Recent literature at the intersections of surveillance, security, and globalization trace the contours of global security surveillance (GSS), a distinct form of social control that combines traditional and technical means to extract or create personal or group data transcending national boundaries to detect and respond to criminal and national threats to the social order. In contrast to much domestic state surveillance (DSS), GSS involves coordination between public and private law enforcement, security providers, and intelligence services across national borders to counteract threats to collectively valued dimensions of the global order as defined by surveillance agents. While GSS builds upon past forms of state monitoring, sophisticated technologies, the preeminence of neoliberalism, and the uncertainty of post–Cold War politics lend it a distinctive quality. GSS promises better social control against both novel and traditional threats, but it also risks weakening individual civil liberties and increasing social inequalities.
Article
Global Security Surveillance
Keith Guzik and Gary T. Marx
Article
Laws of Geography
Michael Leitner, Philip Glasner, and Ourania Kounadi
The most prominent law in geography is Tobler’s first law (TFL) of geography, which states that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” No other law in geography has received more attention than TFL. It is important because many spatial statistical methods have been developed since its publication and, especially since the advent of geographic information system (GIS) and geospatial technology, have been conceptually based on it. These methods include global and local indicators of spatial autocorrelation (SA), spatial and spatial-temporal hotspots and cold spots, and spatial interpolation. All of these are highly relevant to spatial crime analysis, modeling, and mapping and will be discussed in the main part of this text.
Article
Place Managers and Crime Places
John E. Eck
Place management theory—a part of routine activity theory—explains why a relatively few places have a great deal of crime while most places have little or no crime. The explanation is the way place managers carry out their four primary functions: organization of space, regulation of conduct, control of access, and acquisition of resources.
Place managers are those people and organizations that own and operate businesses, homes, hotels, drinking establishments, schools, government offices, places of worship, health centers, and other specific locations. They can even operate mobile places such as busses, trains, ships, and aircraft. Some are large—a multi-story office tower for example—while others are tiny—a bus stop, for example. Place managers are important because they can exercise control over the people who use these locations and in doing so contribute to public order and safety. Consequently, it is important to understand place management, how it can fail, and what one can do to prevent failures.
Place management has implications beyond high-crime sites. When crime places are connected, they can create crime hot spots in an area. The concentration of high crime places can inflate crime in a neighborhood. Moreover, place management can be applied to virtual locations, such as servers, websites, and other network infrastructures.
There is considerable evaluation evidence that place managers can change high crime locations to low crime locations. Research also shows that displacement to other places, though possible, is far from inevitable. Indeed, research shows that improving a high crime place can reduce crime at places nearby places. Although much of this research has studied how police intervene with place managers, non-police regulatory agencies can carry out this public safety function.
