Almost ten years before that. Two other universities we see that each one quite a few of those. Love technology. He's quite a writer and he's written about many different topics that most currently writing on the project called The Politics of Crime. Just concerned, I think he mentions that the relationship between crime, control and Democratic policy. So his research and his teaching exposed the crime to the justice and the political framework within which that takes place.
His presentation today is called Promiscuous Government Nature Space in Search of the Public Interest. Okay. Thank you very much. Let me first just echo the thanks to my colleagues for so for the invitation and for your own very kind and generous hospitality. It's been a long cherished ambition of mine to come to India. So this fall gives an opportunity to to time's up. Before I start, I should also just correct a couple of potentially misleading impressions.
And Carolyn, in her introduction this morning said, I was the only member of our party who could claim to be a lawyer. And I kind of feel a complete confession is required at this point. The complete confession is that I have a 28 year old law degree, and as I discovered in life, there's few things more useless than a neglected old law degree. So I was once taught law does so. So that gave the impression I was rather closer to your concerns that I in fact, of all the other.
The other misimpression I want to clear up is I appear to have the title and the paper, which is the most remote from the stated objectives of this conference. As was alluded to at the outset. So the impression, the misleading impression I want to clear up here just by way of self thing is to suggest a number of reasons why it's not as remote as it might at first seem.
And I think there are three. Firstly, it seems to me and a number of other people who work on criminal justice in policing these days, that you really don't do adequacy to the world in which we live. If you just study the processes of state ordering and justice and the words in many, many jurisdictions across the world of which mine is one, and I would rather that yours is another.
Policing protection, security, justice is not just a conservative state institutions, but is increasingly a concern of actors who services are purchased through through mechanisms of market exchange. And I think that it's incumbent on us, therefore, to think not only about the relationship, not only about state and non-state justice, but also increasingly about the meshing of public and private policing and justice systems.
And the second. The second reason to think this is closer than you might you might first imagine to the concerns of the conference, is that the particularly the way I want to think about it, the private security system. He raises a series of issues to do with regulation, to do with legal reform of a similar kind to those that one would engage in a form of thinking about how you go about rectifying questions of failure and wrongdoing inside state criminal justice system.
And thirdly, it strikes me that what private security does is raised very explicitly, at least we think about it properly and raised very explicitly a set of questions that are sometimes buried in discussions of state criminal justice. And these are a set of questions basically about distributional justice, about the idea and the problem of how the benefits and burdens of ordering and policing and justice systems actually get distributed as between us,
between individuals and groups. And in what kind of relationship to the risk that different individuals and groups differentially face? And the other thing I just want to say by way of a prefatory remark, and I'm not I'm not the respondent, I'm going to be my own respondent. That's that's that's just not the easy thing to do. But it does say this time, sensing that the one the one thing that we are all illustrating is different stages of the empirical research process.
And so Carolyn is someone who is deep in the middle of it, and Alpha is someone who is trying to get a project off the ground. I'm about to give you a paper which is in the sense of to some extent about a project that I've just completed on the market for security products and services, but also an attempt to kind of use that research to kind of revisit an old debate and to think about it, hopefully in some new ways.
And that old debate is a debate about the regulation of the private security industry. So that's what I want to talk to you about today. It doesn't make sense to me to labour the point that the private security in all its various guises from guilty Geordie labouring through to and through to technology through to its involvement in various forms of security. Policing is a fast growing industry. I tried to do a little bit of background research on private security in India.
In India, to which I'll just give a few things. And one that has almost nothing written about private security in India. In India. So if anybody is searching around for research projects in the room, come and talk to me afterwards. I also mentioned something to the best estimate is there are 5 million people in this country working in the private security industry in various guises.
And private security brings to its customers a number of state advantages in terms of expertise, in terms of dedicated service, in terms of accountability to customers. But also, my judgement raises a series of what you might call public interest considerations. In other words, the more that the market for policing becomes a market, the more that there is a risk that resources are distributed in inverse relationship to people's actual vulnerability to victimisation.
The more there is a risk that the market, private markets and security chip away at the kind of collective commitments to collectively, as it were, funding and providing security as a public good. I mean, the more you think about private security in these ways, the more it acquires. And what John Dewey, fantastically called a public capacity, was it becomes a legitimate interest of all citizens, not merely those who engage in the buying and selling of goods inside that industry.
So the question that we've been forced to revisit and the basis the research that I mentioned it briefly, is how can you better rely on the assumption that it's not going to go away and there may be no good normative reasons why you would entirely want private security to go away. Given that, it's hard to say, how can you better align the private security industry with considerations of the public interest?
