The politics of policing a pandemic panic

Introduction

The first global police event is happening. For the first time in history, police in just about every jurisdiction in the world have been mobilized at the same time due to the same fundamental occurrence. The pandemic panic concerning the novel COVID-19 virus marks a watershed. The current moment can be viewed from the standpoint of police studies as a massive global field experiment in how different practical manifestations of police power are operationalized under different local social and political contexts, and further with what consequence for human well-being the world over. It is a natural experiment for transnational and comparative criminologists (Wardak & Sheptycki, 2005). In simple terms, looking at what police do in different countries during this crisis says a lot about the global system.

Drawing attention to thinking about policework in the context of a global pandemic panic is not to say that what the police do is the most important aspect of the social response to the spread of a disease. Foucauldian theories concerning the bio-politics of populations and the anatomo-politics of individuals offer another possible window onto this historical shift (Dean, 2010), if we think of those forms of power now being constituted in a wired world. However, Foucauldian theory does not really help clarify the point that the response to the pandemic panic is what it is: a global police event. That is an event whereby the order of the global system is imposed by police methods across multiple jurisdictions in response to the same world-wide occurrence. Here the emphasis is on thinking about the trajectory of the politics of the police in a global context up to the crisis moment of the pandemic panic in order to think beyond it. This presents a challenge. Amidst the torrent of words expended during the crisis, what does the research and scholarship about crime and policing have to contribute? Characterizing the present moment as a pandemic panic is a reference to the distillation of a critical frame of analysis concerning interactions between media, crime and police reaction first articulated by Stanley Cohen, Stuart Hall and others in the 1970s (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 211–212). From that perspective, there is in the current crisis a phenomenon—“the virus”—which seems to be a “suitable foe” that justifies police action. But the ensuing societal reaction in the circumstances of the crisis can be expected to create self-fulfilling prophecies since, on the basis of the need to control the phenomenon, are manufactured culturally identifiable symbols which structure future situations and legitimize social control. This view does not deny the real existential threat of the COVID-19 virus, but instead it raises questions about the future consequences of the political and social reaction to the immediate crisis as manifest in the politics of the police.

The study of the police and policing is very relevant to the current circumstances. What follows is a consideration of the subject at the onset of a global panic surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, which will last for an indeterminate period. In placing the politics of the police in the spotlight, this presumptive analysis draws on Bowling et al. (2019, pp. 20–37). In the multitude of commentary being produced in these extra-ordinary circumstances, it is important for specialist scholarship to contribute in a targeted way to the discussion. This means that contributions should remain based on existing empirical knowledge and tested theoretical notions and not become speculative beyond those boundaries (Goldsmith & Halsey, 2020). What do we know about the practices and politics of already existing policing around the world, and what might we expect as the pandemic panic passes and the virus becomes part of the global ecosystem? This essay sketches some insights and prognoses about an evidently momentous juncture in the evolution of the global system that might be gleaned from existing thinking and research concerning police practice. It suggests where scholarship and thinking in this domain might ought to go in the coming period, and it is a record of how things looked at the start of something new to one long-schooled in the politics of the police.

Thinking about police and policing during a time of plague

It is useful to start with basic terminological issues. Who are the police? The police are agents linked through a complex division-of-labor by a common métier (Sheptycki, 2017). The police métier has evolved as a set of institutional practices of tracking, surveillance, keeping watch, and unending vigilance, and it remains ready to apply force, up to and including fatal force, in pursuit of police organizational goals of reproducing social order, making crime, managing risk and governing insecurity (Bowling et al., 2019, p. 37). In this moment of rapid transition, the reproduction of order is in question, the management of risk is tenuous and the governance of security paramount. Because policing institutions are plural (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 145–163), and global (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 185–206), scholars have suggested we look at this effort in terms of a complex world-wide “policing web” (Brodeur, 2010).

