Haggerty, Kevin D. 1965-

views updated

HAGGERTY, Kevin D. 1965-

PERSONAL:

Born June 10, 1965, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada; son of Eldred and Shirley (Hawkins) Haggerty; married Serra Tinic; children: Declan. Education: Carleton University, B.A., 1990; University of Toronto Centre of Criminology, M.A., 1992; University of British Columbia, Ph.D., 1998.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta 76G 2H4, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Alberta, Edmonton, assistant professor of sociology, 2000—.

MEMBER:

Society for the Study of Social Problems, American Law and Society Association, American Society of Criminology.

WRITINGS:

(With Richard Ericson) Policing the Risk Society, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Making Crime Count, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Criminal Visions: Surveillance and Criminal Justice.

SIDELIGHTS:

Canadian sociologist Kevin D. Haggerty is the author of several books that examine the role of law enforcement in an increasingly technological society. His Making Crime Count, published in 2001, is based in part on a study undertaken by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics to determine to what degree the consumption of alcohol was a factor in criminal activity. While the study was abandoned due to opposition from many police departments, the inner workings of the study proved revealing. As Canadian Journal of Sociology contributor Martin Gold noted, through its author's anthropological approach, Making Crime Count spins "a cautionary tale about the myriad social influences that shape crime statistics, a caution helpful to anyone who uses these data for basic research, for formulating policy, or for creating and evaluating ameliorative programs."

Haggerty's Policing the Risk Society, written with Richard Ericson, is a study of the influence that information technologies have had on modern police work. According to J. W. E. Sheptycki in the British Journal of Criminology, the two authors "have sought to bring to the sociology of policing a fundamentally new paradigm." This paradigm sees policing as but one aspect of a larger societal effort, grounded in technological techniques of surveillance, to minimize the risks of modern life. Haggerty and Ericson, wrote Stephen D. Mastrofski in the American Journal of Sociology, "critique the received wisdom and provide a new framework that should alter what questions scholars ask about policing, as well as how they find answers." According to Maurice Punch in the Administrative Science Quarterly, Policing the Risk Society "represents a considerable achievement" in studies of police methodology. Lauding the authors for establishing "not only a critique of existing research but also a new paradigm (and new conceptual vocabulary) for viewing the police in the postmodern, 'risk' society," Punch went on to describe Policing the Risk Society as "well researched, extensively documented, tightly argued, and full of provocative insights."