Policing The 2012 London Olympics

Download or read book Policing the 2012 London Olympics written by Gary Armstrong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Legacy written by Michael Gillard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Reveals criminal corruption on a scale that the Kray twins would never have dreamt of' John Pearson, Profession of Violence, The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins 'Gillard's detailed investigation makes for a stunning and shocking read' Barry Keeffe, The Long Good Friday 'Legacy illustrates the sordid links between business, politics and organised crime' Ioan Grillo, El Narco and Gangster Warlords When billions poured into the neglected east London borough hosting the 2012 Olympics, a turf war broke out between crime families for control of a now valuable strip of land. Using violence, guile and corruption, one gangster, the Long Fella, emerged as a true untouchable. A team of local detectives made it their business to take him on until Scotland Yard threw them under the bus and the business of putting on 'the greatest show on earth' won the day. Protecting the Olympic legacy by covering up a scandal of suspicious deaths and corruption seemed more important than protecting Londoners from the predatory Long Fella and his friends in suits. For others at Scotland Yard, the crime lord was simply too big and too dangerous to take on. Award-winning journalist Michael Gillard took up where they left off to expose the tangled web of chief executives, big banks, politicians and dirty money where innocent lives are destroyed and the guilty flourish. Gillard's efforts culminated in a landmark court case, which finally put a spotlight on the Long Fella and his friends and exposed London's real Olympic legacy.

Download or read book Power Played written by Derek Silva and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2022-10-01 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection convincingly argues that modern sport can be characterized by unequal and problematic power relations that are inextricably linked to issues of violence, harm, deviance, and punishment. On the one hand, sport is a mainstay of community building, an expression of solidarity, and a means to mental and social health. On the other, there is the star player who commits sexual violence, the trans athlete whose achievements are dismissed as fraudulent, or the racist and abusive nationalism of the impassioned sports fan. From drawing connections between head trauma and athletic violence to exploring the social meanings of sport in prison, contributors to this volume reimagine sport as an important unit of analysis for critical criminologists. Messages about crime, violence, and punishment in sport mirror broader relations of power that exist off the field. Situated at the intersections of sport, sporting culture, and crime, Power Played blows the whistle on the harm, violence, and exploitation embedded within.

Download or read book The Olympic Legacy written by Alan Tomlinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive collection provides an overview of social scientific perspectives on Olympic legacy, using specialist analyses and selected cases to illuminate the recurring anthropological, political, and sociological dimensions of the legacy debate. Drawing upon research conducted on the Beijing, Vancouver, Athens, London and Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, it identifies the recurrent rhetoric that has characterised the legacy debate, alongside the harsh realities that contradict many legacies and aspirations. Fifteen researchers from six countries contribute a range of critical analytical studies which explore macro-perspectives on the shifting political economy symbolized at Beijing or in an over-reaching Greece, the soft power benefits perceived by the Rio 2016 organizers, the anthropological study of neighbourhood spaces threatened by corporate branding, and the apparatus of surveillance surrounding an Olympic Games. The symbolic importance of the Games is also captured in studies of volunteer motivations, labour and work initiatives, and the introduction of women’s boxing at London 2012. In a comprehensive overview, Alan Tomlinson illuminates the rhetoric of successive Olympic cycles and the rise to prominence of the legacy question in that debate. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

Download or read book Activism and the Olympics written by Jules Boykoff and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-27 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Olympics have developed into the world's premier sporting event. They are simultaneously a competitive exhibition and a grand display of cooperation that bring together global cultures on ski slopes, shooting ranges, swimming pools, and track ovals. Given their scale in the modern era, the Games are a useful window for better comprehending larger cultural, social, and historical processes, argues Jules Boykoff, an academic social scientist and a former Olympic athlete. In Activism and the Olympics, Boykoff provides a critical overview of the Olympic industry and its political opponents in the modern era. After presenting a brief history of Olympic activism, he turns his attention to on-the-ground activism through the lens of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Here we see how anti-Olympic activists deploy a range of approaches to challenge the Olympic machine, from direct action and the seizure of public space to humor-based and online tactics. Drawing on primary evidence from myriad personal interviews with activists, journalists, civil libertarians, and Olympics organizers, Boykoff angles in on the Games from numerous vantages and viewpoints. Although modern Olympic authorities have strived—even through the Cold War era—to appear apolitical, Boykoff notes, the Games have always been the site of hotly contested political actions and competing interests. During the last thirty years, as the Olympics became an economic juggernaut, they also generated numerous reactions from groups that have sought to challenge the event’s triumphalism and pageantry. The 21st century has seen an increased level of activism across the world, from the Occupy Movement in the United States to the Arab Spring in the Middle East. What does this spike in dissent mean for Olympic activists as they prepare for future Games?

Download or read book Policing Sport Mega-Events written by Dennis Pauschinger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Security has become one of the most important aspects of sport mega-event organisation. This book explores how Rio de Janeiro was imagined and transformed into a security fortress when the 2014 Men's World Cup and the 2016 Olympics came to the city and how the fortress was nonetheless permeable and porous. Dennis Pauschinger experienced exceptional backstage access at high level in the Brazilian mega-event security architecture as well as at street level with the local public security sphere. His ethnographic account takes us from the hidden world of surveillance and control centres, to the security perimeters around stadiums, and to the mundane routine of police officers during day and night shifts at local police stations or at the Special Forces' headquarters. This book shows how police officers' emotions and Special Forces' war narratives impact the static and technology-based security models at mega-events and how traditional patterns of police work, along lines of class and racial inequalities, still prevail and shape the city's public security. The book argues against the common narrative of the positive impacts of mega-event security legacies upon host cities by advancing towards a general understanding of how security governance is carried out in places where the use of digital security technologies co-exists with overly lethal and repressive forms of policing.

Download or read book Policing Major Events written by James F. Albrecht and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whenever a major event requires police intervention, questions are raised about the nature of the police response. Could the police have prevented the conflict, been better prepared, reacted more quickly? Could they have acted more forcefully or brought the altercation under control more effectively? Based upon real case studies of events from all