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UK Plans Private Police Force
An anonymous reader writes "'Private companies could take responsibility for investigating crimes, patrolling neighborhoods and even detaining suspects under a radical privatization plan,' The Guardian reports. 'The contract is the largest on police privatization so far, with a potential value of £1.5bn over seven years, rising to a possible £3.5bn depending on how many other forces get involved.' A worrying development in a country with an ever-increasing culture of surveillance and intrusive policing."
The story lists the tasks that might be taken over by private companies:
The breathtaking list of policing activities up for grabs includes investigating crimes, detaining suspects, developing cases, responding to and investigating incidents, supporting victims and witnesses, managing high-risk individuals, patrolling neighbourhoods, managing intelligence, managing engagement with the public, as well as more traditional back-office functions, such as managing forensics, providing legal services, managing the vehicle fleet, finance and human resources
That seems like pretty much the entire job description short of actual Arrest. (The Detaining Suspects bit may mean running the jail, or arrest, its unclear).
The good side of this is you might have more luck suing a corporation than the constabulary. (No clue about UK law here, just a guess). And when the public becomes unsatisfied its much easier for city government to cancel the contract and find a new firm. The new guys will probably be on their best behavior for a few months at least.
Its not unheard of to find private police forces employed by some jurisdictions in the US. And its not unheard of the have entire companies fired. An incident in a Seattle transit hub eventually lead to fines and term termination of their contract.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I'm so glad Scotland controls it's own Law budget.
One more reason to vote for independence though.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
In the US, public agencies -- like police departments -- are often immune from liability in civil cases. If the UK is the same, privatization could open up the potential for abuses to actually be punished.
I don't know of any government function that was privatized that actually saves the government any money. From what I've seen, they privatize, and the people doing the work get replaced by a bunch of semitrained minimum wagers while the corporation keeps negociating for ever higher priced contracts. It happened with the Post Office, it's happening in the prisons, it happened to Medicare.
Back in the day, Medicare payments came out of my income taxes. Then, they set aside a new specific Medicare tax. Then under Bush II, Medicare went private. Now they withhold Medicare premiums from peoples' Social Security checks to pay for private health insurance tarted up to look like Medicare. Back in the day, Medicare's paperwork costs were 2% of every healthcare dollar, while private insurance ran up to 30%. Then they passed HIPPA, the Healthcare Information Portability and Privacy Act, to bring private insurance paperwork practices in line with Medicare and make the data easily transported between the systems. Now that Medicare is private, healthcare costs are soaring, nobody gives a shit about the 'portability' portion of HIPPA, they just fine and/or sue about any percieved breach of the 'privacy' aspects of the act. Paperwork costs under the 'new' Medicare are climbing through the roof and will soon reach that 30% mark. And this is progress?
So now Britain has private police. Do they have private prisons like they do here in the US? How soon until the court system there goes private as well?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Snow Crash! (A science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson; it did a good job forecasting this trend...and satirizing it.)
The Israeli military historian, Martin Van Creveld, also noted the trend toward privatization of state functions in the early nineties. (See for example, the The Transformation of War and the somewhat ponderous The Rise and Decline of the State.) As he predicted, the European-model nation-state continues to decline; as it weakens, it transfers its powers to private entities, and its sovereignty to more nebulous institutions that are not nation-states at all (such as the European Union, NATO, the UN, etc.) This in turn leads to a loss of faith in the nation-state by its citizens, until the state's government is no longer seen as legitimate. Not surprisingly, van Creveld is a fan of Snow Crash.
This has also been happening in the U.S., most prominently during the recent Iraqi Infelicity. As you may remember, the U.S. State Department outsourced its security operations to The Company Formerly Known As "Blackwater" during this time. This led to a fiasco in which a team from said organization—which was "protecting" a State Department delegation—shot up a crowd of harmless civilians with automatic weapons fire from armored vehicles, causing numerous death and mild embarrassment to the U.S. State Department. They should have been much more embarrassed, of course—official heads should have rolled—but such actions no longer have their just consequences. The U.S. Army also worked with TCFKAB and similar organizations with names like Triple Canopy, Executive Outcomes (I think that's defunct, actually), and companies smarter than TCFKAB who don't try to get business through publicizing their names. Of course, TCFKAB is still in business, under another name that I can't at the moment recall, probably because that name was designed to be impossible to remember. In addition to outright combat, other civilian agencies pretty much have taken over the role of providing the U.S. Army's infrastructure, and the entire "re-construction" of Iraq was handled by large corporations in a most unseemly manner.
So why is everyone surprised when the Brits want to outsource a bit of policing?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary