At its core, the idea of policing and ‘the police’ – particularly in the British psyche – seems intrinsically bound up with notions of the State and public provision of protection and redress, under the democratic law.
The association, however, is less than 200 years old – roughly the length of six or seven police careers.
Prior to Sir Robert Peel’s groundbreaking reforms in the early 19th century, policing was a largely private and voluntary affair, reliant on institutions such as the Village Constable – an office typically held by a local dignitary with little by way of training or oversight. Peel’s great insight was that a modern, industrial democracy could no longer rely on private interests to ensure social order and public protection against burgeoning urban crime levels, and thus a new, professional mode of public policing was born in London, and exported around the world.
During the latter decades of the 20th century however, the narrative of the civilising, monopolistic public police began to come unstuck, through a process academics have called the pluralisation of policing. This describes how, while the public police continue to play a central role, various non-state actors, ranging from transnational bodies like Interpol to grass-roots community groups, have become increasingly involved in various aspects of policing and crime control.
Notably, pluralisation has also involved a significant reprise of private sector involvement in the provision of policing (broadly conceived), both through government outsourcing and the growth of private security, cybersecurity, private investigation, asset recovery and so on. Today, there are two and half times as many licensed private security guards in the UK as there are police officers, while the global cybersecurity industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Without private policing and crime control efforts, the world would be a considerably less safe and less functional place.
In 21st century Britain, driven in particular by the evolving cyber threat and constrained public finances, a new strand of pluralisation has emerged, characterised by private sector organisations operating, not just ‘through’ or ‘beyond’ government and the police, but in close partnership ‘with’ them – particularly in relation to acquisitive crime.
The Police Foundation’s new report, Policing in Partnership: the role of public-private partnership in tackling theft and fraud, profiles three forms of arrangement that have developed in this space.
First, commercially operated property registers enable the owners of items – ranging from phones and bikes to art works and luxury watches, to farm machinery and construction vehicles – to register that property as their own. By making these records available to the police, and to dealers, retailers and insurers, these registers assist with police investigations, change the dynamics in resale markets to make them less conducive to crime, keep insurance premiums low, and help reunite owners with their property if it is lost or stolen. While the details of their commercial models vary, all operate on the principle that the dividends gained by denying criminal profits can be shared between the police and public purse, insurers, responsible retailers, register owner/operators and of course the public.
Second, a set of industry-funded police units have been established to tackle crimes like insurance and payment card fraud, vehicle crime and machinery theft, which could simply never be prioritised by the public police given their current demand pressures and financial constraints. While the funders of these units and their wider sectors benefit from enhanced police activity, there are significant externalities, both for the police service and the public at large.
Third, data sharing partnerships have been set up to enable the finance sector and police to work together to tackle fraud, demonstrating just how essential the data assets of private companies are to fighting these forms of crime.
There are, of course, legitimate concerns about the introduction of private interests into policing provision. Whereas the core promise of public policing is a service available to all (or at least one subject to democratic prioritisation), private security is a commodity to be bought and sold – and the latter set of forces need to be kept out of public police allocation decisions, lest the social contract at the heart of the Peelian policing model begins to erode.
There are also more pragmatic concerns about the fragmentation of data between private contributors and the way this may impede effective risk management, while the police relationship with commercial entities like property registers, which generally fall outside regular procurement processes, can also be ambiguous, particularly where competitor products are available.
For all of these reasons, policing has tended to be cautious about pursuing public-private partnerships of the kind we describe, but in doing so, fails to fully capitalise on the skills, data, resources and innovation that these arrangements can provide.
Where they are additive to a core public policing model, where they are appropriately regulated and where provisions are in place to ensure operational independence, it is clear that police/private sector partnerships can operate in the public interest and are in fact necessary given the changing nature of acquisitive crime and current constraints on public policing.
That is why we are calling on government to make it a goal to encourage partnership between the police and private sector to tackle theft and fraud (in particular) and to establish a clear policy framework to facilitate this so that the police and their private sector partners can develop productive collaborative arrangements with confidence, and in the public interest.
We are grateful to The Art Loss Register for supporting our research.