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Deaths in police custody present a set of enduring and troubling puzzles. Why do such deaths seldom result in prosecutions or adequate redress? Why are victims' families so under-resourced and typically met with a conflicted mix of empathy and hostility? Why do acknowledged problems remain unresolved despite review after review making the same criticisms and seemingly consensual recommendations? Why is the state's failure to fulfil its duty of care towards those it detains met with public indifference? In this article, I argue that we can shed new light on these questions if we theorize and investigate police power using the metaphor of sacrifice. Thinking about police power through this lens enables us to identify and illuminate a conflict between the liberal rationality that appears to govern responses to custodial deaths and the illiberal values and affects that constitute what I term the deep structure of deaths in police custody. By re-examining reports of recent enquiries into the issue, I outline four recurring elements of this deep structure and show how they clash with surface liberal rationalities. The systemic reduction of custodial death requires, I conclude, that we name and contest the quasi-sacred conception of police authority that holds the police vital to the production of order and control and its agents to require protection when things 'go wrong'.

In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for investigating the relationship between contemporary consumer desires and practices and public demands for security and punishment. My organizing suggestion is that punishment-centred public responses to crime, social disorder and terrorist threats (what has been termed penal excess) are today bound up with other, widespread social practices of excess. The article outlines the questions that need to be posed, and the practices that can usefully be investigated, in a bid to advance empirical enquiry into this way of understanding contemporary penality. In so doing, it proceeds as follows: I begin with a discussion of how the concept of excess (and its close cousins) has been and might potentially be applied to the social analysis of crime and crime control. I then make a case for understanding demands for security and punishment as an appetite and consider how we might examine the coupling of such appetites with identity, the market and the State in ways that can shed new light on the emergence of excessive, insecurity-reproducing penal practices. I conclude with some brief reflections on corrosive, self-defeating effects of such practices and how one may seek to moderate or counteract them.

In this article, the author reflects on the question of how policing institutions can help to foster and sustain the values and practices of democracy. The author's overarching concern is to outline and defend a conception of democratic policing that highlights the role of policing agencies in recognizing the legitimate claims of all individuals and groups affected by police actions and affirming their sense of belonging to a political community. From this perspective, the author offers a critique of certain prominent forms of what he calls "ambient policing" and aims to cast some new light on the issue of how policing contributes to—or undermines—citizen security in democratic societies.

In this article, the author reflects on the question of how policing institutions can help to foster and sustain the values and practices of democracy. The author's overarching concern is to outline and defend a conception of democratic policing that highlights the role of policing agencies in recognizing the legitimate claims of all individuals and groups affected by police actions and affirming their sense of belonging to a political community. From this perspective, the author offers a critique of certain prominent forms of what he calls "ambient policing" and aims to cast some new light on the issue of how policing contributes to or undermines citizen security in democratic societies. References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2006 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

This article asks how we might best come to terms with - and seek to govern - the multiplicity of institutional forms that are now involved in the delivery of policing and security services and technologies. I begin by documenting briefly the network of providers that constitute the policing field locally, nationally and transnationally, before specifying how the fragmentation and pluralization of policing has called radically into doubt a number of received (liberal) suppositions about the relationship between police and government. I then attempt - drawing constructively yet critically on recent theorizations of governance and 'governmentality' - to make sense of some contemporary reconfigurations of policing within and beyond the state, and tease out their implications for questions of democratic legitimacy. Finally, I outline the contours of an institutional politics for the regulation of policing that is both normatively adequate to the task of connecting policing to processes of public will-formation and sociologically plausible under the altered conditions of plural, networked policing.