The European world of metropolitan policing: Interpreting patterns of governance, policy and politics
It is presumed in the Policing European Metropolises Project (PEMP) that the metropolitan area is an increasingly important object of policing governance, given the transnational challenges encountered by European nation states, including the movement of capital, labour, goods and services enabled by the Treaty on European Union: the 'Amsterdam Settlement' In this sense, metropolitan policing is, in part, an artefact of the Amsterdam Settlement and the four freedoms which facilitate mobility across national territories and, in doing so, create new internal security fields. This is a principal insight of the concept of multiple, overlapping, internal security fields introduced in Chapter One of this collection. Illicit, as well as licit, capital, labour, goods and services move from particular localities to others and, especially, to the metropolises in which the markets for these are concentrated. This can be understood as a specific European instance of the broader process of 'glocalisation' a concept coined by social scientists to characterise greater transnational mobility and how this privileges certain localities that are able to project their political, economic and cultural power, acting as 'command points' (Sassen, 2001; Massey, 2007) in emerging global markets, whilst subordinating those localities that struggle to adapt to these global forces (Swyngedouw, 1997) The basic assumption behind the PEMP is that this process is producing a significant and uneven development of security problems and responses that need to be registered at the level of the metropolis, given that city regions have different trajectories in the import and export of security problems. Contributors to this edited collection were invited to reflect on the particular significance of metropolitan policing in different nation state contexts, as registered through reference to particular governing arrangements and policy agendas, in order to test and to adapt this proposition (see Chapter One, this volume)