The politics of patrolling ‘safety guards’ in Sweden: outsourcing, depoliticization, and immunization

ABSTRACT

The contracting of private guards to patrol public spaces has rapidly become a widespread approach to increase public safety and prevent crime in Swedish municipalities. Drawing on interviews and policy materials from three municipalities, this paper examines how private patrolling guards has become a solution to (un)safety in Sweden, and the political implications of this development. The governmentality analysis shows how the rendering of (un)safety as technical and governable depoliticizes safety by detaching it from its social and political connotations. At the same time, in the process of demarcating the space to be ‘guarded,’ safety is problematized as a matter of order and sameness in public space, which (re)produces racialized boundaries between those to be made safe and those considered threatening safety. The study further demonstrates how the outsourcing of responsibility for public safety to the security industry is bringing about a shift in democratic legitimacy, accountability, and the monopoly on the use of force, largely without political contestation in the studied municipalities. The paper concludes by discussing the underlying rationale of this practice of governing (un)safety as informed by a biopolitical logic of immunization: safeguarding and immunizing some, at the expense of those marked as risky ‘others’.

KEYWORDS:

• Public safety
• security guards
• patrolling
• private policing
• governmentality
• depoliticization

Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank all of the participants in this study who have contributed with their valuable time and reflections. I also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as my colleagues Josefine Olsson and Elisabeth Olivius for generous engagements in the article and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Swedish Police Authority describes an ‘especially vulnerable area’ as ‘characterized by social problems and a presence of criminality that has resulted in a broad unwillingness to participate in legal processes and difficulties for the police to fulfil their mission. The situation is considered urgent’ (2017, 10).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation [MMW 2012.0211].

Notes on contributors

Jennie Brandén

Jennie Brandén has a PhD in Political Science and currently works as a postdoctoral fellow at the department of Epidemiology and Global Health, Umeå University. Her research is largely situated in governmentality studies and linked to critical studies of gender equality, safety and security. Her research interests involve the politics of violence and safety in Sweden, with a particular analytical focus on how gendered and (post)colonial relations of power operate in and through practices of government. Her recently published dissertation “In the Name of Safety: power, politics and the constitutive effects of local governing practices in Sweden” demonstrates that while safety is increasingly presented as an answer to societal issues in Sweden, the government of safety operates through a de-democratizing dynamic of governmental precarization.