The Allen Austin Bartholomew Award in 2021 was awarded to Professor James Sheptycki for the best article in The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology in 2020 for their article “The politics of policing a pandemic panic.”
Supported by Sage Publications
Further reflections on the politics of policing
When I began writing about the politics of policing the pandemic panic the world was in the first stages of a revolutionary change and many people, probably most, thought in terms of a ‘return to normal’. Almost two years later, and after the Government of Canada and a number of other democracies have had to use emergency police powers to ‘keep the lid on’, people are beginning to realize that the new normal is rather different than what came before. Criminologists and others who study the institutions of formal social control, surveillance and coercion are sensitive to these changes. Unfortunately, like the other social sciences and humanities disciplines attuned to the questions of our time, criminology has had a tendency to fragment into tribes that can agree no overarching narrative or synthesis of understanding and opinion. Meanwhile, in counties like Australia, Canada and New Zealand, citizens have witnessed the massive mobilization of police minimal use-of-force with military precision. Public order encounters between police and people in these countries has revealed full-spectrum policing. Policing powered by ambient surveillance – not only in space and time, but also in cyber space, in the new social spaces of the Internet, and in the financial system – is a new kind of ‘iron fist in the velvet glove’ of state governance. Political scientist Colin Crouch has begun the work of theorizing post-democracy. What readers of this newsletter must now do is theorize what that means for the institutions of policing because, as David Bayley said so many years ago, police are to government as the edge is to the knife.
