Stacked Fields of Criminal Justice: The National Embeddedness of Transnational Policing

Previous Scholarship and Approach of the Article

Competing theories have been developed to analyze how criminal justice unfolds beyond and at the border of the state. Previous social science scholarship has developed four (sometimes overlapping) explanatory models for understanding transnational criminal justice and especially policing. These explanatory frameworks focus on institutions, norms, practices, or structural dynamics. With respect to institutions, Deflem (2000) has outlined the parallel bureaucratization of police forces as an important factor in the creation of international police organizations through which important forms of transnational cooperation flow. This idea is linked to wider theories of organizational isomorphism that show how institutions mimic each other (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), something that has also been analyzed with regard to police forces (Burruss & Giblin, 2014; Carter, 2016; Giblin, 2006; Willis et al., 2007). Related historical research has demonstrated how police ideas and technologies circulated internationally as the nation-state expanded and consolidated its criminal justice institutions in the mid-1800s (Christensen, 2016; Emsley, 1999; Rocha Gonçalves, 2014; Westney, 1982). In this perspective, the creation of similar bureaucracies, especially similar forms of police organization, across the world underpins transnational police cooperation that builds on common, if competitive, perceptions and practices of crime control.

Focusing specifically on the norms on which such crime control builds, Nadelmann (1990) has contributed an influential perspective on the development of particular global prohibition regimes. Investigating globalized criminalization of behavior such as piracy, slavery, drug trafficking, prostitution, and other activities, Nadelmann points to the importance of norms and ideologies in the transnational emergence and development of these forms of prohibition. A similar take on the globalization of criminal justice has recently been developed under the wider theoretical framework of “transnational legal orderings” (Aaronson & Shaffer, 2021; Halliday & Shaffer, 2015; Shaffer & Aaronson, 2020). This perspective takes the normative framing of crime problems as its starting point but also investigates how institutions and criminal justice systems were built around and respond to these perceived problems.

The third approach to transnational crime and criminal justice takes the practices of law enforcement as its main object. Inspired partly by network theory (Slaughter, 1997), Bowling and Sheptycki (2012) identify four different geographic spheres in which policing practices play out: global, national, regional, and transnational. Across these spheres, police officers enforce and interpret national rules as well as international legal frameworks (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2012, pp. 17, 18). Following a definition of policing as the coercive ability to create social order (Bittner, 1973), the focal point of analyses of police practices become their networked activities with regard to police operations, surveillance, and coercion (Andreas & Nadelmann, 2006; Bowling, 2010; Bowling & Sheptycki, 2015; Deflem, 2006; Fijnaut, 1992; Goldsmith & Sheptycki, 2007; Sheptycki, 2000, 2014). In this perspective, transnational, regional, and even global police cooperation are composed of the practices of national police officers who collectively shape the direction of policing beyond the state (Deflem, 2010; Friedrichs, 2008). Other studies have been inspired by Brodeur (2010) to expand the idea of policing to focus not only on public police organizations with formal authority to exercise force. This article takes public police forces as its object and zooms in how the national field of criminal justice structures different policing practices, including operative and administrative, as performed by units that consist of both uniformed and plainclothes officers.

This article is inspired primarily by a structural sociological perspective. The term structural refers here to how fields of practice are organized (Bourdieu, 1996, 2013), a field being defined as a relational social space defined by the linkages between positions within it (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 94–101). Whereas it is perhaps less sensitive to the heterogeneity of policing practices than the perspective presented above, structural sociology enables a critical study of how the position of distinct police units in the wider Danish field of criminal justice shapes their norms and practices—in particular, how this field values and gives preference to specific forms of transnational policing that may have their own global norms. To develop this perspective, this article is inspired by Bourdieu’s concept of the “field” that has also been used by previous scholars of transnational, particularly European, policing (Bigo, 2007, 2008; Megie, 2007). Whereas research on the European field of security investigated mainly how transnational social spaces were constructed and developed, this article zooms in on how transnational cooperation is folded into and affected by national fields of criminal justice. This article uses the field concept to tease out the relation between specific institutional and professional positions in the Danish space of criminal justice. As part of the analysis of such positions, this article also investigates the position-taking of these agents as they legitimize their, sometimes heterodox, position, norms, and practices. As such, this article investigates the distribution of intrafield capital, of the perceived social value of specific types of policing activities and labor, and the prestige and worth it is attributed. The concept of capital here refers to the valuation and potential for reconversion of particular forms of expertise, experience, and career trajectories in a particular social field (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 107–109). The analysis shows that seen from within a national field of criminal justice, the police habitus (the socially embodied dispositions and perceptive schemes (Bourdieu, 1994, pp. 22–23) are diverse, as visible in different position-takings as well as in the bodily hexis of different police units, the ways in which they dress, carry, and present themselves to the world. Such differences and distinctions are visible in particular when officers of specific units position themselves vis-à-vis colleagues working elsewhere in the system but can also be observed when performing interviews.

