The politics of patrolling ‘safety guards’ in Sweden: outsourcing, depoliticization, and immunization

ABSTRACT The contracting of private guards to patrol public spaces has rapidly become a widespread approach to increase public safety and prevent crime in Swedish municipalities. Drawing on interviews and policy materials from three municipalities, this paper examines how private patrolling guards has become a solution to (un)safety in Sweden, and the political implications of this development. The governmentality analysis shows how the rendering of (un)safety as technical and governable depoliticizes safety by detaching it from its social and political connotations. At the same time, in the process of demarcating the space to be ‘guarded,’ safety is problematized as a matter of order and sameness in public space, which (re)produces racialized boundaries between those to be made safe and those considered threatening safety. The study further demonstrates how the outsourcing of responsibility for public safety to the security industry is bringing about a shift in democratic legitimacy, accountability, and the monopoly on the use of force, largely without political contestation in the studied municipalities. The paper concludes by discussing the underlying rationale of this practice of governing (un)safety as informed by a biopolitical logic of immunization: safeguarding and immunizing some, at the expense of those marked as risky ‘others’.