Policing as a Public Good:

Abstract

The gradual de-coupling of police and state is an increasingly well-documented phenomenon. Against this backdrop, we set out in this article to reformulate and defend a positive (rather than pejorative) connection between policing and the state. We begin by reconstructing four candidate means by which the state-policing nexus might plausibly be established—the monopoly of legitimate coercion, the delivery of civic governance, the guarantee of collective provision and the symbolism of state and nation; and in so doing assess both their sociological viability under conditions of fragmentation and pluralization, and their normative adequacy to the task of producing democratic, equitable and effective policing. We then outline our preferred mode of reconfiguring the linkage between policing and the state; one that recognizes the irreducibly social nature of what policing offers to guarantee—namely, security, and seeks on that basis to recombine elements of the above four `positions' into a `thick', communal conception of policing as a public good.