ABSTRACT
By outlining and analysing the form and impact of the London 2012 Olympic security programme, this book has presented a number of central arguments. In the first instance, specific post-millennium tensions continue to dominate much of the discourse surrounding security planning for the 2012 Games. In turn, as Chapters 2 and 5 outline, these have led to a selective constitution of Olympic risks around catastrophic terrorist attacks. Being both dynamic and diffuse, these risks necessitate complex and uncertain strategies of mitigation. In response, the 2012 security strategy blends cutting-edge technological interpretations of Olympic security traditions with more inert crime control orthodoxies. As the original 2012 security budget more than tripled to address these threats, a range of new formal and informal, human and non-human surveillance-oriented security measures have been hastily shepherded into East London’s splintered geographies. Although these spaces have become patrolled by contemporaneously advanced technologies, pre-existing standardized themes of security prevail. These include the deployment of increasingly sophisticated technologies, extensive private policing, a commitment to zero-tolerance models of policing, programmes of metropolitan militarization, target hardening and architectures of ‘defensible space’ to cleave Olympic neighbourhoods into geographies of access and entitlement. Movement across these borders is, of course, highly regulated and dependent on (physical or fiscal) license. In sum, security innovations, particularly in the areas of technological control, including novel forms of data capture, networking and video analytics, sit atop a bedrock of more permanent underlying orthodoxies.
