Scholarship by Serendipity

Clifford Shearing wanted to be a farmer. He wound up as an international expert on policing.

After 33 years as a criminologist, Clifford Shearing has his story down pat – and he tells it with an ease and understatement that can deceive you into forgetting he is a giant in his field.

“My interest,” he says with the warm grin that never seems to leave his face, “is how power is exercised and how collective life is regulated.”

That “interest” has become his expertise. At 57, Shearing is a senior scholar in U of T’s Centre of Criminology (he was its director from 1993 to 1998) and an internationally respected leader in what he calls the “governance of security.” Sought after by governments worldwide to advise on how policing, police, and security can be provided more effectively to citizens, Shearing makes an impact in locations as disparate as Northern Ireland, South Africa, Argentina, and public housing projects in Toronto.

Funny thing is, as a young man in his native South Africa in the early 1960s, he had intended to become a farmer. “I grew up as a white child in a well-to-do family,” he wrote in a recent autobiographical essay. “I became a cowboy – up at dawn, herding cows, building fences, and ploughing fields. I really loved this life.”

Then the white farm owner fired him for his advocacy of black employees, all of them living under South Africa’s apartheid system.

“I helped to organize better conditions for them. One day, I brought everyone back to my place for a barbeque. The farmer got angry because we weren’t working. Everyone laughed at him and he fired me for inciting the natives to rebellion.”

Shearing’s farming career was over, but the incident sparked ideas that would change his life. “My consciousness, which I thought had been mine, had been shaped and structured by a political apparatus. That spurred an interest in power and government and how society is regulated and controlled.”

After earning his PhD from U of T, Shearing just fell into criminology. “I had no interest in this area, but the program advisor told me about the new Centre of Criminology and they agreed to take me on as a research associate.”

He took up policing, simply because no one else was working on it. When he began his research, his first inclination was to follow what was then accepted theory – that policing meant police and police work. Still, he had a feeling that social control went far beyond the work of police officers. “My South African experiences had included few police officers. But my life was, all the same, still thoroughly policed. That farmer who fired me was as much an agent of the state as any police officer.” So the focus, he theorized, should be “‘polic-ing,’ not police.”

Shearing has spent the past three decades examining various aspects of policing. He has done so in a variety of settings, with a small group of regular research partners, such as U of T’s Phillip Stenning, a legal scholar who also specializes in public and private policing.

“Stenning and I realized that many of the things that police officers did within state structures were also done by others within corporate structures and by private police forces in ‘gated’ communities, security guards in shopping malls and on university campuses and private investigators. Yet we, like most people, had overlooked them.”

Policing was even moving beyond these private police entities into the hands of the broader public, a phenomenon Shearing first realized in the oddest place – Disney World – on a trip in 1982 prompted by his daughter, Renée.
“As soon as we entered the grounds, I said ‘A-ha.’ From the moment we turned on Disney Radio in the car, and were directed to our parking lot, I realized that policing was everywhere and was everybody’s business. Everyone – visitors, parking attendants, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck – was responsible for security. Everyone was ‘responsibilized.'”

Shearing says that the Disney World approach is now being widely applied. “Embedding policing throughout the social fabric has become a feature of a move to ‘reinvent government’ that is reshaping the way in which governance takes place.”

As South Africa began its transition from apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Shearing was asked to advise on how the government could institute a more equitable system of policing. In 1998, Shearing became involved in a similar process as a member of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, which was asked to recommend ways in which the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) could be made more representative of the Roman Catholic and Protestant communities.

And today, there are new projects and priorities. Shearing’s son, Anthony (a recent U of T Faculty of Medicine graduate), and his wife Helen presented Shearing with his first grandchild, Graham, last year. And daughter, Renée, who coaxed her dad into the Disney World visit that opened his eyes to new ideas about policing and security, is now 27 and an occupational therapist in Australia. There are also advisory projects in new places, such as Argentina, and he is expanding his research into the governance of health and the environment.

“I’ve been enormously fortunate to be able to contribute to the evolving landscape of society. In this field, things are always changing. There is no bottom line, so I’m always learning. That’s the fun of it.”