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Initially introduced and hailed as means of offering more democratic and facilitative policing, but increasingly subject to question by protestors, Police Liaison Teams (PLTs) are one of the primary tactical options used by Public Order Police in the UK. This paper will analyse the deployment of PLTs over the 14 days of the global COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021. The police plan for the event emphasised Human Rights, dialogue and facilitation, but some protest groups accused PLTs of 'intelligence-gathering' and urged activists not to speak to them. This paper draws on participant observation and interviews with both police and protestors to analyse the deployment of PLTs at the summit and consider why some groups chose not to engage with the liaison officers. Responding to calls for more evidence-based analyses of PLT deployment, we highlight the difficulties of police-protestor liaison at a Global Summit and outline why protest groups might choose not to engage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the legal dilemma of surrogacy in the novel Frog by the Nobel prize winner Mo Yan, which was written in the context of China's past one-child policy. This study offers a tri-tier exploration of how surrogacy led to conflicts and tensions in Frog: first, it traces how the intended parents' demand for surrogacy developed under the one-child policy in China while clarifying the application of "the principle of public order"; second, it explores the predicament of the surrogate mother Chen Mei regarding the violation of her rights and dignity, and delves into the interpretation of "the principle of human dignity"; third, it focuses on the custody dispute between the surrogate mother and the intended parents to explore the controversies over the concept of parentage in surrogacy and consider the principle of "best interest of the child." This study concludes that despite all the legal and ethical controversies, the spirit of law demands a response to the growing practice of surrogacy and an extension of our exploration of legal principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a call for the historical study of transit etiquette: the behavioural expectations that guide the mundane conduct of transport users. It identifies the formation of contemporary protocols of transit etiquette as a productive line of scholarly inquiry by taking the transformation of (de)boarding behaviours in Tokyo between the 1880s and the 1960s as a case study. Zooming in on urban railways in the Japanese capital, it describes the processes through which (de)boarding practices grew more elaborate in character and more narrowly defined in terms of the spatio-temporal location at which they could be legitimately exercised. It examines three groups of factors that contributed to this process: "software" and "hardware" interventions in transport operations as well as their broader historic context. Simultaneously, it cautions against linear narratives of consistent improvement by stressing the contradictions of this process. The article contributes to mobility studies by calling attention to the malleability and socio-technical construction of the norms that guide mundane mobility practices. It provides a provisional template for subsequent historical accounts of transit etiquette, and argues that such studies can empower research on mobilities and transport to contribute to wider debates about (in)civility and the organisation of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The slogan 'defend the right to protest' has proved popular in recent years, connecting a wide variety of organisations, activists and institutional actors. But beneath this apparent agreement of left and centre-left groups, we find quite a significant difference of views over the meaning of the 'right to protest', and what activities it might protect. This article sets out to critically engage with the way that an institutional human rights discourse frames protest. It insists that a primacy is accorded to communication, to the exclusion of material forms of power. At the same time, the article shows that 'violence' becomes a meta-signifier for the jurisprudence on the right to protest, often rubber stamping the way that state violence is externalised onto protestors. The article uses these issues to understand how we might traverse rights, moving from a point where they hold an immense grip on the political imagination, to a point where that grip begins to loosen. In short, the article uses the right to protest to begin to think about what Santner calls 'the far side of rights'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the response of the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police to mass demonstrations in 1968. Using a variety of contemporaneous sources, including underused archival material, documents released through freedom of information requests, and evidence disclosed as part of the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), it shows how the experience of mass demonstrations that year, which came against the backdrop of widespread international protest, prompted significant developments in terms of crowd control tactics, covert intelligence gathering practices and the use of new technology to enable greater command and control over police resources. Taken together, these measures represented a permanent change to the public order capacity of the Metropolitan Police, providing a model that was gradually exported to other forces across England and Wales with the encouragement of the Home Office. However, despite the significant changes introduced in 1968, this article shows how police officers, civil servants, and politicians emphasised the continuation of 'traditional methods', a term that functioned as a way of situating public order policing within an idealised image of a uniquely English policing tradition, with an appeal to historical continuity that aimed to convey legitimacy and construct consent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we aim to contribute to the history of contemporary State by bringing into the picture what often falls outside its domain, defies its logic and is built against it. For that purpose, we look at the history of anarchism in Portugal, dominant among the Portuguese working classes during the first decades of the 20th