Ian Loader

University of Oxford | OX · Centre for Criminology

Over the past half century, conservatism has been a powerful force in shaping public and political responses to crime in Britain. But within criminology, conservative ideology remains curiously neglected and poorly understood. In this paper, I develop an interpretive reconstruction of conservative thinking about crime that seeks to make good this i...

Deaths in police custody present a set of enduring and troubling puzzles. Why do such deaths seldom result in prosecutions or adequate redress? Why are victims’ families so under-resourced and typically met with a conflicted mix of empathy and hostility? Why do acknowledged problems remain unresolved despite review after review making the same crit...

Scholars of security governance generally assume that the labour of private security officers can straightforwardly be transformed into discrete commodities. We argue, by contrast, that it is extremely difficult to commodify the labour of private security officers because their duties frequently require them to confront and work through both econom...

This article explores the phenomenon of scandals as they unfold in the private security industry. We begin by outlining our theoretical understanding of scandals, before tracking the key phases of two recent events – one in Sweden, the other in Britain. Scandals, we suggest, are best viewed as moral tales which dramatize a host of societal norms an...

Report of the Independent Commission on Policing, published in 2013. Authors listed were the principle contributors and co-editors of the report which was approved by the wider Commission

Questions of crime and security often today seem dominated by a contest between populism on the one hand and technocracy on the other. These positions appear to press conflicting claims: the former seeks to speak for 'the people', or 'victims', or 'law-abiding citizens' who have been ill-served by remote penal elites; the latter (for example, the e...

No abstract is available for this article.

This article assembles some theoretical resources for a project that investigates the ways in which thinking about politics has since the 1970s been bound up with thinking and action around crime. Such investigation is hampered by a dominant (neoliberal) narrative of governance that tends to reduce crime policy to a ‘contest’ between tactics and te...

How can we better align private security with the public interest? This question has met with two answers in the literature on private security regulation, one seeking to cleanse the market of deviant sellers, the other to communalize the market through the empowerment of buyers. Both models of regulation are premised upon a limited neoclassical ec...

This article draws upon two different ethnographic studies – one based in Sweden, the other in the United Kingdom – to explore how private security officers working in a stigmatized industry construct and repair their self-esteem. Whereas the concept of ‘dirty work’ (Hughes, 1951) has been applied to public police officers, an examination of privat...

In this chapter we revisit and extend discussion about the relation of the police to the key political concepts of 'crime' and 'order' using the case of the police power of stop and search/frisk. We select this power as a case study because its exercise is laden with implications for how we understand the overarching purpose of the police and seek...

In the paper, we use data from an English study of security consumption, and recent work in the cultural sociology of markets, to illustrate the way in which moral and social commitments shape and often constrain decisions about how, or indeed whether, individuals and organizations enter markets for protection. Three main claims are proffered. We s...

In this article we draw upon our recent research into security consumption to answer two questions: first, under what conditions do people experience the buying and selling of security goods and services as morally troubling? Second, what are the theoretical implications of understanding private security as, in certain respects, tainted trade? We b...

This symposium is a timely, welcome and valuable addition to the developing body of work that strives to draw productive linkages between accounts of the problems of contemporary democratic politics, the vagaries and extravagances of punishment in advanced capitalist countries today and efforts to sketch how these matters might be theorised, approa...

For over a century the so-called ‘Peelian’ principles have been central to the self-understanding of Anglo-American policing. But these principles are the product of modern state-building and speak only partially to the challenges of urban policing today. In fact, they stand in the way of clear thinking and better practice. In this paper, I argue t...

This paper develops an argument lightly sketched in our book Public Criminology? (2010). There we posed the question of what it would take for criminology to make a substantial contribution to the search for “a better politics of crime”. We were of course well aware of what some of our critics then informed us, namely that this was just a suggestio...

Why do certain security goods become banal (while others do not)? Under what conditions does banality occur and with what effects? In this paper, we answer these questions by examining the story of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) in Britain. We consider the lessons to be learned from CCTV’s rapid—but puzzling—transformation from novelty to...

What is the role and value of criminology in a democratic society? How do, and how should, its practitioners engage with politics and public policy? How can criminology find a voice in an agitated, insecure and intensely mediated world in which crime and punishment loom large in government agendas and public discourse? What collective good do we wa...

