Public police as a greedy institution: cops, control, and economic capital

Incorporating greedy institution theory into the critical analysis of public policing in the 21st century, this paper examines the tendency of public police to accumulate economic and technological resources. Drawing from a thematic analysis of news articles in Canada and the United States, we assess examples of police framing in which public police make claims about the necessity of additional resources, and we explore the framing practices that public police use to justify their expansion. These accumulation strategies are grouped into six themes, including ballooning budgets, excessive overtime, expanded territory and jurisdiction, additional police technology and games, and control of information. Public police also react negatively to critiques of their efforts to accumulate resources and critique their critics. To conceptualize these accumulation strategies and framing efforts intended to expand police power and economic capital, we draw from literature on public police as a greedy institution. In so doing, this paper adds to conceptualizations of the public police mission and operations, and to the literature on police budgets, raising questions about the future of the police institution and public safety in the 21st century.