century, and suggest that the threat that anarchism posed to the affirmation of modern State powers contributed to the urban planning and social housing projects developed by private and public institutions. In other words, and despite anarchism being an anti-statist political culture, in this article we are interested in the conflicting but mutually constitutive relationship between anarchism and the State. Our main focus is on the disciplinary and moral dimensions of the social housing projects developed throughout a historical period that encompasses different political regimes (Monarchy, Republic and a Fascist dictatorship). As we argue, those projects had amongst their purposes the destruction of the "collectivist tendencies," class struggle and the overcoming of the nefarious and unpredictable effects that industrialisation had brought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discretion is a key feature of policing, yet its surrounding research has historically been heavily reliant upon exploring interpersonal or dyadic encounters between individual officers and members of the public. More recently, studies have explored how discretionary decisions by police officers impact upon and interact with group-level and organisational processes but few studies have explored the relevance of discretion to debates in the literature on public order policing. Correspondingly, there is to date only a limited body of research exploring the nature and dynamics of dialogue-based football-related public order policing. This study addresses these combined gaps by drawing upon data from interviews with specialist football officers, referred to as 'spotters' or Dedicated Football Officers, from five English police forces. Our analysis critiques the idea that these specialist roles revolve merely around the surveillance, categorisation and enforcement of fans who are considered to pose a risk to public order. We highlight how these officers understand their roles in terms of the use of discretion. We argue that in a complex intergroup environment officers utilise discretion to manage perceptions of their legitimacy among supporters. This 'social capital' in turn enhances their capacity to de-escalate and avoid disorder through the promotion of self-regulatory behaviour. We discuss the relevance of our study for theoretical approaches to understanding discretion and consider the implications of our analysis for developing a more formal dialogue-focused and discretion-based approach to football crowd policing in and beyond England and Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, municipal bylaws became important tools of negotiating public order in Australian cities. While many were introduced in the interest of public safety, some were seen to overstep acceptable governmental management and instead came to be perceived as forms of interference with individual rights and liberties in urban spaces. This article examines the anti-loitering bylaw, the 'move on law' introduced in Brisbane in 1889, and the public opposition surrounding the law's enforcement. It demonstrates how municipal bylaws were used to reinforce abstract concepts of acceptable public behaviour and promote desirable forms of urban citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is no European consensus on the most appropriate prostitution policies, in most European countries selling sex itself is not criminalised. Exceptions are most of the former communist/socialist countries of the Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, including Croatia, where it is a misdemeanour/administrative offence against public order and peace, despite recommendations by human rights bodies to decriminalise sex workers. The legitimacy of protecting public order through criminalising selling sex has remained largely unchallenged and there is a lack of empirical studies examining the application of those provisions from a human rights perspective. This article addresses the gap and provides a human rights analysis of the case-law of the municipal misdemeanour courts in the two largest Croatian cities (Zagreb and Split), in the period from 2014 to 2019 concerning the offence of 'falling into prostitution'. We show how laws criminalising sex workers are not only ineffective, but are also harmful for public order. Not only does the indeterminacy of the offence and its different interpretations fail to fully respect the principle of legality, police and judicial practice show discrepancies with the human rights standards, which impacts primarily women in vulnerable situations, thus raising the questions of gender (in)equality and intersectional discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the models of protest policing deployed by the Malaysian police during the BERSIH 2.0 wave of protests (2011–2016). Based on participant observation and critical ethnography of these protest events, it explains how the state and police adapted to the surge of street protests in Kuala Lumpur by bringing together various elements of policing practices in its attempt to contain dissent on the streets. I argue that the new 'Peaceful Assembly assemblage' of policing practices, though distinct and significantly different in its overall governing logic compared to its predecessor, it remains heavily connected to late colonial forms of public order and counterinsurgent policing, especially the Special Branch and the Federal Reserve Unit (riot police). In this sense, the article shows that colonial policing's afterlife is a major factor for understanding how Malaysia's protest policing experience complicates and departs from patterns of protest policing development observed in the Global North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that UN peace operations play a central role in the nexus between policing and counterinsurgency, and constitute one of the underappreciated sites and circuits of counterinsurgent knowledge. It posits that the convergence between peace operations and counterinsurgency has been driven not only (or even primarily) by these mission's more assertive military posture under 'stabilization', but also by the turn to 'polickeeping', the growing role of police forces and increasing importance of policing tasks in peacekeeping. The stabilization/policekeeping mindset rests on the assumption of a continuum from minor instances of disorders to full-blown armed conflict, leading