ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses only one aspect of the historical changes in which contemporary people feel themselves to be embroiled – namely, the feeling that crime stalks our cities and the idea that its suppression is neither feasible nor in keeping with enlightened thought. In her urban ethnography of a Brazilian megalopolis, Teresa Caldeira has shown how the marketization of insecurity, the fear of crime and concomitant strategies of risk suppression promote a type of policing that bypasses the legal institutions of social ordering in the resolution of social conflict. The transnationalization of policing seems to be part and parcel of the internal history of the police organization in the twentieth-century; certainly as mentioned earlier in discussing 'A Genealogy of "Police"', the exportation of the 'colonial model' in the nineteenth century reveals policing to be, in a sense, transnational from the outset.
