The city as a medium of future policing

This chapter introduces a conceptual framework through which to understand the city as a medium of future policing. Employing the city as a lens for illuminating how the police perceive of and seek to preempt and counter diffuse and hybrid threats associated with crime and terrorism, we direct attention towards how officers’ affective orientations such as fear, anxiety and desire inform practices of policing. At the core of our framework is the argument that police work in the city implies an emotional response to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the urban environment that is aimed increasingly at responding to threats that have not yet materialized. To capture how affective orientations inform police work, it is necessary to move beyond the understanding of police work as expressions of a centrally governed bureaucratic institution, adopting instead an ethnographic focus on the micro-dynamics and everyday practices of policing. An ethnographic approach, we propose, allows access to the context-specific ways in which the police engage in preemptive practices of policing the future, and in turn, opportunities for unfolding how urban transformations will shape the future of policing.