Behave or be banned? Banning orders and selective exclusion from public space

Behave or be banned? Banning orders and selective exclusion from public space Marc Schuilenburg 0 0 VU School of Criminology, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law, VU University Amsterdam , De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam , The Netherlands By describing the practice of banning orders in the Netherlands, we investigate how the involved parties are dealing with their new responsibilities. We describe the way the changes in security management exert further influence in the spatial environment of city centers, and we analyze what this means in terms of equality of rights for all citizens. With this analysis, an attempt to explain the exercise of power beyond the State in policing space in Western countries is provided. - Improving justice, upholding the law and protecting society are the cornerstones of a democratic society and help people lead a safe and secure life. The last three decades have witnessed radical changes in the way in which this occurs. Traditionally, the government was viewed as the prime actor responsible for our security. But now, an increasing number of other players have assumed tasks and responsibilities relating to our safety and security. In some cases, they have taken over these duties completely. Private guards monitoring shopping malls, university campuses and airports are a wellknown example [2–5].1 But schools, sports clubs and housing organizations are also made responsible for the concern for safety and security in their policy [6, 7]. As a 1For example, in 1981, the Netherlands had more than 10,000 private security agents, in comparison to almost 27,000 police officers. This number has now tripled in twenty years’ time and is approaching the current number of public police functionaries [74]. consequence, the government is merely ‘one of the players’, and no longer has a monopoly on resolving challenges to security [8–10]. This does not mean that the influence of the state has diminished, but it does mean that security issues can no longer be approached from the standpoint of the government’s exclusive right. To paraphrase Michel Foucault: BThe king is dead, long live the extended royal family^ [11]. The ‘responsibilization’ [12, 13] of parties other than the police emanates from the insight that the traditional judicial slant is too restricted to allow an effective approach to the current security issue. Tasks in this domain are increasingly being transferred to other parties. An example is the Collective Pub Ban, a measure taken in the Netherlands in an effort to make pubs, bars and nightclubs co-responsible for maintaining safety and security within the city-center nightlife [14]. Depending on the severity of the conduct, an offender can be denied of entry to these venues for a period of 5 years. During this period, the offender is not allowed to enter the particular pub or any of the other pubs, bars and nightclubs that participate in this measure. In addition, similar sanctions are now being introduced in other Dutch cities, through denials of access to public transport and shopping facilities. Despite the sizeable body of knowledge of explanations for strategies such as responsibilization to explain the exercise of power beyond the State, little research has been performed in studies of governance about (1) how the new parties are actually dealing with their new responsibilities, (2) the way the changes in security management exert further influence in the spatial environment and (3) what this means in terms of equality of rights for all citizens. In the knowledge that great progress can be made in this field, the remainder of this article unfolds in three parts. First, I will describe the new distribution of responsibility with regard to the organization of security management in the Netherlands.2 Second, I will make a contribution to ethnographic research into the regulation of public space by examining two public-private security assemblages, the Collective Pub Ban and the Collective Shop Ban. Finally, I will give a response to normative issues concerning the extent to which the changes in security management lead to a specific use of urban space and in which way this is accompanied by the denial of access to large parts of cities to certain groups. In this way, this article contributes to the growing literature on ‘policing space’ in Western countries (e.g., [7, 15, 16]). Regulation of public space in the Netherlands Where objective security is concerned, a strong increase in registered crime, in both quality and degree of seriousness, has been visible in the Netherlands since the 1960s. In 1980, the police registered 24 violent crimes per 10,000 inhabitants. This had risen to 2 In this matter, it is important to mention that not all Western countries demonstrate the same development with regard to sharing responsibility in the field of safety and security. For instance, there is still a clear distinction between governmental and pr (...truncated)