Author: Pete Fussey, Jon Coaffee, Gary Armstrong, and Dick Hobbs
ISBN No: 978-0-7546-794
Review date: 06/12/2025
No of pages: 290
Publisher: Ashgate
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
From the July 2011 print issue of Professional Security magazine
Next year if you work in London, let alone work in security in the capital, chances are you will have something to do with the Olympics. An academic book aims to tell you why; and what next.
Something as big – in numbers of people, risks, and spread across the East End of London – as the Games has many topics, quite apart from the massive policing operation. To whizz through a few: there’s the actual history of terror (killings at Munich, a bomb at Atlanta in 1996). How the Games site and ‘village’ fits into the city, before and after the big event. How each Olympics, every four years in whatever city, creates (like the City of London, as Jon Coaffee has written) ‘fortified urban enclaves’, ‘rings of steel’ like the City of London, or a ‘sterile zone’ to quote from a sign on the Olympic perimeter fence. Might this security set-up, grafted onto what the city has already, merely displace terrorism (and routine crime) to other places? Private security providers have stressed how partnership work with the police will leave a worthwhile ‘legacy’, which is one of the buzz-words for the Games organisers. The authors spot this, and indeed the thousands of guarding jobs for the Olympics. The authors are at pains to show the security and policing implications of the Games, and that summer 2012 is not a one-off (the main Olympic stadium will become the home of West Ham football club, for instance). What the authors call ‘mega-events’ will keep cropping up; next is the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014. Inevitably, before the big day, such a book has more questions than answers. There’s a hefty 36 pages of references.
Briefly to go through the authors: Jon Coaffee wrote the insightful Terrorism, Risk and the City (Ashgate, 2003) coming at resilience from an urban geography angle. Pete Fussey you may have heard at Global MSC Security CCTV seminars. Dick Hobbs, one of the grittier sociologists around, has written among other things Bouncers, about night-time violence and managing pub security, which has made it into paperback. Gary Armstrong, a sports academic, has written on CCTV, and football hooligans. So between them, these UK academics have covered the bases. Among their questions: who’s paying? Who’s in charge of the space? And what sort of city will the regenerated shopping centres and athletes’ village (a gated community?) turn into?
