Policing Space

Abstract

This paper explores the policing of New Travellers: a nomadic community who have existed since the 1970s. They have been presented by the British mass media as ‘folk devils’ and they are treated by the police as a public order problem. The paper will discuss the methods used by the police to manage New Travellers, applying a spatial analysis to understand police practice. The empirical evidence shows that the ability of policing agencies to manage nomadic people is determined by their notion of space and who can legitimately occupy it. The paper therefore explores the policing of nomadism which incorporates a discussion of the need to develop conceptions of public order policing that recognize the use of ‘guerrilla tactics’.