The geographies of policing

Abstract

In 1991 Nicolas Fyfe published a paper in this journal arguing that studies of the police were `conspicuously absent from the landscapes of human geography' (Fyfe, 1991: 249). This article reviews geographical progress in this area and argues that attention should be shifted from the police towards policing. Consideration is given to the increasing numbers of agencies that perform policing, including state, private and voluntary actors, as well as `the police' themselves. Second, critical scrutiny is given to discourses of policing and their potential to exclude particular people from particular spaces. It is argued that the concept of governance provides a suitable framework for theorizing new geographies of policing.