ABSTRACT
In July 2012, a major controversy erupted over security arrangements for the London Olympic Games when the private security firm G4S was unable to meet its contractual obligations (Syal 2012). G4S had a total of £284m of contracts for outsourced support functions with English and Welsh police forces, including a 10-year £230m contract with Lincolnshire Police (Lister 2012). These contracts represented a structural shift in the organization and delivery of British policing in the wider context of reductions in policing budgets, and the introduction of elected Police Commissioners to provide external ‘democratic’ oversight (Crawford 2012; Lister 2012). One legacy of the Olympic Games was to be major new housing developments financed and managed by the private sector (for critiques, see Fainstein 2011; Minton 2012). London was already the site of controversial plans by Borough Councils to relocate some public housing tenants to northern cities in response to welfare reforms, including Housing Benefit changes, during a continuing national housing affordability crisis (Flint 2012; Ramesh et al. 2012). These controversies epitomize contemporary debates about urban security, the relationships between public and private policing and the right of particular populations to reside in urban space. These debates are magnified by the policing and governance of hyper-visible (Rhodes 2010) global urban events, such as the Olympic Games. But they are equally relevant to urban regeneration programmes and reconfiguring the spatial and social realities of public housing, including its policing.
