ABSTRACT
The concept that the police represent only a part – albeit the most important part – of the policing infrastructure has become much more widely recognised in recent years. A wide range of public, private and ‘hybrid’ agents are engaged in the policing process. However, such are the changes that have taken place in society and in policing organisations that it has become much more difficult to identify the public, ‘hybrid’ and private sectors. Instead it has become more appropriate to consider policing bodies in terms of their degree of ‘publicness’ and ‘privateness’. These changes have made the classification of policing much more complicated. Despite these challenges, however, it is possible to construct a classificatory model that provides a means for analysing and debating the complex web of policing.
