Message from Department of Sociology

Thinking Globally About Crime and Justice Seminar Series

Global policing: dream, nightmare or reality?

As crime becomes a global problem, police officers are travelling abroad to collect evidence, apprehend fugitives and render them overseas for interrogation, trial or detention. Complex investigations of crimes and conspiracies spanning numerous countries demand international collaboration. Police officers frequently share information with their overseas counterparts and steer local policing practices from a distance. Globally integrated policing is a law enforcer’s dream, but being arrested and detained at the request of overseas police can be a nightmare. This paper examines the reality of global policing and considers some practical, political and ethical issues emerging from the field.

Professor Ben Bowlingis Professor of Criminology &Criminal Justice and Associate Dean of the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London.

He was previously Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York), Senior Research Officer in the Home Office and lecturer at the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology. He has been a visiting professor at the University of the West Indies, at Monash University (Melbourne) and at the East China University of Political Science and Law (Shanghai). Ben’s research examines practical, political and legal problems in policing and the connections between local and global police power.

His work exploring central themes of fairness, effectiveness and accountability has been published in three recent books – Policing the Caribbean (Oxford University Press 2010),Global Policing(with James Sheptycki, Sage 2012) and Stop & Search: Police Power in Global Context(edited with Leanne Weber, Routledge 2012) – and in articles in the Modern Law Review, Criminal Law Review, Policing and Society and Theoretical Criminology. His studies of Violent Racism(Oxford University Press 1998) and Racism, Crime and Justice(with Coretta Phillips, Longman 2002) are the standard works on these subjects.

All are welcome