ABSTRACT
‘Policing’ is too readily reduced to the activities of ‘the police’. Subsequently, developments in the market, private and voluntary sectors and civil society are marginalised. Moreover, the implications of one of the most enduring lessons of decades of police scholarship from Banton (1964) to Brodeur (2010), namely the marginal place of the police in social control and crime prevention, are largely overlooked. Hence, much public debate and policy reform erroneously perpetuates the ‘myth’ of the sovereign state monopoly over crime control and policing; of the public monopoly over policing; and the police monopoly over crime.