To study the Danish field of criminal justice and the relative positions and position-takings of different professionals, this article builds on semistructured, qualitative interviews with police officers and prosecutors. Rather than performing an ethnography of police practices and not being able to go into the same detail as studies based on longer fieldwork (Fassin, 2011; Holmberg, 2003; Sausdal, 2018), the interviews were used to unpack larger dynamics of power active in the Danish field of criminal justice and how they affect transnational policing. Unlike most other criminal justice systems, the Danish police and prosecution service are not separated. Despite having distinct management structures, they are part of the same institution (Langsted et al., 2014, pp. 19–22). This means that police officers and prosecutors work closely together, often in interdisciplinary teams focused on serious and complex crimes. Because of this professional proximity of legally trained professionals and police, perspectives from both groups are important for situating transnational policing in the Danish system, and both police officers and prosecutors were interviewed. The chapter builds on 59 interviews with professionals from these two groups (five interviews were with cooperators, for instance, in nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]). These interviews were originally related to different research projects—on the police and prosecution, respectively—but proved to support each other and followed the same semistructured interview format.

Interviewees were police officers and prosecutors with management responsibilities working with different forms of transnational or international policing. Interviewees had typically held management posts for at least a decade. Reflecting the gender distribution of the Danish police, most interviews were male (about 8% of police managers are female; Politi, 2021). Interviews lasted on average about an hour, on rare occasions going over 2 hr. During the interviews, respondents were asked questions about their career trajectories, how they got into policing/prosecution, how they moved up the ranks, and their responsibilities in past and current positions. The interviews then turned to questions related more to their normative perspectives on how different types of work ought to be performed and prioritized in the police and prosecution service. Through this strategy, the interviews connect the position of the agents in the wider Danish field of criminal justice to their position-taking on matters related to specific transnational practices and activities and also asked them to identify and relate their own perceptions to opposing views expressed by others in the system. The data from the interviews were analyzed focusing specifically on how interviewees saw their work, its perceived value in the wider system, and how they positioned themselves and the unit they worked in with regard to others. On the basis of these interviews, supplemented with official publications of the police, for instance, on output and performance, this article investigates the institutional position and perceived value of transnational work within the Danish police and prosecution service and how it is linked to wider global transformations that also affected criminal justice systems in other parts of Europe and the world.

At a theoretical level, this article contributes a conceptual framework to study transnational criminal justice and policing by investigating the relations between “stacked fields.” This contribution is linked to wider debates about how to study the limits of specific fields or the relations and boundaries between such social spaces. This literature has generated different concepts to study the limits of field analysis (Lahire, 2014) including how to conceive of variation among fields (Krause, 2018). A part of this literature is concerned specifically the relations between fields, conceptualized, for instance, as “proximate fields” (Lei, 2016), “spaces between” fields (Eyal, 2013), “interstitial fields” (Medvetz, 2008), and “overlap” between fields (Evans & Kay, 2008), overlap often being considered the most complex form of relation between fields (Liu, 2020, p. 8). However, whereas scholarship on overlaps focuses on patterns of brokerage in the meeting between fields, the present perspective zooms in the power dynamics that can develop as national fields come into contact through specific positions within them.

In the previous literature, the concept of a “weak field” has been used to highlight the characteristics of some transnational social spaces (Dezalay, 2017; Mudge & Vauchez, 2012; Vauchez, 2011), in particular, their lack of autonomy in relation to national fields. With regard to transnational policing, organized around both national law enforcement agencies and some of the transnationalized institutions analyzed by Didier Bigo and others (Bigo, 2007), this weakness is less pronounced. The state remains highly involved. National criminal justice systems and their patterns of power and prestige structure transnational organizations and cooperation. Embedded in such fields, different national criminal justice units engage in transnational cooperation, whether related to international police missions, intelligence sharing, or to operational work with a specific case. The concept of “stacked fields” aims to enable critical studies of the ways in which the national embeddedness of transnationally engaged police units format patterns of hierarchical and heterarchical power relations between them. The stacking of these fields, that hinges on the particular units involved and their embeddedness in national fields, has both a national and a transnational dimension. At a national level, the field of criminal justice structures which units are involved in which transnational forms and types of cooperation, including the institutional and political support, both symbolic and material, they have for this engagement. At the transnational level, the power relations between the police units situated in different national fields, and thus holding varying degrees of institutional clout, help structure how they cooperate, which units dominate cooperation, and how transnational policing develops and has effects in particular settings.

