ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to elaborate and defend a general framework that may help to identify moral ambiguities inherent in police activities characterised by attempts to come to grips with the challenge of contingency. It starts with a case which the author have called a case of pre-emptive justice, and then sets out to explicate and systematise central concepts embedded in that case, and their normative implications for the varieties of knowledge-based police practices informed by what might be somewhat loosely called the logic of precaution. Paradigmatic instances of coerced confessions are confessions generated by threats of torture. Reactive policing, either by way of order maintenance or criminal investigation, is usually contrasted with preventive policing, although law enforcement officers regularly refer to the preventive effects of reactive police work as the basic justificatory rationale for both order maintenance and policing based on threats of the punishment.