And the reason for the thinking about this is a kind of regulatory question was all dissatisfaction with the way in which private security regulation actually gets discussed in the existing literature. Now, in that literature, we think you can find two, two dominant models for the sake of simplicity, one of which we call the idea of cleansing markets, the other one which seeks to communalism markets.
And we'll say more about these in a small while for our point of view, what these two in many ways very different models share in common is a kind of a set of standard neoclassical assumptions about how markets for security work and in which they assume that people who are buying and selling security goods all as they would for any other markets rational,
calculating, egoistic, obsequious off to their own interests were somehow lifted from any kind of moral or political or social or cultural context, which may in some way shape the ways in which they behave in those markets and indeed their inclination to enter or not into those markets in the first place. All research in the hour. Here is myself and my co-author.
We work for the University of York. All respective research, different projects of recent years has led us to challenge this view because both of our studies of private security in the UK have demonstrated that this in fact is a market in all kinds of ways, is shot through with moral and political considerations of various kinds. In other words, when people think about whether or not to buy security, they are not solely thinking about Can I afford this, will offer me protection.
But in some way their minds are also full of a series of considerations to do with the relationship between the potential purchase of this particular product, say G.P.S. Chocolate or a hired guard, and a series of other things about which they care what you do with relationships and mutual trust of privacy, of solidarity, of conceptions, of community and so forth, so forth. And trying to put my glasses on because I can't read the thing I wrote about 10 minutes ago. And that was is it?
The security markets are a market in which a market and not market consideration considerations are always in some sense colliding and where the decisions to purchase products are always in some sense shaped by no market values.
Furthermore, specifically in relation to the security industry, we are talking about a market in which the players involved or in some sense deeply themselves, deeply embedded in longstanding processes of state building, in which the idea that the security is delivered equally to all the what we call the modern probably the modern democratic promise of security is somehow also imbued in people who are trying to seek to sell or buy additional alternative forms of provision.
Now, thinking about that security in those terms, as it were, as a moral economy, as leaders to approach the question of regulation in a slightly different way, and just try and find ways of thinking about how to harness those no market values in the way in which security, the private security industry is regulated.
No, it's how can we how can we regulate security in ways that honours these plurality of understandings that shape the market, a factor which seems to me to lead you to towards a form of regulation, which isn't about just trying to control for market failure, but producing efficiency to dealing with just the quality of goods, but also trying to protect,
preserve and give expression to and protect the range of non-market, otherwise political and social values that the security industry impinges on. Furthermore, just by way of introduction, it seems to me that the other thing we've been trying to do is to try and connect the debate that currently takes place about private security regulation to a much wider and I've discovered huge and sometimes rather tedious literature on regulation more more broadly conceived.
But from that literature, we've taken three things which we want to build into the model that we're trying to develop. Firstly, the now close to being axiomatic, saying that regulation is dissented.
In other words, the model of regulation which just assumes that the state is a regulator and exists in the kind of command and control relationship with the the industry or the companies they're trying to regulate has long since been jettisoned in favour of a much broader notion of regulatory space, which one encompasses a whole range of different state and non-state actors in the regulatory process and doesn't think the regulatory relationship just goes one way from the state to to the market.
Secondly, we've taken on board the idea that there is no single regulatory template which you can start to carry around with you and just plonk down on any market activity you want to regulate. But you need to tailor regulatory strategies and tools to the peculiarities of the market you're trying to understand and control. And secondly, that any regulatory activity requires some clarity.
Thirdly, sorry, requires some clarity as to the goals and values of regulation and what you one needs to provide a kind of clear and cogent answer to the question, Why are you trying to regulate this industry and for what purpose? Now it's it's with that in mind that I want to both talk about two existing models of regulation as a kind of ground theory exercise, as a prelude to trying to introduce and kind of articulate the merits of, shall I say, of the third preferred alternative.
Now, the reason I don't have a PowerPoint is for all the reasons to do with technological failure that you just had illustrate it to you. And because we've achieved a remarkable feat of reducing a 10,000 word paper to one one table, which you can all find on page 94. So I'm just going to spend the next 10 minutes basically elaborating on that table. And if you prefer to have some notes to follow and that's the place to look, right?
The default model in the in the in the discussion of private security regulation, we have we described I should make it clear that these are all terms, not the terms of the the people associated with these models described as trying. You cleanse markets. This is very much the default position in the literature.
As I've stated already, it rests upon a series of neoclassical assumptions to do with the fact the buyers and sellers voluntarily enter markets, have information available, take rational, calculating decisions, and so on and so forth, and that the problems and as it were, the public interest issues that arise in relation to markets occur insofar as the security market doesn't operate in those ways.