A fundamental distinction has been made between “high policing” and “low policing” in understanding the politics and practices of the police. The distinction between high and low policing tells us about who policing is supposed to be for and whether it is done covertly or openly. Drawing on Marenin (1982), low policing is for the general good of society. In the circumstances, drastic policing measures are being undertaken or considered in almost every police jurisdiction in the world and these are being initiated on the expectation that they are for the general well-being of the population. Policing is to governance as the edge is to the knife (Bayley, 1985, p. 189). Put less metaphorically: policing is power. High policing denotes practices that are for the particular good of social, political and economic elites, and it connotes a degree of clandestine activity beyond the necessities of professional secrecy. Some of the means of high policing—covert poisoning, as a use-of-force option, for example—could never be countenanced under the pretension that it is low policing for the general well-being (Bowling et al., 2019, p. 191). The practice of divide-and-rule is central to high policing (Liang, 1992). We shall return to these considerations, but for now let us acknowledge that the police will inevitably, for better and for ill, be part of the social response to phenomena that are considered fundamental existential threats. The pandemic panic is such a situation. The distinction between low policing and high policing is essential if we are to gauge the extent to which policing practices are open and transparent or secretive and opaque, and are either for the general social good, or merely serve particular interests.

Police agents and the other institutional actors they work alongside, use legal tools to symbolize, represent, justify, and undertake action (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 22–24). Socio-legal scholarship on policing is greatly attuned to the ways in which police agents acquire and use the instruments of law. Police agents use legal tools (not only criminal law ones, but also administrative) to reproduce the existing social order, manage risk and govern insecurity. In the present, the laws at hand include those usually reserved for emergencies, which give power to executive authorities in all the jurisdictions where Emergency Powers have been assumed, and this is essentially rule by law. Rule by law in constitutional democracies of the global north appears less severe than it does in the global south. ¹

In the existing legal tool kit of transnational policing, perhaps the most obvious ones are those legal instruments that control social-geographical mobility. However, other dimensions of policing reveal very different kinds of legal implements. For example, any cure for the COVID-19 infection or vaccination against it will likely be subject to intellectual property law, and the policing of these legal claims is of fundamental political import (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2015, pp. 162–166). When it comes to the policing of mobility, it is very easy to see that wealth and privilege secures better promises of virus free travel than does refugee status (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2015, pp. 158–162; Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 159–161). What may be more difficult to discern is that the policing of patent medicine produces the same pattern and, indeed, that the two patterns may dovetail. Proof of vaccination could become a standard requirement of citizen identification and patent medicine might thereby become a means of policing mobility. In criticizing liberal “rule of law” type claims, critical socio-legal scholarship draws (even if only tacitly) on the high–low distinction in order to make the point that legality can be used ideologically to provide a hypocritical façade for more subterranean processes in the maintenance of power (Shearing, 1981). Given the extra-ordinary circumstances, and the accompanying invocation of police emergency powers, national emergency measures and so forth, it is too early to tell what will be the novel manifestations of global police rule with law (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2015). In the present circumstances, it is not difficult to imagine powerful or wealthy persons travelling internationally in search of medical aid, and in possession of the latest and best patented pharmaceutical remedies, while for good bio-medical reasons the common masses remain under lockdown in their homes.

The way that police agents deploy the legal tools at their disposal is dependent on the cultural understandings of police in different localities. Already in this early phase of the global pandemic panic it is possible to see very obvious but none-the-less interesting and remarkable differences in local styles of policing around the world. The analysis of policing styles reflects upon the twin tropes of police “force” and police “service” (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 25–26). This is not a simple dichotomy, since sometimes force is a service. For example, to the victims of hate crime, family or domestic violence, or any number of other types of violent crime, sometimes police use-of-force is a necessary service in preserving life and limb. Likewise, at a more geo-political level, sometimes violent conflicts between political factions, and even violent competition between criminal enterprises, beckons for a transnational police response involving not only surveillance, but also the practical application of force.

The historical record demonstrates that police work is nonetheless always practically entwined with social service provision, even when and where high policing has been dominant (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 43–49). For example, in the contemporary period when public provision of services for people with mental and emotional health problems is insufficient, more potential occurrences of disorder involving municipal police result (Marquis, 2016, pp. 218–223). Similarly, transnational policework aimed at intervening in weak, failing or failed states involve social service and community capacity-building more than it does the actual application of coercive measures (Goldsmith & Sheptycki, 2007). At every level of action in the global system, policework is fundamentally shaped by the use-of-force option and the powers of surveillance, and yet somehow is intertwined with an expectation of service to society. Egon Bittner (1974) offered a benign image of how force in aid of social service can have noble ends when he pictured police officers creating a zone of containment for firefighters to do their job, perhaps using coercion (or at least the threat of it) to get things done, so the fire can get put out.

