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Introduction: On Categorizing New Forms of Social Control
Private security is an increasingly ubiquitous aspect of contemporary life in North America and around the world, with private security officers and technology related to private security efforts increasingly visible in both public and private environments. Coming to terms with a new social sphere in which security and governance are, increasingly, accomplishments and responsibilities of private companies has brought about efforts to delineate the place of private security vis-a-vis that of traditional public police.
Part of what researchers in the social sciences have done to accomplish this delineation conceptually has been to use evocative terminologies that encapsulate the similarities and differences between security and police. The term 'parapolice' has acquired a measure of currency among some criminologists and is one that connotes a relationship as well as a distinction between private security and public police. The word 'parapolice' was first deployed in legislation that attempted to define penalties for neighbourhood watch group members who falsely identified as police officers (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 1972) and was thus specifically portrayed as illicit. More recently, sociologists and criminologists such as Fleming et al. (2006), Fleury-Steiner and Wiles (2003), Forst (2000), McLeod (2002), Rigakos (1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002), Singh (2005) and Skolnick and Fyfe (1993) and have made use of the expression in ways that do not treat it as an inherently illegal practice. Other terms extant to express the fact that private security is 'police-like' but not 'police' include 'quasipolicing' (Jason-Lloyd, 2003), which entails approaches to justice that are administered outside of police and/or criminal courts, like regulatory responses wherein members of an organization or profession are fined or otherwise punished, or where criminal actions are taken as civil matters, and what Shearing and Stenning (1985) refer to as 'the Disney order' whereby members of organizations or work settings 'police' one another.
Expressions like 'parapolice' capture important similarities and connections between security and police, and a conceptual distinction between these phenomena. This distinction is moreover not only linguistic, conceptual or otherwise 'theoretical' but also bears on policy and practice recommendations to ensure that private security remains separate from the police as an autonomous and legally distinct source of social control, in private spaces only and with different status,...