ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to use four 'postulates of postmodern police' as a thread through the labyrinth of conflicting signs, images and data (hyper reality in Baudrillard's terms) about crime and social control. Those postulates should be seen as two dual processes or dyads. The first duality is the marketization of insecurity and of state-provided social control; the second is the transnationalization of clandestine markets and of policing. The transnationalization of policing seems to be part and parcel of the internal history of the police organization in the twentieth century. The integration of clandestine markets has become one of the key foreign-policy issues, not only for the USA, but for Europe. In January 1995, a subcommittee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in England and Wales began a 12-month review of cross-border crime. The vigilante tradition in the USA might explain why it is that the marketization of insecurity is so much more advanced there.
