Policing the 2012 London Olympics: Legacy and Social Exclusion

Gary Armstrong · Richard Giulianotti · Dick Hobbs

Jun 2016 · Routledge

About this ebook

The summer Olympic Games are renowned for producing the world’s biggest single-city cultural event. While the Olympics and other sport mega-events have received growing levels of academic investigation from a variety of disciplinary approaches, relatively little is known about how such occasions are experienced directly by local host communities and publics.

This ethnography examines the everyday policing of the London Borough of Newham in relation to the London 2012 Olympics. It explains how police defined, monitored, prioritized, contained and investigated ‘Olympic-related’ crime, and how ‘Olympic-related’ policing connected to the policing of Newham. The authors examine how the threat of terrorism impacted on the everyday policing of the 2012 Olympics, as well as the exaggeration of other threats to the Games – such as youth gangs – for political reasons. The book also explores local resistance to Olympic policing, and the legacy of the Games with regard to policing, local housing, demographics and social exclusion.

Discussing the lessons that can be learned for the future staging of sporting mega-events, this book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in sport, policing, crime and criminology, mega-events, event management, urban studies, global studies and sociology.

About the author

Gary Armstrong is Reader in the Department of Sociology at Brunel University, London, UK.

Richard Giulianotti

is Professor of Sociology at Loughborough University, and also Professor II at Telemark University College, Norway.

Dick Hobbs

is Professor of Sociology at University Western Sydney University, Australia, Professor Emeritus at the University of Essex, UK, Visiting Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK, and an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.