The stacking of field positions (in reality particular sites in the form of institutional units, but at times singular agents) can take on both hierarchical and heterarchical dynamics. Hierarchical relations are often affected by larger geopolitical power dynamics. For instance, the United States has been dominant in global responses to drug trafficking, and cooperation with U.S. authorities helped initiate and still affects Danish policing of drugs. Such hierarchies can also be driven by established cooperation patterns linked to the institutional position of collaborating units and their ability to produce and share knowledge, evidence, resources, and so on. At the same time, the stacking of fields can have heterarchical potential formatted by more operative or procedural elements, related, for instance, to national bureaucratic (at times political) valuation of the type of case, to the choice of collaborative channel, or to which unit took initiative to, and has the main stakes in, the cooperation in question.

To exemplify how stacked fields (more precisely the stacking of field positions) format transnational cooperation, the analysis focuses on three different units within the Danish police. All of these units have distinct positions in the Danish field of criminal justice that structure their involvement in transnational cooperation. The first type of unit is exemplified by the serious crimes unit of the Police of Copenhagen (that has parallels in other police districts) in which specialized police officers and prosecutors work closely together. The transnational work of this unit is valued by the institution because it is operational and solves especially drug cases in an effective and efficient manner. The second is the unit responsible for deployments of Danish police officers to international missions and postings abroad. The work of this unit is not generally valued in the bureaucracy, despite its employees trying to promote is as the first line of defense against serious crime that also affect Denmark. The third unit is responsible for coordinating transnational cooperation on behalf of the Danish police (referred to as the Single Point of Contact [SPOC]) and is folded into National Investigation Centre (NEC, for Nationalt Efterforskningscenter), a specialized part of the Danish National Police that was created to assist individual precincts with organized and complex crime. The SPOC mediates relations, for instance, between the Danish police and Europol, something that has become increasingly important for access to large European databases. Despite this position as a broker of transnational cooperation, this unit has a marginalized position in the wider system as well as internally in NEC.

Each of these units was folded into the Danish field of criminal justice, and in particular the police and prosecution service, at different historical junctures and has developed distinct positions within it. Since these units wield different levels of professional and institutional power, initiatives for transnational criminal justice cooperation coming from the Danish system takes on different forms. Reversing the perspective, this means that other criminal justice systems meet very different versions of Danish policing depending on the channel of collaboration and case in question, linked to their knowledge of who to contact with regard to specific requests for cooperation. In the perspective of stacked fields, the power dynamics of national fields is written into transnational cooperation through the different units that carry their position in the national field with them into collaborations. The analyses of the three Danish police units focus on their institutional position and role in the broader system as well as how it affected, and was affected by, their transnational activities.

The Global/Danish War on Drugs

As a baseline for comparing the institutional position of different units within the Danish police, the history and role of the specialized units dealing with drug offenses is important. It was one of the first and remains one of the most prioritized type of units engaged in transnational policing. The particularities and challenges of drug policing in the U.S. context and beyond have been analyzed elsewhere (Friedrichs, 2008; Manning, 1980). The development of Danish antidrug policing was related to such larger global developments. In the capital city of Copenhagen, the policing of drugs is situated in the Division for Serious Crimes that also deals with gang-related crimes (often related to drugs). The unit has a staff of about 50. Similarly organized, but smaller units, exist other Danish police districts. Due to their productivity in terms of solving cases of importance to the system, these units have a strong operational role in the system and usually maintain control of their own transnational cooperation. This cooperation takes different forms, often depending on where cases, suspects, or drugs are located or trafficked or which country initiates the case. At times, these collaborations are heterarchical, and the dominance of specific units in a transnational cooperation depends on the resources they are willing to invest, previous patterns of cooperation and on operational tactics related to the perceived nature of the case. However, established cooperation, in particular the influence of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), also creates strong hierarchical relations between national units in this case area.

The Copenhagen unit was the first of its kind in Denmark, formed in 1969 in close cooperation with agents from what would become the DEA, established in 1973 (Wilson, 1978). The DEA still has officers stationed at the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen. Created as a small unit composed of both prosecutors and police officers with the goal of bringing kingpins to justice (Wilhjelm, 1991), the unit was built (and legitimized) around a hierarchical perception of the drug trade that mirrored that of the United States (interview with prosecutor August 5, 2007). However, the unit soon proved to target mostly small-scale sellers and seller/users (Brydensholt, 1971). Despite this apparent paradox, the pervasiveness of drug crime and abuse throughout Denmark has given specialized drug squads a central role in the system where their work is attributed with significant professional value (Christensen, 2018).

