ABSTRACT
Research on public and private policing is now a major social scientific enterprise. Studies range from the ethnographies of police work to largescale statistical evaluations of the impact of various forms of policing. Egon Bittner, a pioneering contributor to the sociology of the police, looks in Chapter 6 at the appealing, but largely unclear notion of community policing. The following three chapters are not studies of "the police" as such, but rather of trends in "policing" that raise far wider issues: notably the moral and political implications of extending state and privatized controls by deception, by surveillance, and by force. In Chapter 7, Gary Marx locates the techniques of undercover policing in terms of wider changes in social control strategies. He revisits his well-known 1988 book, Undercover, a study of the methods and ethics of the new technologies of covert policing. The arguments about "sting" operations cannot rest on evalutions of "what works" without a wider discussion about trust, secrecy, and deceit. The same applies to new forms of surveillance reviewed by William Staples in Chapter 8. The video monitor (or closed-circuit television, CCTV) in a shopping mall is just one of the many mundane procedures that to which we have become accustomed. "Seemingly benign and relatively inconspicuous," they are part of the scene and behind the scene. They are not "ushered in with dramatic displays of state power" nor do they really threaten democratic rights. Yet, as Staples suggests, they belong on the "soft" side of a continuum that has harder aims ("public security") and intentions (not just monitoring but modifying behavior).
