Urban policing in Italy: Some reflections in a comparative perspective

The chapter explores some conceptual issues related to changing forms of urban social control and policing with a focus on Italian cities, and in a comparative perspective. It relies upon a number of different theoretical perspectives, particularly those that focus on dynamics of state’s sovereignty and re-distribution of powers (Garland (1996, 2001) on how governance unfolds at the local level (Crawford, 1999; Johnston and Shearing 2003), including recent integrations of the idea of governance offered by “regime analysis” (Edwards and Hughes, 2012), combined with theories of urban social control and pluralization of policing (Beckett and Herbert 2008; Crawford 2006; Jones and Newburn 2006). The analysis is based on a comparative perspective, aimed at singling out how ideas, concepts, practices and policies recur in different contexts and how they are adopted – or not – in different places or times. The “adoption process” implies also an “adaptation,” i.e. that the local context reshapes those flows according to its own specific needs and interests (Newburn and Sparks, 2004). This process of adaptation is the result of many structural and cultural factors, and, starting from a convergent “global” dynamic characterized by homogeneization, gives rise to local – sometimes quite important - divergences in the development of the new forms of governance of local security policies and policing.