This role is supported by the output measures upon which the police and prosecution are assessed. First implemented in the 1990s, output measurement parameters are negotiated by police management and the political level and are written into contract goals (Christensen, 2021). Drug policing plays a significant role in meeting these goals. This is evident in the latest goal and performance contract (mål-og resultatkontrakt) where the effective and efficient handling of cases accounts for 30% of the overall review, other focus areas being the handling of crime close to the citizens (25%), organized crime (22.5%), and an effective police (22.5%; Justitsministeriet, 2018). The efficient handling of the many drug cases clearly affects the first performance goal and also factors into the focus on organized crime, drug trafficking being one of the main sources of income for Danish gangs (Klement, 2016; Moeller, 2017). Due to the prevalence of drug cases, effectively and efficiently handling them is important for the entire police and prosecution service and its ability to meet output-based performance goals. In 2018, 12% of all charges brought by Danish police (excluding traffic offenses) were related to drugs (Rigspolitiet, 2020).

In the Danish system, drug policing is performed by highly specialized staff who spends considerable parts of their career doing this type of work. While some officers circulate in and out of serious crime units, their core is composed of repeat players, both police and prosecutors. The expertise of these officers often extends beyond formal procedures for transnational cooperation as they build informal relations to colleagues and units in other countries relevant, often along some of the main trafficking routes, for instance, in Spain and The Netherlands. Even though the SPOC (analyzed below) is formally supposed to handle transnational communication, the serious crimes unit in Copenhagen often activates its own contacts to request legal aid or ask for surveillance in other countries. The need for secrecy and expediency means that drug officers perceive the involvement of other units in Denmark as problematic. Going through other national units takes too long and necessitates translation of some of the parlance characteristic of drug policing (interview with police officer April 20, 2020) that is linked to a particular transnational policing guild (Bigo, 2016) focused on drugs. The serious drugs unit circumvents formal Danish processes of transnational cooperation, to work instead with such guilds of trusted cooperators, many having built transnational relations over several years (interview with prosecutor January 15, 2013). This enables them to secure support from officers and prosecutors in other countries before making official legal requests, ensuring that guild members in other countries can help expedite such requests by following their route in their national system. Some of these collaborations have fluid power relations that depend on who initiated it and what is perceived to be the nature and location of the crime (something that is not always clear, for instance, in cases where different national citizens traffic drugs across different national borders).

Taking on a more hierarchical dynamics, the potential takeaway of pursuing a case can be tested through contacts in the DEA. With their wide global network, contacts in the DEA can often share information that can feed into the Copenhagen unit’s decisions of whether to pursue a particular case or how many resources to invest in it. In this context, the DEA serves as a pivotal knowledge broker. In fact, staff in the serious crimes unit report that the DEA often knows about ongoing Danish investigations before they have reported them, often picking up knowledge from collaborators abroad (interview with police officer April 20, 2020). The DEA has a unique and powerful role that allows it to monitor casework around the world and discreetly direct national attention to particular cases, patterns of cooperation, and potential outcomes. In this capacity, the DEA can also draw attention to cases or collaborations that are of interest for the U.S. system. In the case of the Danish serious crimes unit, particularly the one in Copenhagen but also more broadly, close cooperation with the DEA was written into the very genesis of national drug policing and has been reproduced by successive generations of police and prosecutors working serious crimes. They still rely on, and feed information into, a global guild of drug policing dominated by the DEA.

The policing of drugs in Denmark is driven by highly specialized officers. The targeted transnational cooperation of these officers is linked to a particular type of operational police work. The professional value and institutional support for this type of transnational expertise and work are directly linked to bureaucratic and political demands for productivity, as well as to a global focus on the policing of drugs, and are supported by significant resources, including specialized prosecutors. The serious crimes units have significant operational power in the Danish context and use it to circumvent formal channels of transnational collaboration, substituting it with their own informal, networked channels. Some of these informal channels link Danish drug policing to similar units in other countries. At times the power dynamics of such cooperation are unsettled, and on other cases they are dominated by the presence of the DEA. Foreign police services working with the serious crimes unit cooperate with specialized officers and prosecutors with wide transnational networks and detailed knowledge about legal and policing tools that target drug offenses. The position of these units in the national field of criminal justice, and highly valued capital built in them, allow them to deploy and mobilize significant institutional resources, both symbolic and material, across the criminal justice system.

