Municipal Policing Meets the New Deal

Abstract

In urban centres across the UK and elsewhere, one encounters an ever-increasing array of uniformed agencies. Often explicitly aligned with efforts for an urban renaissance, these patrols not only give advice and information to users of urban public spaces but, more significantly, are instrumental in securing these spaces and their populations. Drawing on empirical research in the British city of Glasgow, this article argues that, far from being merely designed to minimize risk, such new policing initiatives work hard to establish a new moral order of acceptable activities for revitalized urban spaces. This happens through renewed involvement of the local authorities as municipal policing. There is, however, one element in the debates of an urban renaissance or the entrepreneurial city that tends to get sidelined easily: that of the actual labour and work lying at the heart of such renaissance. Here, the warden project under discussion, in its design as an intermediate labour market programme, forcefully illustrates the meanings of `securing' and `policing' as it reconnects the moral ordering of contemporary labour market policies with the patrolling of new urban spaces.