The response to the pandemic panic may not be clearly evident for what it is: an event that has police agents in every jurisdiction around the world working to reproduce a transnational social and political order that is in rapid transition. In trying to make sense of the different police responses seen around the world the concepts of police “force” and “service” offer useful analytical concepts for organizing an understanding of differences across jurisdictions (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 25–27). It is interesting to note, for example, the symbolic marshaling of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in response to the crisis as compared to South Korea where police agents have worked to actively mobilize citizen social distancing using advanced digital communications. ² Iran, suffering externally from international sanctions imposed by the United States and governed internally through a system which combines religious authority, state-bureaucratic power, along with parallel structures of the Revolutionary Guards and religious police (who contribute enormously to the enforcement of social order), does not have the sophisticated technical capacities of a 21st century state like South Korea (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 57–58). In Iran, riots and disturbances have been met with a variety of use-of-force techniques including firing live ammunition directly into crowds of people. ³ South Korea, has been shaped by rather different external factors, chiefly its position in the geo-politics of the Cold War. Although a democratic uprising is officially acknowledged to have prised the south of the peninsula loose from the grip of the military in 1987, authoritarian practices persist beneath liberal rhetoric. Pointing to the continuing powerlessness of ordinary people (particularly poor laborers) and plentiful examples of political and financial scandals involving political and economic elites in the country that betray a lack of real accountability, Dae Hwan Kim and Tat Yan Kong ([1997] 2016) comment with studied understatement that “while the label ‘neo-authoritarianism’ may be too strong, South Korea remains a fledgling democracy” (p. 4). The police in South Korea are thoroughly politicized, and the continuing high policing emphasis on enforcing the particular interests of political, social, and economic elites fairly routinely ignores constitutional guarantees and human rights norms (Moon, 2004). The styles of policing in Iran and South Korea are in no way democratic, but they manifest different capacities and inclinations to mobilize police force in the service of social order, and the comparative differences are partly measurable in infection and morbidity rates.

This analysis can be extended or elevated by considering how relations between police, people and community are shaped by the institutions of the state, market, and civil society (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 29–31). So, for example, in the United States maximal emphasis on market relations at the expense of state capacity to provide social welfare, and in the context of institutionalized social conflict, has fractured communities and undermined the conditions of authority and trust that legitimates police and government intervention in the lives of ordinary people, with the resulting widespread perception among command level police officers that there is a “war on cops” (Nix et al., 2017). ⁴ In Scandinavia and Europe, a different balance has been struck between political organization and market relations in shaping the order of civil society and there is markedly greater degree of trust (Bjørgo & Damen, 2020). ⁵ The evidence suggests that more equal societies almost always do better, and raises the prospect that the twilight of social democracy might be about to descend on the 21st century (Piketty, 2014; Reiner, forthcoming; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009).

Neo-liberalism can be simply defined as an ideology advocating an extreme emphasis on market relations as the principal mode of interaction outside of the family or clan, like in the United States (Mann, 2003, p. 49). ⁶ Social democracy can, in equally simple terms, be defined as an ideology advocating state provision of essential social services and infrastructure thought necessary to sustain cultural life in civil society, like in Scandinavia. Thus, in very simple terms, neo-liberalism signals less state capacity and social democracy greater state capacity. The police métier as practiced in Sweden and America, each has its own style. Thinking in terms of the pandemic panic then, future scholarship in police studies might focus on comparing the variability of what Goldsmith (2003, following Michael Mann), called “infrastructural power”, that is: general state capacities in providing things like communications and transportation, but also public provision of education, health and social and mental welfare. These vary in different jurisdictions, and the different local styles of policing practice adapted to deal with the crisis will likely reflect this. The virtue of the examining police practices, as opposed to the metrics of comparative political-economists, criminologists or epidemiologists, is that the police dramatize social order in a more profound way. Understanding the comparative differences in the social and political responses to the pandemic panic in Latin America and elsewhere is seriously aided by an understanding of the practices and politics of policing in the relevant countries (Bonner et al., 2018). Systematic research along these lines will build up a picture of how the new landscape of the global system is going to be policed. Not everybody gets to live in Denmark (Fukuyama, 2011).