to an expansive understanding of what may constitute a threat to stability and require international intervention. The articles teases out the macro and micro manifestations of this mindset through the lens of UN peace operations' response to civil unrest and demonstrations. It shows that, because peace operations are a point of cross-fertilization for the creation and transmission of global policing practices, UN protest policing reverberates beyond the specific countries in which peace operations are deployed. Peace operations create a global demand for and supply of specific skills and tools, in particular paramilitary police forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, moving from a sociological perspective, aims at stressing the ambiguity of the process of democratization of the Italian Republican police by focusing on the notion of public order in Republican Italy and within a Republican model of policing. Towards this end, it focuses not on police practices but on police knowledge in its relationship with concrete police work on the field. In particular, this article analyses the manuals designed for and, between 2000 and 2008, employed in the training of Italian police officers and operators, especially of the mobile units that operate in policing activities dedicated to keeping the public order. By resorting to the tools provided by the critical discourse analysis, special attention is paid to how these texts describe and depict crowds, and how such representations become a device for legitimizing preventive yet repressive interventions. Such interventions take place before potential violent behaviours from demonstrators occur and therefore are not reactive. However, they are not based on mediation and dialogue but rather are coercive, and hinge on a strong use of force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a revival in studies on the various Italian police forces in recent times. This article is part of that trend and uses interpretive categories that have become widespread internationally, such as protest policing. The use of these categories allows the work to introduce specific events and law enforcement history within the broader history of contemporary Italy. In this context, the article examines a previously understudied issue from a historical and scientific perspective. There has never been a comprehensive study of the special police units called 'Celeri' and 'Mobili'. However, since their creation in 1944, they have played an important role in the Italian Republic and affairs between politics and law and order through their unique characteristics, direct dependence on Interior ministers, their capacity for rapid intervention throughout the national territory, and their function as anti-riot police. Through largely unpublished sources, the article outlines the history of the Italian riot police, including the images and public perceptions associated with them. The interpretative perspective focuses on the relationships of antagonism and mutual influence between two 'spaces': the internal space of the special units and the external space of society in Italy. Polysemic categories of physical and symbolic knowledge, help explain the complex history of the Italian riot police. The article also investigates the 'bodies' (police, society, political), the disconnect between practice and imagination, and the weight of certain stereotypes associated with these units which have, until now, impeded a scientific reconstruction of their history.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1938, a communal conflict took place in the city of Bombay. This confrontation between Hindus and Muslims flared into large-scale violence. During the riots, the home minister of the provincial government invoked a combination of laws such as Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and instituted curfews to control the situation. As a result, hundreds of inhabitants of the city were arrested. The purpose of this article is threefold. Firstly, it will highlight how communal conflict in the late colonial period would often begin over trivial issues but could easily expand into large-scale riots influenced by metapolitical concerns. Secondly, moments of 'disorder' facilitated the administrative urge to institute extraordinary laws like Section 144 and curfews. And thirdly, the invocation of extraordinary laws was justified in reference to various problem categories like mawaalis and hooligans in this case. Overall, the article will show that the provincial government led by Indians continued the colonial art of governance by resorting to repression as a significant tool to deal with political unrest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a militant worker strike at the Bata shoe factory in Calcutta in the year 1938. The strike owed to the communist mobilisation of the workers in the city and demanded various rights from the factory management including non-interference in their lives outside the factory. The discussion will show that the late colonial labour politics in Calcutta was dynamic and sought political solidarities with the broader anti-colonial mobilisation in the city. As a result, the factory management and the colonial administration could not sustain workers' harassment based on an 'insider-outsider dichotomy' that attempted to segregate workers' issues inside the factory from the larger politics outside it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legal example is used in large part to dress the rule. A naked norm, for common lawyers, is simply an abstraction, an umbrageous nebulosity that needs its particulars, its cases, to have meaning, impact and thought. Using the paradoxical example of nakedness the essay examines the inability of British and European courts candidly to address the undressed. Nakedness is here examined as an instance of undressing the law, of stripping and streaking the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports upon the first formal academic analysis of the deployment of a dialogue based and explicitly non-coercive 'Police Liaison Team' (PLT) within the public order policing operation surrounding a football fixture. The study uses an approach based upon Participant Action Research to first generate changes to operational practices and then to analyse the consequences of these changes upon the dynamics of the event and of the public order policing operation itself. Data is drawn from multiple sources including direct observation and post event focus groups. It is argued that the PLT played an important role in terms of enhancing police capacity for dialogue and communication with 'risk' fans, adding depth and quality to risk assessment as well as assisting in the avoidance of 'disorder' and police coercion. Problems were identified in terms of strategy, inappropriate deployment of the resource by police commanders and resistance to change among police staff. The implication of the study for understanding 'risk' is discussed along with the role of PLTs in helping to achieve proportionality and efficiency in the policing of football. