Preventive urban discipline: rent-a-cops and neoliberal glocalization in Germany.

• Date: 22 September 2006
• Author: Eick, Volker
• Published date: 22 September 2006
• Author: Eick, Volker

SINCE THE MID- 1970S, THE TREND IN PUBLIC POLICY FOR GERMAN CITIES HAS SHIFTED from more socially inclusive to more exclusive measures. Due to global competitive pressures and growing neoliberalization, German municipalities and regions have experienced growing socio-spatial polarization within and among urban areas. Over the last two decades, location competition and benchmarking between cities have become two of the main reference points for entrepreneurial city politics. With cities today confronting a more competitive (global) environment, local governments and their supporting growth machines have adopted place marketing, enterprise zones, tax abatements, public-private partnerships, and new forms of local boosterism, while also seeking new strategies of social control and workfare policies. In urban agglomerations, emerging prosperity enclaves are surrounded by islands of poverty, and both are fuelled by microeconomic logic in urban management and the (re)commodification of public spaces. The mercantile reengineering of urban spaces and of its residents by urban elites has led to intensified segregation and polarization of urban societies.

Re-regulating and restructuring the dysfunctional Fordist model in major cities has entailed new tasks for state police, as well as for rent-a-cops and "civil society" policing entities, thus underpinning the new centrality of urban (in)security. Though private policing has been in operation since 1901 in Germany, private security companies--or rent-a-cops--play a special role in popularizing the new centrality of (in)security and in reorganizing access rights to the city. The consequences of neoliberal restructuring, such as unemployment and growing poverty, are transformed into (in)security and (dis)order problems and are, therefore, integrated into the field of domestic security. In this reformulation of "social problems," commercial security companies have come to be understood as the missing link between "civil society" and the state police, as rent-a-cops are said to be able to fill security and safety gaps in contemporary societies of the global North. Readjusting state and municipal police tasks and offering security on a for-profit basis came to the fore in the early 1990s. In doing so, the state attempts to create and activate a "policing family" instead of relying solely on a lonely "Big Brother."

Since the early 1990s, the dominant trends in reorganizing state police in Germany are proactive community-oriented policing, specialization in ethnic groups and city spaces, policing patterned after the intelligence service, and a generally more preventive orientation (Busch et al., 1988; Busch and Putter, 1994). Throughout Germany, one of the most recent trends within "civil society"--the mobilization of selected residents in an attempt to activate them for self-responsibility--has led to the installation of "security partnerships" (BKA, 2005; Schreiber, 2005). (1) Additionally, community policing and crime prevention councils (Kommunale Praventionsrate) have been set up (see Kury, 1997). A pluralization of policing (Crawford and Lister, 2004; see Table 1) is at stake, as state-run, commercial, and "civil society" security policies grow in scale and scope, connect more closely with one another, and even merge. (2) Not surprisingly, such police-private partnerships create additional disadvantages for "undesirables."

This article will concentrate on rent-a-cops in Germany, using three case studies of everyday private policing in (formerly) public spaces. It will focus on rent-a-cops in social housing complexes and "migration management" of asylum-seekers, as well as draw attention to protest and resistance by the respective "target groups." The article sheds light on the neoliberalization of policing as the rolling-back and even vanishing of state police, especially in neglected areas, which German governmental bodies and scholars alike have constantly denied (see BMI, 2001; Kirsch, 2003; Stober and Olschok, 2004). The first section conceptualizes current rent-a-cop firms as an outcome of neoliberal globalization. The second section provides data on Germany's rent-a-cop industry and describes recent market trends. In the final section, case studies illustrate that the neoliberal project has accomplished the "rolling-back" (Peck and Tickell, 2002) of the Fordist compromise and the introduction of new forms of capitalist regulation (roll-out). Moreover, the roll-back and roll-out forms of neoliberalism intensify the pressure on the already disadvantaged parts of the population. Where NIMBYism prevails, civil rights are contested. Nevertheless, the neoliberal project as a project must prevail in conflict-laden processes in situ to become a real neoliberal product. Both the project and the product remain contested terrain.

