Policing The New Commons: Corporate Security Governance on a Mass Private Property in Canada

Abstract

This article examines the governance programme of an in-house security department on a mass private property in Canada. Under the auspice of state laws, diverse zones of autonomy are constituted and powerful governance programmes are authorized to police communities of patrons, staff and other service providers within and beyond property boundaries. Analysis of this particular security programme reveals a primary concern with the maintenance and promotion of a corporate image rather than justice. This aim is supported by the in-house security department as it actualizes various forms of risk management, both through informal and systematic risk-based patron profiles and classification schemes. In addition to providing physical security and managing populations through risk, security officers are also involved in “information work” necessary for the reproduction of the programmatic risk management formula.

Keywords:

• Private security
• Liberalism
• Governance
• Risk management
• Profiling
• Information work

Notes

The research herein has been supported by research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In accordance with the national Tri-Council Policy Statement, “Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans”, this study has received ethics clearance from the University of Windsor's Research Ethics Board.

Steven Hutchinson is with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University. Daniel O'Connor is with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor.

A security assemblage is not limited to activities of the state, such as legal regulation or enforcement, but refers to a broader set of aims to manage conduct. It is a temporally extended eventuality characterized by the calculability and predictability of the future consequences of conduct and the programmatic efforts to control these consequences. It encompasses forms of information and knowledge, representations, practices and institutional forms that are put together in novel and specific ways, and used to imagine, direct and act upon bodies, spaces and flows. In addition to physical security produced by actual or potential use of force, a security assemblage may also encompass physical indices used to produce security through symbolic means (see Lippert & O'Connor, 2003: 332–335).

A pseudonym. The ethnographic description of this site is purposefully limited to accord with our confidentiality agreement with the corporation.

There has recently been a surge in academic literature that centres on risk (see, e.g., Ewald, 1991; Beck, 1992; Feeley & Simon, 1992 Feeley & Simon, 1994; Ericson & Haggerty, 1997 Ericson & Haggerty, 2002; Ericson & Doyle, 2003). These studies conceive of risk as either a neo-liberal governmental rationality (see, e.g., Dean, 1999; Rose, 2000) or as an increasingly common phenomena resulting from processes of modernization and the distancing of scientific and technological innovation from the ability to control their [unintended] consequences (see, most notably, Beck, 1992 Beck, 1994 Beck, 1999 Beck, 2000 Beck, 2002).

While Rose's (1993) exposition of what he terms “advanced liberalism” is based on a critique of “neo-liberalism” as a problematic term, the two signifiers have become somewhat synonymous in the literature (Dean, 1999).

Nodes are identified as locations of knowledge, capacity and resources that can be deployed to both authorize and provide governance. They may or may not form governing assemblages, and they may or may not develop networks that traffic in information and other goods to enhance their efficiency (Shearing, 2004: 6).

Provincial legislation referring to the law of trespass and Innkeepers rights—e.g., see Innkeepers Act (R.S.O. (1990) Chapter I.7. Available online at: www.canlii.org/on/sta/cson/20030205/r.s.o.1990c.i.7/whole.html) and Trespass to Property Act (R.S.O. (1990), Chapter T.21. Available online at: www.canlii.org/on/sta/cson/20030327/r.s.o.1990c.t.21/whole.html).

See Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Schedule B of the Constitution Act, 1982 (79). Available online at: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter.

In a recent Supreme Court case (R. v. Buhay, 2003, SCC30, 28667. Available online at: www.lexum.umontreal.ca/csc-scc/en/rec/html/2003scc030.wpd.html), the court ruled that security officers who searched a rented locker at a Winnipeg bus depot did not violate Charter rights because they were not acting as “agents of the state”.

It has been argued elsewhere that private police are much more intrusive and coercive than the public police, have less accountability, more discretion, and are subject to less oversight and state regulation (see, e.g., Johnston & Shearing, 2003; Mopas & Stenning, 2001).

The threat of exclusion can be used to justify various forms of intrusion that blur the bounds between consent and coercion.

The province's Trespass to Property Act of 1990 allows property agents to evict persons that are in the process of contravening property policy as designated by the owner or occupier.

As employees enter through the employee entrance, they pass by a noticeboard containing pictures of recent subjects that have been arrested. Also on the board are descriptions of other “undesirables” that have been forwarded by other properties. Such mechanisms have the effect of making all employees of the property responsible for security in some way (either by looking out for risks or making note of important information in relation to risks).