Patrolling the ‘Thin Blue Line’ in a World in Motion: An Exploration of the Crime–Migration Nexus in UK Policing

Post by Ana Aliverti. Ana is a Reader in Law at the School of Law, University of Warwick. Her research explores questions of national identity and belonging in criminal justice, and of law, sovereignty and globalization. She is currently writing a monograph on migration policing in the UK based on a research project exploring police and immigration collaboration in everyday policing funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council and the University of Warwick. This is the second instalment in the themed series on Policing, Migration and National Identity.

My article explores the drivers for the growing importance of immigration in everyday police. I first knew of Operation Nexus when I was doing research in criminal courts in the early 2010s. A court clerk casually mentioned that some cases involving foreign nationals don’t even get to court stage, as they are diverted away from the criminal justice and funnelled through the immigration system. Rather than a new strategy to deal with foreign suspects, Operation Nexus was created in part to formalise and expand longstanding informal arrangements between police and immigration officers to get rid of ‘problem people’. As a lawyer, the pragmatism involved in the manipulation of legal rules and bargaining in these cases sparked my attention. I was interested in exploring how frontline staff perceive those tools and negotiate decisions outside the remits of the criminal court, yet in its shadows. I was curious to understand the operation of what Sklanskly called ‘ad hoc instrumentalism’ and its potentially spurious consequences. Within the twin track system of criminal and immigration law, he explains, there is a tendency to treat legal rules as tools to achieve a particular goal in an opportunistic way. 

As I ventured in the world of policing, however, my research focus and orientation shifted from understanding the operation of the fine-grained procedural bargaining to explore what lies behind the significance of immigration controls in policing. When I first met the Chief Superintendent who led the foreign national strategy within one of the police forces I worked with, he explained that foreign nationals are ‘a Pandora’s box’ for the police: they are hard to decipher, a hidden threat and a reputational risk. That conversation was illuminating. The confession by a high ranked British police officer that they were deeply at loss, was puzzling. As social scientists, we tend to see state power as a sophisticated and perfectly functioning machine, enabled by state-of-the-art technology and whose tentacles are far reaching. As my fieldwork unfolded, I met many police officers who also conveyed their sense of disorientation and impotence at not being able to ‘read’ their patches anymore. With a dose of melancholy, they explain that in the ‘old days’ they knew who was who: similar to family business, people specialised in certain crimes and passed it on to the next generation. That ‘street craft’ has been diminished with austerity and mass mobility, they lamented. 

In contrast to the almost mythical representation of the British bobby as ‘the eyes and ears’ of the state in the community, PC Ben lays bare a less assertive stance when commenting on his encounters with strangers who didn’t tally with familiar categories: 

‘[B]basically there were these four men who were pushing hand-made trolleys of scrap metal around the community and they just looked really sorry for themselves, like, you're in the middle of winter and the guys are wearing just a t-shirt and some shabby trousers and covered in dirt. It's like something out of Oliver Twist, something Victorian. And, first you don't know who they are, you don't know what they're doing, and they look dodgy and they're very suspicious and they're not forthcoming so you treat them as a suspect. Over time, through speaking to these people and just seeing how dejected they were, um, you got to work out that something wasn't right with them.’ 

Thus, police categories and crime typologies with which they operate are no longer useful to make sense of the people and the communities they patrol. Global mobility and the growing economies of illegalities serviced by an army of modern slaves leave officers perplexed, challenging their ability to make the world scrutable. 

In this context, I argue, immigration–police cooperation has been propelled to decipher the unknown threat posed by undifferentiated strangers, sometimes reinforcing racialized suspicions and fears. One of the most challenging aspects of contemporary policing and the main impetus for Operation Nexus is the accurate and timely identification of non-British subjects. Immigration staff can easily access data on individuals with ‘immigration traces’. More importantly, they are believed to have a professional ‘fifth sense’ for spotting ‘foreigners’. As immigration officer Billy confidently asserts, ‘[the police] like [working with immigration] because we can see things that they can’t see, we solve their problems. We can look at people who can’t they do anything about’. So too, I found, the reliance on immigration expertise relieves police officers from assuming the distasteful task of spotting ‘non-GB’ citizens, as the label of institutional racism looms large in officers’ consciousness.          

As sociologists of policing have argued, the police wield a distinctive power and possess an authoritative voice to communicate meaning about individuals and the world, to name problems and diagnose its causes and solutions, to craft an ‘aesthetic of order’, and to offer people a template to make sense of the world (Loader 2006). Yet, in this edgy world of eroded certitudes, crime itself is difficult to dissect and decipher through ordinary policing methods, as identities are illegible and the line between law and its transgression becomes blurred. In this context, I argue, the police have lost their reassuring gaze and protective aura. 

We might interpret Operation Nexus and related arrangements to disentangle identities and extirpate risky strangers as an obstacles in restoring a semblance of order in an increasingly inscrutable world and an attempt to impose ‘law on lawlessness’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2017). The familiar milieu of the ‘bobby on the beat’, where suspects were fixated to categories (and lineages) and territorially bounded patches, has been substantially altered by the increased fluidity and uncertainty of the global city. The ambition to know and control through technological and institutional innovations evinces the sense of ‘camera obscura’ in which much of contemporary policing takes place and a sense that traditional policing and criminal justice tools to decipher crime have been rendered futile. Operation Nexus is much more than a pragmatic solution to deal with crime effectively. It evinces the limitations of policing to decipher the new geographies of crime and disorder, and the difficulties of the police in offering a coherent, reassuring response to public anxieties and producing social order. 

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Aliverti, A. (2020). Patrolling the ‘Thin Blue Line’ in a World in Motion: An Exploration of the Crime–Migration Nexus in UK Policing. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/03/patrolling-thin [date]