Explaining patterns of variation in the cultural meanings of police practice is a major preoccupation of police studies. Of central concern is the theoretical relationship between general cultural understandings of police and policing, as against the specific manifestations of occupational police subculture. Of course, a fully rounded theory would try to understand how both sides fit together. Simply put, what do police do, and what do police and people think about it? Moreover, given the present situation, what are police doing in different places around the world and how does local thinking about policing differ?

These are largely empirical questions which are quite varied. For example, the policing of international borders in the context of large-scale migrations of refugees is a focused policing function, with its own unique occupational challenges and its own projection into the public imaginary. And even this function is expressed differently depending on geographical location. The voluminous literature on the criminalization of immigration—“crimmigration”—is testimony to the problems of policing the borders of the state-system that pre-existed the pandemic panic (Aas & Bosworth, 2013). During the 1990s, the circuits of global capitalism were rapidly expanding and with that came a huge growth in transnational mobility, practices and processes, and the concerns of political sociologists reflected this. Fukuyama’s ideas about the “end of history”, or David Held’s about “cosmopolitan democracy”, Michael Ignatieff’s about the growing primacy of international human rights law, and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s notion of “R2P”—“responsibility to protect”—were different ways of trying to understand the signs of the times (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2016; Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 185–188).

During that period observers described a transnational state system, where a myriad of trans-border practices knit together a complex global networked society that seemingly transcended the control and influence of sovereign states. Subsequent to the turn of the millennium and up until now, the world has experienced a series of shocks of which the pandemic panic is only the most recent. Thinking longitudinally, how has the policing of international airports and seaports changed since the Cold War ceased in 1989? The answer to this question is “significantly”, but exactly how and how much differs from place to place. Australia has been notoriously stringent about policing its national borders for much of this period, whereas Canada has been much less so. Policing the internal borders of Europe ceased altogether during this period, while policing the external borders became more sophisticated and strategic, leading some critics to speak in terms of “fortress Europe” (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2012).

The global pandemic panic has resulted in dramatic reinforcement of border controls and the cessation of mass travel and tourism. Europe’s internal borders have been tactically mobilized in the emergency. Australia and New Zealand are islands unto themselves after the imposition of drastic border control measures. Canada cannot seal its border with the United States but has tried to, and has nonetheless declared drastic control measures on travel through international airports and seaports with the aim of facilitating return of Canadians while excluding people who do not have pre-existing legal rights in Canada. The pluralized policing apparatus observable at international airports has been stretched to the breaking point in the management of the crisis (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 159–161). Among other things, thousands of Australians have been stranded abroad in the process, many of whom have been exposed to the virus in the crowded conditions. ⁷ Federal states like Australia, Canada and the United States are beginning to impose internal border controls and there is no freedom of movement. As local populations in Australia and elsewhere have raised the alarm concerning COVID-19 infected cruise ships, local police and naval forces have come into conflict with cruise operators in the management of affected people whose suffering made images of the plague-ridden luxury liner another redolent symbol of the end of an era.

It is obviously too early to say precisely what the ramifications of the shift will be for the police agents working in these different jurisdictions, but some things seem likely. Keeping in mind that the police métier essentially involves surveillance, the already existing literature on police use of biometric technologies suggests that police agents will readily adopt new devices aimed at screening bodies for manifestations of ill-health. It does not stretch credulity to suggest that, in the future, citizens’ proof of immunization against specified health risks and communicable diseases will be a requirement for geographic mobility, indeed that has been partially true for a long period of time. Wearable digital technology that constantly monitors bodily health and functioning already exists. Given the connectivity and surveillance power of new digital technologies, the policing of mobility on the grounds of contagion control could become very fine grained. The borders of confinement and exclusion could be as tactically small as a city block as well as strategically large as a continent. As of today, there are tens or hundreds of millions of people all over the world experiencing “lock-down” in their own homes on the grounds of necessity based on a public health emergency.

