Grey policing: A theoretical framework

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Abstract
In the Netherlands regulatory bodies and private policing increasingly undertake different repressive police tasks. The growth of these forms of policing is related to crises in the welfare state. The welfare state encounters financial pressures hence the need for control in social‐economic processes grows. Increasingly regulatory bodies investigate different forms of ‘welfare crime’. At the same time the welfare state is faced with pressure of continuing privatization in many policy areas including policing. The Netherlands has witnessed the dispersal of the police function. On a theoretical level this is analyzed with notions developed by Foucault (disciplinary power) and Cohen (dispersal of social control and blurring). Although criminal policy in the Netherlands advocates a ‘multi‐agency’ approach, attention is drawn to ‘grey policing’: forms of cooperation between different social control agencies, mostly on a ‘rank and file’ level, that take on the form of using each other's (police) powers, exchanging legally protected information and passing on the ‘dirty work’. Dispersal of the police function on the one hand and (possible) accompanying ‘grey policing’ on the other hand could have important consequences for the accountability‐debate in matters of policing.

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