ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses sociological sense of some contemporary trends in the consumption of policing services and security products. It examines how a culture of consumption is pervading the practices and rhetoric of the public police and outlining the impact of ‘consumerism’ on lay sensibilities towards policing. The chapter argues that the commodification of policing and security can fruitfully be theorised and investigated in terms of the spread of consumer culture and demonstrates in several ways. The commodification of policing is also, more widely, giving rise to new forms of solidarity, subjectivity and identification, and, conversely, to new configurations of social exclusion and division. The provision of policing and security in contemporary Britain appears clearly to be headed, then, in the direction of further commodification. The most obvious appeal of the security market is that it appears to offer its various consumers some semblance of control over an otherwise unpredictable and troubling future.