One of the most significant manifestations of the police métier concerns so-called public order policing (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 85–93, 272). Public order policing is an umbrella term. It includes the policing of occasions like parades, festivals, carnivals and (when numbers warrant) even weddings and funerals. Policing public order also includes security provision at major sporting and entertainment events, mega events like the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games, and it includes policing at major political meetings such as the G20 (Marquis, 2016, pp. 225–230). Public order policing also obviously includes major street disturbances, riots, and other significant violent challenges to civil order. When police patrol, they are symbolizing public order. Public order policing can be achieved by persuasive means and negotiated management, it involves surveillance and intelligence gathering, pre-planning, and (if all goes according to plan) carefully calibrated coercive tactics and escalated use-of-force only as a last resort. Public order policing precepts are frequently embedded into the architecture of the urban environment, for example in the way that Disneyland or a well-designed international airport facilitates the smooth flow of consumer consumption and pedestrian traffic. The pandemic panic has greatly altered the conditions in which public order policing takes place but the ramifications of this have yet to be established beyond the immediate emergency measures. Our understanding of some fundamental concepts of democratic policing—policing by consent, and freedom of association and assembly foremost among them—are thrown into disarray in the atmosphere of panic (King & Waddington, 2006; Wood, 2014).

Prior to the pandemic panic, the jurisdiction of Hong Kong had already been in a state of chronic unrest due to civil protests against the harsh regime in Beijing. The reasons for this have not changed, but the presence of COVID-19 has greatly altered the conditions under which political protest might take place. Further west in the Chinese sphere of influence, in the Uighur province of Xinjiang, where human rights NGOs have already observed that the treatment of local ethnic peoples has been tantamount to cultural genocide, masses of people have been effectively placed under house arrest, sealed in their homes on the grounds of pandemic prevention for their own good. Outside observers know little of what is going on in the enormous “re-education camps” that countless Uighur people have endured for several years. In a jurisdiction like China, where the virus originated, draconian population control is the expected characteristic of the police métier (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 59–60). In an authoritarian, if not totalitarian, police state, the contagion must either be harnessed to the utility of the social order, or the social order will fall (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 34–36).

The United States presents a very different picture (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 51–54, 157–158, 214–218). There the police system consists in a patchwork quilt of thousands of local municipal police forces, linked in by a multi-channel national communications network, overlaid by a system of intelligence fusion centers and a welter of federal law enforcement agencies, atop which sits another network of high police Agencies. The American police sector is highly militarized (Balko, 2013; Kraska, 2007). ⁸ Relations between the police and public in the United States are confrontational and conflictual. One of the outstanding reactions to the pandemic panic in North America was an upsurge in sales of guns and ammunition. North American public policing operates in a context that, although it exhibits a few very bright spots, is predominantly one of urban, suburban and rural social decay, marked by significant social conflict. In the United States, public institutions for education, health and social care have been severely hollowed out since the Great Society of the 1960s, and have been replaced with a massive police and penal apparatus with one of the largest, if not the largest, incarcerated populations in the world (Simon, 2007). But this is really old news, because Peter Andreas (1997) observed more than two decades ago “the decline of the New Deal welfare state and of the Cold War warfare state and the rise of what might be called the ‘crime-fare state’” (p. 37). The record of the recent past concerning natural events such as floods, hurricanes and tornadoes shows that, in the United States, there is poor state capacity to render service during disasters and emergencies. America does not provide low policing in the general interest. Instead, front-line policing is militarized and the social exclusions thereby maintained serve particular interests and are therefore high policing.

The situation in the US varies greatly between regions but the rates of COVID-19 infection and mortality (and the concomitant social disorder) experienced as the pandemic panic unfolds will provide a measure of variable governmental incapacity across the continent. Local police in cities as varied as Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angles, Memphis, San Francisco, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and New York will not respond uniformly. All the signs are that morgues in America will be overwhelmed by May or June, perhaps sooner. Questions arise, however, about the extent and way in which existing racial tensions and anger over economic exclusion will play out in the circumstances and the changing degree and character of police violence. The picture in the United States is further complicated by the way pluralized policing involves so-called mass private property. Spaces such as shopping malls, as well as Las Vegas, Disneyland and Times Square, all manifest variations of the pluralized policing of public order. This social terrain may be subject to prolonged, or at least intermittent, shutdown and new modes of social exclusion are likely to emerge. In the short term, the accompanying cancellation of major professional sports league games, and other public gatherings, may create social strain as the industries of mass distraction re-calibrate to the new conditions (which includes mass unemployment). As the plague spreads and the fatalities mount over the coming months, will the summer “riot season” happen as normal? Perhaps it will be worse. Maybe, like professional baseball, it will be called off due to plague.