And three particular problems of articulated within this model which a system of regulation has to deal with. Firstly, the wide the widespread recognition that security is a grudge purchase, but which I mean, we've we've found this in all research as well and tried to deepen our understanding of it that that that people don't don't buy security in the way that they buy clothes.
The security is the security is is a form of consumption that people are in some sense dragged to sometimes by the stipulations of insurance companies, sometimes by health and safety regulation, sometimes by the experience of victimisation, which they don't want to be repeated. And that that, that that grudging nature of purchase creates an industry.
This is particularly acute in the guarded the the guarded security sector in which there's a deep reluctance to believe that you can purchase pay more for more quality and a market which is extremely price sensitive, which makes it for the people who are selling those goods extremely cutthroat and competitive. This the argument runs tends to generate an industry with fairly low standards, with fairly poor staff, with recruitment, with low pay, with a great deal of churn and so on and so forth.
And this leaves the market open to what the British call the mark button called deviant influences. In other words, a whole series of recurring problems to do with malpractice fraud, corruption, false arrest, poor training and so on and so forth, which have now become recurrent findings of anyone who does work on private security. Now, the solution to this problem inside the cleansing model is firstly, it's interesting to note focussed on sellers, not buyers.
The point to which I'm concerned and does cleave to that assumption about regulation, which I previously just indicated, was somehow now considered rather antiquated. In other words, this is a kind of this is a kind of state centred solution. And the cleansing model continues to operate on the idea that the state is the principal regulator. And through a series of command and control, basically through the issuing of rules that it can bring the industry into line.
And the particular form this is taken across increasing parts of the world in recent decades has been the introduction of state licensing systems. In other words, it says if you as an individual or you as a company want to operate as a private security industry, you need to obtain a license from the state and therefore you need to meet certain minimum requirements in terms of training of staff, in terms of criminal record background checks and so on and so forth.
And through these means the industry can be cleansed, hence all title of its deviant operators. Now with that in mind, what those working in the in the cleansing tradition, if you like, have done in recent years is two things ready. One, to kind of do a kind of collation job, to look around the world and just compare and contrast different kinds of licensing regimes. And as I note in the paper, there's a recent UN document which is kind of brought all this stuff together.
And secondly, to kind of to go through those existing regimes and try to identify what you might call forms of best practice and then become then try and generate models of regulation on that basis. But that regulate that regulatory model is always takes the similar kind of form, in other words, to try and regulate just enough to cleanse the industry of its deviant influences, but not so much that it becomes an excessive regulatory burden.
Now, in all kinds of ways, this is a valuable way of thinking about the regulation, that the industry is no part of our case to say that somehow this somehow licensing is no, it doesn't have its place and needs to be jettisoned. There's also some evidence it does work. It does it does exercise a kind of cleansing function if you get effective state licensing systems in place.
But nonetheless, there are some limits and I'll briefly just mention three. Firstly, within the cleansing model, there is there's almost no attention paid to the kind of distributional issues involved in the in the emergence of private security, nor of the kind of nor of the kind of relationship that you might want to in any attention to the relationship between private security and the practices and values of democracy.
Nobody's regulation here. It's about correcting for market failure and nothing else. Secondly, as I mentioned, it's all very centred on rule based know. So if you think about regulation as a kind of space involving a number of actors, then the cleansing model doesn't mobilise many of those actors in the regulatory process. And so it is very conservative. I suppose it depends on your point of view with. Do you think this is a good thing or a less good thing?
By which I mean, it's kind of stated reform agenda is to find the kind of best, the best that's currently happening somewhere in the world and to try and spread it as if the best that we can hope for in social and political life is the best that we can come to identify in some place in the world. Right. Secondly, we're now in the middle of the table, and what we call the communal housing model also rests on a series of neoclassical assumptions about how market works.
But in almost every other respect differs from the cleansing model. It differs in the following way. Firstly, it is focussed on problems of distribution. It's secondly, it seeks to empower buyers rather than kerbing sellers. Thirdly, it's dissented radically, dissented in the way of demonstrate shortly. And thirdly, it brings questions of democracy, and in particular, the attempt to involve local communities in deliberative democratic practice around how security is delivered.
Makes that central to the business of regulating security. Fifthly, when you start saying the list to get into law anyway, this never nearly finished. It's not conservative. Far from it, but is engaged in that practice of trying to radically realign the relationship between states and markets.
And finally, a mere form is part of a much wider conceptual framework, which has become known as nodal governance, through which you need to understand the particular regulatory strategy which emerges here. This requires me to spend 2 minutes on local governance, and nodal governance is is a body of work in the security literature associated principally with clyfford sharing of the University of Cape Town and many of his other colleagues who in the 1990 and 2000 really made the following claims.