International Deployments and Rule-of-Law Missions

Danish police officers have been deployed internationally for more than 50 years, including to international peacebuilding missions and as liaison officers. Whereas, at a glance, these deployments appear very different from operative police work, police officers who have been or work with deployments try to legitimize this practice by referring to how it helps build security and good policing abroad. Building operative capacity in other countries, they argue, is in fact part of the solution to some of the transnational crime problems that also have effects in Denmark (interview with police officer March 20, 2018).

The Danish police does not have an official policy on internationalization. The lack of organizational interest has allowed the unit in charge of managing Danish deployments to bypass national hierarchies to help formulate policy at the level of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This influence deepens a schism between police officers that have influence on international missions but lose this influence the minute they return home. Volunteering from the 12 districts or centralized police units, around 50 police officers, of a total of 11,000 police staff, are deployed annually, some being deployed multiple times. In the Danish National Police (the highest police authority that coordinates work across the 12 police districts and hosts specialized units of national relevance), a small unit of four people (two trained police officers, one consultant, and one administrator) are in charge of recruiting, training, and managing international deployments. This management includes human resources as well as operative (in the context of the missions abroad) and strategic responsibilities. Officers who volunteer for international missions rotate out of their normal position and come under the management of the unit for the duration of their deployment.

Danish police and prosecutors have been involved in international peacekeeping missions since the UN mission in Cypress in 1964 (Dyrvig, 1987). Such missions have since developed from classic peacekeeping, where forces were deployed to uphold the status quo, to increasingly activist forms of peacebuilding and rule-of-law missions where the police has more active roles (Eide & Holm, 2013). Scholarship has even pointed to the particular value of the “policekeeping” approach (Day & Freeman, 2003, 2005). In particular from the 1990s, peacebuilding relied on deployments of police officers, and to a lesser extent prosecutors, to ensure support for a constructive transition from war and conflict to new more stable forms of governance, often including a reformed justice system. Whereas this rule-of-law component typically had a broad focus on rebuilding the state apparatus, a focal point for many missions was to help rebuild criminal justice systems (Proksik, 2018; Spernbauer, 2010). Such systems were often reformed to enable them to focus, among other things, on serious crimes often covered by international conventions and the subject of transnational cooperation such as trafficking in drugs, weapons and humans, corruption, and terrorism.

The funding for most Danish deployments is politically defined and comes from outside of the normal police budget. In the annual state budget, a fixed amount of 50 million DKK (6.7 million EUR) is reserved for international peace and capacity-building initiatives (“Finanslovsforslag 2020,” 2019, p. § 06.32.08.60.). These initiatives have been a part of the annual budget since 1995 and were created in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda. Of this amount, 30 million DKK is allocated to the Peace and Stabilisation Response initiative driven by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Udenrigsministeriet, 2010a). This initiative deploys experts to crisis management missions that include capacity building of law- and security sectors. The additional 20 million targets stabilization and conflict prevention, focusing in particular on capacity building in weak or failed states (Udenrigsministeriet, 2010b). It is within such missions police officers are deployed in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other civil actors that can include, for instance, NGOs such as the Danish Red Cross and national experts from Médecins Sans Frontières. Other deployments relate to liaison missions in different countries, these officers being part of a network of Nordic Liaison Officers. This politically defined financial support, however, does not translate into institutional value.

A few Danish police officers have created international careers on the basis of such deployments. Former chefpolitiinspektør (comparable to Assistant Chief Constable in the UK system) in the police of Copenhagen, Kai Vittrup, is perhaps the best example. Serving in missions in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East-Timor, and Iraq, Vittrup held high positions including the head of the UN police mission in Kosovo 2002–2004 and the head of Eupol Afghanistan from 2008. However, despite his international success, Vittrup did not return to a career in the Danish police. Instead, he worked in private capacity in different consultancy positions, including with the border police of Saudi Arabia. Vittrup is currently with Certa Intelligence and Security, a company created and managed by Jakob Scharff, former head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (Politiets Efterretningstjeneste or PET). The international and then private turn of Vittrup’s career exemplifies the fork in the road often reported by officers with experience from being deployed. They report being valued at the international level but devalued in the national, public police service.

If they do return to their former position in the domestic setting, the international expertise of deployed officers is rarely seen as valuable, international deployment in some cases even being seen as an impediment to promotion. In a system where promotion and prestige are tied to the operative ability to lift different kinds of police tasks in an effective and efficient way (especially those related to defined output goals), international deployment is seen as a bump in the road and something officers do for personal reasons, rather than as something that strengthens their professional profile. In fact, some police officers have reported being told directly, albeit informally, that volunteering for international missions was the reason they were bypassed for promotion (interview with police officer November 27, 2012). The professional capital built from international missions devalues as soon as the officer crosses the border and returns to the national field of criminal justice.

