Governance and Accountability in a Plural Policing Environment—the Story so Far

Abstract

The gradual 'pluralization' of policing provision has been noted in many countries during the last 20 years or so, but little has been written about how policing might be effectively governed and held accountable in the public interest in such an environment of plural provision. In this article, I consider how this pluralization has had the effect of blurring distinctions between the 'public' and the 'private' that were previously more or less taken for granted, and review some of the interesting proposals that have been made in recent years by policy makers and policing scholars for mechanisms of governance and accountability for policing that will meet the challenges that this pluralized provision presents. I note, however, that we are still quite a long way from any consensus about which, if any, of these proposals may be viable and should be implemented, let alone from actually experimenting with them.