British Journal of Criminology 55(4)

British Journal of Criminology, July 2015: Volume 55, Issue 4

Let Sleeping Lawyers Lie: Organized Crime, Lawyers and the Regulation of Legal Services
David Middleton and Michael Levi

The study examines the range of crimes in which solicitors become involved as primary offenders (mainly fraud) or on behalf of others (criminal planning and money laundering) and critically reviews the factors in their personal and working environment that may promote or inhibit such crimes and the ways that criminologists and socio-legal scholars have accounted for deviance and the regulation of the profession. It ends by discussing trends in contemporary lawyering and its regulation—ethics, discipline, ownership and surveillance—that could plausibly affect rates of crime by solicitors, focusing on England and Wales but also giving some comparative context with the United States.

‘Police Culture’ at Work: Making Sense of Police Oversight

Holly Campeau

Within police studies, ‘police culture’ is often depicted according to a series of values (e.g. conservatism, solidarity, suspicion, etc.). This article argues in favour of an alternative conceptualization of police ‘culture’, which draws on concepts from the sociology of culture. Police culture is viewed as a resource, which actors deploy within particular institutional constraints. Drawing on 100 interviews and participant observation in a police department, the analysis examines how officers negotiate meaning in an unsettled occupational environment prompted by heightened levels of police oversight. Two culture indicators are examined: solidarity and mission. This article represents an explicit attempt to theorize police culture sociologically and invoke an adaptive framework for uncovering how actors use culture within a definable set of structuring conditions.

The Pluralization of High Policing: Convergence and Divergence at the Public–Private Interface
Conor O’Reilly

High policing has long been associated with the preservation and augmentation of state interests by the intelligence community. However, this paradigm can neither be examined, nor theorized, within an exclusively ‘public’ framework; a host of ‘private’ actors must now be acknowledged on this conceptual terrain. Moving beyond well-acknowledged patterns of outsourcing intelligence, this paper brings sharper research attention to transnational security consultancies as well as the more shadowy realms of boutique intelligence firms, private detectives and freelance covert operatives. By examining these new private categories of high policing, this paper considers the complex patterns of convergence and divergence that characterize the public–private interface. Specific attention is devoted to resources of symbolic power and how these impact the capacity for coercive action.

Police Innovations, ‘Secret Squirrels’ and Accountability: Empirically Studying Intelligence-led Policing in Canada

Carrie B. Sanders, Crystal Weston, and Nicole Schott

In an environment of fiscal constraint and growing fear of catastrophic events, police services are turning to intelligence and analytic technologies to conduct aggressive information gathering and risk analysis. The present study uses 86 in-depth interviews and participant observation to explore the integration and utilization of intelligence-led policing (ILP) in a Canadian context. From this analysis, we identify how police cultures, organizational context and situational pace of policing constrain an intelligence-led framework. Further, we illustrate how police services have rhetorically adopted ILP and translated it to mean accountability in a time of austerity. By translating ILP, Canadian police services have been able to redefine success within their services without necessarily attending to the outcomes of their practices.

Simmel, the Police Form and the Limits of Democratic Policing

Diarmaid Harkin

I argue that the social theory of Georg Simmel can be used to illustrate certain limitations to the potential of democratic policing. Simmel makes a number of claims about trust, secrecy and accountability that are shown to have immediate relevance to my empirical case study of police–public consultation forums in Edinburgh, Scotland. Two particular aspects of the ‘form’ of the police–public relationship—the police’s command of non-negotiable force and inequality in the reciprocity of information—play a key role in limiting some of the principal aspirations of democratic policing theory. There are permanent barriers to improving the democratic credentials of the police I argue, yet positive and progressive change is still achievable.

Cultural and Institutional Adaptation and Change in Europe: A Test of Institutional Anomie Theory Using Time Series Modelling of Homicide Data
Diana S. Dolliver

This study examined whether geographic differences in intentional homicide rates in Europe were a function of societies that exhibit Anomic cultural tendencies and an institutional imbalance, as guided by Institutional Anomie Theory. This research is temporally sensitive, taking into account these differences over a 15-year time period. Additionally, separate operations of the theory within developed and transitioning countries were tested, and various cultural–institutional configurations were uncovered that led to increases or decreases in homicide rates. While still restricted by a lack of guidance from Messner and Rosenfeld and inconsistency in past research on how to operationalize key concepts of Institutional Anomie Theory, this study significantly contributes to the literature by assessing core theoretical questions of the theory while employing appropriate measurement strategies.

First Nations Peoples and Judicial Sentencing: Main Effects and the Impact of Contextual Variability
Krystal Lockwood, Timothy C. Hart, and Anna Stewart

Over-representation of First Nations peoples throughout criminal justice systems is an ongoing critical public policy issue. Judicial sentencing is a pivotal process, which has complex relationships with legal and extra-legal factors. In this study, we use data of serious offences from Queensland’s lower and higher courts from 2009 to 2010. First, logistic regression is used to consider the main effect of Indigenous status on the decision to imprison. Second, conjunctive analyses are used to determine whether contextual variability can illustrate when sentencing disparities occur. Results show the main effect of Indigenous status remained statistically significant in both court levels after controlling for variables. However, contextual variability influenced both the magnitude and direction of the effect of Indigenous status on sentencing.

Feeling Unsafe in a Multicultural Neighbourhood: Indigenous Inhabitants’ Perspectives
Thaddeus Müller and Tamar Fischer

Feeling unsafe in a multicultural neighbourhood has been related—especially in the case of indigenous inhabitants—to the presence of groups of young immigrant men in public space. However, indigenous inhabitants differ in their response to the presence of immigrant men. Our goal is to examine (in a qualitative and quantitative way) whether interethnic social involvement has added value when it comes to explaining the experience of fear of crime, as compared to general social involvement. We conclude that our thesis regarding the relevance of interethnic social involvement for explaining the experience of safety is sustained by our material. Therefore, we advise that interethnic social involvement should be integrated in future studies on the fear of crime.

Narratives and Counternarratives: Somali-Canadians on Recruitment as Foreign Fighters to Al-Shabaab

Paul Joosse, Sandra M. Bucerius, and Sara K. Thompson

Recently, the Somali diaspora has found itself at the centre of heightened security concerns surrounding the proliferation of international terrorist networks and their recruitment strategies. These concerns have reached new levels since the absorption of al-Shabaab into al-Qaeda in 2012. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with 118 members of Canada’s largest Somali community, this article draws upon narrative criminology to reverse the ‘why they joined’ question that serves as the predicate for much recent radicalization scholarship, and instead explores, ‘why they would never join’. We encounter Somali-Canadians equipping themselves with sophisticated counternarratives that vitiate the enticements of al-Shabaab. Particularly, notions of ‘coolness’, ‘trickery’ and ‘religious perversion’ mediate participants’ perceptions of al-Shabaab and enable a self-empowering rejection of its recruitment narratives. In particular, we find resonances between the narratives of non-recruits and ‘bogeyman’ narratives that exist commonly in many cultures. The efficacy of these narratives for resilience is three-fold, positioning the recruiters as odious agents, recruits as weak-minded dupes and our participants as knowledgeable storytellers who can forewarn others against recruitment to al-Shabaab.