Gaining Security: Neoliberal Spaces in the Glocalized City

The relationship of neoliberal globalization to urban space has been subjected to a wide-ranging critique in recent years (Mitchell, 2001; Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Jessop, 2002; Lamer, 2003). This literature has broadly observed that the strengthening of market competition, the selling of the public infrastructure, the proliferation of market logic throughout the public sector, and "free" trade are international trends in urban economies. Each trend clearly depends on the national context in which it occurs, as well as on historic traditions, development paths, and changing economic and political conjunctures. Jessop (2002:113), in particular, has identified different strategies for implementing global neoliberalism, which he describes as "neocorporatism, neostatism, and neocommunitarianism." Additionally, as Swyngedouw (1997) has shown, the global and local are interlinked in a process of "glocalization," through which the simultaneous shifting of regulatory tasks (and the creation of corresponding institutions) from the national scale to the scale above (supranational) and below (local) the nation-state occurs.

Finally, Peck and Tickell (2002) have differentiated the process as follows: an initial phase of proto-neoliberalism, when cities became flashpoints for major economic dislocations and struggles, particularly in the sphere of social reproduction (see also Hamel et al., 2000); the era of roll-back neoliberalism in the 1980s, when municipalities introduced a variety of cost-cutting measures, cutbacks in public services, and the privatization of infrastructural facilities; and a phase of roll-out neoliberalism, which since the 1990s has responded to the contradictions of the earlier zero-sum form of entrepreneurialism. In Germany, "the excesses of rollback neoliberalism" (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 391) found vivid expression both in the bursting of the real estate bubble--worth over 2.5 billion euros at the Deutsche Bank alone (Frey, 1996)--and in the near collapse of the Berliner Bank in Berlin (Rose, 2003). Privatization of German railway transport occurred in 1992, with public housing and the power supply following in the mid-1990s; moreover, the transformation of the Keynesian welfare state into a workfare regime peaked with the Hartz IV labor laws, which were initiated in 2004 (Eick et al., 2004).

During the early phase of neoliberalism, urban zones of concentrated poverty and exclusion remained more or less unnoticed. But in its roll-out phase, such areas have been penetrated by programs addressing crime, "welfare dependency," unemployment, and the like (Mayer, 2007). Meanwhile, there are urban areas that the state recently abandoned and handed over to private interests, as is the case with social housing. From a total German housing stock of approximately 40 million apartments, over 4.3 million apartments were social housing until 1995; currently, only 1.42 million remain as public housing (Holm, 2006). In Berlin alone, 200,000 of the 480,000 social housing apartments have been sold to the private real estate market since 1993. The same is true for Berlin's energy sector, as water supply was privatized in 1999 and electricity and gas in 2003 (Schneider and Tenbrucken, 2004). Such processes can be understood as the destructive moments of regulation under neoliberalization, but Germany's neoliberalization also comprises creative moments of regulation and the respective creation of institutions. For example, at the local level since 1999 are space-based programs such as the "Socially Integrative City" (Lohr, 2003) and, nationally, the re-regulation of financial control (Eick, 2007b). These creative moments establish new or reorganize preexisting institutions and practices, which serve to reproduce neoliberalism.

Although the basic neoliberal imperative of mobilizing city space as an arena for growth and market discipline remains important in the dominant municipal project of many German cities, roll-out neoliberalism has established some flanking mechanisms and modes of crisis displacement, such as community-based programs to alleviate social exclusion; it has also introduced new forms of coordination and inter-organizational networking among previously distinct spheres of state intervention, such as local welfare systems (Eick et al., 2004: 56-91). Inasmuch as "entrepreneurialism" comes to the fore under global competition, public space in particular grabs the attention of the urban elites. Three processes operate simultaneously: private space is shrinking through commodification; semi-public spaces such as shopping malls (referred to as mass private property [Kempa et al., 2004]) start to dominate central cities; and rent-a-cops achieve nearly unrestricted access to urban space, whether public, semi-public, or private. Thus, it appears that the dichotomy between public and private now has a precarious status, inasmuch as public and private spaces mingle and merge, and access rights in both spaces are denied or opened only to selected groups. Additionally, urban...