Search

Ericson and Haggerty's book, Policing the Risk Society (1997), sets out to annul Bittner's classical, coercion-based reading of the police and replace it with a radically new paradigm that foregrounds the panoptical or knowledge work dimension of the police and its potential to serve the interests of non~police social-disciplinary institutions. In this article, we test this neo-Foucauldian paradigm on the basis of a body of research into road traffic policing. As a result, we observe that though non- police owner-managers of new risks challenge the societal immanence, centrality and publicness of police organizations, with time, these challenges fail. We therefore argue that Ericson and Haggerty `s notion of panoptical policing should be taken as a theoretical innovation, which, far from eliminating Bittner's paradigm, enhances it with a new force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]