Firstly, they made an empirical claim to the fact that if you're studying policing and security, you should no longer assume that the state is the major player in the game, and in particular either in providing security or regulating it.
And certainly you should no longer treat that somehow as a starting assumption for doing research or thinking about any kind of policing the security issue, but instead treat that as an empirical question of whether any particular jurisdiction should just damn well find out who all the major players and providers in any particular nexus. And in this context, sharing these colleagues become particularly interested in what they call nodes, by which they mean quite small locations.
They could be shopping malls or leisure complexes or gated communities or universities, all of which are, in some sense now in the business of sourcing or providing or regulating their own forms of security, hence the term nodal governance. Now, on top of that principally descriptive claim about how the world is, it rests a kind of normative claim that no forms of nodal security or in some sense better for the denizens of particular nodes then old fashioned forms of state centred security.
And this all rests on a kind of a kind of borrowing of the kind of hierarchy and that it's not so familiar to the critique made by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek of states, as opposed to markets and high exclaimed was that remote state official was lack the knowledge and the ability to to discover the knowledge to be able to respond effectively to the needs of individuals and communities. And this can be done much better through the mechanism of markets and prices and so on and so forth.
And the extension of this nodal governance serious make is that those operating within particular nodes are much better able to to articulate and understand and source their own forms of security than than simply relying upon remote bureaucratic organisations of the state. And the problem that arises in this context is that that form of nodal kind of dissent and security, as sharing and failure points out, actually generate a whole series of unequal distributions.
In other words, the well-financed, well-to-do nodes with large amounts of social and political capital are able in this world to generate for themselves much greater forms of protection than,
for example, poor communities. Now, the solution that one finds within this this form of regulation is not, as neoliberals would have it, to treat this as just a natural order of things, or as many liberals and Social Democrats would try to do, is to try and reasserts the authority of the state over the world of policing and security, but instead to empower buyers, in other words,
to try and find a way of community izing security markets so that they can meet the needs of poor as well as rich communities. And particular mechanism that sharing and Bailly found to doing this is to try and is through a system what they call block grants. And it was, in other words, involving local, often local, state actors and giving local communities a kind of security port which they can decide how to spend as they see fit.
Now, it's safe to say. I think this model has various kinds of advantages in terms of involving a whole series of new matches in regulatory space and involving in the kind of encouragement of democratic participation in how that block grant can spend, for example, but continues to do well. It's two features. One, it's entirely focussed on buyers and not seller.
So there's a kind of unstated assumption that under this community, those market sellers will kind of come to the ball, if you like, and it continues to rest on a whole series of assumptions of a neoclassical kind about how markets work. How long ago? I told you, I'm unlikely to need all seven. Okay. Right. Finally. And we should be clear, though, in making this this third proposal.
We have no ambition to somehow kind of wipe the field clean so that we can entirely occupy it with this kind of new model of regulating private security. In many ways, what we propose is an attempt to kind of keep in place and build upon some of the insights and regulatory regimes that have been generated on the back of what we're calling the cleansing and criminalising approach.
But nonetheless, we want to endeavour to provide a model of regulation, private security, which is in some sense a genuine alternative and which has its ambition, as we put it, to civilise markets, but which we made an attempt to try and reap the benefits that private security can bring. As described at the outset.
But to try and situate private security in a regulatory space in such a way that it doesn't threaten the egalitarian project of providing equal protection for all and in some way exists in a greater degree of alignment with the various kinds of non-market values trust, solidarity, human rights, which in various occasions private security can threaten. So the question is how can you realign regulatory space in order to try and do that? And I'll just say a few words about that.
Now, the first thing to say, and this is where my thinking on this is really been a product of this research project, which I'm going to just treat in the place, in the background for the moment, which is going to change the way in which I think we we should think about how our security markets work and has developed, in my mind, the idea that they are forms of moral economies. And I think this is true both among both among buyers.
And we met various forms of evidence about the ways in which very, as I said at the outset, various kinds of non-market considerations to do with, well, what effect will buying a GPS tracker have on my relationship to my children? Or what does living in a gated community say about the relationship, about the kind of country I live in, about the kind of neighbourhood it is, and so on and so forth.
I could go on and chapter verse on that. Perhaps more surprisingly, we also found that more ambivalence about security among those who sell security. And so if you sit down and if you read the trade press in the U.K., when you sit down and talk to security sellers, those two things become very apparent. Firstly is they will go on endlessly about how the industry is full of people who are sullying its reputation, about selling bad products, about not properly regulating their charging.
