ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the new forms of policing arrangement and links them to the nature of change affecting contemporary British cities. It discusses the diverse range of bodies currently involved in policing and providing ‘security’, also examines the nature of the changes underpinning the transformation of contemporary policing and considers the implications of such trends in this apparently increasingly commodified late modern urban environment. The chapter explores the emergence of this increasingly complex and differentiated patchwork of security provision. It describes the extent to which this can be understood as a process of ‘commodification’, and relate the changes in security provision to broader and deeper structural processes impacting on contemporary cities. There are several sources of data about the size and shape of the private security sector in Britain, none of them terribly accurate. The provision of policing and security would indeed appear to have become significantly more complex in recent decades, particularly within urban environments.
