eight - Conclusion: Policing and Security Frontiers

Summary

This book has examined new frontiers of policing and security provision in the 21st century, by adopting three major themes. These are that

• • criminology benefits from drawing on approaches and concepts from beyond its disciplinary borders;

• • this foray beyond disciplinary borders demands cutting-edge methods, such as freedom of information (FOI) requests;

• • types of policing and security provision migrate and mutate across jurisdictional boundaries.

To accomplish this study, the theme of frontier was invoked as, at once, a source of danger and a sought-after destination. The frontier is to be found ahead of formal spaces of control as well as ahead of its time. The frontier is indeterminable by borders and tradition, and can sometimes re-enact colonial relations, whether directed at Indigenous peoples or other disadvantaged groups. This book has explored this shifting and institutionally unsettled terrain of policing and security provision.

There are other frontiers of policing and security provision not covered in the preceding pages – in some ways, the most obvious being policing of migration, which is increasingly a topic of criminological study. That topic exemplifies subjects of the preceding chapters that future work on policing and security must continue to examine. Work in this area has led to the development of concepts such as ‘crimmigration’ (Welch, 2012), which sees the overlap of public policing (and criminal law) and immigration law enforcement. The notion of frontier has much purchase here, where this form of policing and security provision impacts on millions of citizens and migrants. The notion of frontier widens the spatial and temporal scope of research – and its relations to borders – to the vast fields upon which migrants and supporters well beyond borders operate, live and resist.

By examining various phenomena in the preceding chapters, we have sought to analytically augment and explore the notion of frontier in criminology and other social sciences, by suggesting a threefold meaning: as the edge and realms beyond conventional policing and security thinking and practice; how these forms of policing and security are studied in ways beyond and across clear-cut disciplinary boundaries; and as continuing colonial control of Indigenous peoples.