignty can be answered theoretically by the contention that it's only
possible for police officers to use coercive and intrusive powers within their own geographical jurisdiction.
You could say the very definition of police power, of state power,
the possession of specialist powers to use legitimate coercive force within a given territory implies jurisdictional exclusivity.
But there seems to be a bit of a gap here because policing resources are fragmented
and therefore national authorities cannot dominate all external relations.
And poor, small and poor states in particular have difficulties exercising sovereignty.
So this sort of decentralised state model in which officers from different countries
communicate directly with one another and in formal contexts become standard practice.
So certainly the idea that the domestic police would have a monopoly on information,
criminal intelligence simply is unsustainable because this information is flowing relatively freely across transnational boundaries.
But what about the I think it was David Bailey who said the police are too government as the edge is to the knife.
So what about the kind of cutting edge then of state power, the use of coercive force beyond national boundaries?
Well, there clearly are documented instances where overseas police have either carried out or
attempted to carry out arrests outside their jurisdiction without involving the local police.
The most blatant examples concern the high policing activities concerned with terrorist activities or suspected involvement in terrorist activities.
One of the most extraordinary cases is the is the case of Khalid El-Masri,
a German citizen of Lebanese descent who was abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003,
handed over to the US CIA, taken to the US salt pit where he was held for four months, tortured.
And then the US government realised that it was a case of mistaken identity.
The al-Masri was a different al-Masri and so returned him, not returned to him, but took him to Albania.
But they just got off the side of the road. In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights determined that al-Masri had been detained, unlawfully,
tortured and abused and criticised the Macedonian police for collaborating with the US secret programs.
The US in the US courts, the government, the US government claimed state secrets privileged and the case was dismissed as an Alien Torts Act,
which protects the US government from activities taken overseas.
But I think understanding police power requires going beyond the idea of these sort of egregious instances of international
police flying in and doing bad things of flying out against police liaison officers don't have formal arrest powers,
but they don't need them. They can use coercive powers beyond the time,
but beyond the nation state by what you might call remote control or governing at a distance through lawful routes,
they can use available, available information and other resources to enable local police officers to undertake arrests on their behalf.
It was very interesting watching the dynamics in the West Indies between the US police and the domestic police.
The US police were understood to be more powerful, better trained, more resources and they didn't need to undertake enforcement activities.
They just did over there. Over there. That's what that's happening. So.
So while the system of accountability is mainly being structured according to national borders,
policing is no longer a set of practices embedded in the sovereign nation state.
And so we now need to be thinking about a and accountability structure, which should apply to all forms of policing,
including those carried out by inter-governmental and supranational law enforcement agencies.
And there are some solutions to this, but are actually powers in another chapter.
So I'm going to break it off, you know, be available from all good bookshops in the spring.
So to conclude, globalisation is reshaping the politics of the police.
And although there have been interconnections among police officers from different parts of the world
since the police emerged as an integral part of the machinery of governments in the 19th century,
there is now a quantitative and qualitative shift from the end of the 20th century.
The task of policing that had been seen for 200 years as a domestic matter was transformed into
a political and policy issue that was widely perceived to be integral to global governance.
So what we tried to do in this chapter is to examine how the transnational turn of phrase is shaping policing in local,
national, regional and global spheres of activity. Global policing agencies have gathered strength in the second half of the 20th century.
The idea of an international police force has old roots, but only became a reality under the aegis of the United Nations in 1960s.
And it's now a very extensive policing capacity.
Every region of the world now has some form of Pan Continental Police Organisation that provides cooperation,
coordination and collaboration amongst numerous policing agencies.
And a common policing doctrine provides interoperability and joint investigation and enforcement activities across entire continental regions.
Debates about the case for and against the national police force of petered out,
but have really been resolved by a such in the form of a national policing hub like politics.
Policing is mostly a local matter and despite the growth of these global regional national police agencies,
the overall majority of direct interaction between police and public is with uniformed officers on the roads and highways,
and less frequently with plainclothes detectives and other specialists.
Behind this interaction, however, is a far reaching change in the nature of police work.
Today's street police to the introduction of information and communications technologies
are now able to check suspect identities using mobile fingerprint readers,
facial recognition software, automatic number plate readers and biometric means that link domestic with international databases.
Local policing has been trans nationalised and global policing now reaches deep into local communities.
These developments raise profound new questions about the relationship between state and citizen.
Observers are critical of the democratic accountability deficits at national and European levels, with serious implications for local accountability.
Local policing was proposed as a solution to the problems of burglary, theft and interpersonal violence social disorder in local communities.
But what is the role of the domestic police officer when threats to life and property emanate from transnational organised crime and rogue states?
In such circumstances,
what kind of response can we expect from the local police and from newly created specialist agencies set up with the goal of keeping us safe?
All the content that the suitable flows of terrorists and transnational organised criminals are the main thing.
Could global policing prioritise more pressing threats such as environmental destruction, global warming, corporate crime?
Perhaps worldwide policing should be thinking more carefully about its service role, whatever its aims and objectives.
How do we know whether or not international policing agencies are effective or efficient or fair?
On what criteria can we judge whether or not the billions that are being spent on global policing is money well spent?
Transnational policing is growing in size, resources and ambition,
enabled by advances in technology and by new laws and policies that are creating domestic and local linkages increasingly powerful,
seen as indispensable domestic and international security in order maintenance.
And while local policing is being shaped by global forces linked by national policing.
Into transnational debates and expertise. As the central argument of the book suggests,
the paradoxes of policing require a searching analysis of how police power can be held
to account and through which the democratic processes the police should be governed.
This was never an easy task, never an easy question. Even while policing was authorised and delivered in local communities by parish constables.
Now that local policing is shaped, at least to some extent, by global forces,
by what means can we be confident that the state's coercive and intrusive powers are deployed for the social good?
Okay. Thank you. And perfectly timed. So somebody like to stop?
Yes.