The many faces of nodal policing: Team play and improvisation in Dutch community safety

Van Steden, Ronald; Wood, Jennifer; Shearing, Clifford; Boutellier, Hans

The many faces of nodal policing: Team play and improvisation in Dutch community safety

Journal Article

2013

Journal Title

Security Journal

Link to Journal

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sj/index.html

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Global Risk Governance Programme

Faculty

Faculty of Law

Abstract

In this paper we reflect on how one police organization, the Dutch police, have acted to embrace nodal assemblages and nodal governance while they have pioneered a form of ‘conduit policing’ (Shearing, 1999). This strategy, conceived as policing with a ‘nodal orientation’, combines policing attention on flows of people, information and things through infrastructural nodes with the policing of local communities (Project Group Vision on Policing, 2006). We examine four initiatives of the Dutch police that illustrate different aspects of policing assemblages in Amsterdam. The analysis considers how these nodes have worked to integrate different, but compatible, conceptions of nodal policing.