In the Danish police, international or transnational work is rarely on the top of the agenda. The demand for productivity effectively marginalizes transnational work that cannot be tied directly to domestic output. As a response to this institutional pressure, the unit in charge of international deployment legitimizes its activities by referring to their transnational contacts with other police forces and the types of crime they come into contact with. This legitimation actively fights against the perception that deployments are a vocational practice linked to the private ambitions of the relevant officers and thus not of relevance operational police work in Denmark (interview with police officer November 27, 2012). As part of this position-taking, officers refer to missions to the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kosovo as examples where police officers helped build new criminal justice systems. In their eyes, building such systems is the first line of defense against a range of the criminal problems that also affect (or are perceived to affect) Denmark, such as terrorism, trafficking in humans and drugs, and transnational organized crime (interview with police officer March 20, 2018). In addition, unit officers highlight the fact that the many Danish officers who have been deployed to international missions acquire policing skills that are sensitive to other cultures and ways of organizing criminal justice systems, something of value in a domestic and operative setting where more and more officers are perceived to come into contact with non-Danish citizens. In addition, they build transnational networks that have the potential be activated in later casework. As such, these officers perceive themselves as better adapted at working with some of the transnational and often complex forms of crime that require collaboration with other police forces. Police forces that officers who have been internationally deployed might have helped (re)build.

International deployments exist at the margins of the national field of criminal justice and have little support within it, despite attempts at infusing it with professional value. In the orthodox perception of good police work, deployments are seen as an irritant. This marginalization means that the unit responsible for this work leads a relatively quiet life—and that returning police officers generally cannot use their international expertise. The low value of international missions within the police bureaucracy, however, has also led to advantages for the unit. Due to the lack of an overall international strategy in the Danish police and the lack of interest of higher echelons of management, police officers in the unit have been part of working groups linked to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, normally not the prerogative of police middle management. This role has allowed the unit to sidestep the hierarchy and feed directly into the organization of Danish missions abroad. As a result, when working with other police forces with regard to rule-of-law missions and peacebuilding, Danish deployments have a strong and flexible role based on direct contact to the Ministry and influence on the role of the police in these missions. However, as soon as they reenter the domestic setting, this power disappears. Whereas there has recent change in the institutional position of the unit responsible deployments, that was folded into the larger Danish National Police’s National Investigation Centre (as of March 1, 2020), the latter organizational branch has not traditionally been highly valued in the system either. As a result of this change, the former head of deployments will now head the international activities of the SPOC (see analysis below) of the Danish National Police.

The SPOC in the National Investigation Centre

The marginalized institutional position of international cooperation can also be seen in the Danish National Police’s National Investigation Centre (NEC). Part of the National Police, NEC operates outside and the supports the work of the police districts. In NEC, a specific unit specializes in international communication and cooperation. This unit has a service function and is tasked with handling contact between Danish police and other police forces. Referred to as the SPOC (using the international police shorthand for SPOC), the unit has a staff of about 30. The SPOC has a peculiar position in the Danish police. It is folded into the NEC, an elite unit that enjoys general prestige but is marginalized in this larger branch as well as in relation to the districts whom it provides services to. This marginalization is linked to the organizational history of NEC.

NEC was created in 1998 as a unit under the Danish National Police. The original task of NEC was to monitor organized crime by collecting and analyzing data, and, on the basis of these analytics, assess threats and suggest appropriate police responses. The unit was formed shortly after the Nordic biker war (1994−1997) but was also related to broader international diffusions of police ideas linked to intelligence-led policing. NEC was modeled after the British National Criminal Intelligence Service (Strand, 2011, pp. 329–370). Originally conceived as an analytical unit, NEC was given operative authority with the transfer of a SWAT-like unit (Politiets Aktionsstyrke) in 2001 as well as parts of the old national, specialized detective unit for complex crime (Rejseholdet) and the police intelligence unit for biker related crime. In 2007, the IT intelligence unit that worked with data security, hacking, and online sharing of illegal material, often related to sexual exploitation of children, was also transferred to NEC (Vendius, 2015). NEC had about 130 employees in 2018 and was also tasked with responsibility for Schengen, Europol, and Interpol cooperation. It is this mandate that was placed in the SPOC (Stevnsborg, 2016, p. 452).

