The Pursuit of Security 1

Our historic preoccupation with crime has been overlaid in recent years by growing concern about personal security, community safety and the maintenance of social order. Notwithstanding the inflated currency of political rhetoric which promises to be ‘tough on crime’, techniques of crime control have become curiously disassociated from crime itself. Rather, they promise some measure of protection, some freedom from anxiety about crime and the insecurities which appear to be the inevitable accompaniment of modern life. ² The ever burgeoning and aptly named ‘security industry’ extends well beyond the traditional sphere of crime control to embrace an array of private provisions. In Britain, security arrangements which were once thought necessary only at points of high risk such as airports or national borders have become routine on transport, at theatres, cinemas and shopping malls. ³ General acceptance of searches of person and property, of identification checks and uniformed security guards, were won with remarkably little public debate about the curtailment of personal freedoms that these entail. ⁴ Policing, public and private, is bolstered by an ever growing arsenal of ‘high-tech’ surveillance equipment, from CCTV to bugging devices, together with the legal sphere powers to use them ever more widely ⁵ The breaking down of constitutional barriers between police and intelligence agencies such as MI5, the expansion of police powers to engage in bugging operations and to employ computer database searches for suspects, are all justified as necessary to the pursuit of security. Yet exactly what security is, who should provide it, for whom and to what ends, remains remarkably unclear.