ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the new subjective criteria of inclusion and exclusion and where black cultural spaces were placed within this nexus. It focuses on the range of informal practices within the policing of the night-time economy and examines how the Licensing Committee and council officers responded to police powers. The facilitation of the night-time economy through the inculcation of deregulatory mores in licensing practice represented the commercialisation and colonisation of nightlife. The three ways in which licensing practice and policing differentiated between orderly/responsible or disorderly/irresponsible venues and licensees: through an identification of social order with commercial viability; the way in which the perception that there were limited resources to regulate influenced the policing and disposal of venues; though the maintenance of informal practices within the local Metropolitan Police. In anti-drugs meeting the Commander of the Borough Metropolitan Police stated that they were intending to pursue a strategy of filming suspected street robbers as a preventative measure.
