Policing, Accountability and Citizenship in the Market State

This paper investigates trends in the reform agenda for Victoria Police. These include the implementation of the concept of user pays, outsourcing of 'non-core' services, expanded privatisation, corporate sponsorship, customer service, flatter management structures, fixed term contracts for senior officers, and performance targets - changes identified with 1990s economic rationalism, managerialism and the market model. With implications for similar trends internationally, the paper unpacks what these reforms mean in terms of relationships between the community and police (including services, management, and organisation). It raises questions related to what constitutes core tasks of the state, state accountability to the public, public safety, the social costs of economic rationalism, managerialism and the microeconomic reforms of the 1990s. These signal shifts in governance, and changes in the relationship between the citizen and the state.