Policing nightlife areas: comparing youths’ trust in police, door staff and CCTV

Abstract

Against a background of the pluralisation of policing in contemporary city spaces, and sustained interests in the assessment of policing in the criminology and criminal justice literatures, the current study seeks to draw a comparative analysis in trust between policing actors, as experienced by nightlife consumers. While studies on trust in the police are numerous, this is much less the case for other actors involved in policing urban (nightlife) spaces. Neither is it very well understood how trust is distributed between policing actors. It is important to investigate this, taking into consideration the privatisation and technologisation of safety provision in contemporary cities, and the legitimacy of the actors involved. Using a survey, 894 youths enrolled in education were asked to evaluate their trust in actors involved in the policing of urban nightlife areas: the police, door staff, and CCTV. Results showed that people tend to trust human policing agents more compared to technological agents. A cluster analysis further indicated that alongside this general pattern, four additional groups can be found in the data: two groups that display the highest trust in either the police or door staff with intermediate trust in CCTV, and two groups expressing either overall low trust or overall high trust, independent of the policing actor. Employing logistic regression analyses, we find that demographic, victimisation, and contextual variables predict cluster membership. We end with suggestions for future research and reflect on whether the privatisation and technologisation of (nightlife) policing are desirable from a nightlife consumer point of view.

Ethnic Minority Youths’ Encounters With Private Security Guards: Unwelcome in the City Space

“…Overall, research on citizens' experiences and perceptions of private security is scarce. Existing research includes a few qualitative studies that have focused on the perceptions of individuals, typically young people, who have experienced private policing (Keskinen et al, 2018;Matthews et al, 2000;Morey, 1999;Saarikkomäki, 2016Saarikkomäki, , 2018Wilson et al, 2010) as well as surveys on young people's experiences of security guards and citizen's general perceptions of private security (e.g., Brands & van Doorn, 2018;Fine et al, 2003;Matthews et al, 2000;Moreira et al, 2015;Saarikkomäki & Kivivuori, 2016;van Steden & Nalla, 2010). In addition, ethnographic studies have investigated security guards' work in shopping malls (Manzo, 2004;Wakefield, 2003).…”

“…Issues regarding procedural justice remain underexplored in plural policing literature (O'Neill & Fyfe, 2017;Paek et al, 2019). Perceived fairness and trust in private security has received little research attention, despite indications that youths' perceptions of procedural fairness and their trust in private security are poorer than their perceptions of the public police (Brands & van Doorn, 2018;Saarikkomäki, 2016Saarikkomäki, , 2018. In addition, studies on ethnic minorities' perceptions of procedural justice are scarce.…”

Exploring the Boundaries of Missing Persons: Hidden Interplay Between Policing and Private Entities in Relation to Cases on the Periphery

“…Most well-known, and most relevant for this special issue, is the notion of privatisation, where previously public duties are relinquished wholesale and passed to private entities. Such processes have seen police responsibility for various functions returned to other actors, e.g., monitoring of disorder-based crime to private door staff (see Brands & van Doorn, 2018); the placing of call handling duties to non-police security contractors (see White, 2014); and even the role of police governance to the electorate via police and crime commissioners (see Lister & Rowe, 2015).…”

Stakeholders’ attitudes towards the installations of closed-circuit television cameras in reducing school violence

“…For instance, the students feared that CCTV could record their sounds and images throughout the campuses, including private areas such as restrooms. Because of these problems, an empirical study in the Netherlands showed that the public tends to trust human supervisors or agents more than agents who monitor surveillance technologies ( Brands and van Doorn, 2020 ).…”