In the book you state that ‘cleanliness and order are amongst the most popular topics of local government officials and the media.’ How did this topic become so popular? What explains local governments’ fixation on these issues?

Local urban revanchism (contrast of urban reformism of the 60s and 70s; the neo-conservative/neo-liberal discourse that states the city has been taken away from the white middle class by a diversity of marginal groups ed.) is certainly an issue here. A part of it is the attempt to discipline and control, if not eliminate, the urban poor for competitive reasons within and between cities, regions and nation states. The neoliberal (re)construction of a workfare (alternative to social welfare ed.) state created unemployment, poverty and even serious illnesses among the urban population. In German metropolises especially children and youngsters are severely affected by these developments – 20% are not finishing secondary school, 30% are lacking any kind of job qualifications. Workfare imposes on people dependent on welfare the moral (and material) obligation to fulfill their duty – as they will otherwise loose any support from the (local) state.

Workfare goes hand in hand with these well-known topics of cleanliness and order. These are the best suited topics for what must be called ‘symbolic politics’ as they does not target the structural reasons for unemployment and poverty. It is rather a show-off of (local) government’s good will to solve urban problems. The expulsion and containment of the urban poor, the development of space-focused policing entities and special units for (or against) specific ethnicities are fueled by the media. (Local) Officials feel pressured to respond to the news by intensifying their attempts to control the urban poor. It becomes a vicious circle, as such policing strategies and tactics are not challenged and supported by the hegemonic media. As the gap between the urban rich and the local (and increasingly migrant) poor is growing, so the urban space is turning into an increasingly contested terrain.

Our experience in Berlin and other cities informs us, that there is no monolithic elite with a single strategic project. There are different fractions with diverging objectives. For example, the highly corrupt and parochial former West Berlin elite, with high stakes in construction and urban development, clung to power for a rather long time until 2002. Ever since the federal government moved to Berlin in the late 1990s a tendency we had already observed before gathered momentum: the project to normalize a former socialist capital (in the East) and a social city (in the West). By normalizing we mean the application of the behavioural standards of a small town in (South)West Germany, where the ›Pietcong‹ rules define the limits of what is acceptable in everyday life. (›Pietcong‹ refers to the guerilla tactics of the ›Vietcong‹ and merges this term with the South-West ›pietism‹ ed.) This project seems to be successful: for example, in a truly godless city as Berlin, church attendance is now on the rise, notably among the spiritually homeless dwellers of the thoroughly gentrified districts of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg (who are small in demographic numbers, but highly visible in the media)

The private security market is a highly contested terrain and an extremely competitive market. Profit margins are tight and therefore wages are low. Capitalism has the implicit tendency to marketize everything everywhere. It is for this reason that the rent-a-cop industry is searching for new fields of activity – obviously and mainly due to for-profit reasons. The tendency to outsource former state activities as well as the tendency to focus on specific tasks within the various sectors of industry opens more and more market niches. Until the late 1980s, private security in Germany basically meant plant security. Within a few years, rent-a-cops took over the control of semi-public spaces such as shopping malls, conquered public transport (in Munich, for example, known as the ›black sheriffs‹ due to their black uniform-like dresses), are responsible for controlling pedestrian zones, are partially in charge of traffic control, and are even protecting military compounds and police stations. In Hamburg, the rent-a-cop industry finances a professorship that solely focuses on the opportunities to privatize state-run security and order tasks further. They argue that the state should concentrate on ›high crime‹, thus, in turn defining, or, let's say, co-defining what has to be treated as ›high‹ and ›low‹ crime. This power to define crime and (dis)order creates markets and, therefore profit opportunities.

To give but one example, never before rent-a-cops have been patrolling and controlling social housing estates. This market emerged only after the private security industry took over the control of privat(is)e(d) housing estates. Large international investment funds such as Texas-based ›Lone Star Europe‹ not only bought the social housing that the German government decided to get rid of but also took over pedestrian zones, play grounds, streets and parks. Within a period of only two years, housing authorities decided to hand over all security and order tasks to private security companies for social, non-privatized estates as well. What we are witnessing now are control, access and restriction regulations defined by for-profit entities on private, semi-public and public spaces. Children in the remaining social housing estates are no longer allowed to use the privatized playgrounds; we found evidence that rent-a-cops took over police authority by arresting youths, confiscating footballs, and even taking them into custody. The power to define and the power to control create the power to extend the profit margins.