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article examines the configurations and organisational dynamics of policing mega-events through the metaphor of ‘flows’. Using the Brisbane 2014 Group of 20 Summit (G20) as an explorative case study, we suggest that the metaphor of flows may not only hold value with regard to understanding how objects of policing are rendered visible and manageable, but also how it might enable us to take stock of internal flows of data, information and intelligence within public order policing operations. We examine how police pursued their goal of containing and controlling protest flows as well as managing rapid intra- and inter-organisational flows. In particular, we examine how police and security actors designed what we call ‘flow-based’ architectures and the underlying organisational and situational contingencies shaping how these structures and systems form and function. The article concludes by calling for greater attention on internal dynamics of policing operations which, we argue, can potentially be advanced by drawing on the metaphor of flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latter part of the twentieth century, a trend towards the ‘pluralisation’ of policing emerged, and that trend is continuing in most European countries. In this article, we use Foucauldian governmentality theories to understand plural policing developments. The key point in this article is the conceptual analysis of the power relations generated by the rhetoric regarding and the practice of plural policing. A central objective is to explore the ways in which broader national, regional and local influences, and distinctive political institutions and structures, shape the agendas and actual decisions of key policy actors. The statement made by many Anglophilic scholars, that industrialised countries are becoming increasingly ‘pluralised-privitised’, often seems to have reached the status of universal acceptance. As the division of political power and state constitutional settlements differ in each country, we cannot rashly transfer British realities to other countries. This article broadens the body of knowledge by providing empirical data regarding the situation of plural policing in Belgium, as a case study. In this research, 27 years of security policing have been reconstructed, based on 72 in-depth interviews with politicians and civil servants, and an extensive document analysis. The findings reveal a completely different situation regarding plural policing than the common stream of empirical research in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper examines emerging trends in protest management in the UK, looking predominantly at the 5 November 2015 demonstrations led by hacktivist collective Anonymous. This event can be considered unique on a number of fronts. First, the common terminology used by police to justify the use of undercover operatives and aggressive forms of crowd control was conspicuously absent from public discourse surrounding the event. Secondly, conventional media channels throughout the UK focused on the London campaign and all but failed to cover the wider national/international demonstrations – thus depicting London itself as an isolated incident. Thirdly, the Million Mask March was a significant moment in civil history, for behind the scenes much of the policing effort was taking place online, with covert agencies manipulating mainstream coverage of the event to discredit campaigners, disrupt a legitimate public protest, and deny participants their right to dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have suggested that the policing of protest have become more permissive in Western democracies since the 1960s. While widely accepted, studies affirming a softening of police conduct have focused on national trends despite awareness that police tactics have unevenly diffused across the USA. This study examines the temporal trends in protest policing in New York City to evaluate how and why the dominant strategies of protest control have changed over time. Drawing on the widespread privatisation of public space in New York during the 1980s coupled with the adoption of Broken Windows crime control strategies, I develop an alternative explanation of the temporal dynamics of protest policing that is based on policy spillover, or the unintentional spillover effects that policy decisions unrelated to protest policing may nonetheless have on police conduct. Using a sample of 6147 protest events occurring in New York between 1960 and 2006, I confirm that the prevalence of arrests and other forms of police force have increased over time even though illegal or other contentious tactics have declined. The results additionally do not suggest that there is a direct relationship between crime rates and either arrests or the use of force. In regards to protest policing, the political construction and control of crime and disorder are more important than the absolute amount of crime, which is consistent with the proposed policy spillover explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Police response to public protest in the USA has been seen as stemming from both threats to the interests of political and financial elite as well as threats to the maintenance of public order. Indeed, many of the same features of protest events are used as indicators of both types of threat, leading to substantial uncertainty regarding the interpretation of threat at public gatherings. In this study, we draw on over 16,000 protest events identified from daily issues of theNew York Times(NYT) from 1960 to 1995 to develop a more complete picture of public order policing. In doing so, we identify several