Introduction

The organisation of policing and, in a wider sense, security is undergoing considerable restructuration in Western societies (Crawford 1999; Hughes and Edwards 2002; Crawford et al. 2005; Jones and Newburn 2006; Wood and Dupont 2006; Fleming and Wood 2006; Henry and Smith 2007). A key development is that the government is losing its previously taken-for-granted dominance over crime and disorder control under pressure of ‘polycentric’ or ‘networked’ agents and agencies. Accordingly, at the local level, police forces and municipalities find themselves in a ‘multilateralised’ environment of both organisational auspices authorising security and policing and providers who supply executive personnel (Bayley and Shearing 2001). These auspices and providers do not necessarily overlap. It is, on the contrary, possible that a municipal authority (public) hires commercial security guards (private) to patrol the streets. Auspices and providers may have become separated. In this manner, the classical distinction between ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ has proved problematic (Jones and Newburn 1998; Kempa et al. 1999; Johnston 2000). Organisations have become part of ‘amorphous’ or ‘hybrid’ assemblages that feature different degrees of ‘publicness’ and ‘privateness’ (Dijkstra and van der Meer 2003).