About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

30 Soc. Probs. 507 (1982-1983)
High Policing and Low Policing: Remarks about the Policing of Political Activities

handle is hein.journals/socprob30 and id is 519 raw text is: SOCIAL PROBLEMS, Vol. 30, No. 5, June 1983 HIGH POLICING AND LOW POLICING: REMARKS ABOUT THE POLICING OF POLITICAL ACTIVITIES* JEAN-PAUL BRODEUR Universit6 de Montrdal Policing political activities is.usually regarded as deviant police action. The deviance approach focuses on police abuse, which is deemed to be secretive and to confuse legitimate dissent with political delinquency, such as terrorism. I take Issue with the deviance approach and attempt to replace it by distinguishing between high policing and low policing models of police action. Political policing Is then seen as a core fea- ture of high policing instead of merely being a suspicious peripheral aspect of the police apparatus. I also argue that mainly through technological change, western police forces are increasingly operating under the high policing model, To write on the subject of policing political activities is from the outset difficult, because one can bog down in problems of semantics. The very meaning of the phrase policing political ac- tivities is fraught with ambiguities. The phrase can be narrowly interpreted to mean keeping elected politicians honest; more broadly, it can refer to police interventions in the struggles tak- ing place inside society over the possession and exercise of state power. Compounding this diffi- culty, policing political activities is deemed to be not even a real topic in Canada and in the United States; the target of such policing- political deviance-has no official status outside the criminal law. Hence, many people claim that there are no political prisoners in North America. Others, such as Platt and Cooper (1974), take an opposite stand and argue that notions such as deviance or social reaction can only be understood as political processes. Any form of policing thus becomes political. To escape this all or nothing dichotomy, I first examine the implicit definitions of political policing which are shared by Canadian and U.S. government inquiries into alleged police wrong- doing: aggressive operations performed under the blanket mandate of protecting national se- curity. Then I look at what I call the deviance approach to the policing of political activities and, noting its shortcomings, I distinguish between low and high policing and apply the latter to modern policing. GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATIONS Several Congressional committees scrutinized the U.S. intelligence community in the wake of the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. The most thorough investigation was conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church. The committee's report (U.S. Congress: Senate, 1976) contained detailed accounts of domestic operations performed against political dissenters by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), under its infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). In Canada, investigations into the propriety of security service operations got off to a bad start. In 1966, the federal government appointed Judge Dalton C. Wells to investigate charges that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had exerted undue pressure on the post office to fire Victor Herbert Spencer on the alleged grounds that he had spied for the Soviet Union. Spencer was found dead in his house a week before the inquiry was scheduled to begin. Later in 1966, the government appointed a royal commission to examine the protection of national security in Canada. It released an expurgated report (Canada, 1969). * This is a revised and slightly expanded version of a paper presented at the 34th annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology in Toronto, November 1982. Correspondence to: Ecole de Criminologie, Universit6 de Montr6al, C.P. 6128, Succursale A, Montreal, Quebec H3C 3J7, Canada.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most