It has already been predicted that organized crime will mutate under the conditions of the pandemic panic (Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2020). Policing the long “war on drugs” has had a considerable effect on the police métier in America and beyond (Manning, 2010). The cultural image of the urban American police “vice squad” is a gross stereotype (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 214–217). Nonetheless, it is a cultural expression of a reality of violence and corruption that characterize the history of American policing. The massive underground economy involving sex, drugs, guns and people that exists within the legitimate North American transcontinental economy represents another possible vector for contagion during the pandemic panic. For example, what will happen within the sex industry (Law, 2019)? If it is true that the major consumers in the retail sex trade of exotic dancers and other forms of sexwork are primarily middle-aged, middle-class white males, then what will be the economic consequences in this industry, both short term and long term? How will formal and informal (public and private) modes of policing the skin trades evolve once people develop consciousness of contagion? Perhaps the illicit economy in North America is less a “house of cards” than the licit one and Las Vegas will prosper. Economists refer to the market demand for the addictive products and services that feature in the “night-time economy” (Hobbs et al., 2003) as being “inelastic”, meaning that demand remains relatively fixed regardless of external factors. In somewhat colloquial terms, pandemic panic or not, policing in the so-called “underworld” abides.

Consider the case of Canada where, over the recent past, resources have shifted from policing serious and organized criminality towards “national security” matters (e.g. pipeline protests, First Nations protests, etc.), leaving the illicit economy to boom in the context of an economically struggling formal social order (Griffiths, 2019; Kiedrowski et al., 2017; Marquis, 2016; Monaghan & Walby, 2012, 2017; Pasternak, 2016; Preston et al., 2012; Prowse, 2013; Ruddell, 2011; Swastsky et al., 2017; Walby & Monaghan, 2011). While petroleum prices plummet, the costs of production do not, and crimes perpetrated through the procedures, practices and processes of resource extraction go un-policed (Sheptycki, 2016). Shifting police priorities and the fact that the oil and gas industry in western Canada has had its day offer an important part of the explanation of the recent explosion in methamphetamine, synthetic opiates and other “hard drugs” in the Canadian west. Another part of the story is the transnational commodity chains of drugs and precursor chemicals that originate in China (Chung, 2019). How these illicit markets adapt over the short and long term will offer a test of state capacities in Canada. What is sure is, since the “legitimate” economic sector offers so few options for poor people, they are hugely affected by what transpires in these markets, where both illicit and licit commodities circulate. In the post-pandemic panic world, how will the policing of “profiteering”, “hoarding” essential supplies, and “black marketeering” differentially effect the economic “haves” and “have-nots”? How the supply lines of the illicit economy will adapt as vectors of the virus is uncertain, but the policing of illicit markets in western Canada, as elsewhere in the global system, has long been shown to be imperfect.

An active question for research on policing is the degree to which the violence and exploitation associated with criminality increases or not in crises, and what role the occupational subculture of policing plays in specific contexts. Over the recent past, close observers have noted what is believed to be an increase of police response activities regarding “domestic violence”, and violence against women and other vulnerable groups in a variety of jurisdictions around the world. In the United States, the (often conflictual) relations between police and different communities have negatively shaped the ability to provide policing services concerning violence against the vulnerable. With a booming illicit economy and a failing formal one, the associated and longstanding violence in both public and private spheres may be expected to increase as a result of the pandemic panic and its possible aftermath. Arguably this process, long underway prior to the COVID-crisis, has already undermined democratic police legitimacy. The de-legitimation intensified over the recent past because, in Canada and other western democratic countries, the police interact with a general public who are increasingly suffering due to lack of adequate public provision of education, health and social welfare. How will North American cities be policing “skid row” as the effects of the pandemic panic sweep through the thronging homeless population who are stuck at the very bottom of the money system?

