Ericson and Haggerty contend that the police have become information brokers to institutions such as insurance companies and health and welfare organizations that operate based on a knowledge of risk.
Professor Ericson and his colleagues followed the work of patrol officers in a large Canadian regional police force. From their direct observations comes a wealth of information, quantitatively assembled and qualitatively discussed, with insights into the nature of policing. This book reveals that the police are not mere 'referees' of our legal lives, blowing the whistle on our infractions. They are censors of certain types of possibly wrong actions. They are selective in their invocation of criminal law and use the law artfully to restore settings to orderliness. Ericson emphasizes the routine manner in which the patrol officer intervenes and gains compliance fron the citizenry. He demonstrates that when the criminal process is invoked, the police maintain fundamental control over the court outcome. Using these findings, he addresses basic questions about the role of police in relation to crime and how it is produced, literally, by the patrol officer. Crime is also seen as the primary basis of police legitimacy, which in turn enables the police to engage in broad surveillance and information-gathering. The author's conclusions about the nature of policing and his discussion of the implications of proposals for reform of police, will generate better-informed deliberation in political and public decision-making and in the general study of sociological theory.
Crime in an Insecure World' investigates the alarming trend across Western societies of treating every imaginable source of harm as a crime. The book explains why selected issues of national security, social security, corporate security and domestic security are at the top of the political agenda.
Professor Ericson and his colleagues followed the work of patrol officers in a large Canadian regional police force. From their direct observations comes a wealth of information, quantitatively assembled and qualitatively discussed, with insights into the nature of policing. This book reveals that the police are not mere 'referees' of our legal lives, blowing the whistle on our infractions. They are censors of certain types of possibly wrong actions. They are selective in their invocation of criminal law and use the law artfully to restore settings to orderliness. Ericson emphasizes the routine manner in which the patrol officer intervenes and gains compliance fron the citizenry. He demonstrates that when the criminal process is invoked, the police maintain fundamental control over the court outcome. Using these findings, he addresses basic questions about the role of police in relation to crime and how it is produced, literally, by the patrol officer. Crime is also seen as the primary basis of police legitimacy, which in turn enables the police to engage in broad surveillance and information-gathering. The author's conclusions about the nature of policing and his discussion of the implications of proposals for reform of police, will generate better-informed deliberation in political and public decision-making and in the general study of sociological theory.
Crime in an Insecure World' investigates the alarming trend across Western societies of treating every imaginable source of harm as a crime. The book explains why selected issues of national security, social security, corporate security and domestic security are at the top of the political agenda.
Ericson and Haggerty contend that the police have become information brokers to institutions such as insurance companies and health and welfare organizations that operate based on a knowledge of risk.
We live in an age of increasing doubt about whether our institutions and technologies can provide security against risks, many of which they themselves have created. Uncertain Business is an unprecedented inquiry into insurance industry practices and what they tell us about risks and uncertainties in contemporary society. The core of the book is ethnographic studies in distinct fields of insurance: premature death, disability, earthquake, and terrorism. These studies reveal that uncertainty pervades different fields of insurance, the very industry that is charged with transforming uncertainty into manageable risk. Scientific data on risk are variously absent, inadequate, controversial, contradictory, and ignored. Insurers impose meaning on uncertainty through non-scientific forms of knowledge that are intuitive, emotional, aesthetic, moral, and speculative. Nevertheless, the nature of uncertainty and the response to it varies substantially across the fields studied, showing how contemporary society is characterized by competing risk logics. Insurers' perceptions and decisions about uncertainty - with potential for windfall profits as well as catastrophic losses - create crises in insurance availability and provoke new forms of inequality and exclusion. Hence, while the insurance industry is a central bulwark against uncertainty, insurers also play a key role in fostering it.
In 1984, the Supreme Court of Canada, in Hunter v Southam, declared warrantless searches unreasonable under section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Police would henceforth require authorization based on “reasonable and probable grounds.” The decision promised to protect individuals from state power, but as Richard Jochelson and David Ireland argue, post-Hunter search and seizure law took a turn away from the landmark decision. An examination of dozens of post-Hunter cases reveals that Justice Dickson’s vision has been diminished in an era of heightened security and expanding police powers.
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