The culture of high security: A case study of the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games (G2014)

In 2014, twenty-four months after London 2012, Glasgow will be hosting the Commonwealth Games, the largest event ever to have been hosted by Scotland. The 2014 Games are anticipated to attract 1.5 million spectators and 4,500 athletes over the 11 days of competition and 13 of the 15 venues will be located in the Glasgow area. The overall Games budget for G2014 is £524 million 1 with the security budget of £27 million making up 5% of the total budget (Audit Scotland, 2012). In comparison, the security budget for the 2010 Commonwealth Games held in Melbourne was 8% of the total Games budget and the 2012 Olympic security costs are estimated to be 5% of the overall Games budget (Graham, 2012), so the proportion being spent on security aligns with other mega-events. The security structure for G2014 consists of several governing bodies made up of the Scottish Government, Strathclyde Police, the Games Organising Committee, and Glasgow City Council. In addition the sublevel working groups consist of partnerships with several additional security and safety organisations including Strathclyde Fire and Rescue, the Scottish Ambulance Service, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland (HMICS), British Transport Police, The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) and private security contractors. The private security contractors will play a crucial role in G2014, in that they will be involved in securing all the venues and access points, and it is estimated there will be nearly three times the number of private security personnel (3000) than police officers (1,100) on competition days (‘Glasgow 2014’, 2007). The security planning for G2014, including risk assessment and securitization, is already well under way and the security vision for a safe, secure and peaceful Games has been developed with the purported aim of ensuring that G2014 is fundamentally a mega-sporting, rather than a mega-security event. Mega-sporting events have attracted academic research from a wide range of disciplines. For criminology, such events offer a unique opportunity to gain an insight into crime control, police management and securitisation at the national and international level. A team of researchers from the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and the Scottish Institute for Policing Research have been funded by the European Commission to study the security planning process, through a grant under the Prevention of and Fight against Crime programme, within the general funding programme on Security and Safeguarding Liberties, in the Freedom, Justice and Security work area. The G2014 research project is concerned with the governance of security in relation to this specific mega-event: in particular the negotiation of the multi-level (central and local) government relationships and public-private partnerships required for the delivery of ‘security’ through policing. While mega-events are, due to their scale and infrequency, sometimes portrayed as exceptions to everyday security processes and discourses, our approach is to analyse the heightened tensions and responses around security during large spectacular events as reflective of broader and more mundane