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Policing Football ‘Hooliganism’: Crowds, Context and Identity

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Football Hooliganism, Fan Behaviour and Crime

Abstract

In November 2012, the government department responsible for policing football released its annual statistics. These figures showed a dramatic 24 per cent reduction in the number of arrests in the context of football in England and Wales. Perhaps more strikingly, across the whole year there were just 27 arrests among the 100,000 or more fans that trav- elled to Continental Europe to the 47 Champions and Europa League fixtures. Perhaps even more remarkably, there were no football-related arrests among the thousands of fans who attended away international fixtures involving England, including the month-long 2012 European Championships in Poland and Ukraine. In comparison with the situ- ation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there can be little doubt that these statistics represent a major transformation in the levels of ‘risk’ to ‘public order’ posed by English fans. In this respect, the figures also reflect important successes in the policing of football. The figures were ‘testament to our hugely successful model of policing football’, accord- ing to Damian Green MP, the then government minister for policing (BBC, 2012).

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Authors
  1. Clifford Stott
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leicester, UK

    Matt Hopkins (Lecturer in Criminology) (Lecturer in Criminology)

  2. University of Birmingham, UK

    James Treadwell (Lecturer in Criminology) (Lecturer in Criminology)

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© 2014 Clifford Stott

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Stott, C. (2014). Policing Football ‘Hooliganism’: Crowds, Context and Identity. In: Hopkins, M., Treadwell, J. (eds) Football Hooliganism, Fan Behaviour and Crime. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137347978_12

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