DIY Policing: Crafting the New Contours of Policing in a Globalized World

Abstract

This chapter explores the experimentation within British policing resulting from the impetus to identify, fix individual identities, and make people legible in recent decades. Concerns over people’s identification and the crave for information has taken a new shift becoming a prime driver of police innovation and partnership work. The quest to know who is who reinvigorated institutional and operational connections with the inland immigration police, Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement (IE), including Operation Nexus. Operation Nexus (Nexus) is an initiative to bring the operational and intelligence capacities of IE and the police together to identify and manage foreign national suspects. While Nexus has been an important catalyst of fragmented and piecemeal practices in the policing of foreign nationals, the chapter focuses on the bespoke, informal nature of much (migration) policing which relies less on formal structures than in ever fragile and contingent relations, termed as ‘DIY policing’. The peculiar nature of such policing points to the intractable challenges of doing policing in contemporary conditions. At least in the UK, the analysis presented here points to a less coherent strategy and less assertive stance towards migration than that sometimes depicted by policy papers and academic literature on ‘crimmigration’, and provides an important empirical corrective to the dystopian diagnosis of penal power in criminology.