In this article, we describe and make sense of the reception of a novel security good: namely, the personal GPS tracking device. There is nothing new about tracking. Electronic monitoring is an established technology with many taken-for-granted uses. Against this backdrop, we focus on a particular juncture in the ‘social life’ of tracking, the mome...

This paper addresses some prospects for and impediments upon the democratization of aspects of crime control policy. It does so in the first place through a sympathetic critique of themes in the recent work of Robert Reiner. A consistent theme especially of Reiner’s later work has been the critique of hegemonic neo-liberalism and of its effects on...

This book seeks to address the pathologies and possibilities that attend the cultural connection between police, state, and nation. The goal is to assess the cultural and political significance of English policing, and its place within contemporary English social relations and public life. Drawing upon a two-year study of a range of police document...

The private security industry is often represented - and typically represents itself - as an expanding business, confident of its place in the world and sure of its ability to meet a rising demand for security. But closer inspection of the ways in which industry players talk about its past, present and future suggests that this self-promotion is ac...

This chapter addresses the following questions: what contribution can criminological knowledge make to shaping responses to crime in a polity which acknowledges crime and punishment to be properly political issues? What in a democracy is the public value of criminology? What is the collective good that criminological enquiry seeks to promote? What...

The 2008 financial crash, and the lessons it teaches us about the costs of unregulated excess, offers an opportunity to think anew about, and seek to temper, the enthusiasm for excessive punishment that has swept across several western societies in recent years. Taking this as my point of departure, I make the case in this article for a public phil...

Not long after this issue of cjm appears the voters of the United Kingdom will elect a new government. We do not know, at the time of writing, the colour or composition of the new administration, though everyone has their hunches, suspicions, and predictions.

How does our understanding of private security alter if we treat security consumption as consumption? In this article, we set out the parameters of a project which strives—theoretically and empirically—to do just this. We begin with a reminder that private security necessarily entails acts of buying and selling, and by indicating how the sociology...

The policing of modern states can never be something which is merely a 'technical' question of administration. Within this are buried a whole range of complex issues of normative political theory.

In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for investigating the relationship between contemporary consumer desires and practices and public demands for security and punishment. My organizing suggestion is that punishment-centred public responses to crime, social disorder and terrorist threats (what has been termed penal excess) are today b...

This paper contains the points and suggestions that the author makes to the former Prime Minister Tony Blair due to the "Civil Liberties" seminar once celebrated in Downing Street in which both took part. Loader, who recognizes the existence of a general perception that the current criminal justice system is unduly balanced in favour of the crimina...

Security has become a defining feature of contemporary public discourse, permeating the so-called 'war on terror', problems of everyday crime and disorder, the reconstruction of 'weak' or 'failed' states, and the dramatic renaissance of the private security industry. But what does it mean for individuals to be secure, and what is the relationship b...

This paper examines the basis on which we might argue that there is a 'transnational' public interest in transnational policing. Is policing beyond the state simply a matter of finding points of overlap between the security interests of different national communities. If so, it appears as a precarious and contingent achievement. But if not, how can...

In this article, the author reflects on the question of how policing institutions can help to foster and sustain the values and practices of democracy. The author's overarching concern is to outline and defend a conception of democratic policing that highlights the role of policing agencies in recognizing the legitimate claims of all individuals an...

This paper offers a critical reconstruction and reinterpretation of the disposition towards the governance of crime that was ascendant in England and Wales during the middle decades of the twentieth century - namely, liberal elitism, or what I term Platonic guardianship. Drawing upon documentary sources, and extended oral history/biographical inter...

Thus far … we have no reason to suppose that there is any better general solution to the problem of security, and little, if any, reason to regard any other possible countervailing value as a serious rival to security as the dominant continuing human need. (Dunn 2000: 212) In their recent book Governing Security, Johnston and Shearing pinpoint what...

Résumé Cet article soulève les questions suivantes : peut-on parler d’une activité policière excessive dans nos sociétés contemporaines ou, plus précisément, d’une police qui aille à l’encontre de la jouissance/production de liberté et de sécurité ? C’est dans le contexte de deux tendances intimement liées, discernables dans les relations entre l’a...