dimensions of protest events that lead to more complicated and complex interactions between protestors and police. These features, including a diverse tactical repertoire, diverse protesting groups and event size, create crowd management difficulties that contribute to an overall more aggressive police response. Tactical diversity is an especially strong predictor of police action, while protest event size is found to interact with threatening protestor behaviours that largely necessitate a police response. We conclude by placing these findings firmly within a public order management approach to protest policing, thereby clearing up some of the ambiguities in existing protest policing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media provide many opportunities to connect people, but the kinds of personally identifiable information that people share through social media is understudied. This paper presents findings from a content analysis in which we coded the amount and kinds of personally identifiable information of public Twitter messages. Overwhelmingly, public Twitter messages do not include identifiable information such as phone numbers, email, and home addresses. Using Goffman's [(1963).Behaviors in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. New York, NY: Free Press] concepts of public order and civil inattention, we also coded for whether people articulate the kinds of information that are communicated with others in public space, including locational, temporal, and activity-related information. Our findings suggest that people do share similar kinds of personal information on Twitter that they do in others kinds of physical public spaces, suggesting that people may also be mapping old practices for public social interaction onto networked publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares and analyzes the functioning of dialog within police and protester interaction. The question is posed whether dialog is a stratagem for safeguarding the public peace or whether it is a form of symbolic theater. Liaison between police and protest organizers sometimes adopts a ritualistic format as both sides seek information about intentions, numbers, and tactics. Dialog initiatives create opportunities for negotiated arrangements that set parameters and expectations for crowd behavior, limit surprises, and establish some rapport. Swedish Dialog Police are arguably the exemplar of this approach. Although dialog is not a panacea for all police–protester encounters, as limitations are apparent and although some suspicion is inevitable, it is argued that it remains in the self-interest of both police and protesters to facilitate peaceful protest through meaningful dialog, whenever feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We propose that late modern policing practices, that rely on neighbourhood intelligence, the monitoring of tensions, surveillance and policing by accommodation, need to be augmented in light of emerging ‘cyber-neighbourhoods’, namely social media networks. The 2011 riots in England were the first to evidence the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder. The police were ill-equipped to make use of the intelligence emerging from these non-terrestrial networks and were found to be at a disadvantage to the more tech-savvy rioters and the general public. In this paper, we outline the development of the ‘tension engine’ component of the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatroy (COSMOS). This engine affords users with the ability to monitor social media data streams for signs of high tension which can be analysed in order to identify deviations from the ‘norm’ (levels of cohesion/low tension). This analysis can be overlaid onto a palimpsest of curated data, such as official statistics about neighbourhood crime, deprivation and demography, to provide a multidimensional picture of the ‘terrestrial’ and ‘cyber’ streets. As a consequence, this ‘neighbourhood informatics’ enables a means of questioning official constructions of civil unrest through reference to the user-generated accounts of social media and their relationship to other, curated, social and economic data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Les études sur le banditisme ont donné lieu à plusieurs interprétations sociologiques anthropologiques ou politiques. La critique marxiste a vu dans les bandes rurales une forme archaïque de la révolte, tandis que les révoltes urbaines ont été lues comme un mécanisme d'économie morale de la foule. Les phénomènes révolutionnaires donnaient aux émeutes urbaines un statut de contestation prépolitique, prélude aux grands mouvements organisés de la contestation populaire de la société en voie d'industrialisation (fin 18e siècle, début 19e siècle). Le propos de cette contribution est de comparer deux grandes vagues de banditisme, l'une à la fin du 18e et au début du 19e siècle, l'autre un siècle plus tard en Belgique. Toutes deux en période d'occupation militaire et de déliquescence de l'Etat. La lecture hobsbawnienne peut être conservée mais inversée. Le banditisme participe à ce « protopolitique » suggéré par Hobsbawn: à la différence de l'Ancien Régime, c'est la faiblesse apparente de l'Etat que stigmatisent en creux dans les alarmes brigandes. La lutte contre le banditisme et sa mise en scène apparaissent comme deux instruments de légitimation de l'Etat. En ce sens le brigandage endémique, qui ressurgit, quand l'Etat s'affaiblit, est un défi politique pour les structures du pouvoir. Studies on banditry have led to multiple sociological, anthropological or political interpretations. Marxist critique considered rural bands as archaic forms of revolt, and urban bands as a tool of the crowd's moral economy. Revolutionary movements gave urban mobs status as prepolitical protest, a prelude to the big organised protests in the industrialising societies of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. This contribution will compare two waves of banditry, the first at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the other a century later in Belgium. Both waves occurred during times of military occupation and state weakness. A Hobsbawmian reading could be maintained here, but inverted. Banditry is part of the 'protopolitical' suggested by Hobsbawm: but unlike in the Ancien Regime, it is the apparant weakness of the Nation-State that is stigmatised by outbreaks