domingo, 22 de novembro de 2009

Conflito de fins e importância do 'sentimento de segurança'

"Important as security is to us, however, our desire to achieve it has to be balanced against other things that we value, such as liberty, privacy and justice. For example, people often say that they will accept a degree of insecurity rather than turn their homes into 'armed fortress' in order to ensure their safety. While they might believe that having someone wath over them all the time would enhance their security, most people would regard the resulting loss of privacy as too high a price to pay for achieving that end. Similarly, the various 'due process' requirements that have been built into our criminal justice systems over the centuries reflect the view that the values of justice and liberty are considered to be just as important to us as the value of security. Of course, it is by no means easy to reconcile these different values. Recent controversy surrounding attempts to prosecute General Pinochet for 'crimes against humanity' in Chile, together with the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Comission in post-Apartheid South Africa, indicate the difficulties which may be encountered in trying to balance demands for justice and security. That is not to say that the two are irreconcilable. (...) We argue that while tensions may exist between the two, they are also mutually interdependent. This means that if authorities want to govern security more effectively they are obliged to pursue justice more diligently."


"Our subjective 'sense of security' (our feeling of safety) is just as important to most of us as any objective measure of our 'actual security' (i.e. the risks we actually face). However, if the discrepancy between the two grows too wide, we are liable to be warned either that we have a 'false sense of security' or that we are 'paranoid'. Thus, to be effective, security measures must adress our subjective perceptions as well as more objectively identifiable threats to our safety. For most of us, when we feel safe it is because we have confidence in the steps we, or others, have taken to promote security. Or, to put it another way, we feel safe because things have been done to govern security. This governance might be quite informal and fleeting as, for example, when we take precautions while engaged in some routine activity. At the other extreme the governance of security might be the result of a complex programme of action that is sustained through space and time and which may involve large numbers of people, sophisticated bureaucratic procedures, complicated budgetary calculations and the deployment of costly resources as, for example, in arrangements established by law enforcement agencies to 'keep the peace'."

Governing Security , Les Johnston and Clifford Shearing

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