Law Enforcement

Law enforcement can be considered in both the ‘narrow’ sense of the policing and enforcement of law, and in a wider sense of the maintenance of order and reinforcement of societal rules and ideologies. The maintenance of social order, protection of citizens and prevention of and redress for harms against citizens, property and non-human nature is heavily reliant on law enforcement. Effective criminal justice is arguably dependent on law enforcement as a dominant feature of criminal justice systems and the notion of punishment as a tool of social control. Societal construction of harm and definition of unacceptable behaviour often manifests itself in laws, rules and regulations that serve as both control mechanisms and expressions of societal norms. Where societal rules, in the form of laws and regulations, are broken, effective law enforcement is essential both to demonstrate societal disapproval of the ‘deviant’ behaviour and to provide for social sanction through appropriate redress and retributive justice mechanisms. Accordingly, law enforcement and policing are inextricably linked in the context of providing a means through which serious social harms can be dealt with. But law enforcement goes far beyond policing, both conceptually and in respect of the mechanisms that are deployed to express society’s disapproval and ultimately secure redress. In a narrow sense policing can be defined as that which the police (or recognised policing agencies) carry out. This often centres around enforcement of the criminal law and a detection, investigation and apprehension model inextricably linked to ideas of retributive justice. By contrast, law enforcement involves civil and criminal justice agencies, can incorporate administrative and regulatory law mechanisms and even alternative dispute resolution (ADR) as a means of resolving disputes and ensuring appropriate redress. Thus, law enforcement can also extend beyond the confines of retributive criminal justice to incorporate restorative and rehabilitative justice mechanisms. Adopting a critical criminology perspective, this analysis examines law enforcement within the context of the major sources of crime as being the unequal class, race/ethnic, and gender relations that control our society. Thus, law enforcement risks being less about the protection of society and maintenance of order as much as it is about selective enforcement of rules, that somewhat perpetuates unequal power relationships within society. Using examples from environmental justice, human rights, and crimes against non-human nature, this analysis identifies law enforcement as both a wider justice approach concerned with maintaining and reinforcing societal norms and a criminal justice approach extending beyond the retributive justice approach employed in policing. This analysis considers how environmental crimes are often subject to an approach based on regulation and settlement with use of the criminal law as a last resort. This contrasts with the law enforcement approach to mainstream crimes which remains situated within a reactive criminal law-based approach.