Threats that fully escape our attention pose a potential, but also a true and invisible, danger to us. They should stand out as the main concern for practitioners who are responsible for the state and level of preparedness. However, to address them, we should first grasp them as pure possibilities. Figuring them out requires tools. This article introduces analogies as a potential tool for this task and analyses the concept of preparedness itself with it. By using memory as a source analogy, the article enables us to consider preparedness as a potential source of vulnerability—it reveals how we can help ourselves in becoming better prepared by scrutinizing the current practices by systematically analyzing the presumptions underpinning them. The vulnerabilities that are most likely to escape our attention are the ones that have become a constitutive part of our very thinking of preparedness. Better preparedness without a systematically and thoroughly scrutinized concept of preparedness will never be able to fulfill the promise it signals to the public. This article outlines one way to pursue such an understanding and employs it as well.
We argue that in the present conditions of differentiated societies a preferable form of police governance and accountability should both be built upon and actively strive towards universal and trans-local criteria, rather than be built upon on some local features or idiosyncrasies. The local governance of the police appears too simple a remedy for police legitimacy and accountability since it might predispose the police to unprofessionalism and heterogeneity of standards, making it vulnerable to co-optation by powerful local interests. The article is based on our experiences of the Finnish form of police governance that has functioned quite well, partly because policing is embedded in the Nordic welfare state model, which strongly supports citizens’ universal rights and social equality. However, the ideas put forward are urgently needed in differentiated societies, characterized by increasing socioeconomic inequality and multiple sources of cultural identity and belongingness. For us the concept of spatial representation appears to be a fundamental aspect in all governance. The argument rests on the idea that modern, differentiated society calls for representations of spatiality and belongingness that are inclusive rather than exclusive, universal rather than particular and trans-local rather than local. Our arguments for trans-local police governance are specified in terms of the universal rule of law, a uniform approach to policing, general professional police competencies and a general professional ethos in policing.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.