They're not charging a high enough price. And in other words, this is kind of widespread recognition that, of course, it's never the person you're speaking to who is making this claim, but the other people in the industry are somehow tainting it. And so it's a slight stretch to say that this is an industry marked by self-loathing, but it is an industry marked by a remarkable degree of kind of ongoing critique of the of the other players in the industry, damaging its reputation.
The other striking thing you find when you talk to people who sell the security industry is how often or how infrequently they use what you might call market based legitimation to describe what they do. In other words, they rarely say we're generating wealth, we're providing jobs,
are doing with the kind of things that the private, private industry does. Instead, they borrow from other kinds of non-market, legitimate actions, one of which there's many of which which we should be describing in a recent paper, and one of which is to try and borrow the symbolic authority of the police. And in other words, in terms of the uniforms, in terms of in terms of making marketing use of police credentials, in terms of trying to improve their relationships and so on and so forth.
All of which suggests that in all kinds ways that that moral ambivalence about the idea that security can be something that can be sold and finds its way into the dispositions and sentiments and practices of the people who are engaged in selling it. Now, the lesson we draw from from that that finding is twofold.
Firstly, that we shouldn't create security markets and therefore the private security industry as just a form of standard consensual market exchange, but instead is a form of social ordering in which a practice of governance that is deeply implicated within modern forms of security and in some sense an ever present threat. Great to a greater or lesser extent to security, modern democratic promise, the idea of equal protection for all.
And then secondly, if you think about the security industry as a form of moral economy, the idea of regulation is no longer just about trying to impose something on that market from the outside, but trying to harness a series of sentiments that are already present among the buyers and sellers of these goods. In other words, you can address the private security state not simply as economic actors. I'm trying to say they're not economic actors, but also as moral actors.
Now what we draw from this is a model of what we describe as democratic guardianship, which is a model which seeks to somehow protect the is the idea of equal equal of equal protection under conditions where security and policing is going to be provided by multiple providers. And I don't I don't want to give you chapter and verse on what this might look like, but you say a few things just to to to finish off.
Firstly, that our model is a model is one which is tries to involve both buyers and sellers, not just buyers or sellers in the other two. And secondly, there is no model principally organised around groups. In other words, with largely a move beyond that kind of command and control, conception of regulation towards one which isn't, which is, makes much more room for four principles for trying to find appropriate principles through which regulatory space can be structured.
And now there's a long discussion in the regulation literature about the effective worth of rules and principles, which I don't need to bore you with now. There is a there's a time and a place and a space, the rules, but rules that also have a number of well-known disadvantages. They create perverse incentives. They encourage people who are subject to rule, regimes they don't believe in, to engage in forms of gaming. They the appearance of rules being followed.
It varies of manufacturer in certain forms that there's a this throw is a sociological wheel out of this point to demonstrate that point. And in that context, it seems to me to be space. How do you regulate private securities for trying to articulate, trying to use principles as one of your regulatory tools? Now, the point about principle, as John Braithwaite points out, is it stipulates a goal without telling those who are being regulated how they how to go about meeting that goal.
And by so doing, invites them to become participants in articulating how it is that that particular goal should actually be met. And that's essentially what principles do within regulatory space. They actually make those being regulated, not simply the subject of regulatory control, but they try and those of them as partners in a regulatory conversation.
Now, in that context, we could have a long discussion and no doubt disagreement about the appropriate principles that might one use for trying to civilise securities markets.
The suggestion we make in the paper is you might want to reorient regulatory space around to firstly a principle of public deliberation in which the idea that the regulatory actors are involved in trying to to foster and sustain an ongoing public dialogue, not only about how this industry and how it's working, but about its appropriate reach and limits and about the about the kind of meanings and sources of security where
the legitimate participants in that discussion and not just the people who buy and sell these goods and services, but all of us as citizens.
And secondly, a principle of solidarity, which is basically a way of saying that we need to find a kind of regulatory regime, which it tends to make central to what it does, the kinds of distributional effects of markets in security devices and which treats the tracking and monitoring and, if necessary, the repair of those distribution injustices, a part of what regulation is about. Now, there's a final part of the paper for those of you who read it in which we just try and sketch.
And it's very much a rough guide of how you might reconstitute a series of relationships inside regulatory space between the securities industry and regulators, between the industry and place, involving the role of trade associations about how we might mobilise civil society in which we're going to sketch, how you might kind of reorient regulatory space in order to give effect to this principle of democratic guardianship, as we so call it.
But if you want to talk about that, we'll do it in discussion and I'll stop there. So thank you. I was asked to find this response, which I'm more than happy to do, but I don't know what it means. Very much so I'm going to take.