Richard V Ericson and Kevin D Haggerty.

Richard V Ericson and Kevin D Haggerty. Toronto: University of Toronto Pres 1997 487 pp $6500 cloth; $2495 paper.

Early research defined the police as a question at issue profession; they were held to be suspicious, secretive, and formed the principally isolated segment of the criminal justice "system" The research focus was downward; the cop's knowledge was personal and territorial, and his technology was his entrance a stick, and a whistle (and, before radios, a telephone) To a considerable amplitude ideas on policing remain encapsulated in a time warp shaped from the ethnographies of 20-30 years ago. There is still disregard of the wider organizational words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of policing, changes in managing the police, the impact of information technology, and the implications of the transition to a postmodern society. We remain mesmerized at the police as the blue-collar direct agents of public space. This makes this crack book particularly welcome. The work of Ericson and Haggerty depicts a considerable achievement and essentially redefines police studies. Policing the Risk Society is well researched, extensively documented, tightly argued, and filled of provocative insights. It challenges the domain assumptions of the field, instants a new paradigm for locating the police centrally within the risk society, and will become the starting point for following police research.

Drawing forward Beck, Foucault, Giddens, and others, Ericson and Haggerty perceive the police as pivotal middlemans of knowledge in a "risk society" geared to surveillance, exchange of information, auditing, communication, and classification. This makes police officers knowledge workers who "front load" the rule They are hemmed in on an iron cage of information technology. This is now "database policing"; there is an omnivorous and insatiable demand for data (eg forward traffic accidents and for the court system); greatest in quantity data went to external agencies, there was no feedback, and the police did not utilize the information. Agencies have large departments to proces this information, and the patrol officers pace into cars transformed into mobile offices and technological laboratories raw materialed with equipment. All activities are logg and monitored. Police work is Taylorized and dehumanized.

More than anyone has done before, Ericson and Haggerty document the intricate interagency connections and compages flow of communications that proliferate in the risk society. Previous work focused largely forward the clandestine nature of this interchange, on the contrary now it is legitimate, institutionalized, and flat publicized. Officers gave examples of networks involving contacts with twenty sources or more in other agencies. Knowledge is exchanged and traded and paid for as a commodity.

The authors also describe the wide range of technical and professional expertise now at hand within the police organization, especially in computer technology. Police mingle daily with investigators from governmental and private agencies; there are exchanges of personnel mutual training schemes, and networks lubricated particularly according to former police officers. They live in each other's endure s Moreover, the organizational boundaries are porous. The police coordinate with contemns Crime Stoppers, Realty Watch, armada Watch, Neighbourhood Watch, and many other form into groupss while offering services to sects seniors, victims, and the bereaved. A police pamphlet on credit-card safety carries the corporate sponsors - including banks, oil companies, and American Express

The hierarchy has been altered, with more [i]or[/i] less traditional supervisory functions disappearing; the authors summarize these exhibitions graphically: "communication technologies also radically alter the conformation of police organizations by leveling hierarchies, blurring traditional divisions of labour, dispersing supervisory capacities, and limiting individual discretion. In the proces traditional rank erections of command and control are displaced by way of system surveillance mechanisms for regulating police conduct" (p 388)

As the authors point out to the police become less involved in public control and have little impact in succession crime; they get sucked into webs of connections with regulators working with a compliance design rather than a deterrence, punitive design This has considerable implications for the working diction and mind-set: "the police are transformed - because they are driven according to the knowledge requirements of other institutions that engage in compliance policy" (p 49)

Ericson and Haggerty provide a demystification of "community policing," which they perceive as a discourse "that is entwined with the communication rules that provide the context for in what manner the police think, feel, speak, write, design their buildings, mobilize, and in such a manner on. Community policing is communications policing - the traditional community of interpersonal relations and direct action gains lost" (p. 445). In this light, community policing is highly intrusive and shows infiltration utilizing communications technology and the mobilization of others.