Third Party Policing in the 21st Century: The Role of Police in Contemporary

Regulatory NetworksBy

Professor Lorraine MazerolleUniversity of Queensland

Acknowledgements

Michael Buerger, my co-author of “Third Party Policing: A Theoretical Analysis of an Emerging Trend” in Justice Quarterly, Vol 15, No 2, June 1998.

Janet Ransley, my co-author of “Third Party Policing,” 2006. Cambridge University Press.

Been on Vacation Skiing!!

Perisher, July 2010

This is day 3!

Day 4!!

Outline of Presentation

• What is Third Party Policing (TPP)?

• What is the broader context? Where does TPP fit into debates about governance, regulation and risk?

• How effective is third party policing? Does it work? For what types of crimes?

• What are the challenges and future directions for third party policing into the 21st century?

What is Third Party Policing?

• Definition: Police efforts that utilize legal levers to co-opt, persuade or coerce third parties (e.g. regulators, business owners, property owners and other non-offending persons) to take responsibility for preventing or reducing crime problems.

• Key Feature #1: It is the police who initiate the partnership by creating, enlisting or coercing “third parties” to do something about controlling or preventing crime problems.

• Key Feature #2: The third party has access to a special type of “legal lever” and it is this legal lever that makes the partnership attractive to police and defines the intervention.

The Relationship between TPP and POP

POP

• SARA drives process; • Facilitated by significant

government investment and internal police policy;

• Derives legitimate authority through consultation & cooperation.

TPP• Parameters of the activated

legal lever dictate the TPP process;

• Facilitated by forces external to the police, especially the rise of responsive regulation;

• Derives authority through laws & regulatory provisions.

About 50% of POP projects involve at least one TPP tactic (see Mazerolle & Ransley, 2006; summary of Goldstein awards 1994-2003).

Less than 1/3rd of TPP initiatives follow the POP process, either implicitly or explicitly.

Late 20th Century Societal Transformations

• Shift away from old, state-centered models of governance -> deregulated, market-based models of governance that encompassed broad regulatory networks

• Reductions in the size and power of the public sector

• Privatization of key commercial activities (e.g. aviation, banking, and telecommunications)

• Privatization of basic infrastructure and services (e.g. water, gas and electricity)

• A new focus on the outputs of regulation (e.g. quality assurance, rather than detailed oversight of inputs and activities)

• Imposition of corporate management, or new public management, on public sector agencies (including performance standards and evaluation)

The 21st Century “New Regulatory State”

• Encourages a plurality of regulatory organizations (e.g. public agencies, professional & community organisations, individuals)

• Creates a multiplicity of regulatory “nodes” that together regulate activity

• Maintains central state control over regulatory policy

• Fosters global, regulatory networks • But, the recent GFC reveals the dark side

of de-regulation!

Contemporary Regulatory Agencies

The transformation from old, state-focused models of governance to responsive regulation involved agencies to shift from:

•reactive hierarchies risk management teams;

•command & control tactics compliance-based systems;

•the use of formal sanctions the use of cooperation, persuasion and incentives for compliance

TPP in the New Regulatory State

• Third party policing is one way that responsive regulation is manifested at the street level of crime control and prevention

• External dynamics (rather than explicit police policies and priorities) create TPP opportunities and drive TPP initiatives

• TPP relies upon a multiplicity of nodes in a regulatory network (e.g. building inspectors, licensing authorities, health inspectors)

• The process of TPP draws on a hierarchy of legal levers (most often regulatory levers) that are applied to ensure compliance

Changing police models

TPP in an era of uncertainty

• In partnership with other organisations (sometimes coerced via legislation), police use a range of civil, regulatory and administrative laws to create or enhance crime control partnerships or networks.

• Functions include: crime, security and terrorism control, crime prevention, regulation and social policy.

• Tactics include: use of information technologies, new surveillance approaches, intelligence-led policing.

• Organizational design: centralized specialist teams, fusion centers, secondments to external agencies.

Advantages of TPP

• Third party policing co-opts and utilizes a broad range of existing regulatory laws, civil laws, ordinances, codes, town by-laws etc to gain a crime control benefit

• Police use legal powers and levers not otherwise available to them

• Someone with power to act on a crime problem is given incentive to do so, voluntarily (e.g. reduce truancy) or with express or implied threats of coercion (eg licensing/building penalties, contract termination, child removal)

• Police take advantage of non-criminal justice responses (e.g. civil penalties and sanctions) to control problems

• Can lead to enhanced social control without constraints of criminal law

The Challenges of TPP

• Potential for civil law to be misused as a way around criminal law protections

• Potential for police misconduct (e.g. abuse of authority)• Unintended consequences (e.g. eviction might lead to

homelessness; shop owners may become vulnerable to retaliation; coerced third parties might feel manipulated by the police)

• Potential for co-opting/re-directing regulatory resources that might be better used otherwise (e.g. strained relations emerging with other regulatory nodes)

• Possibility of displacement

Legal Frameworks for Third Party Policing

Source: Mazerolle & Ransley (2005)

Sanctions and Penalties

TPP gives police access to civil sanctions:

