Aims
The term "high policing" refers to the fact that such policing benefits the "higher" interests of the government rather than individual citizens or the mass population. It also refers to the fact that high-policing organizations are endowed with authority and legal powers superior to that of other types of police organizations.
There is no conventional designation for this category of policing in liberal democracies, however, and it should not be conflated with secret police, although secret police organizations do use high policing methods. Calling it "secret" or "political" policing is too vague since all police work is somewhat both secret (police generally do not reveal their methods until a case is completed) and political (police enforce laws determined by the political system in power).
The primary tool of high policing is intelligence, which is derived from both human ("Humint") and technological sources. The former includes the use of secret informants to gather information on the activities of citizens, while the latter includes electronic surveillance and eavesdropping, such as closed-circuit camera monitoring, telephone tapping, and Internet tapping. Human intelligence and technological intelligence are undoubtedly the most powerful tools in the high policing profession.
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Famous quotes containing the word aims:
“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“Whoever aims publicly at great things and at length perceives secretly that he is too weak to achieve them, has usually also insufficient strength to renounce his aims publicly, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)