Chapter 1 explores what tourism policing and private security are and how they differ from other forms of policing. The chapter provides a brief historical overview of American tourism policing in the late twentieth century and twenty-first century. The chapter addresses the similarities and differences between tourism policing and community policing, how they influence each other and where they separate. Finally, this chapter provides a literary overview of the pertinent literature that regarding tourism policing and addresses the lack of specific material in this field.
TopA Brief History Of Tourism Policing In The United States
In the 1980s there were several academic articles regarding the protection of visitors. The authors tended to take a Marxist perspective. In these articles, tourists were often categorized to be what we might call today, “deserving victims.” Early articles implied that the victim of the crime, the visitor, was responsible for his or her situation (Chesney-Lind & Lind, 1986). The logic behind such a concept was that visitors often did not blend in with the local population, that they tended to be flashy or make the local populations feel unworthy, created acts of jealousy or introduced foreign cultural values into the local culture, thus infecting the culture and creating a negative reaction among local populations. It might have been due to the perspective of the “deserving victim” that during that period even major American tourism cities such as Honolulu, Hawaii and Las Vegas, Nevada paid minimum heed to issues of tourism security.
Thus, until the 1980s, few tourism centers had done much to study the problem, there were no conferences to address these issues, and many police departments took the position that they treated everyone equally.
These departments argued that to provide tourists with an extra layer of safety and security was not feasible and also ethically questionable. The prevailing American police attitude in much of the twentieth century was that the safety and security of the visitor was the responsibility of the visitor.