• Court ordered repairs/upgrades/use restrictions• Fines• Damages/nuisance actions• Forfeiture• Forced sales• Eviction• Temporary or permanent closure• License restrictions• Arrest & incarceration for failure to comply

Positive Inducements

• Grants, subsidies, assistance

• Public praise & awards

• Reduced supervision in return for internal compliance programs

• Waiver of penalties in return for reporting & cooperating

• Encouragement of whistle-blowing (under Qui tam writs)

Legal Levers & Controlling Drug Problems

• Council by laws

• Drug free zones

• Lease conditions

• Liquor licensing

• Housing codes

• Gang abatement laws

• Drug nuisance abatement laws

• Mandatory reporting of pharmaceutical sales

Legal Levers & Controlling Violent Crime

• City Ordinances (e.g. 2 staff members at convenience stores)

• Health and Safety Codes

• Uniform Building Standards

• Drug Nuisance Abatement Laws

• Fire safety regulations

• Liquor Licensing Laws (e.g. hours of alcohol sales)

Legal Levers & Problem Places

• Alcohol free zones

• Duty of care legislation

• Unleashed dog ordinance

• Restraining orders (used to target prostitutes)

Legal Levers & Controlling Juveniles

• Liquor licensing laws• Curfews• Truancy laws• Probation and parole conditions

Tools and Techniques to Recruit Third Parties

• Cooperation

• Consultation

• Persuasion

• Coercion

• Threats

• Initiation of formal legal action

Pyramid of regulatory strategies (Source: Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite, 1992)

Types of Implementation

• Ad hoc and episodic

• As part of a problem-oriented policing project

• As part of a crime prevention initiative

• Mandated via legislation (e.g. Britain’s Crime and Disorder Act, 1998)

• When the police abdicate responsibility to a non-police regulator (e.g. contracting out crime control)

Can third party policing reduce crime?

• Quantitative review (or meta-analyses) undertaken to examine the effects of third party policing on drug problems, violent crime problems, crimes in places, crimes committed by juveniles, and property crime

• Lorraine Mazerolle & Janet Ransley, 2006. “Third Party Policing,” Cambridge University Press.

What is meta-analysis?

• Campbell Collaboration. See www.campbellcollaboration.org

• Meta-analysis is a range of systematic, quantitative methods that are used to synthesize research findings from multiple studies on a similar topic or issue

• The key to meta-analysis is the calculation of an effect size. The effect size is the magnitude of a specific intervention’s effect independent of the study’s sample size

• Calculating an effect size enables one to compare and contrast individual research findings

Search Strategy

• Database search from criminology, government, medicine, education, psych etc

• Examine prior reviews (e.g. Sherman, Eck)

• Scan reference lists of all located studies

• Relevant websites (e.g. POP center)

• Contact with researchers and PhD students

• Phyllis Schultze and the Rutgers Library

Classification Criteria

• Internal validity (e.g. randomisation, control group, pre and post intervention data)

• External validity (e.g. is the sample representative of the population?, replicability?)

• Descriptive/reporting validity (e.g. effect size, sample size, intervention details, design details)

• Design integrity/methodological quality (e.g. are there any controls for threats to validity?, Displacement/diffusion analysis?)

Summary of Search Results

• We identified 77 studies that used a third party policing tactic

• 8/21 drug crime; 2/21 violent crime; 0/15 public disorder; 1/11 juvenile crime and 1/9 property crime studies were included in the meta-analysis (12/77 or 16% were included)

• We calculated 23 effect sizes across the 12 studies (2 outcomes had too large confidence intervals to be included in the presentation of results)

Effect Size Statistics

• There are many approaches to measuring effect size

• There is a general failure in the law enforcement literature to report important data characteristics to enable calculation of effect sizes (e.g. standard deviation, sample size, p values)

• Most of our quantitative review uses the odds-ratio, which is a comparison between two groups in terms of the relative odds of an outcome i.e. the odds of a crime after, given a crime before

• In some cases the standardised mean difference between the intervention and control group (Hedge’s d) was calculated

Table 1: Third Party Policing Strategies Targeting Drug-Related Crime (Odds Ratio)a

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a The “arrest” outcome from the Clarke and Birchler-Richardson (1998) study, as well as the “males selling drugs” from the Mazerolle (1998) study were excluded given their extremely large confidence intervals.

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Table 2: Third Party Policing Strategies Targeting Other Crime (Odds Ratio)

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Summary of Results

• Property owners are the most common third parties (i.e. proximate targets, burden bearers)

• TPP can reduce drug problems (11/16 or 69% revealed desirable outcomes)

• Many TPP studies have poor evaluation designs and fail to present sufficient data that could be reasonably used to calculate an effect size

• Difficult to isolate the unique contribution of the TPP intervention, when multiple interventions occurring at the same time

Future Directions

• Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship - $2.6 million from 2010 to 2014;

• Update systematic review of TPP using the i-Library – automated web-crawling, text mining facility;

• Funding for 3 Randomized Controlled Trials to test key tenets of TPP;

• First trial will be with the Queensland Police, targeting Truant Young People;

• REXNET – simultaneous trials across the world using TPP to test approaches for controlling Persistent and Prolific Offenders (PPOs). Site in Queensland = Townsville.