of banditry. The struggle against banditry and the production of the struggle appear as two legitimising tools for the State. In this way, endemic brigandage, resurgent at a time of state weakness, is a political challenge for the structures of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent reports issued by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, and theManual of Guidance on Keeping the Peace, jointly produced by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS) and the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA), have advocated a more permissive approach to policing public order, involving a greater emphasis on facilitating the right to protest. This reorientation of police policy reflects an acceptance of insights and recommendations relating to the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM), a social psychological approach to explaining the dynamics of police–crowd interaction and its implications for public order. In its recent handling of an anti-‘Lib Dem’ protest staged in Sheffield in March 2011, South Yorkshire Police operated in accordance with the ESIM approach by deploying a Police Liaison Team and social media cell in a concerted attempt to enhance the quality of police–protester communication and interaction. The following article uses participant observation and in-depth interviews with senior police and protest organisers involved in the anti-Lib Dem rally to argue that it would be helpful to apply a more contextualised approach than the ESIM (namely the Flashpoints Model of Public Disorder) as a basis for comprehensively understanding the nature and impact of police strategy and tactics, and appreciating why they were so successful in limiting the occurrence of disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological development in the last 20 years has had a significant input into what is policed and how such policing takes place. This article seeks to explore the policing of a part of the counter-culture in the United Kingdom, the so-called 'New Age Traveller', and in doing so highlight the impact of technology in relation to public order control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nigeria is a Federal Republic made up of thirty-six states. The history of Nigerian federalism dates back to the pre-independence Constitution of 1954 called the Lyttleton Constitution. However, with the advent of the 1979 and 1999 Constitutions, there has been a profound change in the practice of Federalism in the Country which has called into question whether Nigeria is indeed a federation. This question has been further accentuated by the recent damning report of the National Intelligence Council of the United States Government which forecasted that by the year 2020, Nigeria might cease to exist as a nation state! The level of government that should take responsibility for such issues as power sharing arrangement, revenue allocation, maintenance of public order, fiscal federalism, judiciary are the major centripetal and centrifugal forces that have threatened the stability of the Federation. The current situation where the federal government is a towering overlord over the component states on the issues enumerated above, and much to the disenchantment of the states, requires a thorough re-examination and possible redress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the organization and function of Italy's police forces. In contrast with other countries there have been very few recent studies on policing in Italy. This article starts from the origins of the modern police in Italy and tracks changes over time. Police activities that relate specifically to surveillance of territory and individuals, maintaining public order, controlling immigration and the coordination of police operations are reconstructed and documented, with a specific focus on crime prevention. The article attempts to assess to what extent this has been achieved in recent decades, and to what extent the efficiency of crime prevention has increased or decreased over the last thirty years. The article also examines the relations between the size of the police force and crime statistics to discover whether the increase in the former is directly linked to a decline in the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies significant recent public order policing strategy change on the part of the public police--first, in recognition of the dynamic relationship between disorder and policing, and second, concerning a more flexible conceptualization of the traditional "riot curve". This would potentially move the policing of social disorder away from a situation of what Wright refers to in Policing: An Introduction to Concepts and Practice (2002) as "simply coping" with conflict towards one of "managing" it, being part of the process of transition for policing generally from modern to late-modern. For a fundamental shift to occur in the public order policing arena though, such policies would need to be carried through in practice. Our critical analysis and "recontextualization" of a riot that took place in Burnley in 2001 suggests that in this instance, at least, this has not (yet) taken place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the features of contemporary British society is the growth of organized special events and festivals that cause large influxes of people to descend on rural and semi-rural areas for a few days in order to take part in the event. On occasion, these events bring with them a culture that is often seen by local populations as alien, or at least at odds with the locally accepted social behaviour. This "alien culture" is perceived by the local residents as a negative risk and is often accompanied by calls for increased risk regulation and risk management. However, there is another side to this coin: the same events often carry with them entrepreneurial opportunities for local businesses and are thus seen as positive risks by the commercial community, leading to contested perceptions of risk surrounding the special event. In those instances, the public police are often required to make complex decisions as to which aspect of the event to police and how to ensure that entrepreneurial action is supported while, at the same time, protecting the community. This article employs an empirical study to examine that process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]