The Detection and Policing of Gun Crime: Challenges to the Effective Policing of Gun Crime in Europe

Despite a shared understanding across the EU that access to firearms by the general public should be restricted, detailed legislation regarding the ownership, use and trade of firearms varies between EU member states. It is unclear however, how such variations impact on the policing of gun enabled crime. By using qualitative data generated from interviews with police, policy and decision makers from thirteen European countries, the authors of this article aim to determine how stakeholders perceive that national variations in firearms legislation impact on the policing of gun enabled crime within and across EU countries. Four main themes were identified from the qualitative data: disparities in Legislation, disparities in Priority given and the Resources allocated to investigations into gun enabled crime as well as Interventions. Due to the aforementioned disparities, cross-national investigations into incidents of gun crime are at risk of remaining impaired in their effectiveness. Therefore, more legislative coherency as well as sustainable long-term interventions will be needed to successfully reduce ownership and use of firearms in the criminal world. In this context, a departure from an exclusive use of an economic model of gun crime is recommended to allow for a better understanding of the dynamics of the black gun market

The police and the far right in Greece::a case study of police voting behaviour in Athens

The electoral advance of the far right party of Golden Dawn has left a clear mark on the Greek parliamentary elections of 2012. A less debated aspect of these results involves the extent of the electoral influence of Golden Dawn among police personnel. Using electoral data from two districts in Greece’s capital city, this paper explores the extent of that influence among major front line police units based in those localities. Our analysis obtains clear indications that Golden Dawn’s presence has been much more emphatic among police personnel than among the general public. These results warrant further exploration of this development, particularly in light of the possibility that far-right ideology may influence the character of everyday policing in Greece and the use of police discretion at the detriment of vulnerable or politically undesirable groups

The everyday world of bouncers: a rehabilitated role for covert ethnography

© 2018, The Author(s) 2018. The focus of this article is on the everyday world of bouncers in the night-time economy of Manchester, England. The structure of the article is to contextualise my covert passing in this demonized subculture followed by explorations of the everyday world of bouncers through the related concepts of door order and the bouncer self. A part of the article is an examination of the management of situated ‘ethical moments’ during the fieldwork and, more generally, critical reflections on emotionality, embodiment and risk-taking in ethnography. I also reflect on the retrospective and longitudinal nature of my fieldwork immersion, and both the data management challenges and possibilities this brings. Covert ethnography can be a creative part of the ethnographer’s tool kit and can provide an alternative perspective on subcultures, settings and organisations. By overly frowning upon the apparent ethical transgressions of covert research, we can stifle and censor the sociological imagination rather than enhance it. My call is for a rehabilitation of covert research

Grudge spending:The interplay between markets and culture in the purchase of security

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 suggest, firstly, that the purchase of security commodities is a mundane, non-conspicuous mode of consumption that typically exists outside of the paraphernalia of consumer culture - a form of grudge spending. Secondly, we demonstrate that security consumption is weighed against other commitments that individuals and organizations have and is often kept in check by these competing considerations. We find, thirdly, that the prospect of consuming security prompts people to consider the relations that obtain between security objects and other things that they morally or aesthetically value, and to reflect on what the buying and selling of security signals about the condition and likely futures of their society. These points are illustrated using the examples of organizational consumption and gated communities. In respect of each case, we tease out the evaluative judgements that condition and constrain the purchase of security among organizations and individuals and argue that they open up some important but neglected questions to do with the moral economy of security

Security/Capital: A general theory of pacification

What is security, and what is its relationship to capitalism? George S. Rigakos' powerful sociological treatise charts the rise of the security-industrial complex. Starting from a critical appraisal of 'productive labour' in the works of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Rigakos builds a conceptual model of pacification based on practices of dispossession, exploitation and the fetish of security commodities. Rigakos argues that a defining characteristic of the global economic system is its ability to productively sell (in)security to those it makes insecure. Materially and ideologically, the security-industrial complex is the blast furnace of global capitalism, fuelling the perpetuation of the system while feeding relentlessly on the surpluses it has exacted

Nightclub: Bouncers, risk, and the spectacle of consumption

In the last thirty years bouncers have emerged as gatekeepers of contemporary urban cool, exclusivity, and social capital. In this ground-breaking empirical study, George Rigakos looks at the relation between consumption, security, and risk and challenges the idea of nightclubs as places of liberation and personal expression. People go to nightclubs to see and be seen - to view others as aesthetic objects and to present themselves as objects of desire. Rigakos argues that this activity fuses surveillance and aesthetic consumption - it fetishizes bodies and amplifies social capital, producing violence and crises fuelled by alcohol. At closing time, patrons flow out of the insular haze of the nightclub and onto city streets, moving from private spectacle to public nuisance. Bouncers are thus both policing agents in the nighttime economy and the gatekeepers of an urban risk market - a site of circumscribed transgression and consumption that begins at the nightclub door

New right, new left, new challenges: Understanding and responding to neoconservatism in contemporary criminology

This essay examines the rise of neoconservative thought within criminological discourse from the enlightenment 'quarrel' with ancient philosophy and church supported scholasticism in the 1700s to the present day. From the perspective of criminology, it is argued that there is little new about the 'new right' with the exception that it has managed to galvanize itself as a popular retributionist alternative among the working class in the United States, Canada, and England. The current organization of social institutions in a modern 'risk society' facilitates the easy re-definition of the crises of late-modern capitalism into issues of social control. It is not surprising we find the right reinvigorated and prominent under these conditions. New left realism and crime control through social development are offered as competitive platforms from which to advance critique of barbaric right-wing crime-control policies