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... Show moreIt 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). Show less
In this chapter we analyze the politics of policing, with a specific focus on policing agendas in the two largest cities in The Netherlands: Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Both metropolises are... Show moreIn this chapter we analyze the politics of policing, with a specific focus on policing agendas in the two largest cities in The Netherlands: Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Both metropolises are considered metropolises facing ‘glocal’ challenges related to multicultural populations in urban areas, social inequalities in terms of household income, international harbors, crime and disorder. The term ‘glocal’ refers to the interlinkages between global challenges and local communities. In order to get an understanding of the tendencies towards divergence and convergence in urban policing in the metropolises under study we start with a summary of general trends in policing in the Netherlands in the second section. In the third section national, regional and local governmental constitutional arrangements, discretionary powers and public police management are presented. The remainder of the chapter compares and contrasts policing agendas in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and concludes with an overview of their regimes and possible explanations for convergence and divergence in the politics of policing in these metropolises. The search for the regimes in the background of policing agendas in these two embedded case studies reveals both convergence and divergence towards the national agenda and between the agendas in both metropolises. Possible explanations for these trends could be found in the political ‘circuits of power’ (Devroe, Edwards, Ponsaers, this volume) of the municipal ruling coalition and in wider institutional arrangements in place. Show less