This brings us to another important point of consideration, without which no satisfactory conclusions can be drawn from these reflections. Some very urgent questions regarding the policing of illicit markets and “dark money” have already been considered. This prompts us to raise our sights and observe the goings on in the global financial system where turmoil and turbulence make it very difficult to discern the activities of “bad actors” during the present crisis. More than a decade ago Margaret Beare cast a critical light on the dark and nefarious world of policing “dirty money” (Beare, 2003; Beare & Schneider, 2007). Prior to the turn of the millennium researchers working on law enforcement practices involving money laundering were invariably concerned with specific predicate offences, which usually involved illicit markets in drugs and psychotropic substances from the global south to the global north (Sheptycki, 2000). In that context “dirty money” was supposedly clearly demarcated from financial flows more generally: dirty money was drug money and suspicious for that reason. Even then, the problem of money, its corruption of politics and the consequent politics of corruption were clearly evident to scholarly observers, and yet globally white-collar crime and other crimes of the powerful remained under-policed (Nelken & Levi, 1996). Following the attacks of 9/11 there was a brief period where the concern was to police both drug money and terrorist financing (Gilmore, 2011; Orlova & Moore, 2004). After the financial crisis of 2008 some criminologists argued all financial flows were complicit in, or somehow facilitative of, criminal harms (Passas, 2016; Ruggiero, 2013; Spapens et al., 2018). Finally, the disclosure of the so-called Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers exposed the pervasive linkages between the illicit financial underworld and the licit global banking system (Bernstein, 2017; Garfield, 2017; Shaxson, 2011, 2018). The policing of the global money system during and after the pandemic panic of 2020 will build upon this foundation, but it is unclear what it will look like in even the not too distant future.

One final point of consideration is due, and that is the role of technology in the policing response to the pandemic panic. Police institutions have historically been at the forefront of technological innovation. Keeping in mind that their métier involves the activities of tracking, surveillance, keeping watch, and unending vigilance, backed up with the ability to apply force (up to and including fatal force) in pursuit of police organizational goals, these innovations have centered on the adoption of a range of communication and information technologies, along with technologies of surveillance and coercion (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 31–34, 158, 219–221). Intelligence theory identifies an associated shift from “human intelligence” to “signals intelligence”, whereby information from human sources is increasingly replaced by information gathered “by wire” (Gill et al., 2008). That is why the ethics and morals of so-called “intelligence-led policing” have become so important (Fyfe et al., 2018). What is concerning is the political economy and power structures that the new police information and surveillance technologies sustain (Haggart et al., 2019; Zuboff, 2019). Perhaps the current turning point will usher in a new kind of global pluralized policing web, in effect a world-wide “authoritarian surveillant assemblage” (Topak, 2019). Perhaps the future trajectories of pre-emptive policing will actually create new risks and threats without ameliorating present insecurity (Ericson, 2007; McCulloch & Wilson, 2016). Not long prior to the pandemic panic of 2020, it was revealed that police all across North America had entered a new phase of techno-policing replete with facial-recognition, advanced predictive computer analytic social profiling (including the ability to patrol the social-media landscape of Facebook and Instagram in order to profile individuals), and command-and-control systems that manage front-line policing on the basis of systematic attempts aiming at total information awareness (Sanders & Sheptycki, 2017). It is interesting to consider that the “ambient surveillance” facilitated by a coalescence of public CCTV surveillance and surveillance of new social media has transformed the ubiquitous “smart phone”, up until now embraced by North Americans and Europeans as personally liberating, into a technology of social control (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 161–162).

