Autonomy, Regulation and the Police Beat

Abstract

In this article, the historical development of the police beat in the context of liberal governance is explored. As a mechanism of surveillance, the beat was a continuation of rules of the nightly watch, characterized by a tight control over watchmen by fixing person, post and time. As a site of police autonomy, the patrol beat facilitated the furtherance of the enterprise of the amateur constabulary and cultivated police officer dominion by matching police authority to territorial imperatives. In this way, discipline and autonomy have been carved into the mobilization of police in an economy or surveillance and discretion. The legacy of night and day patrol offered an initial temporal organization to this economy, with prohibitions and permissions by time and place. Rather than compromising liberal distinctions, this patrol bifurcation allowed their perseverance by structuring police capacity to intervene into the lives of citizens. But while the legacy of liberal autonomy in the police beat has served to maintain police discretion in the short run, technological innovations offering enhanced time and space compression may in the long run threaten that autonomy and, with it, an important grounding of liberal consent policing.