That is a complex development. Police officials in the UK, namely within the London Metropolitan Police claim that there is an ›extended policing family‹, scholars of policing talk about a ›pluralization of policing‹. The police are not vanishing but getting new partners and competitors. As George Rigakos shows in our book on ›Kontrollierte Urbanität‹, rent-a-cops and state police in Canada are competing with each other for contracts to control public city space. At the very same time, they are also cooperating with private police companies. By this, a new division of labor between state police, rent-a-cops, and/or nonprofit and voluntary policing entities can be identified. We are witnessing, what can be called ›police private partnerships‹. State police is more focused on ›high crime‹ now with a tendency to merge with secret services – even on the international level where the EU provides a good example. There is a focus also on crowd control: Riot gears, new technologies, tactics and weapons have been developed and deployed especially for protest policing. Basically, all meetings of the IMF, the G8, the World Bank etc. demonstrate very clearly how critics of the neoliberal globalization process are treated. In our book, Robert Warren shows through the FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) in Miami, FL and the G8 meeting in Sea Island, GA, how ›pop-up armies‹ are formed by military forces, private security, and the police to bring whole regions to a standstill.

In our book Neil Smith talks about the export and diffusion of ›zero tolerance‹ politics around the globe, highlighting the UK. He summarizes this process, being first deployed by the ›Mussolini of Manhattan‹, as the New York Times once dubbed Rudy Giuliani, in a joking manner: »Beyond Britain, such notoriously dangerous cities as Oslo and Bremen, Vienna and Barcelona, Stockholm and Dublin, have supped at this new holy grail of anti-crime snake oil. Indeed it is difficult to find an urban police force across the world that has not dabbled with it.«
On the European level, especially in Germany, governments and the police themselves state that they do not deploy ›zero tolerance‹ policing. In contrast, what lawyers, human rights activists, scholars of policing and the churches find is exactly this kind of rigorous policing against so-called ›undesirables‹ such as the homeless, drug addicts, ethnic minorities, prostitutes and the like.
In semi-public spaces, such as railway stations, sports stadiums, shopping malls, it is the rent-a-cop industry that takes advantage of the neoliberalisation of urban space. The segmentation of urban space – into ›containment‹ zones, and into ›no-go-areas‹ for the urban poor; into ›high consumption‹ zones in the inner-cities and classical ›NIMBY‹ areas in the outskirts – creates new markets for the plethora of policing entities, including private security. Asylum-seekers, for example, are one of the groups that are a primarily target for rent-a-cops. In one chapter of our book, I show how the privatized social housing estates in German cities, including Berlin, are ever more frequently policed by private security forces.

The processes of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism need further clarifi ca tion. What we are stating in our book is that on the abstract level neoliberalism is associated with a number of tendencies such as a primacy of financial over productive capital, of profit restoration over demand maintenance and of market distribution over social distribution. However, on the whole, these features are unevenly and contingently embedded when it comes to tangible neoliberal formations. It is under these conditions that neoliberalism implies only rhetorically ›less state‹. In reality it entails a thorough reorganisation of governmental systems and state-economy relations. Neoliberalism as a programme involves the roll-out of new state forms, new modes of regulation, and new regimes of governance. This includes the aim of consolidating and managing marketisation and its consequences. Roll-back, by contrast, aims at destructing the Fordist compromise and the achievements that are associated with the European welfare state model under Keynesian capitalism. These include the labor compromise between the unions and the capital-holders, the social housing and the welfare agreements.
In terms of policing responsibility many areas have been transferred to rent-a-cops. The state attempts to ›steer‹ and engage private security companies and the so-called civil society to take over the task of ›rowing‹. The neoliberal marketisation of inner cities is comparatively more developed than the policing strategies in the outskirts. Inner city neoliberalism is a more elaborated type of neoliberalism that usually takes the form of a police private partnerships – it is a comparatively more state-controlled market. On the contrary, the outskirts are less state-policed and constitute a realm where the private security industry can develop freely for its profit purposes – state control is comparatively absent here.

How do you think the private security industry will develop in the future and what effect will this have on (European) cities?

In Germany, as in Europe, we will witness a steady growth of the private security industry. According to industry analysts, Germany’s private security industry employed approximately 162,000 security officers and had an annual turnover of 5.6 million Euros in 2003. The size of the industry’s workforce is expected to grow by 58% from 2003 to 2013, while its annual turnover is expected to jump by 85%. In our book, Eric Töpfer and Roy Coleman show that this growth goes together with the further development of security technology such as CCTV and GIS systems. As much as the neoliberalizing process in European cities remains as an ongoing process rent-a-cops will become an expanding segment within the policing industry; the UK already has more private security officers than state police officers.

Volker Eick, Jens Sambale, Eric Töpfer (Hg.)
Kontrollierte Urbanität
Zur Neoliberalisierung städtischer Sicherheitspolitik
2007, 21,00 €
ISBN: 978-3-89942-676-2