Policing is not only a basic function of the modern state, providing security for its citizens, but also a display of sovereignty designed to demonstrate the state’s claim over the monopoly of legitimate coercion. This well-known definition of the modern state, coined by Max Weber, alludes to the important role of police. The modern state, according to Weber, is to be understood in terms of the “specific means peculiar to it,” as “a human community that (successfully) claims monopoly of the legitimate force within a given territory.” Thus, sovereignty implies that within state borders the right to use physical force is “ascribed to other institutions or individuals only to the extent which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence” (Weber, 1948: 78). For the modern state, the institutionalization of police was another articulation of its national identity and a display of its monopoly over violence. Police played instrumental and symbolic parts in the formation and reproduction of modern states and national cultures. The uniformed police force and the police officer on the street provided for the public an “important aspect of the iconography of the nation state” and a “significant constitutive element in the production and reproduction of political order and community” (Loader and Walker, 2001: 20). The police symbolize the promise embedded in the state, its sovereignty, the norms and rules associated with it and the sense of community it attempts to evoke.