This essay proposes an approach to understanding changes in political responses to crime in England and Wales over the last third of the twentieth century and developments in criminological knowledge over the same period. To explore the association between these in some empirical detail, we argue, would provide a historical-sociological understandi...

The aim of this Special Issue is to stimulate theoretical debate on the relationship between human emotions and crime, punishment and social control. Intuitively, one is bound to think of this relationship as a close one. States of emotional arousal—pleasure, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, re-morse, resentment, shame, guilt and so forth—seem someho...

We have witnessed over recent decades the extension across Europe of an enhanced policing capacity—one comprising a complex, ever-shifting mix of informal professional networks, inter-governmental co-operation, and nascent supranational institutions (notably Europol). These developments have been accompanied— and justified—by a set of public narrat...

In this article, I address some of the 'democratic deficits' raised by the development of a cross-border policing capacity within the European Union and consider how these might best be made good. The argument unfolds in three parts. I seek, first of all, to clear a little ground by offering a critique of two currently prevalent and - in certain po...

This paper—which appears in two separate parts—traces the advent since 1945 of chief constables as significant commentators on both ‘law and order’ in particular and ‘the state of the nation’ more generally. Drawing upon autobiographies (and other writings), force annual reports, and interviews with serving and retired chiefs, we set out to underst...

In Part I of this paper (Loader and Mulcahy 2001) we set out to trace the coming to prominence since 1945 of an elite police voice with a significant symbolic power to represent and name social problems. In so doing, we charted the transition of chief officers from powerful but essentially local figures (1945‐1972), through the rise of maver...

The gradual de-coupling of police and state is an increasingly well-documented phenomenon. Against this backdrop, we set out in this article to reformulate and defend a positive (rather than pejorative) connection between policing and the state. We begin by reconstructing four candidate means by which the state-policing nexus might plausibly be est...

The gradual de-coupling of police and state is an increasingly well-documented phenomenon. Against this backdrop, we set out in this article to reformulate and defend a positive (rather than pejorative) connection between policing and the state. We begin by reconstructing four candidate means by which the state-policing nexus might plausibly be est...

This article asks how we might best come to terms with - and seek to govern - the multiplicity of institutional forms that are now involved in the delivery of policing and security services and technologies. I begin by documenting briefly the network of providers that constitute the policing field locally, nationally and transnationally, before spe...

This paper sets out to make sociological sense of some contemporary trends in the consumption of policing services and security products. I argue that the commodification of policing and security can fruitfully be theorised and investigated in terms of the spread of consumer culture, a contention that I demonstrate in three (related) ways. I begin...

In his latest reflections on our times Zygmunt Bauman (1997) depicts modernity as an epoch in which a good deal of freedom was sacrificed in the name of collectively guaranteed order and security; an era of reliability where people were able (albeit, for many, within severely circumscribed limits) to forge secure identities, plan ahead and hope for...

This paper considers one 'vigilante' episode in an English town in 1993 and its subsequent appearances in the press and in local 'crime-talk'. In so doing it a) proposes as an alternative to most current constructions of 'fear of crime' an interpretive approach grounded in place; b) considers the intersections between the generic 'law and order' pr...

The paper is concerned with how adult residents of one medium-sized, moderately affluent English town which is generally regarded as having a relatively low crime rate interpret and respond to teenage ‘incivilities’. We begin by locating the conflicts over teenage mis/behaviour that occur across many of the town's diverse areas and assessing how th...

In the struggle against the loudest voices in our societies — politicians, editorialists and commentators — scientific discourse has all the cards stacked against it: the difficulty and slowness of its construction, which means it generally arrives after the battle is over; its inevitable complexity, which tends to discourage simplistic or suspicio...

Against a backdrop of uncertainty created by an escalating and unmet public demand for police protection, and the reemergence of unregulated commercial security, this paper has three aims. First, it outlines the developments in security provision currently unfolding in Britain and reviews some of the responses that have been made. It then develops...

Taking as its point of departure the tension that currently exists in Britain between official crime control discourse and popular sentiment towards policing, this paper has two aims. Drawing upon Bourdieu's (1991) concept of symbolic power I argue, first, that sociological enquiry needs to devote more attention to understanding the social meanings...

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