Comparing Police-Private Security Relations in Mexico and the United Kingdom

• In Event: The Politics of Policing and Security

Abstract

Recent scholarship on plural policing has started to differentiate between two divergent global trajectories. The first trajectory is found in a series of much studied countries in the Global North - in particular the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia – where police forces and private security companies are increasingly forging partnerships with one another within the context of the neoliberal policy paradigm. The second trajectory is found in a series of much less studied countries in the Global South – such as Brazil, Indonesia, India and Kenya – where police forces and private security companies exist in a more fragmented and fractured relationship against the backdrop of institutional corruption and socioeconomic inequality. This paper seeks to nuance this depiction through a comparative analysis of police-private security relations in Mexico and the United Kingdom. Using Abrahamsen and Williams’s global security assemblage approach as a comparative framework, we identify both familiar patterns of divergence and notable instances of convergence, such as the attempt by private security companies to appropriate the symbolic capital of the state from the police. Not only does this study provide theoretically informed insights into the dynamics of police-private security relations in these two countries but, more broadly, it transcends the Global North-South oppositionalism in the comparative plural policing literature, opening out a new and important avenue of inquiry.

Authors

• Logan Puck, Salem State University

• Adam James White, University of Sheffield