Customer is king: promoting port policing, supporting hypercommercialism

ABSTRACT

This ethnography of everyday policing realities in the European ports of Rotterdam and Hamburg presents an understanding of policing spaces where protecting and supporting global commerce dominate (Eski 2016a). In undertaking this research, I participated in the daily activities of 85 participants in Rotterdam (N = 52) and Hamburg (N = 33), consisting of 30 operational port police officers, 31 security officers, 10 customs officers and 14 others involved in port security-related matters (e.g. shipping agents, port authorities, boatmen and maritime engineers). These participants were collectively responsible for protecting the vulnerability of the just-in-time logistics by becoming the intervention, through which they become the very local threat to global commerce itself. In their policing struggles with management, colleagues and multiagency partners, as well as with the maritime business community and dangerous others (Hudson 2009), they are fighting a (silent) fight against having to appear to police for commercialism. However, they merely promote port policing without feeling they actually support the flow of global commerce. Frontline staff that deals with profile-raising port policing and what kind of (resistant) attitudes results from it, may deliver a new (method of studying ethnographically) hope against neoliberal policing, from within.

KEYWORDS:

• Port security
• frontline policing
• (hyper)commercialism
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Fergus McNeill and Simon Mackenzie for their guidance throughout this study. I would also like to thank the referees, Ronald van Steden and Peter Millward for their helpful reviews and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Yarin Eski http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6447-7850

Notes

1 The citations used in this article are retrieved from the raw data set I collected myself. I have used these citations in other publications (see Eski 2016a, 2016b, 2018).

2 For a more detailed description of the ISPS Code’s effects on ship and port security regulation, please consider the Eski’s earlier work (2016a).

3 Regarding an elaborate consideration of the thematic coding and analysis of the gathered data that was integrated with a theoretical framework on ‘othering’ (Said 1979), please consider my earlier work (Eski 2018, 2016a, 2016b).

4 Please consider chapter 7, Eski (2016a) and Eski (2016b) (ETHNOGRAPHY journal).