Conclusion

An ethnography of the Self in the port securityscape Due to the clear lack of public and criminological interest in port security, despite the fact that ports are vital transport nodes for global trade and the political economy, this book has been a first attempt to comprehend bottom-up realities of the port securityscape, which is a unique, and physically and socio-culturally closed-off domain. At that crucial and vulnerable transport border, a minor disruption impacts significantly on the entire international supply chain and maritime shipping network. Street-level port police and security officers operate at the very forefront where the smallest local security breach can delay global trade, but they have remained anonymous to this point. In having delivered a criminological verstehen of their daily struggles at work by studying their occupational identity formation, some of the structural and cultural complexities surrounding port security reveal themselves, complexities that can cause real local dangers which could instantly affect the entire global economy. By looking at the participants’ identity formation as the process of (re)creating one’s Self through the familiar and unfamiliar Other, the participants’ narratives, attitudes, wishes, frustrations, cultures and practices were revealed. It became clear that, at the workplace, managers were blamed for lacking an operational sense of port security – being extremely market-orientated and power-hungry, especially since the advent of global austerity – leading to corporate perversities, as has been observed in the wider policing and security domain (Fielding 1995; Punch 1983; Reiner 2010; Wilson 1978), as well as in (air)transport security more particularly (Lippert and O’Connor 2003; Maguire 2014; Molotch 2014). By pushing through inhumane, target-based policies, such managerialism ‘dissolves the bonds of sociality and reciprocity’ and ‘undermines in a very profound way the nature of social obligation itself ’ (Terry 1997: 47). It creates (more) job anxiety, meaninglessness and routinisation, leading some participants to (re)establish a powerless Self and experience the ‘operational’ as near ‘slavery’. The participants consequently (re)establish a resistant Self, second guessing managerial decisions and illuminating silhouettes of the fastfading port culture of anti-authoritarianism. It reflects a (re)construction of ‘blue walls of silence’ among ‘street cops’, against ‘management cops’; a resistance

recurring in police and security cultures more broadly (Reuss-Ianni 1993; Van Steden et al. 2015; Waddington 1999). The port culture and canteen culture of policing and security, paradoxically, require a (role of ) management to create the very resistant, thus meaningful Self (Wilson 1978: 73). Expressed more abstractly, the oppressive managerial Other is the exact and necessary counterpart to the resistant operational Self (Said 1979). It deserves to be pointed out here how the participants respond to commercialised police and security management which (participants think) violates the philosophy of port security as a public good. This is a strong indicator that, in the port securityscape, public and market rationalities are not necessarily supported by their corresponding agents; rather they are evaluated for their (harmful) aims and effects (White 2014). As much as port police officers can be (fully) commercially motivated to provide port security as a public good, so too can a security officer have a ‘critical normative stance toward the [security] industry’ (Löfstrand et al. 2016), and thus be (fully) non-commercially motivated to deliver port security services that are purchased by customers. At the frontline of the ports of this study, an occupational impartiality in security provision exists. It does not matter of which security node(s) you are part (Johnston and Shearing 2003; Shearing 2007; Shearing 2005; Wood and Shearing 2007) and whether you are (considered) to be an anchor in security governance or not (Loader and Mulcahy 2003; Loader and Walker 2007a, 2007b, 2006). Doing multi-agency port policing and security at the operational level shapes and is shaped by a state of mind; it is an occupational mental state. The participants, in other words, possess a nodal security governmentality (Munk 2015) as much as an anchored pluralist security governmentality while on the job. This is yet another ‘strong signal that police culture – or more broadly: policing culture – is in flux at the moment’, indicating that the social scientific lens should not ‘worry too much about the classical public-private divide in policing’ (Van Steden et al. 2015: 240). As for colleagues, collegial unity and shop-floor equality are essential, illuminating the port culture characteristics of ‘strong reciprocal solidarity’ (Smit 2013: 42). Those colleagues who do not live up to these principles are authoritarian, careerist, competitive and exclusionary. They reflect the very characteristics aggressive managerialism embodies and for which they are condemned and resisted. Simultaneously, participants themselves are authoritarian and exclude colleagues who have no nautical background, or those operating outside the port securityscape. So, despite the participants’ ‘defensive solidarity’ (Waddington 1999: 301-302), which is reconfigured at street-level, and regardless of the sense of responsibility for each other (Sanne 2008: 625), the distinctive spirit of the port securityscape-that of maritimeness-divides colleagues in police and security organisations operational in the port. Such a salty, exclusionary solidarity could therefore be (purely) characteristic of maritime-related policing and security, in the way it is physically constructed and socially construed in the port securityscape. When it comes down to multi-agency partnership in the port securityscape, one can conclude that it is a managerial fantasy of equal cooperation, yet a bitter

operational reality of distrust and struggle. The multi-agency partnership ought to be at operational level, having no managerial interference. But daily streetlevel reality consists of multi-agency misunderstanding, distrust and rivalry, which lead to conflict. It became clear that port police officers were frustrated that their original port tasks had been outsourced to the private sector, due to managerialist austerity politics. Security officers, who sit at the other end of this process, consider port police officers to be too authoritarian, but they still need them practically to execute those very same outsourced tasks. The multi-agency struggles, therefore, result from neoliberal agendas of privatising public tasks and austerity-inspired public-private partnerships for efficiency and costreduction reasons. This is despite recent arguments that claim that multi-agency cooperation through security networks develops a specific network culture that gives ‘the network greater ‘strength’, enhancing a network’s functioning by way of promoting a greater willingness among security nodes to cooperate and collaborate’ (Whelan 2015: 19), and that ‘partnership working was not only regularly employed by police officers and Neighbourhood Policing Teams, but welcomed and valued [as well]’ (O’Neill and McCarthy 2014: 147). In the port, however, only managers are considered by participants to benefit from these partnerships, while they themselves feel confronted with power asymmetries that they would not have been confronted with otherwise, while they are expected to cooperatively construct port security together. This tainted quay-level multiagency in the port securityscape is thus an antithesis, a critique of pure neoliberal (t)reason. They cope with their frustration by othering the multi-agency partners and summing up their weaknesses, through which one’s own strengths become clear and the asymmetry is neutralised; the Self formulated through othering once more becomes a resistant Self. In these multi-agency partnerships, the participants police and secure on behalf of the port companies and their dockers, truckers, and shipping companies, as well as their ship crews. They too are familiar Others and reveal that port police officers have (to have) a forced commercial customer-friendly Self, feeling pressured, as they do, into interrupting the industrial activities of the port as little as possible. Security officers everywhere are ‘serving several masters with differing agendas and having to please them all’ (Button 2007: 133), and it is not that different in the port securityscape. Those security officers placed within the port companies, in particular, are more loyal to the port companies than to their own security company, to the extent that they prevent their customer from spending too much money on their security company despite the fact that they consider port company owners arrogant. The customer as Other in need, as incidental (Beauvoir 2007) in the port securityscape, allows the participants to (re)establish a saviour Self, but not in the way one would expect from policing and security actors, that is to say by protecting port companies against crime and insecurity, which is their original duty. Instead, it is established through delivering, primarily, commercial flexibility and only secondarily (or instead of ) actual security. That saviour Self is not necessarily safeguarding their meaningful Self.