ABSTRACT
On 10 May 2012, some 30,000 police officers took to London's streets to protest against the government's 20 per cent reductions in police funding, changes to the service and cuts to police pay. 1 This extraordinary reaction to contemporary events indicates that public policing is undergoing rapid and fundamental change. This is especially so in the British cities that gave birth to modern professional policing, a quintessential dimension of which always has been visible patrol officers. They represent what Thomas (1945) sardonically described as the ‘“scarecrow” function of the police’. The evolution of professional policing has long been tied to shifts in the nature of insecurities fuelled by the changing face of risks and the manner in which these are perceived by powerful elites (Reiner 2010). Contemporary insecurities, moreover, coalesce and take on acute meaning within the city as both host to, and generator of, diverse forms of crime and anti-social behaviour. Consequently, concerns about disorder and urban safety directly inform debates about the urban condition and the nature of city governance.