With its focus is on particular parts of the criminal code such as biker-related crime, other types of organized crime, human trafficking, and so on, NEC routinely works with transnational crime and has been able to build a high degree of autonomy and prestige in the Danish system. NEC consists of plain clothed officers sometimes seen as the “suits” of the police, because they tend to dress up rather than down as is the culture elsewhere in the police force (interview with police officer November 27, 2012). This position was partly built on a reproduction of the prestige of the former detective branch (Strand, 2011) and partly on the creation of a specialist role with regard to complex crime, some of which has received significant media attention. This has been the case, for instance, with regard to cold murder cases where NEC assists local districts with expertise and resources. Consolidating this role as national experts, the unit has also played a major role in the turf war that characterized the streets of Copenhagen. The conflict between established biker groups (Klement, 2016, 2019) and new constellations of inner city gangs (Mørck et al., 2013; Pedersen, 2014) that began in 2008 led to multiple shootings and about 10 killings. Such body counts are unusual in Denmark.

At a more bureaucratic level, the prestige of NEC is related to its handling only of crimes listed in the criminal code. Such transgressions are considered more important (interview with police officer February 18, 2020) than those in more specific, noncriminal forms of legislation, for instance, alcohol licensing rules, building codes, immigration, gambling, and zoning laws, control with parts of which fall under the police. In addition, NEC deals exclusively with heavy and complex criminal code offenses, perceived to be the most prestigious police responsibilities. In addition to being attributed with professional worth in the domestic system, something that is supported by output measurement goals targeting such crime, its focus on crimes such as trafficking, human trafficking, and organized crimes links NEC to larger transnational networks and regional organizations such as Europol. This gives NEC a role as specialized outsiders to the daily practices of the national police and the main brokers of transnationalized police ideas, norms, and technologies related to the most serious and complex forms of crimes. In a system that has a focus on criminal code cases, a well-dressed unit that works analytically on complex cases with transnational links is attributed significant capital, yet is somewhat divorced from the normal humdrum of working the beat and solving everyday crime.

In NEC, the SPOC is tasked with international relations and cooperation and is separated from the daily practices of officers in the districts but is also marginalized internally in NEC due to their lack of operational competences. The 30 SPOC staff is organized into three different sections that specialize in either Interpol, Europol, or Supplementary Information Request at the National Entry (SIRENE). The latter group also works with Schengen Information System cases. As part of the SPOC, staff members take turns to operate the 24/7 front desk and consequently have to be capable of working Interpol, Europol, and SIRENE channels. It is based on their knowledge of these channels that the SPOC provides a service function as the (single) national point of contact for transnational cooperation. The users of these services include police officers in the national system and police districts that come across international linkages in their casework and need to contact colleagues abroad or vice versa police officers from other countries looking for the right Danish unit to contact in relation to a case.

SPOC staff is well-versed in the advantages of the different channels, including which types of case work have the best chance of success in them. This is important especially when Danish police officers take the initiative for starting cases with transnational links (contrary to when foreign police forces contact the SPOC to find the appropriate Danish units). At times, SPOC staff contacts Danish investigators proactively if they identify particular patterns or strategies that could be used in ongoing investigation, at the same time trying to demonstrate their value in the Danish system by developing a role that can generate heterarchical advantages for Danish units in concrete collaborations. For instance, the SPOC closely monitors developments in Europol databases to be able to assess its potential for Danish officers and thus enhance its role within NEC and the broader police force (interview with police officer March 4, 2020). So far, this strategy has not succeeded, and the SPOC is seen as an administrative branch of little value in the 12 districts or the NEC. Officers placed in the wider Danish police see transnational cooperation as relevant, but distant. The average officer may consider Europol or similar organizations important in an abstract sense but do not necessarily see their value for their daily work.

The marginalized role of the SPOC in the larger NEC is also reflected in the career profiles of their employees and the types of police capital they have built. Whereas other NEC staff is recruited from investigative branches in the police district or more centralized national units, the background of SPOC staff is more diverse. SPOC employees have been recruited from former police dog handlers, border police, crime technicians, and from professionals without prior police experience. With distinct career trajectories and no operational competences, the unit is regarded with some skepticism in both NEC itself and the police organization more generally. By other NEC staff, they are seen as superfluous as they do not contribute to solving cases, and in the wider organization they are seen to deal with international matters not relevant in the daily work of most officers. In fact, members of the SPOC say that there is a risk that they are seen as too far removed from “real police work” and from what management call “the business” of policing (interview with police officer February 18, 2020). Despite their formal role as a one-stop shop for international cooperation, some units bypass the SPOC and initiate bilateral connections themselves, as is the case with staff from the serious crimes unit in Copenhagen who often prefer their own informal networks.

