Barry Goetz - On the Frontlines of the Welfare State: How the Fire Service and Police Shape Social Problems

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How the Fire Service and Police Shape Social Problems

Barry Goetz

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Public safety protections, like other essential public goods and services such as health care and education, promote social rights of citizenship and what Marshall (1983[1950], 258) called the concrete substance of civilized life. Fire and policing services are crucial to the social safety net that protects all Americans. Nevertheless, like other aspects of the welfare state, the public safety sector reflects what Marcuse (1986, 248) called the myth of the benevolent state. Policies ostensibly aimed at promoting societal well-being often fail in their mission or promote unequal outcomes.

I use the concept of institutional selectivity to better understand the ways in which governments shape social problems and the dynamics of social inequality. This concept is derived from Claus Offes (1974, 3539) work on selection mechanisms, described in detail in , this volume). Yet, state bias is often not clear-cut. Rather, it tends to be implicit and institutional, rooted in the normative orders of state structures and practices. In this book I have defined these normative orders as the interplay between bureaucratic structures and procedures, agency subcultures, and the micro-foundational aspects of organizational life, including the cognitive orientations of state actors.

The biases implicit to institutional selectivity produce contradictions and conflict that eventually lead to managerial, fiscal, and legitimacy crises that require the reorganization of state structures and practices. It is important to show, however, that changing public policy agendas will introduce new forms of social and political bias. Neil Smith (1996) argued that we are now in the era of the revanchist city, characterized by increasing gentrification, unaffordable housing prices, and curtailments in urban and especially social welfare services. Local governments face unprecedented levels of fiscal austerity, forced to seek neo-liberal solutions for dealing with social problems, outsourcing or privatizing even the most essential of public services (Miller and Hokenstad 2014). Still, citizens demand services, and governments are expected to do more with less, leading to new institutional arrangements for dealing with social problems. As a result of austerity reorganization, local social welfare services are concentrated and expanded in those functions deemed most necessary for security, in police and fire services. These services are asked to do more and more, with uneven consequences.