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How can a specialized public organization, of which the operational sector has been brutally fragmented and privatized, maintain its unity and publicness? The paper looks at how the British Transport Police (BTP) has adapted to the fragmentation and privatization of British Rail since 1993. The fact that the BTP has remained public and national is all the more surprising since a return to the pre-World War II configuration, with each Train Operating Company (TOC) having and running its own police, could be technically envisaged. The answer to the initial question is quite simple. The police organization under examination has intelligently reinvented its publicness, with the negotiated assent of its referring political and economic authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the renewal of public policy via instrumental innovation since the adoption in France of an automated sequence of detection and sanctioning of speed limit violations. Involved here is an instrument of public policy that points up the changes that have taken place in recent years in respect of road safety policy and provides a clearer view of some aspects of ongoing state reorganization. The change in public policy permitted by this instrumentation results from an increasingly close focus on the road hazard issue, which has allowed specialists from different epistemic fields to advocate a system used in other countries for over a decade now. However, this success with policymakers is also explained by the fact that the new system involves the return of the state as the core shaper of this public policy, after 20 years of emphasis on local and partnership-based policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vast majority of Anglo-American police and policing social studies illustrate, both theoretically and empirically, an a-statist, localist and, to a lesser extent, privatist organization. This article reconsiders this common perspective by exploring the socio-historical monographs of the California Highway Patrol. This inquiry reveals how a state can utilize a new and marginal policing objective—road risk and criminality—to develop a powerful and relatively autonomous police organization, which, despite its name, exists more as a police on the road than a police of the road, and plays a vital role in the Californian police system. Surprisingly, the California Highway Patrol embodies the model of a state institution much more common in “Older Europe” than in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We study the terrorist attacks in metro and show the prevalence of onboard bombings. [•] We study the technical and human management of survivors after a bomb attack. [•] We propose vehicle design improvements avoiding identified panic conditions. [•] This allows using the resilience of the passengers for effective crisis management. [•] Our work leads to the effective development of a blast-resilient metro prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]