NEC, and the SPOC specifically, have very distinct positions in the Danish police force. NEC officers have a strong position in the field and are able to deploy considerable resources, both operative and analytic, as linked to its role of working only on complex criminal code cases many of which have transnational operational links and political attention. Drawing on these capacities, NEC plays an important role in police policy building by linking Danish problems to transnational currents through data-driven assessments of crime and policing. Formally part of NEC, the SPOC is marginalized as specialists without operative capacities that focus exclusively on cooperation and communication and can only give advice on how to deploy operative resources. SPOC employees have tried to challenge this role by proactively advising on how operations could be carved out and what international channels to use, but to little avail. Their mainly procedural role separates them from the daily, operative work of the districts and from the prestige of dealing directly with criminal code cases that is the bread and butter of NEC. The transnational expertise and networks accumulated in this group has not allowed it to carve out a strong position in the domestic setting. At best, they can link domestic and foreign police units but often cannot affect the state of play of this cooperation. For foreign collaborators, this means that unless they know exactly who to contact via their own informal network, they are likely to go through the SPOC whose transnational expertise is seen as outlandish by many others units in the system.

Conclusion

Transnational criminal justice is composed of a set of policing and prosecution practices that are structurally anchored in specific (often specialized) national units, many of which work closely with parallel units in other countries. These units may, however, have access to very different forms of institutional support and professional prestige. As exemplified by the Danish case, transnational work performed by nationally embedded units takes on many different forms and is folded into the national system in different ways. Transnational cooperation is formatted by the position of national units involved, their prestige, and closely linked ability to mobilize and deploy resources.

In a Danish context, there are clear differences between drug policing folded into serious crime squads, police deployments to missions abroad, and the SPOC working with transnational cooperation. These units represented different positions in the field, one writing itself into the orthodoxy of operative responsibilities and output management and the two others marginalized in different ways. The prestige and position these units enjoy in the Danish field are formatted by a valuation of operative and efficient police work. Activities that merely support operational police work are devalued, despite potentially being important, or at least being promoted by agents involved in such activities as important. This pattern of distinction and the varied forms of power it gives access to means that foreign police forces will meet very different parts of the Danish system depending on their knowledge of the system and the particular case type they are working with.

When working with drug control, if collaborating directly with serious crimes units, they encounter highly specialized police and prosecutors who are able to organize cooperation informally as well as to deploy considerable resources. When working with Danes while on international missions, non-Danish staff will work with officers whose mission was influenced by a small unit that has a direct line to policy building. However, any informal contacts generated through these missions will be difficult to mobilize at a later stage. When deployments return home, they are spread out in a system where their transnational expertise is devalued and their ability to use any transnational networks diminished. Finally, if following the formal channels of contacting Danish police through the SPOC, foreign police officers will encounter highly specialized officers who do not have any operational power and are marginalized in the own system they are supposed to aid with transnational cooperation. Each of these units was formed as part of broader transnational waves of policing that were received in the Danish police and folded into it in particular ways that affect the work of these units. That different units are able to deploy distinct resources and are attributed variable levels of professional value is presumably the case for most units engaged in transnational policing. How patterns of transitional policing that do not necessarily include the studied Danish units work in practice, and whether it can be capture by the framework of stacked fields, could be the object of future empirical work.

The ways in which the transnational ideas and practices are folded into different national fields of criminal justice are crucial for understanding how the larger structure of transnational policing and crime control works and develops. The idea of stacked fields contributes a conceptualization designed to capture how the transnational work of police units is formatted by the field in which they are situated. National fields of criminal justice are stacked at the position of units involved in transnational policing and prosecutorial cooperation, a stacking that also involves transnational institutions such as Europol. These fields are stacked and restacked depending on the units in question, their national clout, and more operational aspects that vary from case area to case area and sometimes from case to case. Depending on which units are activated, sometimes the result of strategic choice or police tactics, at other times driven by the case (where no previous collaborative contacts were established), field positions are stacked in particular ways. The stacking of fields, and the power relations between them, pivot on the involved sites of cooperation. Whereas the power dynamics in many such collaborations are heterarchical and follow operational characteristics, they are sometimes shaped by already established power dynamics. This has been the case for instance with regard to drug policing in which the DEA has historically played, and continues to play, a central role. However, the particular relations between field positions depend on the patterns of positionality of the involved national units that give some influence over others, a dynamics at times linked to wider geopolitical power structures that can enable a stacking of positions that endures over time. Visible in the power relations between field positions that are activated when police forces interact, the stacking of national fields of criminal justice structure particular patterns of cooperation as well as how the larger constellation of transnational policing develops.