In fact, these developments are not limited to North America and Europe. In China prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, the police-state was already using the technological capabilities of advanced surveillance and communications to control populations. For example, in 2019 the Chinese state had banned millions of people from internal travel on the basis of the “social credit system”. This surveillance system harnesses the power of CCTV, facial recognition, and computers to give people a “social credit score”, and if someone’s score falls below a certain point it triggers the loss of social mobility and other allowances. ⁹ The success that the Chinese state has had in enforcing social distancing in the wake of the contagious COVID-19 disease that incubated there is in large measure due to the surveillance capacities of technologies introduced only recently. Cell phones and hand-held devices have been useful tools of police social control in China before now. This Orwellian mass surveillance state has perhaps been seen as limited to that jurisdiction, but sharp observers noted quite some time ago that the Chinese social-credit system would interfere in the sovereignty of others. ¹⁰ If the Seoul solution to the pandemic panic—intensive police tracking, tracing, surveillance, and monitoring enforced house confinement of COVID-19 “exposed” individuals—looks like a success, how far will the Confucian sphere extend beyond the historic core of the Middle Kingdom (Sheptycki, 2008)? Like the COVID-19 virus, the new technologies of surveillance—from “big data” to “face-recognition”—have been let loose in the police sector. The future is here, it is just geographically uneven. Now it is a question of observing how police in each jurisdiction adapt, with what consequence for people’s and communities’ well-being, and what the results signify about the politics of the police in a global perspective.

Conclusions, of a sort

From a macro perspective and taking the long view it is possible to see that the COVID-19 pandemic panic coincides with a millennial shift. That is certainly how the educated elites of Russia, Japan, Iran, China and other ancient civilizations might see it. This is not, as Samuel Huntington (1993) argued, a “clash of civilizations”. With due regard to Michael Mann’s monumental study of social power and Lesley Sklair’s analysis of transnational practices generally, the analysis pursued here evidences a significant reconfiguration of the global system because we can see it by looking at the global police response as it is locally manifested in the various jurisdictions (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2012; Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 62–64, 146–161). The so-called “global 1%” have a “semi-detached” relation to the national state. The transnational capitalist class and corporations of the west do not like to pay taxes and fund the state. The members of this class who have their basis of economic and political power in countries such as Russia, China, India, Mexico and elsewhere each have a different ground for participation in the competitive game of strategic global capital accumulation. But despite any rhetoric to the contrary, none of them exhibit real substantial loyalties to, or empathy with, the mass of people who supposedly embody “the nation”. They would rather consign them to the Raft of the Medusa (Sheptycki, 2010a, 2012). Insofar as the state system is useful in policing the flow of people, goods and money, and keeping order and maintaining control, it is instrumental (Bowling et al., 2019, pp. 62–64).

However, the ability of different states around the world to provide the services of effective “low policing” is being currently severely tested by the pandemic panic. Where governments have embraced neo-liberalism intensively (as in the UK and the US), the effective service provision of low policing is very much in doubt. In other places, perhaps the Scandinavian countries or Germany, social democracy has been sustained (although a rising political Right is a worrisome factor). In these latter places, governmental capacity appears to be more robust and low policing, for the general good, seems at least possible even in the current crisis. Since trying to use non-democratic means to achieve democratic ends is an oxymoron, it is wise for would-be democratic police operational commanders and policy-makers to begin as they would wish to end. The pandemic panic should probably be read symptomatically, as further evidence of the fundamental global ecological shift as humans become the dominant influence on climate and environment (what geologists call the Anthropocene epoch). When the pandemic panic is over, Earth will still be experiencing calamitous environmental disruption due to human activity. The hazardous grounds for further panic are seeded, a constabulary ethic is sorely needed (Sheptycki, 2010b).

What will be the outcome for democratic policing in the aftermath of the first global police event? This brief exploration into thinking about how the police métier is being put into action in the different jurisdictions of the rapidly changing world system operating in the context of crisis offers important clues as to what is happening, but this is by no means the whole picture. It is nonetheless an appropriate intellectual response to the crisis to ask how police practices will serve to maintain a democratic ethos where all people and citizens have equal access to all of the legal tools necessary to govern their lives successfully, and both understand and endorse practices of low policing that are in their general social interest. Emergency powers have been assumed the world over. As scholars of policing power, our central concern is not so much about how society will weather the pandemic panic, but rather what kind of society will we end up with after it is completed. All the signs are, when it comes to the politics of policing and social order, nothing will ever be quite the same. However, the future lines of development in the global politics of the police (traceable along the lines of current theory and existing evidence) suggest that practical defenders of the ideals of global social democracy in the 21st century will suffer not dissimilar challenges as did the defenders of humanistic ideals in 5th century BCE post-Periclean Athens. The present moment is the first global police event and it brings into mind that timeless question, posed in Plato’s Republic and neatly put by the Roman satirist Juvenal around about two millennia ago: “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”—who will guard the guards?