Policing Cities: Urban Securitization and Regulation in a 21st Century World (Routledge Frontiers of Criminal Justice) - Hardcover

This work provides an important contribution to the academic study of criminology, policing and urban security in the 21st century. The authors are respected contributors in their field and their insights will assist both undergraduate and postgraduate students to inform and develop their own perspectives on a number of key criminological issues.

Tim Parsons, Senior Lecturer in Policing and Criminology at the John Grieve Centre, London Metropolitan University, UK

'This innovative book collapses disciplinary barriers in helping us to understand the ways in which policing both constitutes and is constituted by rapidly changing cities across the world. It should be mandatory reading for police managers, policy makers and social scientists across the board.'

Professor Kevin Stenson, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics, UK

‘As strategies for the control of our urbanizing world proliferate, it is getting more difficult to get a clear overview of what is happening. However, this volume manages to do just that. Featuring an excellent selection of the best writers on urban security, Policing Cities is an essential collection.’

David Murakami Wood, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Surveillance Studies, Queen’s University, Canada

'Ultimately however, this is a timely contribution which demonstrates the need for further work to contextualise the broader shift to a pluralized landscape of urban securitization and policing.'

Andrew Wooff, Research Associate, School of Law, University of Sheffield, UK

Policing Cities brings together international scholars from numerous disciplines to examine urban policing, securitization, and regulation in nine countries and the conceptual issues these practices raise. Chapters cover many of the world’s major cities, including New York, Beijing, Paris, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Boston, Melbourne, and Toronto, as well as other urban areas in Britain, United States, South Africa, Germany, Australia and Georgia.

The collection examines the activities and reforms of the traditional public police, but also those of emerging public and private policing agents and spaces that fall outside the public police’s purview and which previously have received little attention. It explores dramatic changes in public policing arrangements and strategies, exclusion of urban homeless people, new forms of urban surveillance and legal regulation, and securitization and militarization of urban spaces. The core argument in the volume is that cities are more than mere background for policing, securitization and regulation. Policing and the city are intimately intertwined. This collection also reveals commonalities in the empirical interests, methodological preferences, and theoretical concerns of scholars working in these various disciplines and breaks down barriers among them. This is the first collection on urban policing, regulation, and securitization with such a multi-disciplinary and international character.

This collection will have a wide readership among upper level undergraduate and graduate level students in several disciplines and countries and can be used in geography/urban studies, legal and socio-legal studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and criminology courses.