A historical perspective on crime control and private security: a Belgian case study

Leloup, Pieter

doi:10.1080/10439463.2018.1440554

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…A peculiarity of Portville is the existence, at specific historical moments, of a clear nexus between the port workers and organized crime, for what used to be ‘old days’ scenarios of dockers opening the cargos, stealing and/or running labour racketeering at the port (Leloup, 2019). There are historical investigations in Melbourne on the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union in the 1980s, and New York City and Montreal have seen stories of the involvement of organized crime and mafia-type criminality with the International Longshoremen’s Association or the Checkers Union.…”

Section: Policing Of Drug Importation At the Port: Vulnerabilities Di...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Playing Pac-Man in Portville: Policing the dilution and fragmentation of drug importations through major seaports

Sergi

2020

European Journal of Criminology

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This article presents findings from a qualitative research project into organized crime, policing and security across five major seaports (‘Portvilles’): Genoa (Italy); Melbourne (Australia); Montreal (Canada); New York (USA); and Liverpool (UK). Through content analysis of confidential judicial files, the article will construct the offenders’ scenarios and options for importing drugs in Portville. Through also interviews with law enforcement agencies, police forces and security staff in these seaports, the article presents the policing and security struggles to disrupt importations. The main finding is that importation roles and security techniques change constantly and quickly, as in a game of Pac-Man. Security and policing in seaports lead to the dilution and fragmentation of drug importation, and only distribution tends to remain organized in Portville. In this chaotic environment, it is the rules of trade that affect the success of drug importations the most, rather than the failures of effective security and policing.

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Section: Policing Of Drug Importation At the Port: Vulnerabilities Di...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Playing Pac-Man in Portville: Policing the dilution and fragmentation of drug importations through major seaports

Sergi

2020

European Journal of Criminology

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“…For instance, by dressing frontline officers up in police-like uniforms; deploying these officers in police-like vehicles; recruiting former police officers into highly visible corporate positions; using the vocabulary of the police in their day-today communications; seeking out contractual (outsourced) and non-contractual (non-outsourced) partnerships with the police at every opportunity; advertising such partnerships to potential customers; and so on. Various combinations of these strategies have been documented in, among others, Australia (Prenzler and Sarre 2012), Austria (Terpstra 2017), Belgium (Leloup 2019, Leloup and White 2021), Canada (Rigakos 2002, Walby et al 2016) and the United Kingdom (White 2010, Thumala et al 2011, Leloup and White 2021. At the same time, this scholarship indicates that in countries where the police are plagued with comparatively low levels of public trust and confidence a different scenario unfolds.…”

Section: State Market and Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As scholarship on this political-economic dynamic has progressed over recent years, a notable yet until now unremarked upon geographical pattern has started to emerge. In those countries where the police enjoy high levels of public trust and confidence, private security actors can be found openly and directly borrowing from the cultural and symbolic capital of this state institution to enhance the status of their everyday operations (see for example: White 2010, Leloup 2019). By contrast, in those countries where the police are plagued by a poor reputation, private security actors often display a far more ambiguous relationship with these forms of capital, working both through and against them, often at the same time (see for example : Puck 2017a, Diphoorn 2020.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural and symbolic capital in the market for security: police-private security relations in Mexico and the United Kingdom

Puck

White

2021

Policing and Society

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Recent scholarship has observed how private security actors often draw upon the cultural and symbolic capital of the police in their everyday operations. This practice can range from issuing frontline private security officers with police-like uniforms and patrol cars to recruiting former senior police officers into highly visible corporate positions. Geographical variations in this dynamic are little understood, however. In this article, we identify and shed light upon one emergent pattern. In those countries where the police enjoy high levels of public trust and confidence, private security actors can be found openly and directly borrowing from the cultural and symbolic capital of this key state institution to enhance their status. By contrast, in those countries where the police are plagued by a poor reputation, these actors commonly display a far more ambiguous relationship with these forms of capital, working both through and against them, often at the same time. Focusing on the UK and Mexican cases, and drawing upon a combination of Bourdieusian frameworks, we argue that the key to understanding this pattern is the distinction between the objectified (non-human) cultural capital of the police (uniforms, vehicles, etc) and the embodied (human) cultural capital of the police (police officers themselves). While the former enjoys a symbolic value in the market for security which transcends variations in public trust and confidence in the police, the latter is far more intimtately connected to localised police traditions and practices, good or bad. This in turn leads to novel patterns in the global plural policing landscape.

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“…The conceptual framework presented in this paper is empirically analysed considering the port of Antwerp in the different scenarios. The port of Antwerp represents the most extensive port area in the world and several recent research contributions focused on this port in empirical analysis (Haezendonck and Langenus 2019;Leloup 2019). Among others, Esser et al (2019) discussed the importance of this port as a job generator for the province of Antwerp.…”

Section: Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

A competitive analysis of EU ports by fixing spatial and economic dimensions

2020

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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiencies of ten of the leading European ports. The motivation of the research refers to the relevant topic of selection of indicators that can be involved in the comparative analysis. Concerning the theoretical model, the authors’ efforts are especially directed towards the usage of the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and of the data envelopment analysis (DEA). These techniques have been widely adopted for benchmarking and performance evaluation by involving indicators based on data from National Accounts. If one of these indicators, such as labour force consistency, is not available at a specific level of aggregation, detailed assumptions are needed to address this complication. The present study proposes an additive model in order to provide an estimation of ports’ economic activities by fixing the port activity boundaries and the spatial perimeter of the firms investigated. Several NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) levels and NACE (EU Statistical Classification of Economic Activities) codes are fixed to offer a useful comparable labour indicator. Empirical results reveal that each port area presents a combination of the NACE categories which significantly impact the efficiency that can reach very high performance values through both the SFA and DEA techniques. Since the managers can choose which sectors to improve, which particular improvement strategies to support, which specific service to add, their decisions impact this performance evaluation, and their performance can be verified through the approaches proposed.

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A historical perspective on crime control and private security: a Belgian case study

Cited by 8 publications

References 37 publications

Playing Pac-Man in Portville: Policing the dilution and fragmentation of drug importations through major seaports

Playing Pac-Man in Portville: Policing the dilution and fragmentation of drug importations through major seaports

Cultural and symbolic capital in the market for security: police-private security relations in Mexico and the United Kingdom

A competitive analysis of EU ports by fixing spatial and economic dimensions

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